After College

In May of 2000 we moved into an apartment at the Foxborough Cove in his hometown of Shreveport.  I had sat reading him the names of the apartment complexes available, he had insisted on this one, as it had the same name as the stadium that his beloved Patriots played in.  Mike ate, slept and breathed sports, football in particular.  He often called it his religion.  He collected trading cards, of all things that he considered sports.  Some things he referred to as just games.  Mike was also obsessed with video games and toys.  He was obsessed with Pokémon.  He was very childlike. 

I have often wondered what his major malfunction was.  We went through several ideas during our marriage, from hypoglycemia, to him being possessed by a demon, whom we tried to expel.   My first councilor after I left him, Liz, believed him to be a psychopath.  I agree.  I wonder now if Mike was also bipolar like his mother was.  I have always wondered if he was abused by his parents.  He refused to discuss or even tell me one story of himself as a child.  Why I don’t know.  Whatever made him the way he was I will never know. 

At some point I lost the belief that I could change Mike, that I and love alone could make him get better.  That I could make him treat me better.  I wanted out.  I had known for about a year and half before I left him that I wanted to leave, I just had no idea how. Now I had threatened many times, that if he did not clean up his act and get help I was going to leave.   Mike had me believing my parents would never take me back.  About six months before I left I began telling him I wanted a divorce.  He would not listen.  He could not hear me.

When we arrived at the Cove we began to look for work.  We were surviving off a loan that he forced me to sign. In Northwest Louisiana no one wants to hire someone with a college degree and little work experience.  I got some temp work and eventually I began to sell cars at a local dealership.  I was terrible at it.  I can’t lie with a straight face, but I tried.  I think I sold a total of 3 by myself, and one was to my mom.  I quit selling cars in January of 2001.  I told them if they ever need a receptionist to call me.  A few weeks later they did.  I started working as a relief receptionist and later as file clerk at their Shreveport branch.  Mike eventually got a job working in the new sports radio station in town. 

I was now very Buddhist and defined myself as such.  My Christian husband could have cared less.  I remember being at times suicidal, even writing a note that Mike made me burn later.  He made me promise to never write one again.  I remember being very angry.  My Buddhist books helped me to realize that and to realize that I was very angry at Mike for the first time.  I became violent.  When we fought I threw dishes.  I remember one day asking him to come get his dishes out of the sink.  I began to count to ten.  When I got to ten I broke a dish.  I went through three dishes and throwing a canister at him before he finally got up from his video game to do what I had asked.  I just loved to hear them crash!  When I married Jay, I made sure my dishes were heavy enough that if I threw them at the wall they would not break.  I am thankful to say that I am no longer a dish thrower.  I haven’t needed to be.

Mike was fired from his position at the radio station in the Spring of 2001.  I still do not know why.  We had one car so Mike would take me to work.  He would be unshaven and unshowered at that point.  I would ask him if he was going to look for work that day.  He would say, “uhum,” while he continued to play Pokémon on his Gameboy.  When he would come back, he would look just the same.  I would ask if he had looked for work that day.  He would say, “ Yes.”  I began to believe he was lying to me.  So one day I preformed what I called the kiss test.  I had to wear makeup for my job.  One day as he pulled up to drop me off at work.  I put on a very bright red lipstick and as I prepared to leave I covered his whole face in kisses.  I asked him if he was going to look for work that day.  He responded in the affirmative.  He returned 8 hours later unshaven, unshowered and covered in my kisses.  Michael was lying to me. 

I confronted him and he blew up as usual.  I wondered where he was going while I was at work.  Now Michael was a book smart man, but he was stupid about covering up his tracks.  One day not long after, I was putting away his socks and discovered a receipt for Capri video.  He was in the shower.  I stole a look in the checkbook.  Remember I was allowed to deposit money in but I was never allowed to look in it or know how much money was in the check book.  Inside were more receipts for Capri video.  Now Capri video was a little hell hole where men could go and rent a little room for $25, watch pornos and jack off.  Mike got out of the shower.  I was furious.  We were living hand to mouth at that time, I was being lied to and I snapped.  I grabbed him and threw him down on the bed.  I choked him until he turned blue.  That was not the only time I was violent with him.  A few weeks before I picked up a large serrated bread knife and held it against his throat.  I told him, “I ought to kill you, but you’re not worth the prison time,” and I let him go.  I am still ashamed at what I did.  I hesitate to tell you these things, but I want you to understand that this man pushed me to places I never dreamed I could go.  I was becoming like him.

