WHEN RAGE FEELS GOOD (OR, THE THREE STUPIDEST THINGS ANYONE EVER SAID)
1. “I don’t want to hurt you.” He is curled into a ball at the end of the couch, rocking back and forth like people used to say Bill Gates did in meetings, only instead of buzzing with generative energy, he is on fire from guilt.
“That ship has sailed.” He already hurt me, more than I ever imagined possible. “Acknowledge it, accept it, and let’s figure out how to move forward. Where do we go from here? How do we fix this?” He has no answers. He cries and rocks and pats the couch next to him. He wants me to sit. He wants me to comfort him. Ironic, given he’s the one who emailed me from his car in the parking lot at the gym earlier today to tell me that he wanted out, didn’t love me anymore. I should comfort him. No, I think not.
My anger burned hot and clean. I knew that it’s not that he didn’t want to hurt me. He knew it would crush me to read those words. He emailed me so that he wouldn’t have to watch me hurt, see my face when he told me, witness it in real time. Even now, he won’t look at me.
2. “Welcome to my world,” his eyes are bright with tears. I can’t decide whether I want to puke or cry or throw myself across the round oak table in the attorney’s office and slap that hangdog look off his face.
My attorney has just asked me about the custody arrangement we’ve agreed to. “Does that feel like enough free time for you?” Enough FREE time? I want to scream. “You’ll have the girls a lot more than Sean does in this scenario.” It feels like an insane question, but then I realize that she has been divorced and sharing kids for a lot longer than I have. Her perspective is much different than mine. She also works full-time, whereas my life is 40% work and 60% Mom.
“To be honest with you, I am going to hate it. I don’t want to share the kids at all, but I know it’s the right thing to do, for them and for Sean. Those first few weekends they’re away at his place are going to be incredibly hard for me,” my voice breaks.
“Welcome to my world,” he breaks in. “I am so incredibly lonely most nights, I don’t know what to do with myself. You’ll have to keep yourself busy – find things to do. Be with friends. That’s what I do.”
As if I want his fucking advice. How dare he? Welcome to my world?!?! He CREATED this world for us – for all of us. We had no choice but to enter this world, thanks to him. He’s the one who left. He’s the one who chose this for all of us. The fact that he has the audacity to sit there and pretend that our circumstances are the same is absurd.
I look away. If I don’t, this may not be a collaborative divorce anymore and I just want it to be over.
3. “Can we just take a minute to acknowledge the sacrifices I’m making?” This, after the independent financial planner inquired about his opinion of the final settlement we’ve agreed to.
“Sean, you’re twisting in your chair over there. Is there something about these numbers that’s bothering you?” The two of them have that rapport that comes from being like-minded. While she is technically supposed to be neutral here, they are both in the world of business, they both love running numbers and scenarios, and they both love money. They always sit together in our five-way meetings (him, me, our attorneys, and her) and joke with each other about the stock market, elbowing one another on the punch line.
“Can we just take a minute to acknowledge the sacrifices I’m making?” he says, chin quivering. Money is Sean’s Achilles’ heel. No matter how much he has, he will never feel safe enough, secure enough. I know him well enough to know that that is why he is on the verge of tears. I wonder if everyone else believes he’s torn up about our divorce.
“I don’t have to make this as easy as I am. I am paying her alimony for nine years. I’m not asking for a stake in her future earnings from her manuscript, even though all of that work was completed during our marriage.”
He has to be fucking kidding right now. He is, at this very moment, begging for a participation trophy. He is literally exhorting everyone in the room to praise him for doing the right thing, just barely above the bare minimum – supporting me and his children financially for nine years until I can get back into the workforce after 17 years away to raise our girls and support him in every other way but financial while he built his career (state law mandates that it be one third of the time we were married and my attorney rounded up by one year, boo-fucking-hoo). He wants some sort of medal for splitting the remaining assets 50/50 even though we live in a community property state that says exactly that. My tonsils are on fire – an inferno raging out of control as I watch the other three people in the room nod their heads and murmur words of encouragement to him. Yes, he is being kind and magnanimous. Yes, he could make this a lot harder. Thankseversomuch.
