The Phantom Pains of a Bad Divorce (Chapter)

Two months after I moved to Maine, I traveled to Florida for the holidays. My ex insisted I go and paid for my airfare; he even rented a two-bedroom apartment on the beach so that I could visit comfortably with my children during my one week stay. “The kids need to see you,” he said. “What kids?” I thought. It was too soon for me to leave my new home with my demons running wild. I didn’t even know how to hide or tame them yet, and now I was off to revisit an old life that had spurred my running away from it. Celebrating the holidays seemed an untimely thing to do, but, of course, I did it for my children. Because I loved them, I kept up with them on biweekly calls, but their day to day lives had faded to the background of my new exhausted and confusing reality. Still, my past, present, and future kept moving before me like parts in an assembly line that needed fixing before going on to the next station.

Eighteen-year-old Nick was having a blast in college after joining a fraternity and receiving from his father the gift of a new Ram truck that he drove rive around his adopted college town of Pensacola near the Alabama border; and sixteen-year-old Clara was adapting to the ins and outs of high school. She resented my leaving more than my son did; my ex constantly reminded me about her hurt feelings when he called me on the telephone.  My explanations to Clara that the life of single-motherhood and three jobs was killing me, that her father wanted an opportunity to be a full-time parent to her, and that she was welcomed to move in with me went on deaf ears, and there was nothing I could do about that either. 

I was mentally and physically exhausted after ten years of being a single mom. My only remaining energy was used to hike away most of my confusion and sleep away the rest of it. I felt like a soldier recently arrived to Maine from a private war that left me shell-shocked and suffering from PTSD, like my step-brother who after returning from the Vietnam War locked himself in his room and refused to leave it.

That Christmas in Florida I didn’t feel like myself either and I couldn’t fake feeling anything but miserable.  Others stared as if expecting me to have a breakdown-- to tear my clothes off and foam at the mouth because what could be more absurd than leaving your family and friends to move to a state some of them had never even heard of before, at least some of the people in my former father-in-law’s new Colombian wife’s family had never heard of Maine).  My children, , though, were sweet, letting go of any old resentments, at least for the moment, and stopping by to see how I was doing at their grandfather’s party, which we all attended..

I didn’t blame others for their assumptions of my mental state because I forgot to comb my hair and wore jeans and a t-white to the fancy Christmas Eve dinner at my former father-in-law 3000 square ft. home on the golf course, a house with a sauna, sun roof, Italian marble floors, stone fireplace, and pool, a house where I had lived in during the latter half of my marriage and the first part of my divorce.

While I helped in the kitchen, America, my former father-in-law’s new wife, who once recommended that I deal with the heart-wrenching emotions of divorce by wearing a hot shade of red lipstick like she had done when she went through her own divorce (I tried the lipstick but opted for Johnny Walker instead),  cautiously asked me questions about my new life.

She was always well-mannered and well-dressed, wearing monochromatic colors and silk scarves that gave her short stature formidability.  Her main obsession was with wearing the authentic version of the perfume Paris by Yves St. Laurent, and short of flying to the City of Lights to purchase it, which she said was the only place you could buy the real thing and not a watered-down version of it, she made an occasional trip, like a pilgrimage, to higher-end stores at the mall to buy it.

“What do you do there?” she asked in Spanish while carefully removing aluminum foil wrapped dishes from the oven, foods from her native Columbia that I did not appreciate for its mix of seasoning and varied textures and tastes, foods that were chopped up into tiny, bite-sized pieces.

“I work online, hike, and sleep.”

“Do you miss it here?” She got to the point of her inquisition.

