It’s time to come out of the closet.
In a comment to my previous post, MayB brought up the concept of regrets. It was stated in the context of my ongoing friendship with an ex-boyfriend, whom I’ve known nearly twenty years, and who also has remained an important person in my life. Why? Dunno. There are lots of whys. Whys are as plentiful as What-ifs and If-Onlys.
The question of regrets seems to me an interesting coincidence, because of what happened to me last night.
My husband, in normal circumstances, really is a smart, funny, extremely perceptive guy. He’s responsible, and hardworking, and unwaveringly dedicated to his family and the family ideal. He loves kids. He adores his son, and they play together as if they were of an age. I jokingly tell acquaintances that I have two children: My five-year-old son, and my husband. (To be honest, it can be sweet when relating to my son, but when he should be adultlike, it’s bloody frustrating.)
So, my husband has lots of good, admirable qualities.
But my husband also boasts some down sides. Sure, we all do. But his cross the line between being human, and just being… well, I’m at a loss for an appropriate word.
My husband suffers from an undiagnosed mood disorder. We are talking extreme mood swings from one second to the next. If given free reign, he can really work himself up into frightening rages. Mostly, though, he can go from being strangely peppy, to strangely irrational, and settle back into normal rhythm and behave as if nothing has happened. That whole cycle might run its course within an hour, but the mood changes seem to happen instantaneously.
Last night, we ordered take away. It was delivered to us, and I called to my cheery husband in the shower that our food had arrived. He got out, and we all settled down to our individual orders. While we were still eating, I heard a deep cracking noise coming from the kitchen. It sounded like wood from the fire stove popping, but it came distinctly from the kitchen. I glanced inside from where we were sitting in the living room, but saw nothing, and didn’t think anything about it. A minute or two later, I heard what sounded like dripping from the kitchen. I glanced over, didn’t notice anything unusual, and went back to listening to what my husband was saying.
But I kept hearing the noise.
The next time I looked, I saw there was a large puddle forming at the bottom of a cabinet we use to store excess beverages. Water, wine, whisky, beer, more water (I’m the water drinker). I also have been storing my newly bottled Kombucha tea there. And Kombucha tea gets fizzy when you bottle it. Sometimes, if you don’t use bottles appropriate for fizzy beverages, said bottle—a wine bottle, say, like the ones I had been using—will burst.
Well guess what, guys? One of those bottle broke.
I suppose right here would be a good place to explain how controlling my husband is. To make a long and complicated issue as simple as possible, let me apply it only to how it affects my relationship with you fellow bloggers.
My husband hates it when I do things that are part of my own personal development. I don’t write when he’s around because he starts to get agitated. I can see it. And eventually, without fail, he will find a reason to use my writing against me, then enforce acceptable times when I can do it. So, in order to avoid a nasty scene, I don’t write when he’s home. Which is why I don’t blog on the weekends. Consequently, he doesn't know about Blogit, my blogs, or anything of that nature.
The Kombucha tea is a similar story. In order to make it, I needed a live culture and starter fluid to begin. That means I had to find it somewhere. Many people won’t ship it through the mail, which means if you find a provider, you have to drive out there to get it. My husband uses our only car to get to work (even though he can use the train—another control issue of his).
There was some back and forth about driving out to get a culture from someone. Whenever I approached him about it, he got all irritated and pissy. So, then I tried to find someone to mail one to me—with absolutely no luck. (I took advantage of my visit Stateside to purchase one through a reputable herbalist and brought it back to Germany.)
He also limited my buying bottled Kombucha from the store. It’s expensive, but less expensive than the alcohol and cola he purchases every week, by three quarters. In other words, it would have been okay if I wanted a case of soda every week, at 13 euros per 16 1-litre-bottles. But if I wanted to spend 6 euros on two litre-bottles of Kombucha tea (KT), forget it. I could only get one.
So knowing how he thinks, I also knew that he would not like the process of home-brewed KT. I found a discreet area to let it ferment before bottling, but kept the bottles in the cabinet with the rest of our beverages. In a sense, it was an open secret. For two weeks, he said nothing but the occasional disparaging comment about my strange beverage. I thought things were going well.
When the bottle broke in the cabinet last night, I knew I was in trouble. Without a word, I got up, took a dishtowel and tried to catch the liquid as it fell. But when I opened the cabinet, the towel was insufficient to stem the tidal pool of Kombucha waiting to spill out. So, it hit the floor with a splash.
Which caught my husband’s attention.
When I told him oh-so-casually, knowing what thin ice I was standing on, it was over: my husband’s cheeriness, my Kombucha brewing, a pleasant evening.
After some ranting, he told me I had to throw the rest of the bottles away. He wouldn’t have me brewing some shitty drink in his house. He said, to be specific, that the bottles had to be thrown away the next day. So, I finished cleaning up the mess, planning to transfer the precious KT to some plastic 1.5-litre water bottles the next day. I heard an endless rumble from him about how it stank. Which was an exaggeration. It’s a yeasty apple-cider smell. Not unpleasant. Not to me, anyway.
But as I was getting our son ready for bed, I heard bottles banging around in the kitchen. I knew what he was doing. Later on, I went into the kitchen to look for something for my cough, and I saw that he had done what I was afraid of. He’d taken all seven bottles of my home-brewed KT and dumped them all down the kitchen sink. He’d also hidden my box of Pu-erh tea, which he’d made very clear earlier in the day that it smells like fish and he can’t stand it. (I found it this morning, by the way, but left it where it was. I then took my two remaining boxes, which he doesn’t know I have, and hid them. And yes, it sucks living my life in secret from my husband. Isn't that just wrong???)
His reasoning behind it? Brewing the KT, which takes no more than two hours of total physical work each week, is taking too much of my time and attention away from the house, and care and education of my son.
And I thought, uh-oh. Here we go again. It’s this time of year (winter), and he always gets worse. Last year was horrible, and resulted in my leaving him and petitioning for the custody of our son. I won’t go into why I returned. But I did. And now here we are, back to square one, it seems.
In addition to my husband’s control issues, mood disorder/irrational thought, alcoholism and verbal abuse, he also toes the line of being a physical threat. I’ve been pushed/shoved, pinched, scratched, blocked, forced up the stairs, in addition to being raged at and controlled to the point that my human rights have been treaded upon. (The KT being but one example.)
And because of the sticky state and general unlikelihood of foreigners gaining custody of their German-born children, you might understand a portion of the reason I returned to my husband this summer. And you might also understand why I’m so desperate for our family to return to the States.
So do I have regrets?
One might say I do. In a way, I wish that when T had called me out of the blue two weeks before my wedding, I had called the whole thing off and tried again with him. But without my beastly husband, I wouldn’t have the beautiful child that I do. There are some nice times, though they don’t justify the not-so-nice times.
Regrets are complicated. I’ve certainly learned some important lessons in the six years of my marriage. But one thing is clear. I can’t keep it a secret any more. I’m coming out of the closet as an unhappy spouse of a verbally abusive, mood-swinging alcoholic.
I didn’t ever want to write about this issue on Blogit. I didn’t want to whine and complain. I don’t want people to poo-poo me, or poor-Silver me, or give me advice. I hold no illusions of the situation I’m in. None. I choose to stay (for now) for some important reasons, and not one of them is self-delusional. But the time for secret-keeping is over.
And regrets, in my opinion, are a luxury I can’t afford.
What regrets might you have? Are they really regrets? Be careful how you answer. There's a lot more to it than you think.