“If we’re acknowledging sacrifices, let’s take a minute to recognize that the manuscript I wrote would have been completed in three years instead of eight if I’d not been raising our daughters and running our household while you were out working 80+ hours a week. And let’s acknowledge that, for the last nine months, I’ve been doing all of that entirely by myself because you left, which means that I haven’t had any time at all to try and sell the manuscript or find a job that would pay me. Instead, I’ve been consoling our children, transporting them to all of the places they need to go, preparing the house to be sold, moving out, helping take care of my aging mother, and trying to write enough to keep myself relevant for when I finally can start to sell my work again.”
The endless list of sacrifices I’ve made in the last 23 years begins scrolling through my head. I didn’t make them because I wanted a side-by-side tally. I did them because I chose to and because I thought we had each others’ backs. I didn’t expect a trophy, but if he’s getting one now, mine better be a hell of a lot bigger.
It’s not a competition. I keep saying that, but then I keep acting like it is. I want the girls to love me more. I hate that, but it’s true.
When Sean and I were married, I didn’t think that way. I saw us as a team and I was willing to flex and explain to the girls why he said or did certain things. I covered for him when he missed big events like school plays or lacrosse tournaments. I spent hours on a Thursday afternoon mowing our two-acre lawn so that when he got home from his business trip on Friday night, he could look forward to the entire weekend hanging with the kids, no chores for him to do.
Now that we’re not married, even though he wants the girls to still see us as a team, I don’t want to be his teammate. I feel like I do most of the work and carry the heaviest loads and I don’t want to pretend that I don’t believe that anymore. And even though there were plenty of times when we were married that I felt this same way (at least with respect to home, family, parenting), I was still willing to see us as a team because I felt like I was investing in something; that it wouldn’t always be this way. But he betrayed that by leaving before I could reap the fruits of my labor and I’m angry. That makes me feel gross. Did I get so invested in that future payout – he and I retiring, traveling, hanging out together happily – that I made sacrifices for the wrong reasons?
I don’t think so. I wouldn’t change my choices at this point. I parented our children out of love and a deliberate, thoughtful approach. I centered them and did what I thought was best. I did make mistakes. I’m still making mistakes. Maybe I shouldn’t have covered for him or defended him so much. But I thought we were partners, and now that we aren’t, I’ve somehow moved him to the adversary column. I also regret not spending more time with my extended family when the girls were younger, choosing his family instead.
The story I tell in my head is that the kids enjoy being with Sean more than they enjoy being with me. I think they view me as their mom, who is always here and somewhat boring, or at least mundane and everyday, and Sean as fun and entertaining and someone they choose to be with. My parents are dead and his are alive. They have cousins on his side. His family hosts gatherings in the summer with barbecues and swimming and floating the river. I can’t compete with that.
It’s not a competition. How do I get to the place where I believe that? How can I stop comparing the trips I take the girls on to the ones he takes them on? How do I stop imagining them playing games and cooking with him, laughing with their cousins and riding the ATV on the hill? The truth is, I want them to have fun with their family, their dad. I want my kids to feel held in love by a group of people who they’ve known their whole lives. As a kid, I never stopped to ask myself whether I loved one parent more than the other, and I’m certain that my kids don’t do that, either.
But this notion of competition, this binary, this “you’re either with me or you’re against me” persists. It is so deeply rooted in everything I’ve been taught my entire life, from sports to spelling bees to my parents’ multiple marriages, that it is a challenge to unhook from. My relationship with Erin and Lauren has to rest in my absolute belief that they know I love them, adore them, not in how much I love them in comparison to how much their dad loves them.
I’ve had fantasies of retribution. On good days, I want to get past it. On other days, I don’t. There is something very justice-y or “fair” feeling about it. But I am aware of how destructive it is.
Ultimately, when Sean has a really wonderful vacation or experience with the girls, I am happy for them, and I am jealous and angry at him. How dare he literally walk away from any of the work or emotional engagement with his children and then come back later to swoop in and share amazing experiences with them? Where does he get off? What sort of mental gyrations do you have to do to prove that he deserves any of that?