I started perspiring after realizing that I forgot to wear deodorant. Her question rattled me because I did not miss Miami, neither did I miss Portland: not my old home or my new one, not the family or friends I left behind or those I had yet to meet in Maine. My new life was rooted in indifference rather than the excitement of a new beginning.  After the frenetic first couple of weeks of exploring the streets of Old Town Portland and the more local hangouts on Congress Street, I wasn’t interested in much of anything, not even eating fatty, fried foods that provided distraction, instant gratification and/or indigestion—potato chips and sour cream dip, pizza with extra cheese, loaded nachos with meat, cheeseburger with steal fries , chocolate ice cream with drizzles of caramel 

Mostly, I felt indifference for my new life, a place between discarding the deadweight of the past while reaching for a lighter presence and present, which I had always detested because, like my mother, I believed the grass was greener anywhere than where I was. But I still didn’t know how to balance any of the parts of my life, so I was in purgatory, but I couldn’t tell her that either.

“Of course, I miss it here,” I said in Spanish, looking down at the plate of salad I was holding.

She stared me in the face, waiting for me to return her gaze with conviction, but I refused to look her in the eyes. Her intimidation tactics were nerve-wracking, her large brown saucer-like eyes demanded allegiance to tradition and aristocratic behaviors (she was raised by a high-ranking military official and well-heeled mother) and any divergence from proper etiquette in table manners, social interactions, and family life, was deemed an aberration.  She thought me an American rebel--or lunatic--and she wasn’t sure what to make of me after being in the country only five years.

 I spent the night in and out of shallow conversations, trying to hide in the shadows of a party with happy people who knew how to act at festive occasions.  Outside, America replicated the customs of her country’s traditions with Christmas lights draped around the Royal palm trees and the imposing stone statue of Neptune, the god of freshwater, sea, and horses.  Inside she offered a stunning nativity scene, with real hay, by the fireplace in which letters to Jesus from friend’s grandchildren requesting their favorite toys, had been placed, another Christmas tradition in her country. Salsa and cumbia played on loudspeakers and Colombian aguardiente, rum, and beer were offered at the open bar.

In her country, Christmas celebrations started in late November with fireworks and the lighting of candles, and on the nine days leading up to the Christmas Eve extravaganza, called novenas, prayers were recited, hymns were sung, and dinner was eaten at the homes of different family members. She spoke with nostalgia about her Christmas pasts as if she couldn’t believe the puny, several hours-worth of Christmas eve celebration, American style.  But I figured in her 60’s, she had married for her papers and financial security, and not for a familiar “getting-cozy-together-as-we-age” type of love.

I glanced at my former, white, conservative father-in-law who was now in his mid-70s and who several years back had retired from running a multi-million-dollar aviation overhaul company he and his two other partners sold for over forty million dollars, setting themselves up for life.  He held a whiskey straight in his hands, and I didn’t know he drank even though I’d known him for over sixteen years. But he was a man of no clear allegiances. His loyalties were to his only son, my ex-husband, and airplanes, on which he spent his days at Okeechobee Airport repairing, overhauling, painting, and refurbishing World War 2 fighter planes he purchased from collectors or museums.

He was raised in Miami when it was pronounced My-a-ma, a throwback to the Native Indians name for it, and he was old-school South and rote about racism (the prejudice of the Southern white man in Florida pre and post Latin immigration 1960s was his inheritance and birthright; it was the kind of racism he secretly held onto out of loyalty to his ancestors; the kind of racism he never questioned or examined as he surrounded himself with friends and close-relations from the Latino or other minority communities because he had no other choice but to survive and thrive in his new environment; the kind of racism he never talked about but held onto tightly to so that when one of his minority friends or relations committed a transgression it was confirmed in his heart that his parents and grandparents were right about the White man being superior and everyone else a minority). Thankfully, he kept his views about Latinos to himself.  

Over the years, Miami’s multi-cultural community influenced his choice of clothes and cologne, which was always brash and expensive.   Because he was man of considerable girth, his preference for expensive linen Cuban guayaberas, tailored, fine men’s trousers, thick, Italian bracelets, rings, and chains, and European leather shoes made him look ready to conduct business on an expensive yacht on Ft. Lauderdale’s waterways or in the high-rise offices of Miami’s downtown.  He was smart enough to know where his bread was buttered since most of his jet engine mechanics were Latinos and most of his business took him to South America. It was no wonder he married a Latin American woman, even though he had fallen in love with a White American blonde, around his age, after his wife of over forty years had died.

