Leaving my marriage was like coming out of a trance. Looking back now at the 20 years we spent together, the film is blurry, hazy, like there’s static in my memory. There are huge gaps, entire years have gone missing, available for recalling only if I squint. Amid the fuzz there are moments that come into sharp focus, a millisecond in time when someone grabs me and pulls me from the buzzing noise and looks me in the eye. Suddenly everything becomes clear.
“Does he always talk to you like that?” My friend, Sara. It’s 5 months before he will die and he’s drunk, we’re at a backyard bonfire and he’s a dick to me in front of everyone before drunkenly stumbling away, into the snow.
“I love you dude, but I am friends with *you*. Your husband….well, I mean, he sucks. No offense. That dude’s scary.” We’ve just hosted a party for the solstice and he got drunk in the kitchen alone beforehand. He’s made a scene with a crockpot full of lentils, dramatically throwing it into the compost bin while my friends and I stare from the patio, confused.
“Is he always like this?” It’s the fourth of July and the policewoman is looking at me with pity, asking me if he’s gone off his meds. They’re deciding whether or not to charge him with assault and drunk and disorderly behavior or let me take him home. I grind my teeth together when I tell her he’s not medicated.
“Are you ok?” It’s two years before he will die and the last week we owned the record store. He got wasted at work, the kids and I have arrived to share a celebratory cake with friends and he and our daughter are supposed to bike home together with the dog, while I drive with our son. Home is a mile from the store and after 25 minutes of waiting, the kid, age 10, arrives breathless and alone, saying something is wrong with Poppa’s legs.
I get back in the car and return to the store to find the dog standing in Lake Street and him lying in the boulevard, a passerby standing over him, calling 911. I beg her to stop, I’ve got it, I’m here, I will handle it. Thank you, it’s fine, everything is fine.
She glares as she walks away. I grab the elderly, blind dog and place her delicately in the minivan. I go to him. He’s half conscious and cannot walk. She’s right, there is something wrong with his legs: he’s too drunk to stand. I get him upright but lack the strength to move us forward, and together we fall. I curse myself through gritted teeth that I’m not stronger. I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to do.
A woman walking by stops. She asks, “are you ok?” and I nod, unable to speak, afraid a sob will wrench its way free. Wordlessly, she takes him under the other shoulder, and together we maneuver him into the back seat.
“You’re ok,“ she says, as she turns and walks away. “You’re going to be ok.”
-
This weekend I watched the show Kevin Can F*ck Himself on Netflix. I started it impulsively, after reading the description and seeing that it starred Annie Murphy from Schitt’s Creek. I need to stop doomscrolling while anxiously twisting and pulling out my hair, so I’m trying to commit to a knitting project. I needed something to watch while I counted stitches.
The show grabbed ahold of me by the hoodie strings and shook me. If you don’t know it, it has an interesting cinematic structure. It’s the story of a married couple, Kevin and Allison. When Kevin is present, the show is like an Everybody Loves Raymond type sitcom, with annoying incidental music and the worn and tired trope of idiot husband who is constantly inventing a zany scheme! And along for the ride are his best friend and resident father. They are all a drag on his eye-rolling wife, but she puts up with their alcoholic shenanigans because for some reason, she loves his goofy ways. Rife with mildly sexist social commentary, it’s right at home with everything from King of Queens to Married with Children.
But when Kevin exits, the camera switches to Allison’s perspective, and everything from the set design to the lighting to the tone shifts dramatically. Allison’s world is dark, she is miserable and exhausted by the constant insults and drunken tomfoolery that she’s forced to clean up after. While she may have once found his buffoonish antics charming, 15 years into their marriage, she has grown exhausted by his inability to take responsibility for his destructive actions and has grown resentful. She hates that the world seems to reward his stupidity. The show switches between the two worlds seamlessly, everyone putting on a happy face whenever Kevin is on-screen.
I watched the entire series in two days. Everything in it felt raw and startling and deeply personal, from the opening scene where Kevin wakes his sleeping wife by jumping on the bed, to his little slights whenever they’re in front of friends, making sure everyone knows she isn’t smart, isn’t fashionable, isn’t interesting. There’s a moment where she realizes that she isn’t actually bad at driving and doesn’t have a bad sense of direction, she’s just been told that by her husband for so many years she began to believe it. Her poor skills, of course, is why he insists she cannot own her own car. She must share his and ask permission to drive anywhere.
In that ah-ha moment on the show, I felt my own self reflected. While on screen, her eyes glistened with flashes of the past, and I simultaneously realized that making me carless and telling me I was a terrible driver was my own story. Together, we realized that it wasn’t actually true, that it was something he said as a means to manipulate and control. And I actually believed it. We both did.
