After the newly-married glow wore off--within the first week--I became about the business of saving my marriage. Though interested in becoming "something" in a career, my most fervent goals were to have a happy family. My husband had voiced the same strong inclination up to the night of our wedding, for all of the cameras, that "within the next couple of years, we'll have a couple little 'poopies' running around the house." We were on the same path. Thank God I'd found a man who expressed the same goals and timeline as me for our immediate future. He said numerous times that he was "going to take care of you, Baby. You can stay home to raise our kids, and I'll take care of everything else."
My husband was a dreamer, a boastful bright-shiny-future dreamer. Dreams can be incredible, they drive invention and so much positive change in the world. But my husband lacked application, discipline, fortitude, and a work ethic. He lacked other ethics as well. Add to it a daily & nightly proclivity to marijuana, and a big gulp sized nightly "one-for-the-road" Crown n Coke, or Vodka 'n Sprite... well, it was not the kind of fuel needed to propel him into success in any employment.
I'm pretty sure he got fired, though he came home drunk announcing he'd finally quit his abhorrent job, that he'd got tired of being pushed around and told what he could do! (when he was the only one in the office and called all of the shots, except for a few spare visits from one of the two owners of the company). He siphoned money for himself through the company's "referral" program. He got chummy quick with other like-minded opportunists, offered to continually split the cash pay-out between them & him if they would continually refer their own potential loan customers to him instead of the their own company. He earned some thousands this way, under the table. I think the owners figured it own. I think one of the owners showed up, caught him off-guard on it, and perhaps he quit before they could actually fire him in the same sentence.
He funneled his grandma's money, his mom's money, then my money into re-labeled pyramid schemes. All in the name of professing he was a self-employed entrepreneur. He'd scream at me if I questioned his financial "investments in our future." The pyramid schemes, now called a "down-line" of gophers with the same buy-ins upfront, were carried by the same daily fuel as before: pot, alcohol, bravado. I pregnant working three jobs at this point--within months of marriage--to keep the mortgage, keep the utilities on, and hold onto insurance for him and our upcoming baby. And he hated me for it. He hated me for it. The more I worked, the more he said I was trying to "make him look like a piece of shit!"
The more I desperately I tried to keep our marriage, house, and finances from going under, the more he hated me for not "believing" in him, that "any day now" he was going to make it big. From the couch with empty bottles of booze beside him. Any of my words of encouragement were all twisted into his daily madman's rant at me. He let me know I "wasn't successful at anything, so why would he ever listen to a word I said to him about business-- or life!"
Every vile thing he threw at me, I'd try to counteract by showing him how dedicated I was, how helpful I could be, getting him presents, cards, showering him with my embedded love. I would love that man well again, and he'd come out of the other side realizing how he'd treated me had been so wrong and discover heartfelt understanding of my endless devotion to him and our vows, for better, for worse.
There were sparse moments he'd decide he loved me again--one of the most notable was the night before he thought he was going to jail for getting caught stealing $15,000 from a new set of employers. They were onto him having written an "erroneous loan" for a fake car title. They made him work it off over a period of years, in lieu of jail-time. But the money had been stolen and spent in a period of the few months I'd had a restraining order against him. I never knew where that money went. He didn't pay the house note, his car note--both got taken over by banks. He convinced me that was all in the past, and to come back to him-- to sign a house rental lease with him. The day I moved back in with our son, the house reeked of marijuana.
I never saved the house, the car. I never saved our marriage. I never saved him. There was never a light-bulb epiphany from him as to all of meaningful efforts, any remorse, any re-commitment... Just his spite. Resentment. He would literally tell me that if he were "fucked up and in rehab, how much more fucked up and sick was I for being with him!" He meant that. There was always some bizarre comparison he had going, a competition I never signed up for with him--but his subconscious kept score. He had to be doing better than someone--and I was the closest someone. So he put me down. Over and over.
Abusers are never grateful you tried to the point it was killing you, because if you're dying, they're doing better than you. If you are the only thing they can control, then so be it. My husband hurt me on purpose. He hurt me and our child on purpose. In jealousy, anger, spite, rage... because that meant he was in control of something.
And as little as I meant to him, being better than me was enough.