I sometimes want to punish him for the way he left us. I want to tell the people who revere him – former employees who talk about him as this uber-smart, uber-compassionate, uber-family man what he did; how it made me and the girls feel. I want to tell his parents. Sometimes, when I’m walking the dogs, I fantasize about running into a neighbor who says, “Hey there! I haven’t seen Sean around in months. He must be traveling a lot lately.” Whereupon, I would take the opportunity to tell them everything.
In those scenarios, I am careful to protect how I come off – gracious, but back-handed. I would demur slightly, refrain from revealing all of the details of how I do everything, all the time, and he is simply living in his fancy bachelor pad, traveling and hanging with friends while I single-handedly keep the rest of the family afloat. I would let slip that the apartment he has, while exorbitantly expensive, is a studio and, thus, has no room for the girls at all to come stay with him. Odd, no?
I have to move through this. I have to get back to my center and remember that it’s not my job to punish him and that the story I tell in my head is most likely not the truth. He wouldn’t have left if he hadn’t been in a great deal of pain. And yet, I also don’t think it’s my job to have compassion for him such that he feels absolved. I think it ultimately comes down to me feeling disrespected – someone he chose to build a life with, who he entrusted with his children and his home didn’t end up being worth a series of honest, albeit painful discussions about how he really felt and what he wanted. I didn’t rate even that.
There is a strange dichotomy, a yin and yang, between wanting empathy from someone and feeling as though they are the cause of your pain. Wanting an apology is natural. Wanting an acknowledgment that they played a large part in the creation of the situation is one step deeper. Wanting them to offer support and genuine care is the holy grail. And when these things come out of order, or some of the steps are skipped, I am not inclined to accept the last. It seems like a self-betrayal.
It is almost as though there ought to be some period of time where anger is acceptable and even encouraged. Certainly, it should vary with the inciting incident. If someone says something that is terribly hurtful, can you be distant and mad for two days? A week? We have this conditioned response to want to punish them for the transgression, and in my mind, I connect the anger to that punishment, but what if that isn’t true? What if the anger and hurt is natural and conflating it with punishment is something we were taught that doesn’t necessarily have to be?
As a kid, I remember feeling a lot of fear when an adult was angry, but generally that anger was accompanied by punishment of some sort (a wooden spoon or a belt was the tool of choice in my family). Over time, I learned to fear anger itself, rather than seeing it as a natural, normal human response to being hurt, even if it didn’t come along with a smack to the backside or a slap to the face. So, what if it’s okay to be angry and we let it happen without imagining that we get to or have to punish the other person? What if we can let that anger stand on its own, acknowledge it, move through it, and then begin to imagine forgiveness or reconciliation?
Often, when I am angry, I want an apology and an admission of guilt. I have been known to fantasize about standing in moral superiority and righteous indignation when the other person grovels (just a little bit). But, I struggle with accepting apologies gracefully. Regardless of how desperately I want to hear the words, “I am sorry,” I have been conditioned to respond with, “it’s ok.” It feels awkward to respond with “thank you.”
But if the first two – apology and accountability – are skipped and the other person expresses empathy for my pain without acknowledging their part in it, I want to scream. While it is lovely to think that they care for me and want the best for me and don’t like to see me suffer, there is something about the expression of care that falls flat. You don’t step on someone’s foot and respond to their cry of pain by saying, “Oh, I’m so sorry you’re hurting. That must be awful.” You say, “I am so sorry I stepped on you!”
It is a strange line to walk, being caused pain by someone else’s actions and believing they truly want the best for you. My parents did it to me all the time when I was a kid. I was seduced by my desire to feel cared for, so when they minimized my pain and ignored their own role in creating it, I had to choose one reality or the other. I couldn’t exist in both places at once.
After Sean left and refused to go to therapy or acknowledge the suffering he caused, I found myself right back in that place. He was expressing empathy for my sadness and in order to accept it, I had to forgive over and over again, or at least deny what I was actually feeling, which was anger. In order to accept the kind words and his expression of caring, I found myself biting my tongue and offering him the benefit of the doubt even as I tended to my own wounds. It was a new kind of equanimity – juggling anger and sadness, hope and forgiveness, all the while attempting to avoid further injury. It was exhausting.
