Mothering without a net

Our house by the beach is a car. We are homeless.

By Michelle Kennedy

Topics:Divorce

The click of the door handle is entirely too loud as I pull it to peer in and check on my three sleeping children. They are all breathing. In fact, they look peaceful, sleeping there in the back of the station wagon, under the yellowy light of a street lamp.

I smooth the curls on my daughter’s face and gently close the door. Walking through the back door of the kitchen, I look back once and then, all right just once more. I smile at the cooks — they’ll keep an eye out the door for me — as I rush through the kitchen and grab the food for my customers from under the warmers.

My last table leaves after 11 p.m.. I thought they would never finish. Oh, to have that kind of time to linger over a meal. It’s been so long since I’ve enjoyed that kind of freedom. I carefully place the wine glasses in the bus tub next to the dessert plates and haul it all down the stairs. My mother would tell me to make more than one trip, but I’d always rather make one, long, painful trip than two or three.

I tip out the bartender and head for the small parking lot behind the restaurant, where, I am told, my children are still blissfully asleep. Again, I open the door, ever so carefully, and collapse into the front seat.

“Hi, Mom.” Startled, I whip around to find Matthew, the eldest, who is 5, blinking his eyes awake. “How was work?” he asks.

“It was fine,” I reply. “Very busy. It’s late, though, you should go back to sleep. We’ll talk in the morning.”

“OK.” Within seconds he is out again.

Living in the car doesn’t seem to faze him. Oh sure, he asks why we have to keep sleeping in the car, but my answer — plain and simple — that I don’t have the money yet to get us an apartment, seems to suffice, and he doesn’t whine about not having a television. Well, we do have a television, actually. It was a graduation present from years before and it’s tucked in front of the passenger seat. I tried to sell it, but it wasn’t worth much, so I decided to keep it. A last vestige of middle-class life. I was a middle-class housewife once upon a time.

Unfortunately, being middle-class only suited me and the children. My soon to be former husband wanted to live in the woods. I was game for a while. I had grown up on a farm, so the outdoors was not foreign to me. But our ideas of living in the outdoors soon clashed — hard.

“I found an awesome cabin,” he said to me over the phone one day. “Pack up the kids and come up. It’s a nice town; you’ll love it.”

I stayed behind to store some of our unnecessary, much hated “material belongings” in my mother’s house. Then, always ready for an adventure, we headed up north. Very north. The far north of Maine. A place where the majority of accepted currency was Canadian.

Pulling up to the cabin in the middle of the night, I felt my stomach drop to my knees. The cabin was a tarpapered, uninsulated shack with a small wood stove. There was no electricity or running water.

My husband has lost his mind, I thought to myself. Ever cheerful, though, I unloaded the kids and we began our adventure. I should have known that it was to be one of many.

Tonight I wince as I start up the car (I need a new muffler); I don’t want the kids to wake up. My plan is to stay down at the beach tonight. The police know me — I wait on them all the time — and they let me park here as long as I leave early. On the weekends we stay in the campground, where there’s a playground and a shower included in the deal. We also cook out and roast marshmallows (a truly cheap source of entertainment at 79 cents a bag).

I pull up alongside the beach so I can look at the water. I always wanted a house on the water, I joke to myself, and now I have one — my bedroom overlooks a lovely beach.

Cramped in the fetal position in the front seat, while the kids are stretched out in the back, I look out the windshield and yell at God in my head. But what’s He going to do? There are far bigger problems in this world than our living in a car. We are healthy, we are strong. So I yell silently at my ex-husband instead, without expecting a lot of help there either. I fall asleep with my head on the steering wheel, waking up a few hours later to read by placing my head on my jacket in the passenger seat, the gear shift jammed into my stomach.

Although we are living in my old Suburu wagon, I feel reasonably fortunate. My daughter is well, after a horrible attack by an untamed husky — just one relatively small part of the “Up North Experiment,” as I have come to call it.

The dog, a neighbor’s overanxious sled dog, bit her face, arms and shoulders — actually, tore apart would be more accurate. Of course she was terrified of dogs after that, but my ex-husband chose to keep his sled dogs after the accident. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back — not the lack of water, not even the fact that he refused to get a job. (“Thoreau didn’t have a job,” he would say.) It was his choice of dogs over children. I couldn’t believe it.

After that final blowout, I packed up. With about $50 in my pocket, tips saved from bartending at a local nightclub, I headed to the beach. I knew life had to be better at the beach. And it is. I don’t always believe it, but it is cleansing and terrifying all at the same time.

The cooks leave the kitchen door open and help me watch the kids while they sleep. When they’re awake, I split my tips with a couple of college girls who’ve agree to help me out. The girls take them for walks and to the beach. It’s summertime here on the coast of Maine, and the weather is nice. When it’s slow or rainy, my boss lets them play in a separate dining room.

Because I wait tables, I have the day free to take the kids to the ocean, the library, the laundromat. We walk around town and people smile at us. They don’t know how poor we are. They don’t know we live in our car. I applied for food stamps, but I don’t qualify. I make too much money.

Sometimes I think it’s more expensive to be poor than to be rich. I don’t have a refrigerator, so I can’t buy things like concentrated juice for $1 and make a pitcher to last for a couple of days. I have to buy individual servings at a $1 apiece. The kids have developed a taste for water.

I found a truck stop that will let me fill up my water jugs. It has showers for the truckers and I pay for one so that we all can take one communal shower. We go there first thing every morning.