His first girlfriend broke it off with him when he asked her about her day job. (his other passion was keeping track of his money--every penny of it. Before they married, a worried America, asked me about what his attorney intended by the prenup she was scheduled to sign before her wedding day to which I feigned indifference because I never knew or inquired about the money, none of it, neither my father-in-law’s or his son’s. During my marriage every house I lived in, boat, or luxury car I drove was a gift from my in-laws to their only son or a gift to me from my husband, so I enjoyed the “bonuses” of wealth even though I had always insisted, half-heartedly, that my ex-husband budget his money and that we live according to the dictates of our individual checkbooks, which were pretty straightforward with their debit and credit columns based on our salaries:  I was a legal secretary, and he was as an administrator at his father’s aviation firm and while he paid the mortgage, water, electrical, and repairs, I paid for the groceries.  The rest of my earnings, I spent on myself. 

In reality, we never had anything to fear about money; the overhaul jet engine business was good and so was our healthy appetite for spending money made from its business—televisions computers and electronics were discarded for bigger and better brands; furniture was constantly replaced, home renovations were ordered on a yearly basis; luxury cars were traded often; designer shoes, purses, perfumes, and dresses, were bought and donated to charity at the end of a fashion season or at the end of a trend.  Money fed our vanity and constant search for something else beyond the instant gratification of material things, which material things never provided.).

My former father in-law was as two-faced as I was. When I walked over to him at the party and gave him a kiss on the cheek, he smiled at me, his blue eyes magnified through the lens of his wire-framed bifocals, his thick broad forehead folded in wrinkles, his thin, pale lips pressed hard against each other. “How does it feel to be a man of the world?” He asked, sarcastically. I answered truthfully: “It’s good to break free,” I said smiling back, amazed at how all the bad blood between us post-divorce was smiled away as if we meant it. 

He still thought of me as a conniving Latina, and I thought he was cold, hard, racist fish for all his maneuverings during the divorce: my ex told me that he told his attorneys to secure his money when he heard I was seeking legal counsel; he told his son not to deed me the old 1960’s ranch-style house with two bedrooms and a bathroom--a 1100 square foot house, badly in need of a new roof and water heater, that his grandfather had deeded to my husband at his death; and he never offered to help with financial assistance when Hurricane Charley blew away my old roof even though he immediately ordered a $45,000 roof on his luxury home on the golf course.  I disliked the man, but I disliked his son even more. My relationship, though, with my former father-in-law was in the past.  My new beef was with my ex-husband.

Many years after I moved to Maine, I learned that he had inherited his mother’s $2 million dollar monetary gift at her death, which coincided with our separation (at the time, of his mother’s passing he never told me about his inheritance or the reason for his spending on big-money items such as the Boeing engine he rented to airlines in South America for $10,000 a month, the land in the Keys he bought and resold, and a condominium in a retirement community he rented out to the elderly.   I figured he had gone into some side business with his father.  All he kept repeating to me was that I was not entitled to inheritance even though I didn’t know what inheritance he was referring to.

During the years after our divorce, he called me every night to tell him how guilty he felt about his affair, how suicidal he was in the aftermath of his decisions to leave the children and me, and how difficult it was for him to make the $1000 monthly child support we had agreed on between ourselves after I forwent hiring a top-rated law firm who threatened doing a forensic accounting, which I eventually figured would not be worth hiring because my husband earned $60,000 a year, and I was not entitled to anything beyond that..  So, I paid $1500 to a divorce lawyer on the beach who filled in a standard divorce decree, in which he mistakenly had me divorcing my son instead of my husband.  My ex and I settled on $1000 a month for child support, and he agreed to keep the children on his insurance plan.

As we sat at that Christmas Eve party, I didn’t yet know about the timeline of his mother’s inheritance; a confession he made to me years after we got divorced. I had not yet connected the dots about his crazy spending and the bottomless guilt he felt about leaving. I resented him just the same, still imaging a strongman I hired for the job tear him limb by limb and organ by organ (I saw it in my mind’s eye every time I got a good look at his larger than life smile with teeth as straight as arrows, the physical feature he was most proud of, always claiming years of orthodontal hell to achieve such a mouth).