On some philosophical level, I knew that having love in the mix was the right thing; that I couldn’t simply sweep away the years of history we had and the knowledge that he was well and truly suffering too. I knew that allowing him to express care for me was offering him care as well and I knew that he deserved to be cared for, too. I believe that the biggest issue was, again, residing in that binary, believing that it was him or me, that if I was to care for myself, I had to be on My Side and not His Side.
I was fighting against years and years of social conditioning. I heard the words of so many others in my head, telling me I was justified in my anger, I should shut him out and demand an admission of guilt. Don’t let him off the hook so easily! Those voices were seductive in their righteous anger and their willingness to be on My Side. But somewhere deeper inside was a quieter voice telling me I’d gone down that path of righteous indignation before and, when my anger cooled, I was left cold and alone. The only way to stay warm in that scenario was to continue stoking the fire of rage, but that takes a lot of energy. I was reminded of something I learned with my children: that when my instinct is to push them away in anger, the best thing I can do is stay in place and soften and open. It requires a strong commitment to myself and the whole of humanity, this opening up. It flies in the face of fear and retribution and independence, and it hurts like hell. It often means that the pain reverberates, but it is a powerful reminder that I am connected to others and not expected to do anything alone. The best response is pulse after pulse of forgiveness.
I used to think that forgiveness was a one-and-done phenomenon. And to be honest, I have had that experience with people who are no longer in my life and can no longer hurt me – like the young man who molested me as a child. But this kind of forgiving is very different. It is at war with my need for self-preservation, but only in my head, because I cannot save myself in any meaningful way if I am alone and hiding in the corner, shielding myself from further pain. I have to open my heart, accept that I am safe and loved, and know that even if I have to forgive a million times, it is better than closing off, shutting down, staying in anger and pain. And to be clear, it doesn’t mean that I have to continue to open myself up to being harmed over and over again, but in this instance, Sean and I were necessarily going to exist in relationship to one another for at least a period of years while our children needed our support. So unless I wanted to show up in some semblance of a rage over and over again, I had to figure out how to manage my feelings about it.
The truth is, while I did want Sean to acknowledge what he did, I didn’t truly want him to suffer. I also didn’t know how to witness his suffering and my own without overriding my own and finding a way to help him with his, it still felt like a binary – him or me. Once I realized he didn’t want to be married to me anymore, I struggled with the seemingly sudden role-change. I had to stifle my reflex to reach out to him and offer support. He wanted me to continue to be a sounding board because of the close relationship we’d shared for more than two decades, but I had to craft boundaries in order to stay open and empathetic and let my own wounds heal, too.
I won’t say it was simple. Every time I put together a digital calendar with the kids’ events and obligations on it and sent it to him it was with an edge of resentment. A few days after what would have been our 24th wedding anniversary, he texted me to ask how I was doing and I felt disdain. I do believe he didn’t just stop loving me altogether, but it was polluted by his inability to take accountability for his actions. It was a struggle to figure out how to accept his care and concern for me without demanding he adhere to some set of requirements I crafted that would show me he understood the impact of his choices, how hurtful he had been.
I had some sense that he had to do some sort of penance for his behavior before I could accept any cordial messages or be friendly with him. But how much of that was about power or performance versus actually repairing damage? It may have been satisfying for me to imagine Sean taking care of the myriad tasks I used to manage for him and feeling frustrated. I will admit to fantasizing a time or two that he was trying to deal with an insurance company or talk to Lauren’s school about an unpaid bill and he stopped and thought, Wow, Kari was so good at this. I took her for granted, didn’t I? but none of that is restorative. It doesn’t repair relationship.
And, if I was feeling that way, it wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine he was feeling the same – experiencing some schadenfreude about me managing the household finances or arranging air travel. I know he often experienced those things as a burden, so it was entirely possible he was smug about me having to do it all myself now.
I know now that some of my desire for him to suffer was about reasserting power. When he left, I felt powerless to do anything about it. I couldn’t force him to come back or go to therapy or prioritize our marriage. He had all the power – he had made a unilateral decision to end our marriage and there wasn’t anything I could do to change that. Fortunately, I also know now that power has no place in a healthy relationship. That’s part of what we got wrong, and we did it because that’s what we both learned: namely, that apologizing is for wimps, when things get hard you pretend they aren’t until you absolutely can’t anymore, and when you hurt someone you don’t have to talk about it if you just keep moving forward. Never let ‘em see you sweat, kid.