I am absolutely committed to getting an apartment by the time my oldest is set to start kindergarten in a couple of weeks. The pile of cash in the videocassette box in my glove compartment is growing, and with a little luck it will be enough for the security deposit and first and last month’s rent. The apartments I’m looking at are around $550 a month — quite a bit in a one-horse town like this. There isn’t a lot of industry besides the tourist trade, although there is always canning fish and working at McDonald’s.

I would settle for a smaller and cheaper apartment, but most landlords won’t consider letting four of us live in a studio or one-bedroom. So I have to find a bigger one, even though I can’t afford it. What a Catch-22. I can afford a smaller apartment but no one will let me live in it, but my car, for some reason, is just fine, even though it’s smaller. At least the car is paid for, although it’s not insured. I helplessly hope that if I ever get in an accident, it won’t be my fault.

While I am optimistic for the future and set on getting through this (there’s a reason for everything, right?), I cannot contain my anger sometimes. Sitting on an old log, watching the kids play in the surf, I am almost shaking with pain and fear and rage. How is it possible that this is what my life is supposed to be like? I went to American University, damn it! I worked in the U.S. Senate! I am smarter than this — I have to be.

But maybe I’m not. What kind of mother would put her children through a life like this? What kind of parent would make her children endure a life without … without what? Without television? Without electricity? Without space? Just without. I am sickened by my selfishness. How dare I think I could provide a better life? I’m a loser, with or without my nifty credentials. There are people who didn’t finish elementary school who provide better lives for their children.

I am ready to pack it in, ready to go, ready to be done with this esoteric little experiment in the human condition. I want this class to be over and I want to go home.

“What’s the matter, Mom?” Lydia pops up from behind me and throws her arms around my neck.

I trace the scar on her forehead with my finger, studying its jagged edges.

“Nothing. Just feeling a little sad.”

“Ill be right back,” she says and she runs off to the sand castle my two sons are creating. They return and sit before me, the youngest, just barely 2, imitating his older brother and sister. He looks like a little Buddha with his big belly laying on crossed legs.

Lydia crawls up into my lap and looks at me thoughtfully. “You need an adventure, Mom,” she says. “I think you’re bored.”

So we plan an adventure, elaborate and daring, once more.

: Michelle Kennedy is a writer in Green Bay, WI. More Michelle Kennedy

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My ex went to prison for sex crimes

He ruined our marriage but never my family. It took years of struggle, and a long road trip, to let go of the pain

By Jean Ellen Whatley

(Credit: iStockphoto/shakzu)

Topics:Coupling, Divorce, Life stories, Real Families

People assume the wife knows. Not really. I found out about my former husband’s descent into pedophilia at the same time the rest of the world did — on the 10 o’clock news.

My mind could not comprehend what my eyes were seeing. I studied his mug shot on TV. Here was the face of the man I had loved, the cleft in his chin, his square jaw, the soft, smooth skin just below his eyes, which I’d kissed a thousand times. Who was this broken man with the downcast eyes? Did he look away when the shutter closed because he was thinking of his children? What happened to the proud young father who cradled his newborns like fragile glass, the guy with a contagious laugh and shiny blue eyes, who owned any room he walked into? A hometown celebrity, a respected journalist, with a good wife and four great kids — now, reduced to this. Who was this man?

The kids in bed, I turned down the volume on the TV in a futile attempt to shield them for just one more day. My colleagues in the press, with whom I’d jockeyed for position at many a crime scene, were now covering a crime that would deal my kids a blow unimaginable. “The accused is charged with three counts of statutory sodomy stemming from a series of sexual encounters with a teenage boy at a high school field house.” For years I’d been blase about broadcasting the worst day of someone else’s life. In one minute, I knew what that felt like.

What would I say to my children? How could I prepare them? I had one son in college, a 17-year-old, a 14-year-old and my youngest, barely 13. How does a mother explain sodomy to a seventh grader? How does a mother suck back into the cylinder the toxic cloud that has just exploded all over her family? How could he?

Disbelief turned to maternal rage, like jet fuel in my blood. I would not let him ruin my children’s future. I would not let his indefensible addiction stain their beautiful lives. And in this flashpoint, I seized the strength of a righteous fury long trapped.

I had been one of those kids once, a victim kid. A little girl caught in a hopeless game of duck and cover. I remained silent for decades, until I simply couldn’t hold down the bile of violation and secrecy any longer. I was in my 40s when I finally told my mother that my stepdad had molested me. By then he was was dead. I’d even delivered the eulogy at his funeral, skipping over his ignoble deeds. Little did I know that the man I was married to — the man in the first pew, dabbing his eyes — would end up in prison years later for committing some crimes of his own.

I had no clue when I married him that the very thing I was running away from, I was actually running to. This happens sometimes to people who were sexually abused; we tend to behave like refugees. We don’t assert our rights, because we’re not sure we have any. We lack confidence in scrutinizing others, because we feel like damaged goods ourselves.

But in time, I stood up for myself, challenging the endless hours he spent on the Internet, his increasing disengagement from our family. Backed into a corner, he told me he was gay. I told him to get out. But they don’t lock people up for being gay anymore. No longer under the wary eye of a wife, or the threat of being discovered, he took greater risks. He was found out by a mother who made a painful discovery about what was keeping her son so busy on the computer.

