The Husband

So last Thursday I wrote about Mr. Invisible. I told you my husband was not happy.

We are trying to work through this. I am trying, at least. He told me I needed to quit; that these guys are taking my soul. Today he opined I was, “being taken advantage of.” I’m trying to find some place to speak of this clearly. Our friend, Julie, says it is my quest for a level of stimulation my husband finds distasteful and repugnant. He cannot watch anything on television or the movies that is shocking, violent or too sad. I quest for this level of stimulation. At the same time he is right, it drains me in a way. And then I am less available to him.

I don’t talk about him much except as a passing reference. He makes things. His days are pretty constant and very far away from any trauma besides what he concocts in his brain. My days fluctuate wildly between feeding energy and draining.

We have loaded guns in our bedroom closet. This is new. This is to dissuade the guys that he believes might hunt me down after they are released. He is no longer afraid I will be hurt on the facility. He is now afraid they will become so attached they will come after me when they are released.

When I was 22, I had this dream about who I would be. I wanted to be this quiet, centered earth-mother person. Somebody who could absorb and be quiet. I am the farthest thing from quiet and calm. I finally understood this goal was beyond my personality, beyond my character, and I needed to give it up. I’ve spent the next decades working through this reality. The easy description of me is I’m a loud, pushy, bitchy person. I do not give in easily to society’s expectations of me. I am not cute or nice. I am me.

And now I am in prison. As I’ve said in earlier blogs, my mother made me do it. My great friends are totally unsurprised by how this environment has worked for me. These men are the boys I dated in high school. They are the lost souls that I saw and could not save at that time. They are known to me. I am fierce, and strange and authentic. I demand a lot, and I do not abrogate my ideals. The guys tell me I am real, a compliment I cherish and have never heard before. They do not judge me and they do not find me wanting.

So they come into my office, and each starts as a person, not a felon. Some of them are so dead; their shiny bits have been destroyed and their desire for interaction is puerile and oriented toward sex. They cannot find something larger. They persist and I send them elsewhere as in Proposition.

And so the majority finds me. I say something or do something that catches them. And then out of their pain and their fear and their hopelessness they decide to take another chance with me. Each finds another reason to believe and trust me. And each moves toward something new at their own pace.

Mr. Invisible takes a leap that I have asked him for, and I have never imagined how it might affect me. For any man, especially in a prison situation, to admit to a woman that they were looking for love from the man that sodomized them is huge. It is not something that can be conjured for my interest. It is far too possibly humiliating and horrifying to even float out unless you have some huge goal. A goal such as finding wholeness and seeing the need to slough off the insanity of your childhood. Again, he has gifted me with such a secret, such a moment that I am devastated by both his trust and the horror of his experience.

Then the husband suggests he is using me? What is the husband thinking? He is thinking that I am taking something from him and giving it to somebody ELSE. He wants me to come up with some concrete plan of when enough is enough. When I stop giving of myself. How nebulous. I don’t know how to do this.

Mr. Invisible has taken my soul for a number of hours. After I write about it, I remain so sad, but I am no longer wracked with sorrow. I can spend ten hours of my blessed life to alleviate some of his pain. If my horribly privileged husband has to give up some comfort, so be it. I’ve put up with his obsessions for years; he can deal with mine now. I am doing good. I am convinced of this.