Melancholy Flowers

There are a lot of great songs about memories. Just off the top of my head..

Weezer, Panic! At The Disco, David Guetta and of course, Cats.

Sometimes I feel like this whole divorce is a bad dream that I am trapped in and I just can't wake up.

I find this to be really odd. I can still clearly remember my life prior to June 22nd. I remember the family trip we took to Washington D.C. in April. I remember how much fun we all had together and what a great experience it was for me, my wife and our kids seeing the various museums and monuments.

I have the pictures to prove it.

I remember having dinner at the top of the Holiday Inn overlooking Georgetown. I remember the picnic on the banks of the Potomac with my mother and my half-sisters. I remember how much fun my son had riding the Metro through the city. I remember Cordie smiling in the morning sunshine.

I remember going fishing on Lake Ontario and the excitement of the kids. I remember stopping in Picton for ice cream. I remember Cordie catching perch and playing in the boat. I remember swimming at the beach.

I remember Christmas morning opening gifts and our Christmas dinner. I remember decorating the tree and putting the lights on the house. I remember shopping for my wife and wrapping her presents while hoping that this year I finally got it right.

And then I remember that it's all gone. No more Christmas mornings together as a family. No more family vacations. No more laughter, no more hugs, no more photos. Everything that made life worth living is gone for good.

I still have no idea why my wife felt she needed to leave. I wonder if she really understood the impact of that decision on our children, on me, on herself? Did she realize the true cost of her "vacation" when she made that decision? If she didn't, would she do it again?

I feel like I'm going to wake up and everything will be back to normal and my wife will love me again. I feel like this is all a big mistake.

And then I feel pretty damn stupid for feeling this way.

"We have it all, yet we have nothing" - Megamind

I know it's not exactly Shakespeare, but it fits my mood. I find myself very mel-on-kaly of late. I'm depressed over the lack of resolution on my divorce, the length of the Michigan winter and the affect all of this is having on my kids. It's tough. This is easily the hardest thing I've ever had to go through. It's much worse than eighth grade, my senior year or the death of my father. Sometimes it seems like everything good has been sucked out of the world.

And it's only going to get worse.

My trial starts in four weeks. We failed to reach an amicable settlement. It's going to get very, very ugly very, very soon.

I desperately want to blame myself for this. I want to know what I did wrong so I can force myself to feel like I deserve this. If it made sense perhaps I could forgive myself. But not knowing is my curse. The Ex doesn't realize it, but the fact that I will never know why she left is the worst thing she could do to me. The hurtful words, the greed, the false accusations - those roll off. But the 'not knowing' drives me insane. It eats at me every day to not know where it went wrong. To not know what brought this ugliness about. To not know why she felt the need to throw away everything we built together over 16 years. To not know why she needed to damage our children in this way. To not understand why she chose someone else over me.

I'll never know.

I think my divorce may have to do with the power dynamic in our relationship. The Ex was always the dominant member of our partnership. I was the submissive. It was this way from the very beginning. I never realized this during our marriage - it's only become apparent after the fact.

I can't say this for sure, but I think the cognitive dissonance between her need to be dominant and her economic subservience to me may have been the root cause of her unhappiness and the reason our marriage imploded.

I know she was very unhappy with her career. I think my (relative) success ate at her. I think she was very, very uncomfortable being dependent upon me financially. As long as I was submissive to her, we made it work. But when I demanded an end to her inappropriate emotional relationship it all boiled to a head. I wasn't just financially dominating her, I was now trying to control her emotionally, and that was too much. I think I've written before how I can't remember ever saying "no" to any request from her. This might have been the peanut butter that kept our marriage sandwich together.

In this light, her need to hurt and destroy me is understandable. It's dominance behavior. She wants desperately to regain control over me, and she's going to do it financially through the courts. She's trying to turn my own "weapon" against me. She's breaking free of my control. It's not greed driving her behavior - it's her need to see me broken. To see me crawl. To make me kneel before Zod. Perhaps even to free herself.

Funny aside, Zod never actually says this to Superman - he addresses that line to the American President.

Unfortunately, I've been responding to her every attack by becoming more resistant, more angry, more dominant, more controlling. This escalates the tension and animosity even further and raises the stakes of our dangerous game. Somehow we need to get this train off the current tracks before we go off the cliff.

If you think about it, my desperate need to blame myself for this is more evidence of my need to be submissive. It's certainly consistent with my taste for strong, assertive women.

Perhaps all relationships are about control. Perhaps everything comes down to a simple battle for dominance. Maybe my psychological analysis of the situation is total claptrap.

Maybe I won't have to do this again if I can figure out what I truly did wrong this time. Maybe this is a good place to end this blog.


A peace is of the nature of a conquest; for then both parties nobly are subdued, and neither party loser. - William Shakespeare