Save Your Relationship Today
To Save Our Relationship We Needed to Get Some Things Straight
In June of 1990, my ex left me and the children in Boston and drove to his father's house alone. It was his first time back in Allentown since his mother's funeral, five years earlier. I really worried that coming up to him was going to hurt me again. I thought he might kill himself. I worried that he might boot me out, saying, 'How dare you march in here and subvert my life with all this stuff.Let me be!'
The truth of the matter is, I needn't have worried much as I set out to save my relationship. My ex is a war veteran. He raised a family working two jobs at a time to make ends meet. He lost us his family and his own two brothers who were dead now. And I thought I was going to say something that was going to give him his life back? I may have had a pompous view of my own self importance.
When I came up to Tom my ex, I walked up to his room carrying a set of props in a duffle bag with three AA medals in it which stood for four years of sobriety, a metal spatula and a portrait of him as a boy wearing red suspenders and a bow tie. I opened up the bag and showed him the medallions. I inquired of him if he knew what they were and he could not say anything. That was the first shock for him—that he had a kid in AA. Then I took out the picture of myself and him together and put it on the table. I asked him what he remembered about us. He began to tell me many wonderful things all of which were quite true. Then I started to fill in the other side of that story. I didn't tell him that his memories of that boy or that time were wrong, just that they were incomplete, and he was able to hear that.
The more difficult thing was to take the metal spatula out of the bag. I asked him if he recalled pounding me with it. He said, `I probably threatened you with it once or twice.'
"I said, `No, you hit me with this thing. Now I have a little boy, and I can't imagine what would possess somebody to take this metal instrument and hit a child's soft bottom with it. What the hell were you thinking?'
"At first he tried to minimize it. I was cross with you. That's what occurs.'
"I replied, `You didn't get angry. You struck me badly. You chased me around with a belt when you came home drunk from the brewery. I was so scared of you to the point of death.' "
Then Tom began to cry. As a caring husband and father he could not imagin striking his own spouse like that. Then finally he turned to me and confessed, "You're right. I don't know what was going through my mind."
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