In 2013 my mother suggested I enter the POWA request for stories for their anthology series. Below is what I submitted and although accepted, my story never reached print.
I can state with pride that I am imperfectly perfect. It has taken a good number of years before I can say that I have reached this point. My self-esteem has been trampled and my self-worth left in tatters. This year is the year that I walked away from my ten year relationship and five of those years we were married.
It wasn’t an easy decision to make and I have doubted myself on many an occasion. Like many in my situation the thought of leaving the known for the unknown was a daunting task. And really did I have it so bad that I needed to leave? I have asked myself whether my decision was an emotionally based decision. And strangely I haven’t been happier since making the decision. It has now been six months since I left and during that time I have started finding myself once again. The saddest part is how much of myself I have lost.
Many have asked me for my reasons for staying so long. The relationship was imperfectly perfect, or so I thought. I tried to make it perfect and refused to admit defeat. It does however take both parties create perfection. I cannot say that I am blameless, there were many things that I did wrong over the years, however at least I cared enough to get emotional about things that mattered.
The hardest thing to accept now is how I have been conditioned over the years. How much I have adapted to over the years. I can’t accuse my ex-husband of abuse as it was more insidious than that. It is the little things that I have adapted to over the years. How to make coffee correctly. How to attend social functions alone. How to arrange everything from car services to holidays. How to accept that there will be no support. How I had to justify the expenditure of my own income. How to defend myself to verbal attacks from his family.
Seeing as though I was so adaptive and complacent, why did I leave? A lot of people have asked that. From the outside I appeared to have everything that a person could require. The final straw was the lesson of how to deal with my miscarriage by myself. The shame I now feel for having to beg for a hug from my husband. The bigger shame in feeling guilty for demanding such support from him. That is when I realised that what we had couldn’t be fixed, that he wasn’t just emotionally stunted by emotionally barren.
With a stubbornness and refusal to see with clear eyes, I pushed for marriage as that was the natural progression of a relationship. I have come to the conclusion that women are capable of ignoring the warning signs and justify their partner’s actions. There were so many warning signs early on in the relationship and I did choose to ignore them. The saying that you can judge a man by how he treats his mother is very true in our case, his relationship with his mother or the lack thereof should have told me right away what I was getting myself into. Looking back, the minister might just have been right in asking me why in the world was I getting married to him. I brushed the question aside and stated that I would never leave him, those words have haunted me on some days. I promised I would never leave, that I would stand by his side, and yet I left.
During my marriage I accumulated quite a few self-help books. Convinced that there was something wrong with me, the buying of the books became an addiction. I was looking for something that would fix our marriage, something that would explain it all to me, something that would tell me where I was going wrong.
Over the years I had managed to convince myself that I was perfectly imperfect. My ex may have disagreed, he said as much. Yet actions speak louder than words. There had to be something wrong with me for him not to love me as I needed to be loved. Many look at me in disbelief, including my divorce lawyer, when I tell them that I was in a sexless marriage. The lack of sex wasn’t from my side but from his. He made promises about how it would improve, how he would do better. Needless to say these never were fulfilled, and the mere fact that I fell pregnant was due to careful timing on my part. There is nothing like the feeling of forcing your husband to have sex with you, it kinds of adds to the demeaning role you play in the relationship.
The lack of sex or intimacy added to my feelings of inadequacy and shattered my body image, self-worth and self-image. This didn’t happen over night but it happened in small increments over the years. I no longer took pride in my appearance as there was no point, my choice in clothing started getting drab and dull. I knew what was happening to me and would accuse him of slowly killing the very soul of me. His response was that it wasn’t his responsibility to make me happy. I agree with that, one has to make themselves happy which is why I started seeing a life coach. By the time the miscarriage occurred, I realised that I could be happier without him. It might be my responsibility to make myself happy, but I didn’t need to stay in a toxic relationship that made it impossible for me to be happy.
The one thing that I do take a guilty delight in, is I left the self-help books behind. My reasoning is that I may not be perfect but I embrace that. He requires the help more than I do as he tends to think he is perfect.
It is taking time and a lot of thought but I am slowly breaking the conditioning. I may not be perfect but I revel in it. I no longer have to strive to be perfect. Perfection is unobtainable, yet to be perfectly imperfect is something that we can all be.
It hasn’t been easy. I have spent a good couple of days just crying over the loss of my marriage. I felt like I had failed, that there was more I could have done and should have done. I accepted the full weight of the collapse of our marriage. The mere fact that I filed for divorce, that I had left him, added to my sense of failure.
I am perfectly imperfect and plan to stay that way for the rest of my life.