Why I’m giving my estranged wife, who makes 80K per year, a bag of groceries
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. — Dream Song 14, John Berryman
I filled the reusable organic sack I was preparing for my estranged wife with some basic food staples: cans of green beans and vegetable soup, bags of raw pinto beans and oatmeal, a bag of fresh, crisp carrots, some all-natural applesauce, and a few luxury staples like butternut squash ravioli and fresh-frozen haddock filets.
My wife lives apart from me in a rent-reduced sober living house after a few years of struggles with alcohol use disorder (what used to be termed “alcoholism”). This way, she is surrounded by counselors and peers who ensure her safety and sobriety.
Life at home had become untenable for her. After a few years of problems with alcohol use that increased in intensity, she finally figured out the source of her travails that led her to abuse alcohol.
It was me.
At age 50, I’m a shadow of a man, a Falstaff to her Prince Hal. My light-hearted, humor-filled take on life wasn’t funny anymore. I’d taken too many withdrawals from her bank of generosity without replenishing the accounts. My marriage, like so many of my quixotic entrepreneurial ventures, had ended in failure.
When a business fails, you’re out some start-up capital, perhaps you’ve angered a few creditors, and you’ve squandered a shit-ton of sweat equity. But you’ve also learned some valuable lessons along the way, chief among them that life isn’t fair, and that success doesn’t always come to those who work hardest.
There is an inherent throw of the dice to life, but we must not say so.
We tell ourselves that the man with the mansion on the hill got there because he worked harder than everyone else and put his nose to the grindstone while everyone else was out living the good life.
Some of the time this is true, of course, and indolence will get you nowhere in life. But often, good fortune is the catalyst for success from a formula assembled and primed by hard work.
But when we marry someone, the possibility of failure is never entertained. It’s a lifelong commitment for better or for worse, as the traditional vows inform.
Divorce? We must not say so.
As in business, sometimes good fortune provides the razor’s edge between a successful, happy marriage and the abyss of divorce.
Last year, my wife lost her job in the healthcare industry, and was out of work for several months. As a freelancer who specializes in marketing and media for special events, I was the secondary breadwinner. Sometimes I did bring home a full loaf, but often, it was mere crumbs. I underestimated the toll that my work took on our marriage, and specifically on my wife, who measures success in dollars and cents.
I tried and failed to take the traditional income pole position as the husband, as detailed in another essay I wrote. My wife’s patience had run out, her kindness was depleted and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do, no matter how hard I tried to save the marriage.
After a few months in employment purgatory (she was officially employed so that our family could keep our health insurance, but not being paid a salary), my wife was offered another position. She took a pay cut, but was still making north of 80K per year.
I also got two good contracts in the tourism industry, so our family’s financial situation was beginning to recover nicely.
Then, my wife dropped the atom bomb on our happy, if fragile, family situation.
First, she moved out of the house and into a group home for recovering addicts after a relapse. Next, she arranged couples counseling for us, which I was only too happy to take part in. The first couple of sessions went well, and within what I thought was a culture of mutual respect and understanding.
But towards the end of the third session, the counselor asked us where we saw ourselves in two years’ time, and my wife said she saw us apart. Both the therapist and I were shocked, our jaws agape. We tried one more session a week later, but about 20 minutes into it, my wife started screaming and left the meeting in a rage.
Her outbursts were concomitant with the outbreak of Covid-19 here in the eastern United States. In scarcely two weeks’ time, my son was home from college, my daughter suddenly alienated from friends and teachers at her high school, and I was out of a job as international travel ground to a halt.
My wife was physically about 10 miles from us, but she might as well have been half a world away. There was no contact, no explanation, no support offered — only cold indifference and schadenfreude for our bewildered suffering.
Like the pilot of the Enola Gay over Hiroshima, she had dropped her payload of destruction, then she cut and ran, sensing the flash and burn of the damage she’d deliberately caused, but unwilling to look behind and take responsibility for the inferno that engulfed the rest of our family.
And ironically, as the heat of the Covid-blighted summer beckoned, our family faced the nuclear winter of my wife’s destruction.
Months later, I packed the bag of groceries for my estranged wife, just a few weeks away from being able to file for divorce.
She’d complained, during one of our terse but rare email exchanges, of being hungry because she barely had any money to pay for food.