I wanted to write down the number of times I saw my autobiography appear on screen, but it was quickly too many times to count. I watched as Allison drowned her sorrows with a bottle of wine in an empty bathtub and went after drugs and men and all kinds of terrible decisions as a means to escape the misery she was living in, while at home and whenever they were together, she plastered a mile on her face and did her best to grin and bear it. Oh that’s just how it is-itis, emphasized by older female characters living the same sad existence with the same drunk, abusive men. I watched her continually abandon herself and laugh at his shitty jokes at her own expense. Agree when he insulted her.
Fortunately, our paths diverge, and the show takes a dark turn when (spoilers ahead!) she decides her only way out is to murder him. Ultimately, she rethinks that plan and instead fakes her own death and moves across the country to escape. In the final episode, it’s 6 months after her disappearance and Kevin has a new girlfriend. They hosted a bowling alley funeral for Allison.
She returns to the house to face him, reveal that she’s still alive and announce that she’s divorcing him. In the first half of the scene, the camera is Kevin-view, with the silly music and laugh track at every punchline. When she says she’s divorcing him, he dismisses her, telling her “you don’t want to do this.”
In that moment, everything shifts. For the first time in the series, the show switches from the happy go lucky, laugh track version of their lives to Allison’s perspective mid-scene, and we see Kevin through a very different lens. He is dark and brooding, overweight. He insults her, talks down to her, his eyes have heavy bags beneath them and his beard is overgrown. Before our very eyes, the harmless dimwit whose misfortune we’ve been laughing along to has been transformed into a monster. He insults her, talks down to her, tells her she will never be able to survive without him and names every other attempt she’s made to escape that has failed. While he talks, he moves in on her, backing her against the wall, physically blocking her path.
“Without me, you will have nothing, because I will fucking destroy you.” He is lumbering, physically threatening. For the first time, we realize Kevin is fucking terrifying. When he moves to strike her, she flinches and darts, moving swiftly through the room and away from him.
“Do your worst.” Her final words before she disappears out the door, this time for good.
The end of the show zeros in on Kevin, in the living room alone in an alcoholic rage, burning her things in a garbage can in the living room. He starts the fire and pours his bottle into it while everything ignites. Before long, he is passed out on the couch and the fire has engulfed the house. He dies in the blaze.
-
The week before I left my marriage I went to my mother-in-law’s house. I had finally hit a wall and decided I didn’t want to stay in my marriage any longer. Though he had cut off contact and stopped speaking to her and his sister 6 years prior, I went there as an attempt to reconnect. Their older brother had died in a house fire that he caused the year after his wife had moved out.
I was met with unexpected panic and fear. My sister-in-law demanded to know if he knew where I was, and insisted we were all in danger. She was the first person that week to ask me, “Do you have a restraining order?”
I scoffed. “He’s not going to hurt me.”
She shook her head and looked at me with solemn eyes. “You still don’t understand.”
Alone in the car afterward, I had my first panic attack. Hyperventilating on the side of the road, it felt like my entire reality had crumbled. Everything was confusing. I had spent decades thinking of his sister as someone who had fabricated stories that he and their brother had “abused” her. He said she was like the boy that cried wolf, making up stories about things they did to hurt her. That she was too sensitive, always pretending to be a victim. Faking being in pain so everyone would feel bad. Attention seeking behavior.
For the first time I saw the truth, that she actually was the victim, that he and his brother had relentlessly bullied her throughout their childhood, that this was not at all a boy crying wolf but a girl crying for help. That she hadn’t made up any of it. That he and his brother had actually been terrifying, cruel, and abusive.
I thought of the number of times Dave had bullied others, from the U of M Goldie mascot he once threw a banana at, to the man at the 4th of July party he assaulted, to the guy in the Home Depot that got too close to him during Covid. He worked at a diner and a few days before my visit, on April 1st, he stood in the alley with a coworker and threw eggs at the college kids crossing the street to get to campus. He said they deserved it, because they were “uppity” college kids, and it was funny because April Fools! Didn’t I have a sense of humor? I failed to see what was funny about a mildly drunk 44-year-old dishwasher hurtling eggs at strangers.
I thought of the moments that someone had grabbed me by the arm and snapped me to my senses, asking me if I was ok, if he was hurting me, if I was safe. It felt like my world was crashing down around me. Was I being abused? Me? How could I be, and not know? He didn’t hit me (except during sex) so I thought it didn’t count. He wasn’t abusing me! He was just an asshole. This is just what marriage is like. This is just how husbands are. Cue the Homer Simpson and Al Bundy montage.