Sean and I only went to see a therapist one time during our marriage and I’d like to say it made a big difference, but I don’t know that either of us was capable of really hearing what she said.
We went because I forced the issue. Sean was mostly recovered from the mystery illness that had lasted for three and a half years. Three and a half years of sudden, seemingly unexplained attacks that sent him to the hospital nearly every time. He had been sick in Italy, the Czech Republic, China, Argentina, London, and at home. He had been hospitalized in a few of those places as well, and been carried out of our home on a stretcher more than once. Despite round after round of invasive tests, thousands and thousands of dollars spent on specialists and inpatient stays, doctors were unable to determine the cause of his illness. And so they performed an exploratory surgery – one that lasted most of the day, left him with an enormous scar and three months of mostly lying on the couch not being able to move, and a subsequent attack 12 weeks later.
During this time, I was drawing on my past experience as a surgical assistant and my biology degree, researching everything I could think of. I pushed his family doctor and the specialists to think outside the box and I’m sure they got to the point when they saw my name on their message slips, it elicited an eye roll and a huge sigh. I was relentless. But following the surgery and the next attack, I found a new specialist who was finally able to diagnose the issue and give us hope, in the form of either a second surgery (which Sean vehemently refused – and who could blame him? He’d just missed three months of work from the last one) or an experimental medication trial.
As I was in charge of all things logistical in our household, it fell to me to get and refill prescriptions. Sean began taking the medication (to the tune of $800/month – uncovered by insurance because it was being used for an “off- label” purpose) and went six months without an attack. This was the longest he’d gone in nearly four years. I was thrilled. But at some point, I realized he should have been due for a refill, and yet the bottle was still halfway full. I pointed it out to him, and he confessed that he hadn’t been taking them for quite some time.
My body responded much more quickly than my brain. I went numb, only feeling the pounding of my heart behind my ribcage. My brain was trying to catch up, but it was as if he were speaking a foreign language that I couldn’t comprehend. He had nearly died several times from this illness. There were occasions when he left for a business trip and I wondered, honestly, if he would come home or if he would suffer an attack without me around to help him get the proper care and end up dying in Spain or Japan or Korea. One time he phoned me in the middle of the night from Prague to ask if we knew anyone in London – he was starting to get sick and wanted to see if he could make it there before he needed to be in the hospital. I was absolutely frantic, terrified, and utterly unable to do anything that would truly ensure he made it home to us. But we’d found the answer and it was (or had been, up to this point, at least) these pills. And he stopped taking them. Why?
He wasn’t interested in discussing the matter. He simply told me he didn’t want to take them any longer, that taking nine pills a day every day made him feel “like a sick, old man” and he hated it. I was still unable to understand, and he was unyielding.
Erin had been seeing a therapist to help her manage the fear she had related to his illness. Witnessing him being carted off by paramedics, visiting him in the hospital with tubes coming out of his arms and face, and the fear of an unpredictable, pending attack always hanging over her had proven to be an incredible burden for her to hold alone. We both liked this therapist, Erin and I, so I asked her if she would be willing to be a neutral third party and hear Sean and I out. I felt as if I were losing touch with reality. Sean was so calm and resolved. Was I making it up? Had I overreacted to the circumstances of his illness? Was I being a drama queen? Wasn’t it strange that he could go through so much, including a massively invasive surgery, and then just simply decide not to take his medication anymore?
I cried and begged and pleaded and Sean agreed to go talk to the therapist one time. She had been treating Erin for a few months and had witnessed the stress and anxiety she was experiencing from the last few years of her dad being so sick, so maybe I was stacking the deck a little bit, but I knew I couldn’t ask my therapist to see us. Sean would think she was on my side from the outset.