We had had violent tussles during out separation, including my surprise visit to his office, to beat up his paralegal, who was also his girlfriend, a threat I could only express on a yellow post-it note (“Watch your back, bitch,” was the short message I posted on her computer screen) after she ran out of her cubicle when she saw me coming. In turn, he showed up at my job at Miami Children’s Hospital, where I worked the receptionist desk of the critical care unit, and threatened to beat me up, a situation I de-escalated by asking him to leave in a whisper while gently pushing him towards the elevator.   His sudden appearance at my place of work horrified and embarassed me. Here were children on ECMO machines or ventilators fighting for their lives, and he had the nerve to bring the trifles of our day to day wars into such a scene. Seeing life and death every day, witnessing heartbroken parents leave the waiting room after all hope was gone, taking notes in Bioethic meetings in which doctors and specialists determined when a brain-dead child would be taken off life-support while parents wept, listening to Code Blue announced on the hospital’s loudspeaker, and hearing of a child’ passing was enough to ground me into a bit more of emotional perspective.

 Really, the job at the hospital had unexpectedly saved me from the bottomless pit of despair. It was also the first job offered to me after my husband left the house for the other woman and stopped paying the utility bills forcing me to take whatever job came along. Still, in an interesting turn of events it turned out to be exactly what I needed to move a couple of centimeters away from my grief.

The truth was that our behaviors were alarming and distressing. We had never even had a fight before and now were we willing to tear each other up at the slightest provocation, and tear into anyone else who seemed the least bit deserving of it.

At that time, I became a loyal follower of my erratic emotions and their demands I daily adventure in heartbreak, adventures that led me to visit a smorgasbord of intense feelings I became familiar enough with to relate them to images: sorrow, a shallow, lifeless pond in the middle of nowhere; rage, the throbbing tip of a welder’s burning torch; bitterness, the soul’s lining worn away by acidic bubbles of resentment; wailing, the gurgling of primal life’s first signs; revenge landing punch after punch in a violent boxing match; forgiveness, a pilgrimage with its end-journey to an ancient, holy cathedral nowhere in sight.

But my favorite emotion was a revenge that led me to a dark and delicious romance with its demand I act on my most vigilante and pressing need for justice. Once I skipped work and broke into the house my husband was renting. After stepping behind the tall cherry hedges, I removed the screen from the large front window and finagled my body into his living room.  In his house, I spent the day smelling his bedsheets, sniffing for traces of her. Thankfully, only his clean body scent remained because I could not have handled sensing her presence so early in my discovery of the affair.

I gathered from the dirty dishes in the sink, the unmade bed, and the shirts and pants strewn around the empty living room with no furniture, that he hardly spent time at the house.  Even then I took consolation in witnessing the lack of evidence for his affair, a calming balm that did not trigger of any more breakdowns.  My heart needed confirmation that his affair wasn’t as heady as all that, that even though he had left the house and our marriage was over, he was not spiritually, emotionally and physically vested in another woman. That his affair was just a superficial thing and would pass as quickly as it started, that what we had once shared had such value that it could not be instantly turned to dust.  But, suddenly, as if by surprise, I found in his hamper, evidence of the full-on relationship and its price tag--in the thousands: hundreds of pages of American Express credit card statements confirming the thousands of dollars spent on romance: weekend stays at the Ritz Carlton in Coconut Grove and Naples, sailboat rides on the Atlantic Ocean, romantic dinners at five-star restaurants in Miami Beach , couple’s spa treatments in five-star hotels, all confirmations of a betrayal that blasted its hurt onto me, reaching deep into my gut and stretching to all cells until my entire body hunched over and wept.  For a woman who had never cried before, wailing became second nature: at night I wailed into my pillow until falling into the dark space of deep sleep, calming but all too short, and in the mornings, after I dropped my kids off at school,  I wailed in the living room in combinations of high pitches and low drones like a trapped and wounded wild animal and a victim of violent crime moaning away her last breaths on earth.