When I suddenly saw everything in a different light, my world, like Allison’s, shifted. From that moment on, I could not stand to spend time in the same room as him. Every word out of his mouth made my skin crawl. It was like a giant curtain had been drawn back, and the thing I had been avoiding, the thing that many, many people over the years had tried to tell me, was now so apparent I couldn’t scarcely stand to speak to him.
I spent every day that week away from home as much as possible. I slept at friends houses at night. Making excuses about fictional work events, I took myself hiking. In the woods, taking pictures of moss and lichen and the spring plants poking through the leaf litter, I replayed my entire marriage in my head. With this shifted perspective, I was shocked to revisit time after time Dave had been cruel to me. Disrespectful, insulting me in front of someone, making me feel small. It felt like I had been living underwater, and I had somehow been boosted free of my tank into a hyper clear reality. I stared at my life, aghast.
I was filled with anger and disgust at myself, at the number of times I apologized for him, excused his behavior, called someone to make amends for him, patched the road for him. In his mother’s living room, his sister had told me that she had been his “clean-up crew” for longer that she could remember and I saw myself now, doing the work that she left off when I married him. After her, it was my job to make sure everything was always ok, fixing the problems he created, making sure everything was always alright, that he was happy and not upset and not in trouble. Apologizing to the cops for him. Bailing him out of jail. Fortunately, I was good at it. I spent most of my twenties doing it for my brother before he got married.
I felt completely detached from what was happening. It felt like I was floating. I walked in the woods and watched my memories without understanding them, like I was seeing them for the first time. Like I was a different person. I marveled at the fact that I had defended him, that I had ever apologized for him. Why hadn’t I listened when my friends told me what a dick he was? Why didn’t I stand up for myself? Why was I so afraid of him? Instead of having the guts to walk out, to put my foot down, to end it, I had literally bought him a self-help book titled, “How Not to Be a Dick: An Everyday Etiquette Guide” and told him he couldn’t eat dinner with us until he could be nice to everyone at the table for the whole meal.
For decades I had tolerated the way that he spoke to me. The dismissive comments, the derisive things he said about my appearance, my intelligence, my parenting, the college I went to, the fact that I was from North Dakota. All of it was normal. And worse, I believed him. I thought he was right. I thought it was all true. I thought I wasn’t as smart as him, or as interesting. I thought I should be ashamed of where I was from and where I got my degree. I thought I wasn’t good enough. I thought I was lucky that he loved me.
I had no confidence; I was terrified people close to me would discover that underneath my pleasant façade, I was actually a monster. A selfish, horrible monster, just like my husband said I was. I believed what he said about his family. I believed when he would get into fights in parking lots with strangers and would tell the story about how he was the victim, always the victim. In his daily life, in his family, in his marriage, in his head. Nothing was ever his fault.
Even after he died, I still heard his voice in my head. Chiding me, scolding me, telling me how horrible I was. I would wake from dreams where he was choking me. Rising up from black water to pull me under. His hands, enveloped in darkness, clawing at me. For months I suffered anxiety attacks, unable to get out of the car after parking in the garage in the dark, terrified he was in my house, standing in my basement, that he was here, that he was waiting for me, that he was angry. That he found out where we lived even though I never told him. Even though he was dead.
I had spent so many years afraid of his temper that even though he was gone, my fear remained. My therapist taught me to practice mantras, and I would rhythmically tap my chest and repeat, “I am safe, I am safe, I am safe.” taking deep breaths until I felt like I could get out of the car.
Out of the garage I would sprint with my pepper spray in hand to the back door, holding my breath and leaping inside, like the darkness was trying to grab me, holding onto my ankle. I told a friend I felt like Theoden, who in the Lord of the Rings is controlled by a treacherous advisor who is secretly working for the bad guys, like Jafar in Aladdin but sketchier. After the evil sorcerer (whose excellent name is Wormtongue) is bested, light returns to Theoden’s eyes and he comes alive again.
That spring, I felt awake for the first time, like I’d been reborn. Somehow, I’d been hypnotized for much of my life, and when the universe snapped its fingers, the haze lifted. I breathed air for the first time. I felt truly alive. Slowly, with work and with healing and time, silence replaced his voice in my head, and eventually I could hear my own voice coming through, my own thoughts. I learned to trust myself. To stop abandoning myself. To believe in myself. To be nice to myself. To love myself.
I finally feel like I’m going to be ok.
That one was rough to take. Wow. I'm glad you're here.
Wow… sending cyber hugs and prayers your way, Laura.