Skip to main content

Verbal Abuse


She cooked his favorite supper and waited for him to get home from work. Six o’clock turned into seven, so she called to see what kept him.  When he didn’t answer she left a voice mail.
Are you working late?  Are you on your way home?
After a half hour, she tried again, tamping down her suspicions, quieting her imagination. She schooled her voice to cover her concern.
I made your favorite supper.  Should I go ahead and eat without you?
At nine o’clock, she put away the food, her hunger replaced with anger and disappointment.
The cycle was starting again. She knew what to expect next.
He started coming home later and later each day.  At first, he blamed work, and instead of six, the norm became ten or eleven at night. She stopped asking for an explanation, because when she did, he yelled at her; he accused her of nagging.
Her silence gave him license to do whatever he pleased, but even when she dared to utter a protest, he turned the blame on her.   
Are you gaining weight again? Look how you dress.  Can’t you do something with your hair?
He never hit her but his words felt like fists, pounding away at her insecurities and shielding his infidelities.
          She stopped liking him long before she stopped loving him, so when there was nothing left between them, she demanded he leave.
          Insulted, he packed the tiny bit of him that remained in the house and left. 
          She changed the locks and the bank accounts.  She called a lawyer and got divorced. His love affairs never lasted long, so she knew he would call wanting a “home” again.  He listed all the same lame promises she had heard before many times, but when he started naming what she needed to change, she hung up on him.
          He was nothing to her.  He had no right to insult her any more.
When his voice mails got fewer and fewer, she knew his nonsense lived elsewhere. He had found someone else to own.  

She, on the other hand, lived wonderfully, ecstatically, happily ever after.  
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Happy Breastday to Me!

I gave myself a very special birthday present this year – I had surgery. Before you think it was to increase, decrease, or “lift” something, let me tell you it was not cosmetic (though I could probably use a few nips and tucks at my age; the infinite number of creams I buy OTC are not working their promised magic). About four or five months ago, I discovered a hard lump about the size of a large marble in my left armpit.  I had been feeling small pangs of pain in my left chest for several months, but I figured it was just my turn to dance with heart disease.  Everyone in my immediate family is diabetic and suffers from strokes or heart attacks, so I thought – here we go; my turn. I was going to tell my internist about the pangs during my next visit, so imagine my surprise when I discovered the lump. The Drama Queen in me immediately manifested herself – cancer, I thought.  I have cancer. I searched some more and found that the texture on the left side of my left breast felt diffe
9 comments
Read more

Dating Challenged

I stink at dating – always have.   I sputter.   I hyperventilate.   I fail miserably every time. I blame a pathetically underdeveloped gene that got little use before I married in my early twenties, then atrophied, gathering dust and rust, until I became single again in my fifties.   I decided to use this defect to my advantage when I needed to do some investigative reporting a few years back.   While on a newspaper writing assignment on Boomer-aged dating, I sacrificed my dignity and my vanity for the sake of the story (and I got several). Thank goodness, HoneyBunch saved me from all this when we married.  (He comes up with the best dates.) I’ve decided I will “show you mine if you show me yours.”   I will swap dating horror stories with you, but you have to promise to play along. The trick here is to tell about your worst date in 25 words or less.   You must keep it clean and you cannot name names. Our little contest will run only this week and before my next blogger posting.   Me
8 comments
Read more

Grandma’s Dining Table

Twenty five years ago my first husband and I bought a new home with four bedrooms and three baths, but my favorite part of the house was the enormous room you walked into from the front door. It had no dividing wall but the design was to use half of it as a formal living and the other half as a formal dining. From the beginning I decided to make it into one huge dining room that would catch the eye when everyone walked in through the front door of my home.   My three children were very young, but I envisioned them grown and married. We counted five at the time, but one day we would grow to eight, maybe more if we factored in grandchildren, so I bought a table that sat a family of twelve.  My husband thought it silly to look that far ahead and convinced me to buy only ten chairs. The room looked magnificent – the long, majestic table, the ten chairs, the buffet, a couple of real ficus, and a few other nice pieces of furniture – I was pleased. The table lasted longer than t
6 comments
Read more