After a 14-month IV drip of news coverage, my former husband was sentenced to seven years in prison for having sex with that teenage boy. I spent those seven years trying to convince my children that the sins of their father were not carried on their backs, seven years of trying to help them deflect the shame by association that I had endured firsthand. Seven years; I was like a widow with no death benefits, no child support, no moral support, no “every-other-weekend” relief, no one to call in the middle of the night to meet me at the hospital with a sick kid, nobody else to ante up for college or cars, braces or bail money. Nothing. We inherited nothing, except enough pain and financial hardship to throw us all into a bottomless well with no rope, just the bucket tossed in behind us, smackin’ us on the head. But guess what?

We climbed out. We climbed out of that dark, slimy drowning hole by our bloody fingernails, each one, pushing up the next, back into the sunlight, where we sat on the side of the well, flicking off the mud. We made it. Three of my four kids are now out of college, the fourth will graduate next year. They’re amazing: loving, resilient, remarkably well adjusted, and a funnier lot, I have never seen.

I just didn’t realize how tired I was. It’s hard to process stuff while you’re holding up a car. When my brother died not long ago — the second of my brothers to die inside a few short years — I hit the mat. I couldn’t rally. I found myself asking, “Is this it? Really? Is this what my life is about?” Have you ever felt that way? Like you just might lose it?

So I did something radical. I set the car down, got behind the wheel and drove — all across America. I blew off my soul-killing, 60-hour-a-week job, took every last dime I had in savings (which wasn’t even enough to get back home on), loaded up my dog and more baggage than I realized and hit the road. We drove all over the country last summer, traveling through 21 states, from Missouri to New York to California and back again. I needed a defibrillator as big as a nation. I went to reconnect with every place and every person I had ever loved. I went to find a half-brother I had never seen. I went seeking solace.

What I got was healing. Eight weeks and more than 8,000 miles later, at a scenic overlook alongside a lonely, two-lane highway, it all got settled. Gazing out at the endless Utah desert, I sat on a huge, flat rock with my dog watching the sun go down. We were safe and dry, but out on the far horizon brewed a huge thunderstorm. Rain in the desert comes down in grey, vertical shafts from giant pink and purple clouds. Looking out at what felt like infinity, I was inspired to let it all go. I simply let it go.

All the egregious offenses that had been hurled my way — a betrayed wife, an abused child — over time, had ceased to matter. They were like a downpour on the desert, dark stabs into a porous surface. I absorbed them to make my life better, yes better, because along the way, I’d been blessed with the wisdom that there is far more surface than there is rain.

How quickly the pain can vanish if we are open to the healing. Mile by mile, house by house — at the end of this road trip in which I’d been embraced by friends, family, strangers on the highway, and yes, my found brother, I realized how fortunate I really am. The grimy corners of shame and bitterness had been scrubbed clean by love. Victim, no more.

We’ve heard a lot about victims in the news lately and the staggering abuse that came from people who were charged with helping them, not hurting them. Heads should roll. But, in the cacophony of competing sound bites, with the accusations, denials, demands for retribution and pleas for justice, there is a vital message that isn’t breaking through.

Healing is possible.

It takes time. It takes courage. It takes trusting another human being enough to open up your mind and your heart to speak your truth.

If I had a chance to yell from a mountaintop to anyone whose life has been marred by sexual abuse, here’s what I would say: There is a place where it’s safe and dry. Come see how fleeting the rain can be.

: Jean Ellen Whatley is a writer in St. Louis, Missouri. This is an excerpt from her forthcoming book, "Off the Leash: A Woman, Her Dog and the Road Trip to Revival." More Jean Ellen Whatley

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I’m in an arranged marriage, but my wife left with our baby

I went along with ancient custom in my traditional Asian family, but now I am prey to a very modern breakup

By Cary Tennis

(Credit: Zach Trenholm/Salon)

Topics:Since You Asked, Divorce, Marriage

Dear Cary,

I came across your column about a week ago and I do believe that I’m close to having read almost all of your posts there. I was simply amazed and mesmerized by your words of advice and hope. I do hope that your your words can help me deal with my current condition. My family served as attachés and thus we moved … a lot. I grew to become a bit distant emotionally to avoid the heartbreak of losing all friends, moving into an alien environment every two to three years or so, with the threat of moving ever ominous on the horizon. I grew to crave a stable environment I could call HOME, or at the very least create a home for my family that I never had. I came close to it, but six months ago my wife filed for a divorce and it’s been dragging on and on in court over child rights. I have a beautiful 5-month-old baby boy whom I adore.

During my campus years I matured to become quite social, especially as an activist, since I knew that at least campus was a more stable environment than I ever had at home. After graduation, my family coming from a very traditional Asian background with rather strict moral and religious values, arranged a marriage with the girl who would be my wife, and after months of bitter disagreements (I prefer not to use the word argue) I finally gave in.

From the start, I realized I would start in a loveless relationship and that I would have to learn to love her eventually, and I did learn to love her. Things started to take a slow but dark turn as my wife then started to control my life, especially when it came to women (she had serious abandonment issues) and rather than risk breaking up my marriage, with the obvious socio-cultural fallout it would definitely create, I chose to suck it up and simply let it slide. Eventually it progressed to the point that she became paranoid about every single person (male and female) that I knew, convinced I was having an affair with them. This got worse over the course of her pregnancy, and this to me was literally a living hell. For the sake of my child, I stood by like an idiot going along, but in the end after she gave birth, SHE said she couldn’t take it anymore and packed up and left with my son when I was overseas. I tried going after her and my son, but now she’s staying with her family and they refuse me access to my son. Any contact I have with them is simply via their lawyer. For weeks I couldn’t sleep or concentrate. I even managed to mess up an important project that got me fired from my job.