I made the decision to try to reestablish relations with my parents.  I remember sitting down with them in my living room.  I told them, we are broke, it looks like we are going to have to file bankruptcy, and I told them finally about his porn addiction.  It was the first time I had told the truth I a long time.  It felt good and I kept doing it.  It was the first time I had been open with them about my relationship with him.  They were shocked.

I wanted to leave and I just did not know how to do it.  In April of 2001 my mom did something very smart.  She began to take me to the movies once a week.  It was a glorious break of normalcy.  I remember getting in the car one Sunday afternoon after our movie and saying, “I just don’t want to go home.”  She chimed in with, “You don’t have too.”  I convinced myself that I did and I went home, but that…that was the seed that started it all. 

Ilsa

 

 

 

The Goings on of Apartment C

In August of 1997 as we prepared to spend another semester in different dorms.  When we received the good news that we had gotten into married student housing and that apartment C would soon be ours. Mike’s manipulation and control also began in earnest about this time.  I was told what I could watch on TV.  Anything that was empowering or liberal he told me I was not allowed to watch.  He really hated Oprah.   He began to turn me against my parents so that I felt I was backed into a corner, and had no one but him.  The porn got worse.  My attempts to stop it became more frequent.  When I tried to confront him about it he flew off the handle and blamed me that I was no open enough. 

I began to try to remove the temptation from him.  I remember one time filling up half of a large black garbage bag with magazines, video tapes, and cd’s that I had cooked in the microwave.  They sparkle and pop when you cook them.  I went through his disks and his browser history.  I remember one time going thru a stack of floppy disks to see how many had porn on them.  My stack was about a foot tall when I stopped.  I destroyed them all.  It got to the point that I could not even keep a clothing catalogue or magazine with a picture of a woman in it, because he would steal them, hide them and use them.  What’s worse is I had to pick up his crunchy socks in the morning, because he would never put them in the hamper. 

I still have no idea how much money he spent on porn.  He hid so much of it from me.  I made the money and was in charge of the bills when we first got married.  Until I bounced a few checks and he took the check book away from me.  I turned the bills over to him, like a good little Christian.  He was the man.  He was supposed to run the house.  I remember one day getting a $500 phone bill.  Turns out he had been calling 800 numbers, that would then route him to a 900 number, where he could have phone sex.  He was furious when I found out.  I had to put a 900 number block on our phone.

We were piss ass poor.  I was working as a lab monitor and it paid very little.  Mike, when he did work, was delivering pizzas.  I remember even scrubbing his shirts on a washboard at night so that he would have clean clothes.  I did all of the house work.  If I did ask him to help, he would just ignore me.

I tried to throw him out one night.  I packed his bag, his teddy bear included, and threw it out on the lawn along with all his porn. I locked the doors and would not let him back in the house.  He banged and screamed on the door and windows.  I made it 30 min. before I finally gave in.

I would often begged him to stop, to get help, but in the late ‘90s there was no help for sex addicts in our area.  And that’s what he had become, by the definition.  He would just become more enraged, and fly into a tantrum, hit the wall and terrify me.  Always blaming it on someone else, USL, Liberals, me.  It didn’t matter.  He never took responsibility for what he was doing. I always expected his next punch would be my face, but he never hit me.  He just verbally, emotional, mentally and financially abused me. 

As for me, he would not touch me.  It took weeks, often of begging on my hands and knees for him to touch me or have sex with me.  This man I loved, no longer wanted me and I became a prisoner in my own home.  I would go to bed, and he would masturbate by the computer in the other room until the wee hours of the morning.  I would try to go to the bathroom to pee and he would scream at me to get back to bed.  I developed bladder problems for holding it for so long.  I still think this is part of why I developed IC.