As I glanced at my ex walking around the Christmas party, stopping to saying something personal enough to charm who he was talking to, I recalled a long ago and strange frustration with his not being cool enough in high school, a confession he repeated to me oftentimes (he now, though, seemed to feel “cool” enough). Of course, he said the “cool” kids knew of him but never welcomed him into their inner circles, a frustration that played into his life post-high school graduation and into his subconscious desire to be crowned “prom king” in all experiences, and, especially, by his counterpart to the crown—a beautiful, popular, bad girl with the body measurements of 36-24-36, or numbers within that range, a woman he had not been worthy of in high school because of his lack of popularity.

His dreams of the “crown” didn’t take full possession of him until sixteen year into our marriage, and even though he once admitted I was beautiful, I figured I wasn’t wild enough to live out the full ramification of his high school dreams; it was only after his mother’s passing that he felt free enough to pursue his heart’s desire. . His mother, Joanne was a straight shooter. She was also 6 feet tall and always elegant, with thick green eye shadow, hot pink lipstick, splashes of red rouge on both cheeks, strong perfume, a neck full of gold necklaces and chokers, and wrists and fingers loaded with bracelets and rings, all made to order by her favorite jeweler in her choice of rare stones. Every two weeks she had her hairdresser color her fine grey into a light pinkish blond and whip it up into a frothy, see-through beehive. 

All she expected what that we behave and do as she say, which included packing into the back seat of her Lincoln Mercury of the year, always pink, with her best friends to go out to eat to fancy restaurants in town, her favorite pastime. She hardly spoke, but when she was not pleased, especially with her beloved, only son, she stared directly at him, without blinking, for long stretches of time, if necessary, until he did what she said.  And because the cornea of her brown eyes bulged slightly due to a thyroid condition, her stare seemed pressing and non-negotiable. After she died from complications of diabetes, all hell broke lose and my husband became the wild man he couldn’t be while she was alive.

Looking back at his husband’s affair, I understood his attraction to Dawn..  When he talked about her as his paralegal and friend (they both worked at the government office where my husband was an attorney for social services), he said that she was raised in Spanish Harlem in New York City, and that she had dated a famous boxer with who got her hooked on cocaine, yet when she settled down she moved to Miami, she got off drugs, married a lawyer and had two kids who she adored.

After her Marine husband was sent to fight in Afghanistan, my husband invited her and the kids to come over to swim in our pool.  At the time, I didn’t know about their affair, but I did get a good look at her.  She was tall, dark, and Caribbean with enough physycial assets to attract any man who paid attention, but it was her bedroom eyes that sealed the deal.  I’d had heard about those type of eyes but never seen them. When I asked her if her kids needed towels, she didn’t answer but instead took me in as if she didn’t dabble in plain speak, common words, or chit chat. Her dark brown eyes with their long black lashes strolled around my eyes, nose, cheeks, mouth… Her pouty lips formed a sly smile. She liked what she saw. She always did--in the mailman, grocer, passing stranger. I looked away before she reached my decolletage, and went to grab the towels:

We all feared an undressing and call to frolic naked with her on a Caribbean island beach. I felt sorry for my husband. I felt sorry myself. We were in way above our heads: Our marriage, which started out with two hopeful young virgins determined to keep the tradition of the vows alive, no matter changing feelings or circumstances, was waylaid by an expert vixen with enough heat of revolution to topple over the status quo, especially in a relationship that had seen its time.  But my beef with Dawn was over and so were the daily migraines she caused.  After I left the threatening post-it on the computer screen in her office, I never thought about her again.

As I write this, I grapple with my ignorance about my ex-husband’s inheritance (It made sense so many years later--the timeline of his affair, his leaving the house, his bad behavior), about not hiring those sharks to tear him up in court, about not securing a better financial future for myself and the children, instead of working endless hours as a college instructor, online and on campus, and continuing, those hours at home as single mother of two young children. 