I just don’t seem to have the energy or focus to pursue anything now, and have distanced myself from everything. I started to drink rather heavily as well as smoke (I used to campaign against smoking companies). I realize that this could be classified as clinical depression but I just don’t see any solution.

My few remaining friends keep telling to get back out there, but every time I do it feels awkward, especially after having such a controlling person so central to my life for the past two years. I can’t seem to fight the urge to blame others for it all, especially my family, but in the end I know it was my fault. I can’t help but imagine what I’m putting my young son through, imagining what kind of life he’d have growing up without a father, since I had mine all along the way. In the end even though I feel an intense anger to them, I still feel I’ve let them down. I’m just clueless about what to do and that frustrates me even more since I’m usually a very driven and focused person.

As incoherent as it is, please help.

Clueless and HOMEless

Dear Clueless and HOMEless,

I have felt the same way you do. The exact things that have happened to you have not happened to me, not exactly, but I have felt the confusion and sense of betrayal, of having tried to do the right thing and have it come out badly, and the sense of not having a home.

So I speak to you with tears in my eyes. That is probably not the most disciplined way to write a column, and it may seem as though I am being melodramatic or currying sympathy but it is simply the truth, and I say not so much to arouse emotions in others but because, actually, I would like to bring tears into the written discourse of elite American society, so that over time it might become acceptable for a male writer to say from time to time that as he writes there are tears in his eyes — just as a statement of fact, not as a device. There are many traditional strictures under which a male writer writes, and for a long time I have followed most of them. I came across a line from Strunk and White the other day to the effect of, “Keep yourself out of it,” and I thought, my, how far I’ve drifted from the true and orthodox practice of “good journalistic writing”! (It’s complicated, trying to introduce things into language, as they quickly become their opposites. Yet it interests me, the notion of trying to normalize certain phenomena; it seems like on rare occasions it might be one small way to change how we talk with each other in writing. In more grandiose and hopeful moments one might think it could change how we men habitually process emotion and thus decrease the incidence of depression. But that’s pretty far-fetched. All I’m really saying is that I’ve been very emotional lately and your letter stirred me up again.)

It was the second anniversary of my father’s death last week, and I was not able to fully grieve his death at the time, so that is surely part of it. But your loss is your loss, and it’s real. There is loss and pain and these things are real and that is what crying is for. I hope you are crying from time to time because it makes you feel better afterwards. It lets you know what you are feeling. In fact, it seems that certain things can only be felt by crying; we may think we are feeling something but until our body begins its desperate heaving and sobbing we are more just observing it, knowing it is there, but not immersed in it. With the crying, one feels the emotion in one’s whole body; it passes through us, leaving us more alive. There is no doubt or confusion in the moment when one breaks down and cries; there is only the feeling, and the body suffused with that feeling, hot and awake to sadness and anger.

So when this feeling comes over you, do not be afraid to cry. You may cry for your boyhood, too, that lonely time of wandering, left to yourself, trying to become a good man against difficult odds, working to become a modern man in a family that practices ancient customs. It must have been hard for you growing up like that, especially since you seem to have a modern mind, the mind of an activist, the mind of a man who knows that society can change and people can change. So there must be a split between what you know intellectually and the demands of your family. To marry this girl in fact, therefore, must have required you to renounce a large part of yourself, the inquiring, socially aware, critical side. Yet you did it. You did it out of love and respect for your family. So you sacrificed a part of yourself and then this sacrifice was devalued, or annulled, by your wife’s decision to leave and take the baby.

Having no outlet or solution, you have turned this anger and frustration against yourself. That is likely one source of your depression; the way out will be to undo that act, by accepting that you are not the cause of this, but simply an actor with good intentions and a good heart, caught in a powerful system beyond your control. A good therapist can help you do that.

So do not blame yourself. You have done what you could. You have tried to do the right thing. Now your job is to take care of yourself, to get help for your clinical depression.

When we are depressed, we don’t think logically. Our thinking is clouded. So do not trust your thoughts on this. Trust medical science. Trust other people who are not depressed. They can see things a little more clearly than you can right now.

Now it is time to get help for your depression. You may find yourself putting it off or thinking of reasons not to do it. If so, I suggest taking certain simple, direct steps. Think of it this way: You have a new job. Your new job is to treat your depression. Call a hotline, find a psychiatrist or psychologist who can help you.

Take heart. There are a lot of us out here, and we do understand each other.

Cary Tennis is Salon's advice columnist. His latest book is "Citizens of the Dream: Advice on Writing, Painting, Playing, Acting and Being." He leads writing workshops and creative getaways, and occasionally tweets and bellows as @carytennis on Twitter.

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My narcissistic wife is ruining my life

She has affairs without remorse. If we divorce, she wants all my money plus our three kids

By Cary Tennis

(Credit: Zach Trenholm/Salon)

Topics:Since You Asked, , Marriage, Divorce

Dear Cary,

About three years ago my father was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. I drove three hours back and forth to my hometown every week or so to see him and spend a few days helping him and my mom. I was focused on helping my parents cope and everything else seemed somewhat pointless to me. I was depressed. While my attention was distracted by my father’s illness and subsequent death, my wife began an affair with a married man in town. I was grieving and oblivious. As their relationship progressed, the happy couple wanted to spend more time with each other (and in public) so they surreptitiously pushed their respective families together so that we all could be friends. I should have seen it a mile away but my mind was elsewhere. I had just met these people and suddenly my wife, kids and I were vacationing with them.