I was depressed and under so much stress I developed Shingles.  I reached 300lb. I was suicidal, and wrote several suicide notes.  I reached out for help several times, but to no avail.  How could I ever tell them what was going on?  How could I tell them I was not enough for my husband?  Joe and one other friend were the only ones who knew what I was going through.  I had to have someone to talk too, and it took years for me to get to that point with them.  But neither them nor the councilors had any real answers for me, or could help me understand what was going on.  I was too embarrassed to tell them what was really going on. I did not understand I had been abused until after I left him.  I remember one night even calling a local rehab center and telling them what was going on.  They told me they had no programs for porn addicts at the time.  All they wanted to know was whether he hit me or not.  Mike was furious when he found out I called them.

Oh and this was also one of his things.  I have told you I would often get Bronchitis.  When I would get sick he would tell me, “You just think you’re sick.  You’re not really sick.”  Mike played head games with me.  Every time I caught him in a lie he would say, “It’s not a lie.  It’s omission.”  Or my personal favorite, “I told you.  You just forgot.”  Now I have a memory like an elephant, I didn’t forget, his lying ass just didn’t tell me. 

We continued to play nice in public.  Few knew what was going on with us at home. In the darkness I reached out for anything.  I happened to find a book by his Holiness the Dali Lama, called The art of happiness.  I began to get very into Buddhism.  The first rule of Buddhism is that all life is suffering, and I was most definitely suffering.  The second rule is there is a cause for suffering.  The third is there is a way out of suffering.  I began to look for a way out of that suffering.   I started to study with a small Buddhist group in town, which kind of hid as a book club.  Buddhism helped give me a little light in an other wise dark life.

Then there was Joe.  He had stayed for a few semesters and then he left to join the Army.  He could not keep up with the break neck pace that his scholarships demanded.  He had also been in ROTC for a long time.  It was in Joe that I had hope that I had not lost all my sexiness, despite my weight and my current predicament so I tempted him.  I let him talk to me while I was in the tub.  I could see I was still attractive to someone.  Obviously the problem was not me.  Mike knew about this and was angry, but never tried to stop me.  He never tried to fight for me. 

Mike and I had changed his major, not long after we moved into apartment C.  As a Sociology major I had to chose a minor.  I started taking classes in Anthropology.  I fell even more in love with it then I had with Sociology.  In my senior year I changed my major to my minor.  By the time I graduated my GPA was 2.9, while still a C average, I had pulled it up a full point from the time I left USL.  Mike changed to journalism, just like his father before him.  In the Summer of 1999 Mike left me to do his internship at a news station in Shreveport.  We were elated he had got what we felt was a prestigious internship.  Mike received a D in the class.  Later I found out it was because he spent all his time downloading porn while he was at work. 

That summer I had to master 9 hours of French, or I would not graduate.  It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.  I was in class from 8 in the morning till 5 in the afternoon.  Then I went home to study until midnight or so.  Get up again about 5 a.m. to study and then do it all again, five days a week.  I passed by the skin of my teeth.  I don’t think I even remember how to say, “What is your name?” in French anymore.

It was during that summer that Joe and I became even closer.  I had not been away from Mike for many years.  Joe, Gods’ bless him, would drive up from Fort Polk every other Friday to take care of me.  We would go to put my check in the bank and buy groceries.  I didn’t see Mike for three months.  He could have cared less what happened to me.  While he was gone, Jim would sleep in the bed with me, while we both had our clothes on.  Hey it was better than him sleeping on the love seat.  I was scared to go to sleep on my own back then.  I remember the first few weeks that summer going to sleep with one of Mike’s lightsabers in my hands.  I didn’t have any other weapons.

I was still not sure what I was going to do with my life after I graduated college.  I began looking at attending graduate school.  I had thought about becoming a professor.  You really cannot work in the field of Anthology without a Doctorate.  We made a trip to the University of Alabama at Birmingham for me to look at the college.  I liked it and hoped to enroll.  My GRE, the test to get into a master’s program, was to be paid for by NSU.  Mike comes to me one night and says that we can’t go to graduate school just yet.  He says we need to take a year off and pay some of our bills.  I am devastated.  But he is my husband and he knows best.  We graduate in May of 2000, literally one behind the other.  The next day we pack up and move back to Shreveport. 

Ilsa