On the other hand, I realized that if I would have dedicated my time to a knock-out divorce battle in the Miami courts, I would have been decimated--emotionally, psychologically, and physically.  After once being a legal secretary to one of Miami’s most powerful divorce attorney’s, I had seen how those type of fights dragged out for years, no resolution in sight, just the draining of money and emotions to rage over the Persian rug, fine painting, alimony, child support, and time spent with the children. Even though I once opined these battles non-sensical and inane, I now understood a divorcing couple’s need for the revenge-fueling pursuit of individual justice, rooted in all the hurts once swept away to the back of the heart for the sake of honoring love every single day and year they were together.

Also, during that time, my emotions were taut, my head in a fog about the loss of my marriage and the security that went with it.  My mental and physical energy were limited: I suffered from a self-diagnosed Epstein Barr-like fatigue, symptoms that stemmed from a compromised immune system that years before had me dealing with a complicated case of Endometriosis and a subsequent hysterectomy to cure it. I could now hardly make it through my days without taking a 10-minute power nap here and there.

Then there was the question of my pride, which didn’t allow me to believe that I had lost my man to another woman. Furthermore, rage and hurt, fueled my curiousity about the reasons for his straying from an air-tight marriage, so air-tight in fact that on a business trip years before a “naughty” massage  yielded a heartfelt, teary confession and his swearing to never “cheat” on me again.  Now, during the separation he brought to our bed his new sex skills: he claimed, quickened, stopped, explored, and thrust himself into all my feminine body parts as if he had been trained by a prostitute, like the ones who worked in the ancient temples and bestowed on men their skills for a taste of the divine and not for the lowly pursuit of money. And even though I wanted to win the competition between the other woman and me, I had never been attracted to my former husband--even with his new superpowers--and neither was he to me.    

Furthermore, my allegiance and vow for peace with my ex was rooted in my children’s well-being.  They had been adopted as babies from orphanages in Russia. My going to their country and seeing the difficulty of their early years--the damp rooms where they slept and ate, and the illnesses that besotted them (Nicholas suffered from asthma and digestive issues and weighed only 11 pounds at 15 months of age; and Clara was underweight and developmentally delayed)-- made me focus on their well-being instead of creating more suffering from a divorce battle than they had known as orphans in Russia.

My loyalties to the glory days of my past with my ex-husband and his family also influenced my decision not to fight it out in a divorce court.  They had shown me another way of being family, and not the tension-filled violent years that stemmed from growing up in my own family.    His mother had treated me like a daughter, buying me pretty dresses, perfume, purses, and shoes, and his father had always paid for the dinners at five-star restaurants across the state of Florida, all this because their son had loved me.

I struggled with the sudden, ugly changes to my relationship with my ex-husband and his father; their drastic change of feelings towards me hurt deeply even though I sought a quick resolution and financial compromise at end of my marriage; instead, they treated me as if I was conniving and heartless, pursuing money and its security at any cost. And, for a moment, I acted as ugly as they thought me to be: In a fit of desperation, I hired a locksmith and paid him $500 to break into the strongbox in the 3000 square foot house where I lived during the separation (the same house my father-in-law and his wife lived in before her passing) so that I could steal my deceased mother-in-law’s $40,000 worth of jewelry, a loot of diamond rings, emeralds necklaces, and pearl pendants I returned to my father-in-law a week later with a heavy heart and sincere apologies.

Yet, even before I knew the real reasons for his leaving, my ex-husband taunted me when I didn’t know about his lover: he took me to dinners and said he wanted to start another family.  He refused to deed me his grandfather’s old house during our talks to settle the fine points of our divorce, and when he deeded me the house, he immediately took the $50,000 worth of equity in it, further crippling me financially. Furthermore, he resented paying the monthly child support; and he resented getting the children on his designated weekends twice a month.   The constant struggle to get him to do the right thing by pleading, coaxing, and allowing him to call or stop by the house at all hours of the day were based on my fears that I would soon find myself without the necessary financial means to make a go of my new situation.