The affair went on for a year before I became suspicious. I never suspected him but I knew something wasn’t right. I watched her cry at our 13th wedding anniversary dinner. It looked like she was crying over a breakup. She was. His wife had just found out but the three of them were not telling me. I went through the phone bills and quickly confirmed my suspicions. I confronted her, she admitted it and I was crushed.

We went to counseling, yet she refused to admit that what she had done was in any way wrong. In fact, she said that until she got caught it was the best year of her life, having a happy home life and a secret lover.

Nonetheless, I started trying to put the pieces back together for the sake of our three children. But I was still suspicious. She left her computer on at home one day and when I peeked at her email I found that she was planning a rendezvous with another married man (out of town) with whom she had had another affair several years earlier. We went back to therapy and the therapist advised that she “come clean” about all of her affairs. The number quickly shot to seven including one-night stands with my daughter’s gymnastics coach, an old college boyfriend and a threesome (two guys and her). Needless to say, I now can’t get the images of all of these guys out of my head and it has significantly impacted my ability to perform in bed. We also argue a lot now. When she argues she says the most horrific things. She recently told me that I am the worst lover she has ever had. She had all of three before we were married and in the first 10 years of her marriage she used to tell me that the main thing we had in common was great sex. I guess that changed when she started getting some strange.

She still makes no apologies for her cheating. She has this bizarre sense of entitlement and feels that no one man could ever fulfill her completely so she should be able to get what she needs emotionally and physically from multiple people. She has said, “Wedding vows are a joke because pretty much everyone cheats anyway,” and I am “naive and a prude” and the only one of my friends who doesn’t cheat on his wife and that’s because I am “sexually repressed” whereas she is “fabulous” and “great in bed” and everywhere she goes she can instantly tell how many men want to sleep with her. She is quite beautiful, I will give her that. She’s also a narcissist.

Recently I was on the road for business and couldn’t get in touch with her. I subsequently learned that while our kids were in school she had traveled out of town to have lunch with someone. I don’t know who, but I soon found out that this lunch was preceded by dozens of hour-long phone conversations to and from a private number. She will not come clean about it, only saying that she is allowed to have “friends” and that there was “no sex.” She claims that she’s done with the “cheating phase” of her life but should be allowed to have male friends. The more I type the more sickened I am that I am still in this relationship but I have three wonderful children and I want to continue to live with them and guide them into adulthood. I have no desire for them to end up living with some random guy that wants to be called “Dad” and has his own views of parenting.

After a few too many glasses of wine a few weeks ago, she matter-of-factly stated that if we divorce she will sue to be the custodial parent (which she will get because she’s a stay-at-home mom), that I will have to “pay up big” and if I “try to hide any future income” that she is owed, she will get the best lawyers to find it and get me “thrown in jail” until I pay her every nickel. I apparently deserve all that because she gave birth to our three children. She has a college degree from a big-name university but hasn’t worked since our first child was born.

Do I really live in a country in which I have to stay married to a woman who has remorselessly admitted to cheating rampantly (no-fault divorce!) or be resigned to seeing my children every other weekend and writing her checks for half my net worth upfront and up to a third of my gross income for the rest of my life? And don’t tell me that at least the alimony part will end when she remarries. What woman who says she can’t get what she needs from only one man would ever remarry?

Screwed for the Rest of My Life

Dear Screwed,

You have to get out of this relationship.

You’re going to need help. The High Conflict Institute would be a good place to start.

Dr. William Eddy’s book “High-Conflict People in Legal Disputes” may also help.

You don’t have to lose. There is help for you.

You’re not the only man in such a situation. Perhaps you will relate to the following scenario, posted by “SusyP” on the Daily Strength discussion forum under the headline “Predatory Female Narcissists“:

“Narcissistic woman selects the power professional — handsome, well educated, high income, socially polished, near the top. She maneuvers herself into meeting him. He finds her dazzling, gorgeous, attentive to him and filled with the right chemistry. Her detailed plan is unfolding. He is enraptured. She cleverly feigns her inability to resist him. The two are inseparable. In a few months she is pregnant. He is surprised but subject to his instincts and impulses. She wants marriage, money and lifestyle. He acquiesces. They marry. For a while it’s appear idyllic. Then the worm turns. The marriage begins to falter (part of her plan). He was so taken with her, there is no prenup. After a while, lawyers are hired. She knows the cleverest ones since she has directed this movie before. She gets more than half of the money and possessions. Narcissistic divas use a living human being they call their child as collateral to ensure their financial security and the success of her enterprise.”

She recommends The Narcissist in Your Life site.

So, this is not hopeless. But you need to act. Consult with an attorney. Not just any attorney. Consult with an attorney who knows how to deal with high-conflict individuals and also is familiar with the personalities and biases in his or her venue.

You may believe that social services and the family law justice establishment are biased against you. But how could a judge or social worker reasonably disregard your wife’s deceit, erratic behavior and disregard for the feelings of others? Call me naive, but do not lose hope. Learn what you can about dealing with high-conflict people in divorce proceedings, get some counseling for your own well-being, and get on the road to recovery from this nightmare.

I know that you can emerge from this. After all, though she has treated you cruelly, you are not the sick one. You at least have the capacity to live a life of reason and care for others. Take some consolation in the fact that her inner life must also be a kind of hell, whereas you are a decent man, capable of honest, caring relationships with others. Get some help for your grief. You’ve been through a lot. Don’t assume that she will prevail.