She was still making a salary to live comfortably on, especially given the fact that she hardly paid any rent by living in the group home.
But in this case, my wife was not lying. She is broke because most of her salary is earmarked to pay legal bills. She’d hired a high-powered attorney, intent on escaping the financial and parental responsibilities that come with 24 years of marriage.
My wife was also intent on sticking the knife in further on my back and moving it around seductively to cause me intense pain. She’d repeatedly referred to me in email exchanges as a “burden.” She refused to give me any spousal support as I struggled to find new contracts. She’s looking to unload me from her health insurance plan as soon as possible, even though I have type 1 diabetes, hypertension and clinical depression. My career as an independent contractor was promulgated with the understanding that my wife’s health care job would provide insurance for our family. Now, she delights in my suffering as payback for what she saw as 24 years of misery. And now also her political heroes seek to dismantle the Affordable Care Act that would offer options for me upon her official abandonment.
Only my 21 year old son, home from college and marooned together with me at our house, saved me from attempting to take my life a couple of times this summer.
One such stated desire came after my wife informed me via email that together with her lawyer, they had come up with a figure in excess of 400K, seeking restitution for 26 years of “freeloading.” I have my doubts that this is true, but during my stay in the hospital, I wrote my poem “Zinoviev Letter” in reference to a similar forged piece of polemics from the annals of British history.
My wife’s response to my suicidal ideations that I expressed to her via texts and emails was to mock them on her social media pages. Her female friends from AA, proponents of divorcing me, joined in with the festivities that I got to witness for a few hours until I was blocked and banned from any of her pages.
As my wife celebrated the prospect that my “burden” might be completely off her back, without the pesky morality of divorce law cramping her style, I lined up for food assistance for the first time in my life.
I was blown away, moved to tears by the generosity that was extended to me. My car, and in turn my stomach, was filled with fresh, quality produce. My faith in humanity, shaken to the core by my wife’s cruelty and vindictiveness, was itself replenished and I vowed someday, and at some time, to pay this generosity forward.
That’s why I found myself filling a bag with excess food that I didn’t need any longer, the surplus of the kindness extended to me, for a woman who exhibits sociopathic tendencies and who is certainly not any more deserving than I am.
Matthew 5:44 — But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…
As I packed the bag of groceries for my wife, I snickered out loud in my empty house. I thought of sticking a couple of pieces of rotten food in the “care package.” Maybe I’d carefully replace one of the cans of beans with some cat food, or swap out the almond milk with Pepto-Bismol. That would be revenge, and pretty funny too!
I thought of doing this because I am a human. A deeply flawed human with a good fill of all the pettiness and rancor that infects even the kindest soul.
But then I thought of the words and the example of Jesus Christ, who taught us to love our enemies, and to pray for those who persecute us.
No, I’ve not been nailed to a cross. And I’m the first one to admit that a good portion of my wife’s anger directed at me was well-deserved. I’ve often failed, and failed in good measure at being a good husband and a good father. Maybe I’m not worthy of my wife’s forgiveness.
But to take revenge, to strike back with insults and injury is easy. It’s as easy as it would have been to fill the sack for my wife with junk food.
Revenge and vindictiveness are like junk food. They are enticing and sweet to the lips, but they leave us hollow and sick.
Forgiveness, kindness and compassion are hard. They involve effort, patience and discipline, just as one needs those things to prepare a nourishing meal. And kindness and mercy nourish our soul.
Divorce is also hard. It sucks!
Divorce is so hard because we are forced to reckon with the fact that the person you once loved, that person you fell for and walked home in the dark and laughed with until they snorted, the person who called you when their tire went flat on the freeway or when their soul was similarly deflated, loves you no more.
That very same person who held your hand as you lay on a hospital bed in an emergency room the night of your mother’s funeral, vomiting uncontrollably from poisoning or emotions or whatever it was. That person who later promised before God to love you forever, for better or for worse.
All the preliminaries of earnest devotion, of physical attraction, of the joy of children’s births or the sorrow of lost parents, the sturm und drang, the agony and the ecstasy of married life mean nothing when the diagonal blade of the guillotine that is divorce drops swiftly and mercilessly to forever cleave two souls that had once become one stronger unit through marriage.
Divorce is so hard because that person that you loved like no one else, and maybe still love deep down inside, has become your opponent, and your own worst enemy.
We must not say so.