Page 31 of Stay Away from Him

I shouldn’t complain so much about Thomas.

I’m no picnic. I know that. The issues I’ve had in my life—the depression, the therapy, the drinking issues, the breakdowns, my inability to hold a job—are no joke.

Maybe I should count myself lucky to have a husband at all.

Someone who’s stood by me through it all.

Yes, he’s still close friends with his girlfriend from college.

But that doesn’t mean he’s cheating on me.

That’s probably my own paranoia talking.

And no, maybe he doesn’t look at me quite like he used to.

But what husband does, after twenty years of marriage?

I’m not exactly looking at him the same way I did when we first started dating, either.

Relationships change over time. That’s just what happens.

After my last entry, I realized this diary wasn’t doing me any good. That putting my negative thoughts on paper wasn’t helping me get rid of them—if anything, it was only making them harder to get rid of, entrenching them in my brain, making them look and feel bigger and scarier than ever.

So today I’m going to try a different approach.

Gratitude.

Twenty years, for starters. Thomas and I have been married twenty years. Our marriage isn’t perfect, he isn’t perfect, and God knows I’m not perfect (most of the time I’m a bit of a mess, actually), but we’ve stuck it out longer than a lot of people. That’s got to count for something.

And whatever Thomas’s drawbacks as a husband, he’s a great dad.

The girls adore him, always have. In fact, I’ve always thought they probably love him a little more than they love me.

From the moment they were born, they seemed to respond to him in a way that they never did to me.

In my arms they’d squirm and cry and refuse to sleep.

When I tried to breastfeed them, they never seemed to latch right, bit and pulled until my nipples were raw and bleeding, and eventually I gave up.

Just pumped and let Thomas do half—maybe more than half—of the feedings, from bottles.

Some men might have hated this, but Thomas loved it.

I suppose he just knew how to handle babies, from being a pediatrician.

He had more experience than I did burping them, soothing them, putting them to sleep—even though I was the one who grew them in my body.

Mothers are supposed to have a connection with their babies, a love that proceeds from a cellular level.

But that was never my experience. I hated pregnancy, felt my babies growing in me like a tumor or a tapeworm, and when they came out, I looked at their faces and saw aliens staring back at me.

I didn’t understand them, didn’t know what they wanted.

Thomas did. And as they grew, it was like they grew further away from me and closer to him.

I saw it happen first with Rhiannon. She was a daddy’s girl from the beginning.

When Kendall came, I thought it might be different, that she’d be mine the way Rhiannon was Thomas’s, but it only happened again, my youngest drifting away from me.

Teams developed: Team Dad and Team Mom. Except that Team Mom only had one person on it—me.

Me versus the rest of them. Three against one.

Not that they gang up on me or anything.

Not on purpose, at least. More that the three of them often seem to be part of some club that I haven’t been invited to, speaking a private language that I don’t quite understand.

Thomas shares a connection with them that I can’t replicate, and in turn, they share parts of themselves with him that they’d never dream of sharing with me.

He’s their safe person, their trusted confidant. And what am I? Their mess of a mother.

Often, it’s almost as if they’re all sharing an inside joke, and I’m the punchline.

I know that this is part of their connection, Thomas and Rhiannon and Kendall—they all have to deal with me.

With my problems, my ups and downs, my mercurial moods.

Oh, there goes Mom again; it’s just Mom being Mom; we have to be nice to Mom, she’s having a tough time today.

I suppose I should be grateful for their kindness.

But I’m not. I see their father in their pitying smiles, their patronizing indulgence, their eye rolls and impatient sighs.

Let’s see, do I have an example? A recent one, maybe? It’s so hard to come up with an example of something that’s a pervasive part of your life.

Here’s one: I’ve been feeling a little paranoid lately.

Have I written about this before? I’m plagued by the feeling that everyone I meet hates me, that everyone from my family to perfect strangers are plotting against me, that I’m being followed, watched, surveilled even in my private moments.

Recently I went on a walk on the trails through the woods near our house, and the whole time I felt as though the trees were spying on me, as though the leaves were made of eyes, that there were cameras embedded in the knots of their trunks.

Halfway through the hike, I came upon a dead raccoon on the trail—freshly killed by some predator, flies only just starting to circle.

Its belly was split open, guts spilling out onto the asphalt, and its eyes had been plucked out, the sockets bloody, red drying to black.

I came upon it and felt certain that whoever or whatever had done this had left it there for me. A kind of warning. A threat.

I doubled back, returned to the house, poured myself a glass of water, and gulped it down at the kitchen sink, my hands shaking.

“Mom?” Rhiannon’s voice came from behind me. “What’s wrong?”

I turned and saw both girls, Kendall too, looking at me with mouths agape.

“There was a dead animal,” I said. “On the trail. Someone had taken its eyes out and left it for me to find.”

At first, both girls looked scared, but then Rhiannon’s mouth cracked into a smirk. “Yeah, Mom, like someone would kill an animal and leave it just for you? There’s a coyote in those woods, isn’t there?”

Kendall watched her big sister, her own look of fear replaced by a smile of relief. “Yeah,” she said. “The coyote probably got it.”

“It hadn’t been eaten,” I said quietly, almost to myself—they’d already walked away and couldn’t hear me. I turned back to the sink and looked out the window. It hadn’t been eaten. Only cut open, and the eyes taken out. Would a coyote have done that?

Something similar happened even more recently, on a Saturday, when I was certain that a white car parked up the street was the same car I’d seen at the grocery store, and the same car that I’d spotted in my rearview on the way home. Someone inside, a dark shadow behind the windshield, watching.

When I mentioned it, Thomas only laughed, and the girls echoed him.

“There goes Mom again,” he said, not even speaking to me—instead addressing them as though I wasn’t even there. “She thinks everybody’s watching her. Obsessed with her.” He turned to me, his eyes sharp, his grin cruel. “It’s all about you, right hon?”

I felt a stab of hurt—not only was he minimizing my fear, he was turning it into a taunt. Mocking me in front of my own daughters.

“Yeah, Mom,” Kendall said. “Get over yourself.”

***

I can’t help but think of this as a form of gaslighting.

I might be paranoid—but aren’t my feelings valid?

Couldn’t Thomas just say that he’s sorry for what I’m going through, that he knows that I feel scared, that he’s listening, and that he’s here for me?

If he did, I know the girls would do the same.

They look up to him so much. His opinions become their opinions, and his way of treating me becomes their way of treating me.

If there are teams—me versus them, three against one—it’s his fault. That’s a dynamic he cultivated, that he created from the ground up from the moment they were born.

Well, would you look at that. I tried to start with gratitude. But I found my way back to negative thoughts eventually.

I wonder, am I the problem? Or is it my life that is making me this way? Am I mad? Or am I being driven mad?