Abandonment - noun: The action or fact of abandoning or being abandoned. - Lexico, powered by Oxford
Abandon - verb: 1. Cease to support or look after; desert. 2. Leave empty or uninhabited, without intending to return. 3. Give up completely. - Lexico, powered by Oxford
If you read my first post, you know how I felt about my marriage and what kind of marriage I thought I was in. But I was wrong. It wasn't a partnership. It wasn't a safe place. It wasn't full of everlasting love leading to two old people rocking on their front porch, all wrinkly and gray-haired and reminiscing about their happy decades together.
After Wusband left (and by left, I mean walked out with half my furniture, two kids, and all my dogs), I spent a lot of time reflecting on my marriage, trying to figure out what went wrong and how I missed the signs that it was doomed. The longer he was gone, and the longer I wasn't under his influence, I began to see things that I had never fully seen or understood before.
This is what my marriage was really like: Toxic. Abusive. I was manipulated. He lied. A lot. He cheated. A lot. I was used to feed his ego, fulfill a caretaker role, and sit on his shelf as a trophy; there was never any other purpose for me.
You may be asking yourself, How can you claim to be in an emotionally abusive relationship described like that and not have known the truth about it? Good question (and perhaps a topic for a future post). Perhaps I ignored all the red flags. Perhaps I wanted a happy marriage so badly that I deluded myself into believing it was what I wanted it to be, instead of seeing it for what it really was. Or perhaps he manipulated and abused me so much that I was incapable of seeing the truth at all. I think it's a combination of all three things, honestly.
So Wusband left me while I was nine weeks pregnant with his child. It only took him a week after we decided to get divorced to find a place to live. (I suspect he had been looking prior to the divorce decision.) He moved out and never looked back. In a few weeks, he stopped responding to my emails and texts and generally acted like I didn't exist. I was abandoned. He abandoned me.
In my first post, I compared my idea of marriage to that of an older but well-loved house. I still think the metaphor sticks. The best way I can describe what it feels like to be abandoned is to compare it to an empty house, vacant for years, slowly rotting to its death as passers-by stare at it in disgust, wishing someone would just tear it down already.
Can you picture that abandoned house? The windows have all been broken from years of storms and kids throwing rocks. All that's left is shards of glass and, if anyone cared at all, some wooden boards where the windows used to be. The roof, which once protected the homeowners from cold and rain and snow, is now sunken in and has even fallen into the house in some places. The front yard, which was once nicely mowed and contained impeccable garden beds full of colorful flowers and neatly trimmed shrubs, is overgrown and brown. There aren't any visible signs of the roses and tulips that were planted with such care and love.
When Wusband left, everything about my marraige, my life, and myself was called into question. Everything changed. My eyes, which had once sparkled with joy and hopeful energy, now were filled with pain and tears. The man who promised to spend his life supporting and protecting me had disappeared, apparenlty with no remorse or care for me, leaving me to fend for myself through whatever life was going to throw at me. The beautiful family we had worked so hard to create, the years of carefully blending our once-separate lives into one in which all the kids (his and mine) were comfortable and felt that they truly belonged, was ripped apart. Like that abandoned house, there was nothing left that even remotely resembled the life I thought we had been living.
So what happens to that abandoned house? There are only two possible outcomes: 1. Someone comes along and fixes it up, puts love back into it, and restores it to its former glory. Or 2. It continues to rot, falling apart more quickly as time goes on, until it either caves into itself or gets bulldozed to the ground.
I refuse to let myself be the second house. But I'm not sitting here waiting for the next Mr. Right to resuce me. It looks like I'm going to have restore my own life, but not back to what it was. No. This time, I will make it mine. And it will be glorious.
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