“Your marriage was so abusive.”
“It was?”
That was me asking…about my marriage.
“Wait, do you not know how abusive it was?”
“Well, I mean, I do, I guess, sort of, but go on. Why do you say that?”
She then described what it felt like to be at my house, with our kids, when he came home from work.
“It was like a hurricane.”
“He walked in the door and stirred shit up.”
“The screaming and the yelling and the tears – it was you and the kids trying to meet him at his level. He demanded that.”
“He always brought drama with him everywhere he went.”
“No my friend, it wasn’t you that created the chaos.”
“The piece that you are responsible for is that you stayed. Not the rest.”
I know this and yet I don’t know this.
I carry the weight of being the crazy one; the one that created the drama, the insanity, the unhappiness.
I carry the burden of hurting my children because of being that person.
I have such deep fear of being out of balance these days because it will prove that I am that person.
If anyone actually has to share a room with my feelings, then it will confirm what everyone already believes:
I am a problem.
The problem.
So here is someone letting me off the hook. Someone who witnessed, first hand the reality of my life, not the twisted, skewed perspective that I had been manipulated into believing. And I still shake my head and say, “Oh it wasn’t that bad, was it?”
I ask her to repeat herself. Tell me more. I am soaking this up like water in the desert and yet I still can’t quite wrap my head around it without thinking that I am either being a drama queen or playing victim.
And instead of it being a relief, it feels like a weight.
high desert darlin' 
“Leave a cheater, gain a life’ as Tracy Schorn says. My heart hurts for what you and your sons went through, from what I’ve read on your blogs. As I like to think to people who don’t understand it “If you haven’t walked in my shoes, shut the the fuck up !”