I had always attracted female friends who, unlike me, had been raised in well-adjusted families, nurtured with love and sprinkled with fairy dust. They were their daddies’ little girl. As adult women they didn’t need love, as its warm soothing caress was their birthright. What they wanted was economic wherewithal to nurture them into their old age via furs, Mercedes, mansions and lavish vacation homes. By their mid-to-late forties, they chose their second and third husbands for financial security; much older men, fiscally well seated and domestically well versed after three or four marriages of their own.
My mental health wouldn’t allow such sound decisions. I, the product of a dysfunctional alcoholic family, was anything but Daddy’s little girl. I was the spit in his eye, the stone in his shoe, the child he tried hard to wipe from the face of the earth every chance he got. In short, my inner child desperately needed to feel loved and wanted – just once in her life.
For decades I turned down proposals of wealthy, older men because I was afraid of being owned; the way my father owned my mother. My radar homed in on struggling, damaged men whom I tried to love into wholeness, none of who had the slightest inclination how to love me. One could say the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
At nearly fifty, my ability to ward off good men was beginning to wane. My poison apple childhood had given me a propensity toward self-absorbed men who were committed to one thing, and one thing alone, and it was never me. Each one’s addictive pursuit was more subtle than the last, taking it longer for me to identify and thus drawing me deeper and deeper into their web. The further I ventured, the sicker I became, determined to heal them, desperate for them to love me.
My tragic attempts to fix my daddy issues manifested in my first two marriages. These men were in essence my father, just in a different body; gifted, brilliant addicts, manipulators, abusers, users, control freaks. I had gone to great lengths to avoid the abyss for a third time by enrolling my dear little subconscious support which carefully helped me select men who wouldn’t love me and would never marry me. All I could say was thank you. Choosing men who didn’t love me kept my reality intact. It allowed me to avoid marriage while supporting my unwanted/victim/martyrdom persona that my parents had carefully crafted during my childhood.
Whatever sense of self I had going into a relationship I had utterly lost by its end. Despite my unquenchable need to be the center of someone’s world, I was always the partner responsible for ending the liaison. Even a sick girl can get tired of being sick.
While most little girls grow up dreaming of a fairy tale future filled with a handsome husband, beautiful home, a white picket fence, 2.5 children, and a dog, I shuddered at the thought. I had never actually seen a happy marriage. Each time I thought about the subject, I could hear Bill Murray’s panicked voice from Ghostbusters, “Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!”
Although sometimes late at night I would lie in bed and ask God to give me a man to whom I would be the love of his life, not a recycled husband thrice spent who couldn’t remember which woman lay beside him in the dark. When I prayed, I remembered to include a caveat that my future husband not arrive on the scene until my son was grown, as my ability to multi-task men has always been extremely low.
When I was nearly fifty and my son was grown, Candler appeared: Handsome, loving, devoted, loyal, funny, and kind. My son was now thirty; Candler, thirty-three. How could I marry him? I wasn’t even sure our marriage would be legal. Neither my conscious nor subconscious believed Candler would stick; and did I mention that his struggling young-man status was non-threatening? I let down my guard believing I would never have to worry about becoming a servant to an older, wealthy, self-centered man.
The fact that he didn’t live in Atlanta and seeing one another required planes, trains and automobiles enabled me to maintain the illusion of a relationship without fully having to be in one. This kept me on the fringes for the first three years. Every time I felt us growing too close, I would remind myself of all the addict users in my past. The more he grew to love me, the more frightened I became. Being loved by a man I was actually dating was uncharted territory; I was confident it would end in my demise. To overcome my apprehension I created a mantra, “Don’t break up with him because he’s nice. Don’t break up with him because he’s nice.” I recited it daily for those first three years.
I try not to blame my parents for my profound fear of intimacy. It wasn’t entirely their fault. Having therapized myself for decades, I am down with self-ownership. I am where I am due to my choices. For clarity’s sake, let me say I have taken full responsibility for every train crash, nuclear boom or mid-flight disaster in my life. My parents simply laid a solid foundation for the house that Violet built. My early marriages added the sheetrock.
The day Candler proposed and I reluctantly accepted his offer of marriage, I felt a shift in the space-time continuum, as though the universe had just folded in on me and I was being sucked into Neverland, without the fairies and pixie dust.
From the moment the ring slid across my finger, Candler’s weekly hammerings to set an official date sent shivers down my spine. Just like in Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds, I could see the darkness in the sky from a distance, the sound of a zillion tiny wings flying toward me to peck out my eyes and steal my soul. Even my subconscious began to panic.