No matter what happens, you, at least, can be happy. You can live a fulfilling life. That cannot be said for a person driven by anxiety, fear and delusion, incapable of loving in a healthy way.

Good luck to you, sir!

(p.s. In searching the Web for information on narcissism you may come across the postings of an unusual and controversial personality known as Sam Vaknin. His words may sound compelling but must be read critically and with caution. I found this discussion of his bona fides helpful.– ct)

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The anniversary I spent alone

Twenty-five years after we married, my husband had left me. Now I faced a milestone I didn't know how to celebrate

By Beverly Willett

(Credit: Andrei Dumitru via Shutterstock)

Topics:Coupling, Divorce, Life stories

Silver wedding anniversaries were a big to-do in the small town where I grew up. Practically every marriage I knew made it that far. And even gossip about couples grabbing the gold centered on whether they’d live that long, not if they’d still be together when the time came. In short, the vocabulary of my Southern upbringing most definitely did not include the D-word.

Yet there I was standing in the kitchen one morning at 51, smack dab in the middle of a divorce, when the impending date of my 25th reared its big, ugly, gargantuan head, nearly boinging itself right off the calendar at me. Up until then, I hadn’t given any thought as to how I was going to celebrate. A few years before, I’d have keeled over on the spot if you’d told me I might be marking the milestone alone while my husband ate dinner with his fiancée.

Once reality sank in, there was no calming my anxiety. Even my regular meditation practice failed me. Or rather I failed at it. I was certain I’d be dragging myself around all day with a long face, vulnerable to spontaneous bouts of blubbering. So I immediately made a midday salon appointment. Wash that man right out of my hair, so to speak. It was a start, but only; in my mind a big day required something equally big to mark it.

My first idea — reenacting “Under the Tuscan Sun” — quickly fizzled out. Last-minute plane fare was expensive, and my kids were in school. As a single mom, I simply had too many things on my plate, not to mention guilt, to skip off to Italy.

Plan B included making a list of friends who had listened and returned my calls during the separation. I’d invite them all out for champagne and hors d’oeuvres. My treat. Days passed, however, and my invitations remained on the dining room table, untouched.

“You know, my 25th anniversary is almost here,” I said, pitching my party idea to my best friend Sadie one morning over breakfast.

“Just give me the date, hon,” she said.

“But what do you think about my plan?” I said, finally asking her point-blank the advice I had dreaded soliciting for days.

“I wouldn’t spend the money,” she said. “But if you think about it, there’s nothing to celebrate.” I was silent. “Whatever you decide, you know I’ll support you.”

I did know. Twice since my husband had left I’d gone into surgery alone. Twice Sadie had been there with a cup of Starbucks when I’d woken up.

Two seconds later I ditched the party idea. With only eight days to countdown, I was back to square one. I was petrified and certain I’d be spending my anniversary with the person I wanted to least be with: me.

Fantasies of how my husband and I might have once celebrated engulfed me the following week. It was a thoroughly useless gut-wrencher, I knew. As if continually punctuating my pain might somehow relieve it. I concluded Jake and I would probably have thrown a big party in the dream house we’d picked out 10 years before. We’d gone house hunting, and once I walked in and saw all that sunlight pouring in through the kitchen door, I knew the place was ours. Even Jake had been convinced. More than 25 years ago, we’d been as equally convinced about each other.

Jake had grown up in New York; I moved north from Maryland after law school to accept a job in the same company where Jake worked. The day we met he kept me standing in heels for nearly an hour while peppering me with questions before he finally offered me a seat.

“Let me tell you about myself,” he said. I hadn’t asked and wasn’t interested, big brown dreamy eyes or not. Only 25, I had just landed my first real job in New York City. The last thing on my mind was falling in love.

“I bet you didn’t know I was an actor, did you?” he said, opening his desk drawer and handing me his head shot, which gave me all his stats. I wondered how often he’d rehearsed that role.

“Really,” I replied, my tone flat, not wanting to encourage him one bit. Not that it mattered. He liked to talk and kept at it for another two hours.

“Jerk,” I said under my breath, finally freeing myself with pleas of work to do. But Jake never let up. Day by day he drew me in with some offhand comment that was just so funny I couldn’t help but laugh and toss something in return. He said he’d never met a girl who could give back as good as he gave, and soon I was blushing and warming to all his stories. Before long, I was hopelessly smitten.

Nine months later we were sealed in holy wedlock by my grandfather, a Southern Baptist minister whom my Jewish-born husband nonetheless approved of, at the Madison Avenue Baptist Church in Manhattan. Twenty years we lived in Brooklyn, enduring what at times seemed like more than our fair share of troubles, troubles to me nonetheless overshadowed by the two lives we brought into the world.

Within weeks of the seven-year itch, we conceived our first daughter. Equally auspicious, a few months before unlucky 13, we brought home healthy daughter number two. In between, we threw a grand party to celebrate our 10th anniversary and greeted guests all decked out in nuptial gear. Jake was handsome in his black tuxedo, and I slipped easily into my wedding gown. And damned if we didn’t look happily ever after, I thought, flipping through the photo album, never once doubting in all those years that, just like my mom and dad, Jake and I, too, would one day stand side by side, cutting our anniversary cake.

And then one day my 12-year-old daughter found me in the kitchen one morning, broken.

“Why are you crying, Mom?” she asked, rubbing my back.

“Your dad’s leaving, sweetheart,” I reminded her.

“I know, but Daddy still loves you.”

