The red couch incident thrust our engagement to a whole new level. Happily living alone, I was now faced with finding a home that would suit us both, as Candler assumed the nuptials would occur sometime within the year. I on the other hand, was thinking sometime in the next century.
Determined not to squander the capital earned with my own blood during the lawsuit years, I decided to invest my modest fortune in hope of creating a serious nest egg for our future. This meant that we would live on my husband’s earnings. My husband-to-be considered this a grand idea but neglected to tell me his earnings were nil and far between.
A little more than a year into our engagement, Candler began to feel my resistance. Once every couple of months he would broach the subject, “When are we getting married?”
“Not yet,” I’d reply, “I’m not ready.”
As year two approached he asked, “Are we ever getting married?”
“Not if you keep pressuring me,” I’d respond.
“What about next spring?” he asked just two weeks later.
“Every time you ask, I’m postponing it another sixty days,” I said.
“I feel like it will never happen!” he shouted in his sexy Aussie accent.
I was beginning to think it might. I dug my heels in, struggling with my demons: Break-up and risk never being loved or enter the belly of the beast and risk being gobbled-up like my mother, like all women I knew, perfectly capable women with magnificent careers who married wealthy men and lost their souls. MAC Pro towers gutted on the inside. In the beginning their lives appeared so glamorous — mansions, servants, lavish vacations, five-star hotels, personal accounts with Cartier, designer furs, Europe shopping sprees, luxury spas, the finest in skin care, their children in top-notch private schools, family vacations to the best resorts around the world. All of them had given up their careers to pursue lives of luxury. Before long they were addicted. Heroin was a snap to kick in comparison. Once the drug took hold, there was no leaving the lifestyle — no matter what the cost.
My single-mother life left me lusting after their amenities. Most of those years I only shopped at Marshalls or T.J. Max. Once in a while I’d splurge and rummage the racks of Macy’s or Neiman Marcus’ last-call sales at the end of the season, $39.99 was my cap on personal luxury; I bought drugstore moisturizers. Our few vacations consisted of local Southern beaches in tiny bungalows that barely had running water. My son attended public school.
During my early years of my son’s life, I was charming enough to be on the fringes of society but too poor to enter in. Occasionally I would slip through the cracks and draw closer to the societal status I lusted after. Every time I would discover a dark side. The woman I admired had all become highly paid companions, servants of a sort, to self-consumed men whose careers, preferences and hobbies took precedence. Equality, in any form, did not exist. Most of their husbands were jealous, controlling, and emotionally abusive — all because they could be. They were well-groomed hyenas with nice, straight teeth in custom Italian suits. They ate flesh for breakfast.
My marvelous creativity, which enabled me to create stumbling blocks of every sort in my life, convinced me that a younger man was less headstrong, more easily shaped, and thus less controlling than the finely groomed hyenas. My own beautiful, talented, fiercely independent mother had been falling down the rabbit hole.
Despite my reading in Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary that self-destruction and marriage are synonyms, after four years of
long-distance courtship, I walked down the aisle. Ten feet from the altar I caught my future mother-in-law’s Cheshire-cat smile out of the corner of my eye. For a split second her expression gave me pause, but just as quickly I was seduced into the welcoming smile of my groom. Little did I know my betrothal was akin to the British and American forces landing on her Normandy shores. With every step I took toward the altar, her liberation neared and I drew closer to interment.
The discovery of my new husband’s economic dependence on his mother for financial stability slipped from the shadows within moments of our “I dos.” His unexpressed understanding was that once we crossed the frontier of no return, I would take up where Mommy left off.
Annulment would have been the logical response to my newly discovered role as both mother and wife to the same man, but my doctorate degree in codependence created countless denial mechanisms to ward off such a sound decision. My tendencies toward self-destruction have been mentioned once or twice by a few former friends and ex-therapists. Clearly I still believed martyrdom and marriage were synonyms. After a lifetime of self-sabotage, my oh-so-sick subconscious made a leap while I wasn’t looking and decided, why break the pattern now? But first we needed a house…