Hi, I'm 21 years old, and in my last year of college. I'm also married and a father, and my wife and I are getting a divorce. Our daughter is just over one year old. I feel guilty, but I know that staying with my wife (20 years old, currently studying to be what I suppose you'd call a stay at home nanny or a govenement payed babysitter). Life has never been easy, but I'll tell here only what directly pertains to the current situation.
My wife and I are opposites in almost every way. I think one could say that we differ in everything but the determination that our way is the right one, she's right and I'm wrong and vice versa. All her life she's been kept on a short lease by her parents, who are best described as orthodox evangelical christians, people who do everything and anything in the name of the Lord and don't give a rat's ass about how that makes other people feel. My wife's more or less the same, though not everything's in the name of the Lord, she doesn't give a crap about how I feel. She admittedly knows she only believes it and behaves like it because that was what she was taught, but that's no reasen for her to rethink and adjust.
See, here's the thing, I'm a rather independent thinker, studying every single religion, of not for spiritual, then for cultural significance, trying to find some truth, studying the etymology, as it were, of biblical texts, the Qur'an, gnostic scripture, the Mahabbaratha (I do hope I spelled that correctly),and so on. I've experimented with various psychedelics to see what it does in a spiritual sense, in other words studying what influence psychedelics most likely would have had on religion. I've been baptised as a Christian, and have been through endless hours of sermons, as a good Dutch Protestant should. I've been re-baptised in her Evangelical community, giving their view a chance. I've prayed and sung, laughed and cried with them, but found it to be just another group of people not so much unlike myself desperate for anything to believe in. I've been initiated into reiki, and am therefore allowed to practice that form of energywork on myself and otheres, and have experienced much of this as well, but found it all the same. This search has been the beauty of my life, eventually coming to an understanding that all religion is equally valuable for the hope and joy it can inspire, and a powerful tool for individuals to stick to their virtues and keep their strength even through the most difficult of times. Faith is most certainly worthwile, but religion is also dangerous, for once these individual truths are disposed upon others, they can just as well destroy the same hope and joy they inspire.
And so I believed that, with her pregnant by me and living with her parents in that house, the only way for her to be free to find her own way, would be to marry her, the woman I loved, and for us to...well, figure it out for ourselves. So I did.
I guess this already went wrong while planning the wedding. Still, my fiancee clang to her parents. They took care of a lot of things, their way. No outdoor wedding in the woods, with only close friends there, those whom we knew would support us, no matter what. No drinks. No hippies playing weird musical instruments. No band but a dj who plays at children's birthday parties. I soon stopped caring, but at least I saved the '52 mustang.
Now you'll have to understand something about my mother in law. She's the devil in disguise. A very awkward disguise, being the devil and all... This person should be running a mental institution, not a family. She treats her husband in a way that would drive him insane if he weren't mentally incapable of or unwilling towards perceiving her constant insults and petty ingratitude. It's a sad sight, really.
Another interesting aspect of the story is that even though I could have found a place to live for us, and my family has been very supporting throughout the whole thing, she wanted to stay at her parents' house, even though she knew that I could never thrive there. I worked a lot at that time, and she clinging as always, didn't want to be without the people who would care for her. I care about her, and for her to some degree, but isn't it essential to each and everyone's personal development that they can take care of themselves a bit as well?
I love her. I did and still do. Perhaps the way I love her has changed. But I do. So in spite of our other options, I moved in with her and her Evangelical parents, when we got married. Finally I was allowed to have sex with my pregnant wife. Imagine this awful hipocricy. My parents are devout christians, but even they knew this was madness.
My baby was born, and I supported my wife, giving everything I had. Life had changed dramatically, a father, living with the in-laws, in a city with the luster of a brick. Things were still changing however. My wife was. She'd always been somewhat unstable emotionally. But it got worse, and worse. She felt depressed and angry, honestly I think it was repressed teenage angst showing at the worst of times. And I talked with her, tried to reason with her, but through it all I became the stress ball she "needed", while what she really needed was a fucking doctor. Like her mother did to her father and now also to me, she began criticizing every little thing. I could bake her blueberry pancakes for breakfast and all she'd say is "They're too thick. There's too many calories in them. Why don't you make me something I like." That is, after she asked me to bake her a pancake.
It got worse. My books, even some very old ones that are so hard to come by, pre-war books on kaballah for one, and books on angelology, hinduism, meditation, karma, etc. They were "filth" in that house. And again, I saw only one option. In a sacred house, be a saint. And into the fire my books went, my greatest joy in my miserable life.
At that same time I had been on heavy medication wrongfully prescribed to me for years. The addictive effects were so heavy that stopping the use should always be supervised, and what student-dad-husband-living with his parents in law could do that. So I stopped unsupervised, was experiencing sweating, nausea, tremors, cotton mouth, and panic attacks by the hour for three weeks. It took me a few months to feel fully healthy again, but then I realised how numb I had been, that I had taken all of this. My books burned, the love of my life a constant pain, my mother in law the devil and my daughter raised by a Demiurge's standards.
I kept it up for a year and a half after that. And how I wanted to see her free, from her own irrationality and that of others, how I wanted her to see how beautiful life is if you stop fussing about every little detail, when you're free to see beyond your own horizon. Talking didn't help, she'd just be angrier. Every single suggestion I've ever made in there has been ridiculed. So I did abide. And I loved her, all the while struggling to be who they wanted me to be, trying to preserve a one square foot island for myself against the coming tide. Nothing helped. Always her comments, telling me I'd never be good enough for her, no matter what I did. And whatever pain I had from a distance noticed in myself earlier, now, without pills, I truely felt every sting.
Libertine, oh libertine,
what a dream.
Writing about it tires me now. It's over. I'm getting a divorce. I hope my little girl won't hurt like I do. I'll go through whatever I have to for her.
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