No Combat Zone

Yesterday I received a long attacking comment, the equivalent of a mail bomb really, from my ex-husband’s girlfriend on the post What I’m Not Missing. Of course she has opinions about this post. I don’t begrudge her those opinions. But I won’t air them here. This blog isn’t for her or about her–or my ex-husband. I was writing the blog for a year and a half before he left me, with his support the entire time. And he’s the one who hit “Publish” on the post when I first mentioned the affair and impending divorce. Yes, he read it first.

I’m writing my own story, my own experience. Does that include mentions of my ex and his girlfriend? Absolutely, because as much as either of them argues that all of this happened in the past, I still wake up every day as a divorced person and a single parent. Those realities are in the present moment.

I imagine a time, in the hopefully not too distant future in which I’m not still grieving, where the divorce will be in the past for me too. I understand they’re on a different timeline, that their relationship started eight months before I knew about it, that three years ago they started talking about how, if things had been different, maybe they would have ended up with each other–and then they set about making things different. But the timeline I’m on is that only one year ago last week, I heard my husband say he’d lied and cheated and was leaving me. And I’m not over it. It’s not in the past for me yet.

So, I wanted to make sure I disclose to you, my readers, in case it wasn’t obvious to you already, that the only person’s story I’m telling here is mine. I have been alternately accused by my ex of writing my version of his life and by his mistress of only writing one side of the story. I would not presume to tell anyone else’s side. I don’t know their side. I’ve tried to imagine it actually, in order to get to a place where I could understand and forgive. 

I’ve also offered, should either or both of them decide they want to write about it, to put a link on my site to their side of the story. I’ve also offered to create a Disclaimer page on the blog stating that the only side of the story I’m telling is mine. I even offered my ex-husband the opportunity to write the disclaimer. 

What I refuse to do is turn mamaTRUE into a he said/she said battleground where my ex shows up whenever he feels like defending himself or his girlfriend lobs personal attacks. And I wouldn’t actually go to their site to read their side, any more than I go to the club they run together and where they get up on stage and read their writing in a public venue. I’m clear that it would just hurt me. I’ve asked my ex over and over to stop reading my blog–because it’s not for him; it’s for me.

This isn’t the first attack or threat I’ve received over the last year. My ex-husband and his girlfriend have made veiled threats to sue me, direct threats to report me to Facebook, and the ongoing threat that my continuing to write will destroy any hope of a friendship. Another (used-to-be) mutual friend of ours even sent me an email saying that if I wanted Mike to be my friend, I should really stop writing my  “journal” about this. Then there’s the other (used-to-be) mutual friend who runs political campaigns, whose message in poetry slam and politics has been about giving people a voice, but who commented on the blog saying I should “talk about it offline.”

All of us are writers. My ex-husband and I met at a poetry open mic where he was the host and I signed up to read. He met his mistress at the slam. Those other used-to-be-mutual friends all met at the poetry slam where what you do is write poems then get up on stage and perform them. Sometimes it’s at a local bar in front of 50 people. Sometimes it’s at a national competition in front of thousands. But what we did, all of us, is write about our lives and then share that writing with audiences.

We all shared an art form, a passion, and we all did the same thing: write about our lives and get that writing out to people who wanted to hear and/or read it. I didn’t just write for the poetry slam though. I’ve known I was a writer since I was about ten years old. I got my Bachelor’s degree in English, my teaching certification in Secondary English, and a Master’s in Fine Arts in Creative Writing. I’ve always written about my life and the people in it. My ex-husband began pursuing a relationship with me after seeing me get up on a stage and read poems about my life and the people in it. 

Somehow the poetry slam was okay, but writing my blog isn’t. What’s the difference exactly? That the blog is on the internet? That it feeds to Facebook? Here’s the thing, my blog is one little address on the internet, and you read it by going there and choosing to read it. If you’re my friend on FB, my blog feeds to you there too. If you don’t like it, I can’t make you read it, no matter how catchy my titles, how suspenseful my first lines. No one can make you read it. If you don’t like it, I implore you, stop reading. Unfriend me. It’s okay, really.

I am again faced with the question of how I will deal with the threats to my writing. For over two months after we split up, I offered to have my ex comment on the blog or email me privately with any concern he had about the blog. I thought knowing what he objected to would help me understand exactly where he felt like lines were being crossed so I could be as respectful as possible and still tell my own story. He didn’t do it. I asked him to stop reading the blog. He did for a while. Then I posted Forget the Mistress and someone contacted him and his mistress and said the equivalent of “Have you read all that horrible stuff Sonya is writing? You better get her to stop.”

Then the battle started being waged again, so strong that I agreed to make three of my posts private. We were trying to finalize the divorce, negotiating over who got what, child support, and custody so I did what I could to keep the peace and to make the process run more smoothly. What I did was agree to censor myself. Today, I’ve made the posts public again, all three of them: Don’t Carry That Weight, Revenge Fantasy, and Forget the Mistress.

I’m done writing with my ex-husband on one shoulder and his mistress on the other. With every threat through the last year, every big blow up over the blog, I feel like I’ve lost my voice a bit more. Then I end up writing posts like What I’m Not Missing with long diatribes of questions because for months I’ve been so careful. I’ve tried not to reveal anything of his life. I’ve not been able to fall asleep at night obsessing about five words in the post I published right before bed, so I come downstairs and delete or rephrase something to try to stay out of trouble, to keep the peace.

I just can’t do it anymore. Because, inevitably I step on a landmine with something I write and then they’re threatening me again, telling me to stop writing. I will continue to write my story. I’m not going to stop writing, about me, or my ex, or his mistress/girlfriend–if they’re pertinent to what I’m going through on a particular day. I imagine the more time passes, the less I’ll think or write about them, but I’ve got to do it on my timeline. Their insistence that this is all in the past, that I just get over it already so we can all move forward doesn’t decrease my grieving time or increase my healing. It’s just one more way of them saying, “We’re okay and you’re not,” and it’s not helping anybody.

If the choice is that they stop reading or I stop writing to keep the peace, I can only choose what I will do. And I’m not going to stop writing. Not for them. Not for anybody.

Besides my writing, if you’re into memoir, may I recommend a couple of my favorite divorce memoirs here: Split: A Memoir of Divorce and Falling Apart in One Piece: One Optimist’s Journey Through the Hell of Divorce. They both tell their side of the story but details about their ex-husbands are in there too. Surprise, surprise.

Image by ahermin

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