Diaries
Diary 2: Chapter Two
Verbal, Economic, and Physical Abuse
When my husband and I decided to separate, our daughter still had three months of high school, along with final dance competitions-the culmination of years of dedication. She studied and practiced whenever she wasn’t at school.
Of course, we didn’t want to burden her with the shock and stress of our separation while she was under so much pressure, so we agreed to wait until the end of June. Then we would tell her about our plans.
Until then, we’d continue to live together as always, which was not as strange as I might have expected. We had been amicable but distant for years already, so we just kept behaving the same way. Even sleeping on our own sides of the bed, with little interaction, felt better than upending her world.
When he and I were home without our daughter, I tried to discuss with him how we should proceed. We were both well-versed financial professionals (he a partner at one of the large professional services firm, and I running my own corporate finance advisory firm); surely, we could sit down and divide our assets and liabilities fairly. Whenever I tried to broach the topic of dividing household contents, he became agitated. One day, when I asked which of our furnishings he’d like to keep, he yelled at me, stabbing his finger at me.
“You initiated this!” he told me. “Go f*** yourself!”
His anger showed itself more and more, until he was yelling at me regularly, once even in front of our daughter, his face contorted with anger. One day, as we drove home from an event of our daughter’s, discussing logistics of our separation, he yelled uncontrollably at me again. We drove into the garage, and as I got out of the car, he came around the front, charging at me with his head forward, yelling and his shoulders back. I believe he was close to hitting me when I pushed his face away. He stole himself, turned and entered the house.
For the last three months of our marriage,
I watched my husband of nearly thirty years transform.
Clearly, he was overcome with rage, and that baffled me. He had chosen for us to separate. He had agreed that our marriage wasn’t thriving. He knew I had no malicious intentions toward him; I had imagined an amicable and simple split. I thought we would remain friendly, that over the years to come we’d meet for birthdays with our grown daughter and we would wish each other well as we moved forward in our own directions. I was truly shocked as this person, whom I had known so well for so long, became someone else. Someone whose actions I could not understand and could not predict.
Several months into our separation, I made a list of eleven separate actions that he would have found obtuse when we separated and that he now engaged in shamelessly.
They included verbal, economic, and physical abuse, and mistreatment of our daughter and housekeeper.
The theft of my personal belongings, misstating financial information to the bank and lying about buying a suit for no apparent reason.
I brought that list to a psychologist, because I needed help understanding how a person could undergo such alarming changes. And how could I reverse the trend. I will not narrate all eleven of those incidents here, but I will recount a few of them-partly because they led to the nightmare process that unfolded over the next few years, and partly because I want to show the aspect of the divorce that others may not anticipate.