I began by relaying the facts of the previous four years – detailing the hospital stays and ambulance rides and the time Sean got sick in the middle of Patagonia, Argentina in a cabin and we had to get him to the nearest town to get help, toting our three- and five-year old daughters with us. Sean waited until I was done and the therapist turned to him. She wanted to hear what he had to say. He was just as calm as he’d been with me when he told her he didn’t want to have to take this medication every day for the rest of his life. He was only in his mid-30s. She noted that he could opt for the surgery that would presumably fix the issue forever and he physically recoiled. No. Out of the question.
I was relieved when she said she understood why I was so upset, that she could see that it had been a very traumatic time and I didn’t want to relive it if I could help it. And then she asked Sean if he was afraid, or if he had been during that time.
“I don’t know. It wouldn’t have made any difference if I were. Kari was afraid enough for both of us. It was my job to balance that out by staying calm.”
Ouch. Yes, I had been terrified, but did that mean I hadn’t left him any room to be scared? It was his mortality he was facing, after all. And I like to think that I was very calm during the actual crises – I was able to either call 911 or drive to the fire station and get help. I always knew where the kids were and made sure they were taken care of – either by coming along with us or arranging for them to stay with a neighbor. I didn’t fall apart or shriek and lose it – so while I was very very scared, I still managed to make sure we were all okay.
As I was silently judging myself and dissecting every part of my responses for the last several years, I realized the therapist was talking to him.
“I understand the idea that you might need to balance things out, but that’s not how relationships work. You’re treating it as though you’re on one end of a see-saw and Kari is on the other. When her anxiety goes up, you tamp yours down. The problem with that is that the two of you will always be trading ups and downs, and you’ll stay far apart. The only way to really balance things out is to slowly make your way to the center together and stand in that place. If you can stand together at the fulcrum, what is happening at the extreme ends doesn’t really matter – you’re in a place of relative stability together.”
I was struck by her analogy, if only because I felt like it was an incredibly accurate description of our marriage. When was the last time we stood in the middle together? I knew that he saw me as emotional and reactionary, and he was always trying to get me to relax and not take things so seriously. In many ways, it felt like gaslighting, but because it was so familiar to me, I didn’t question it. I even felt some shame about it, from time to time, but I also knew that I was a very capable person who rarely let my emotions cloud my better judgment.
In that moment, I wanted something very different from my marriage, but I had the clarity to know that we both had to want that in order for it to happen. We both had to want to make our way to the center of the see-saw and when Sean shrugged at her explanation, I knew that he had made up his mind already. I was going to have to manage my own reaction to seeing my husband as a ticking time bomb while he threw the remaining pills away and if I expressed too much emotion about it, I would only confirm his belief that I was prone to overreacting.
As these things go, over time, I was able to relax more and more. For whatever reason, he did not get sick again and, to my knowledge, to this day, he still hasn’t. I got on with the work of raising our girls and running the household and that was that. Now, when I think about it, I understand that the great sadness in all of that was that we were unable to see each other. He was worried about managing my feelings, or at least counteracting them so that the girls wouldn’t feel the tension, and I was worried about managing my feelings so that he wouldn’t feel the need to counteract them. We were treating it as a zero-sum game instead of being in it together.
During that time when he was so sick, I don’t recall asking him if he was afraid or what I could do to help him feel supported. I ran around talking to nurses and doctors and EMTs, I checked his IV and yelled at the nurse when he had a massive allergic reaction to the pain medications. I brought the girls in to visit him and soothed their fears and made sure the house was running smoothly and the dog was cared for and his co-workers came to visit him as he recovered so he wasn’t so bored. I managed things, but I didn’t tend to his feelings. I’m not sure I’d have had the tools to hold any big emotions he might have expressed, given my own fears and the logistical load I was carrying for the girls. But I wish I’d tried.
That said, even if I had, I don’t know if he would have been able to be honest with me. If, at the end of it, when he was mostly recovered, he still felt like he had to “balance out” my emotions, it’s unlikely that he would have had the ability to tell me what he was really feeling. I can’t imagine what it was like to be him – in a body that was unpredictable, being the sole source of financial support for a family of four, traveling internationally for work. If he let himself feel his feelings, I am certain they were overwhelming and he could have used some support. I know better now. I would do it so differently if I had it to do over again, but I suppose that’s just another example of how the two of us learned our lessons from patriarchy so well.