“I’m not so sure,” I’d said.

“Of course he does,” she assured me. “He gave you those emerald earrings you wanted for your anniversary.”

Less than six months before, Jake and I had celebrated our 20th anniversary. He’d loaded the evening with surprises, including a small box containing the emerald earrings I’d seen in a shop the winter before.

What my daughter didn’t know, however, was that three months later her father had a girlfriend. That shortly after he started a new job, he’d begun having an affair with a woman in his office who had a 9-year-old son and two previous marriages behind her.

Still, it was my daughter’s words I hung on to, wanting to believe my little girl was somehow more capable of discerning the truth than I was. Weeks later, though, her father was gone. And five years came and went. And there I was, an A-1 planner without a plan, facing my silver wedding anniversary alone. A woman who had worked her way through law school, traveled the world and made it all the way to New York City, yet still longing for the one thing the women in her small, rural hometown had accomplished that she somehow hadn’t — an abiding marriage.

As I sat home, wallowing, I lifted from the shelf the white wedding album that I’d been avoiding since the day Jake left. My eyes fell on the fresh-faced blonde and her suitor standing at the altar, their future an open slate.

A year and a half before, I’d gone to a lecture one Saturday afternoon and realized I was within a few blocks of that very church. I figured there was no better time to venture a peek, fortified as I was from a two-hour Buddhist lecture, and so I strolled there, only to find the doors bolted. Disappointed, I walked away, avoiding the church from then on, even though the thought of going back lingered.

Suddenly the time seemed right to brave those wooden doors again. So a few days later, when my anniversary arrived, I hopped on the subway.

“Take as long as you like,” the church manager said, leading me inside and then excusing himself. In all honesty I wasn’t exactly sure why I’d gone or what I was going to do. As I looked around, stroking the red-velvet-covered pews, a few details came rushing back — the double aisles, one on either side, the rich wood. The rest was decidedly more majestic than I remembered — eight stained-glass windows, a cathedral ceiling, and a reredos adorned with intricate wood and gold filigree. The scale of my presence in the space where my husband and I had pledged our faithfulness exactly 25 years before was humbling.

Surprised to find myself wanting to recollect more, I strode to the anteroom on the left-hand side of the church where I’d once waited nervously with my attendants on a hot Saturday afternoon. Our flower girl had thrown a fit in that very spot, advising her mother she most assuredly was not walking down that aisle. I laughed, realizing that the little girl who stuck to her guns was all grown up and most surely an executive in charge of a vast number of underlings.

And then I walked through the archway, just as I’d once done, pretending to link arms with my dad, gone 20 years from a heart attack, my head held high, tears flowing, while I marched down the aisle.

It’s OK, I can do this, I said to myself as I reached the front pew and sat down. Brian, the church manager, appeared with a cup of water and left as quietly as he’d entered. Susan Sparks, the pastor, arrived next. I’d read about her online — a woman preacher and a stand-up comic. This was definitely not my mother’s Baptist church.

“Brian told me why you’re here,” she said. “What a brave thing to do. Perhaps you’ll even be able to reclaim this place in a different way.” I hadn’t expected to meet her but half thought she’d say something humorous to lighten the mood a bit. But she was somber, kind. And that’s when I realized that flying off to Europe or partying with my girlfriends would have been all wrong. This was a time for being alone and making peace with my loss. Susan left as quickly and quietly as Brian had done, and I resumed my meditation, breathing in bright white light and blowing all the dark smoky anger out.

As I ran my hands over the plush pews, my thoughts all at once became clear, and I took out paper and pen and started writing my husband’s girlfriend a note. “I imagine it will be as awkward for you to read as it is for me to write,” I began. A month before, she’d been diagnosed with cancer. And while I was still light years from forgiveness, what she and I had in common unexpectedly trumped the enormous gulf between us: We were both mothers. Surprised, I found myself wishing her a complete recovery, though in truth I hadn’t always felt that way.

“I hope your son is doing OK,” I added. “My girls say he’s a nice kid.”

When I finished the note, it was time to go. I’d reenacted my entrance on the left; it was time for my exit on the right. I turned my back to the altar and started as the words “come on Jake” flew from my lips. But once I gathered my wits, I stopped dead mid-aisle, turned round again, and said out loud: “On second thought, I’m going to do this part on my own.” And then I marched down the aisle and out the church, wondering who could possibly be channeling through me, feeling as light as the June air that greeted me outdoors.

: Beverly Willett's articles have appeared in many national newspapers and magazines. She is the Vice Chair of the Coalition for Divorce Reform, which she helped found, and is represented by the Bent Agency. Visit her at beverlywillett.com. More Beverly Willett

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My favorite divorce

Anne and I tried to stay married for our daughter, but it was ending our romance that truly saved our family

By Jonathan Weiler

(Credit: Mincemeat via Shutterstock)

Topics:Divorce, Coupling, Life stories, Parenting, Real Families

On a sunny June day in 2009, I attended the wedding of my former wife, Anne. The small church in Chapel Hill, N.C., contained many people who were at our own wedding 14 years earlier, including my mother, who sat beside me. One person who had not been in attendance that day was our 11-year-old daughter, Lillian. My heart swelled with pride as she delivered a reading from “The Velveteen Rabbit” as part of the ceremony. My former wife and I have often laughed about the readings we chose for our own wedding, which all, somehow, had to do with not getting too close. Khalil Gibran’s “On Marriage” included the evocative phrase, “make not a bond of love …”

In fact, over the years, I have experienced a deep bond with Anne, particularly now that our relationship has more to do with parenting than a failed romance. Ten years ago, when we were still trying to salvage our marriage — we’d spent years in couples counseling — our therapist asked us, “Why would you want to be someone somebody settled for?” Why, indeed? The only answer we could honestly give was the love we each felt for Lillian, who was then 3. We didn’t want to ruin her life by getting divorced.