What was even more difficult about coming to terms with the right thing to do during my separation and divorce, was that my husband’s leaving me was a long-ago wish come true. We were not compatible but things between us were good enough, and we had children: I was raised to believe that you made personal sacrifices to stay in a marriage for the sake of the children. Yet deep-rooted love and understanding were always missing from our relationship. When I eloped to Biloxi, Mississippi I was 19 years old, and he was 20. At the time, we were both running away from overbearing mothers (my father had died two years before of a heart attack), and our subconscious pull to each other was the recognition of our mutual predicaments and the need to bolster each other as we worked through family pressures to become our own kind of man and woman. 

That our relationship became other things, like the pursuit of education (we both had higher advanced degrees in education and law), the adoption of children to Russia when we couldn’t have them ourselves, and a quiet family life was a surprising and unexpected twist to our initial pursuit of individual freedom.  During the years I was married, I saw another side of family, a safe version that gave way to more productive living--and not just surviving my parents’ violence.

Still, when my husband left the house for another woman, things changed overnight: He became a bully, and I his perfect victim.  Because I learned victimhood in childhood from parents who abused me with derogatory name-calling and physical violence, I played into the allure of victimhood’s old siren song, awakening in me the need to revisit  a familiar, deep-rooted habit that eventually exhausted me so thoroughly I ran away to Maine, and in the quiet, solitude of a hermit-like life, I saw my own hand in it. 

Finally, there was the extra stream of financial assistance my ex offered years after the divorce, the payment of my cell phone, money to help out with unexpected bills, and the purchase of airline tickets and a couple hotel reservations he made when I visited the children in Florida after I moved to Maine, just enough cash to keep me psychologically indebted to a man I detested and another layer of obligation to further distance me from my psychic wounds of race:  In childhood, I became determined to bend a knee to any White man who offered to save me from myself and give me an upper footing in a society obsessed with race and social acceptance, even if it cost md my dignity.

My bended knee was taught by my White European father with a French mother and Spanish father who detested my mulatto, albino color like he called it. Every day, he reminded me of my inferiority:  I was the half-breed, the mixed race child, unworthy of anything but a White man who deemed me worthy enough of saving, like he had done for my Native Caribbean mother who preached the same message of Whiteness and its need to be chased after until married into (I pursued my ex-husband when we met as tellers at a bank in North Miami: I asked him out on a date and insisted on his affections until we eloped to Biloxi).

I buried my wounds of race, grounded in family trauma and historical and collective chains of ingrained beliefs leftover from colonialism, slavery, and modern-day discrimination. My elopement to Mississippi with the White man of my choice led me to falsely believe I had a hand in my fate--at least I was free to choose the emotional and psychological suffering my White man dished out. By being stoic enough to take the pain, even years after my divorce, resilient enough to come back for more, and imaginative enough to make excuses for it I mistakenly believed I rose above to claim my story of race.  

Really, I was just another footman in history’s story of race and color, insidiously weaved into my impulses, behaviors, beliefs, expectations…., a story I dare not see for myself because it took a thunderous voice like God’s and conviction like trumpets heralding Armageddon to shuck it all and claim myself and everyone else human.  Until I arrived at the very depth of feelings for who I was and how I really felt about race, I was just as prejudice as everyone else: I hated the White man, I hated the Black man, I hated the Brown man, and because hate was a Sisyphian load carried eternally uphill, I hated myself. 

Mostly, I hated my ex-husband to the core of my being, the throbbing pain of a phantom paper cutting deeper, bleeding often, infecting everything, and becoming gangrened.  Now I understood what my astrologer friend said about the psychic roots of diseases like cancer being born from undealt feelings gone renegade to set up their own internal, secret camps that eventually burst through the organs as tumors with their own set of rules for the survival of its host.

When my ex stopped at the Christmas party to see how I was doing, I smiled hard and nodded my head while imaging that my hired strongman held him down while I knocked out every single one of his perfectly aligned, straight, white teeth.  (It would take seven more years in Maine before I confronted him and forgave myself for lying as flat as an old, dirty rug that he walked all over years after our divorce had been finalized).