But we weren’t happy and couldn’t remember a time when we gave each other the kind of intimate connection one needs from a lifelong romantic partner. Although our daughter was still young, we feared she would become ever more aware of the disconnect between what we were saying and what we were living out on a day-to-day basis. We didn’t divorce “for her” — it caused Lillian confusion and unhappiness. But we also knew that staying together would not have guaranteed her happiness, either. And we resolved to do everything in our power to keep our marital catastrophe from becoming a parenting catastrophe.

That summer of 2001, Anne said to me, “Well, there’s no person I’d rather be divorced from than you.” The mother of all backhanded compliments, I thought at the time. A decade later, it turns out, truer words were never said. Our now 14-year-old daughter is flourishing, Anne is happy in her new marriage and, though this will sound odd to some and worse to others, we’ve thrived in divorce. In fact, I dare say we’ve found true love with one another — without the romance. In some ways, then, our love story begins with our divorce, rather than ending with it.

By the time we exchanged vows, it was obvious that I was ignoring some basic facts about the relationship. We had more or less stopped having sex. Over the years, we joked that the Gibran quote should have read, “Make neither love nor a bond of love …” We had trouble pushing one another to confront our problems, particularly in the bedroom, related as those were to our own fears of conflict, confrontation, taking emotional risks and hurting one another’s feelings. On the day I proposed to Anne, I had more or less talked myself into being engaged. Anne had been pushing in that direction for months. Though she was still only 30, she believed, not unlike Meg Ryan in “When Harry Met Sally,” that the dreaded 40 was just around the corner. She wanted to have kids. She’d decided that I would be a suitable father and life partner. I, on the other hand, had no such clear vision. I was 29, still in graduate school and slogging through my dissertation. I didn’t have strong feelings about being a father. But, I reasoned, many of my closest friends were already married or engaged. Anne was smart, funny and a good-hearted person. I felt warmly toward her family, and her family welcomed me in turn.

Beneath these more mundane considerations was my tendency to ignore my own feelings and to assume that whatever ambivalence I felt about marriage owed to my immaturity and lack of focus. This enabled me to do what I’ve always done so well — dismiss my own desires as questionable. Having pooh-poohed my doubts, getting engaged seemed to make sense “on paper.” So, as I went to meet Anne on an unseasonably warm January morning in 1995, I felt exhilarated. Not because I was delirious with joy to spend the rest of my life with my true love. Instead, I finally had clarity about a profound life decision. When I met Anne that day, I said, “I think I am ready to be engaged now.” Talk about words that will ring across the ages in the annals of romance.

I trust I am not the only man who has found himself “helplessly dependent on the mercy of a redeeming mother-angel-lover,” as Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk describes it. Once Anne turned out to be flesh and blood, a human being with foibles and not an angel sent from heaven to deliver me from my own unsatisfied emotional needs, my discontent began to pervade the relationship.

Years of work in therapy, of low-level resentment and mutual frustration led us to the moment when our therapist asked the question we could not answer. There is a form of loneliness perhaps worse than any other, the loneliness of being in the wrong relationship. Once we recognized that clearly, the decision to end the marriage was clear. And though we have had our ups and downs since then, one of the true gifts of the divorce has been the way my relationship with Anne matured. Thankfully, we’ve never really fought about money, we’ve managed a joint-custody arrangement quite smoothly, and we’ve generally been on the same page about our daughter. And to our surprise, sorting through the conflicts that do arise has not only served our co-parenting. It’s has also deepened our own connection. We’re now more honest with each other. We’re capable of getting mad and then getting over it.

One form our mutual love has taken is a capacity to root for each other, to revel in one another’s achievements, to wish only the best for one another. That’s what I experienced during Anne’s recent wedding. As my mother and I witnessed the exchange of vows from the back of the church, the truth of the moment became crystal clear – Greg loved Anne in a way I never did. I knew this already, but it was that moment when I could feel the depth of Greg’s love for Anne down to my fingers and toes. (Can a Jewish atheist have such a religious experience?)

Parenting without the weight of the marital failure has been freeing. The feelings of a relationship ended are not neatly secured in a trash bag, disposed in a dump, never to be thought of again. Fragments remain. But they need no longer control us. And what’s left is a deep, abiding love.

Recently, Anne and I were having lunch together and I shared with her some relationship struggles I’d been having. Anne listened attentively and offered some useful insights; she certainly knows me and my history. As we were parting, not sure how to end the conversation, she said, “Well, good luck with that!” I’ve been chuckling about that for days. Anne is a dear friend. More than that, a family member, even if there is no such legally recognized category for us. But that part of my life is not her problem anymore. I take profound solace in the clarity that Anne’s little parting sentiment represents. Anne’s presence in my life has been a gift, and not just because we had a daughter together whom we love more than anything. It turns out that Anne was the best person I could hope to have been divorced from.

: Jonathan Weiler, a faculty member at UNC Chapel Hill, is a regular political columnist for the Independent Weekly of North Carolina and a frequent contributor to Huffington Post. He and his former wife Anne Menkens are currently working on a book about divorce. More Jonathan Weiler