2000-10-30 - 14:54:15
I'm purging. I'm getting out all of my stupid, useless memories that seem only to be there to drag me back down. Slowly but surely.
Joel was my boyfriend before he was my husband who I am presently trying to divorce.
While he was my boyfriend, one night, he felt complied to teach me how to talk. He acted like a father. He acted like I was a little girl who needed to learn things. The lesson for that evening was how to talk. It lasted four hours.
You see, I had this quick, dismissing air about me in conversations when I didn't want to go into detail about things, and I would use these series of quick and generally useless answers. The words I used were like filler. This lesson in particular was a good lesson, but, the fact that it didn't come from my mother or father and instead from my boyfriend, made it a control issue on his character.
If someone asked me something that I didn't have an answer for, my reply would be: "No, well, I don't know, I guess so." Joel decided to break me of this. It felt like the worst conversation with your dean in high school that you could ever have. He treated me like a little girl who should do what he says, because he is better at things, etc. He tended to make me feel quite stupid in a lot of areas after that. What a charmer.
So, that night, he would ask me stuff, I think we were talking about some real philosophical issue, that most abusers always try to feign exquisite intelligence with. Everytime he asked my opinion, which was essentially, "I don't really fucking care about this topic." I would beat around the conversation bush using my sentence fillers and my slang, "you know, I don't know, like..." I couldn't help it. I was only 19. So what if I talked like that. He kept remarking that I was going to be a woman some day and women have intelligent things to say. Again, something my father should have taught me. NOT HIM. He treated me like a child and then, asked me why I acted like one. He kept telling me he didn't want me to treat him like an authority figure who I felt uncomfortable listening to. I wanted to ask him, then, why the hell are you behaving like one?
It went on for FOUR HOURS.
I just wanted to like have sex and go to bed or something. I don't know. Why he kept it up, I don't know. He was so silly. He thought he was so righteous. He thought he was doing so good, training this woman of his who he planned on sharing a life with forever. He kept telling me to think before I opened my mouth to answer him. Not to say useless words like I had been doing. It was a generally good lesson. But, he was never meant to be the teacher. It was silly that it even involved him. He said that my father was awful and that's why I couldn't learn these things from him (my dad). (Unfortunately, I had opened up to him on a lot of issues about my past and my childhood--BIG MISTAKE--ammunition for an abuser to be used on his victim.)
I really hope he never treats our daughters like that. Like little unthinking girls. He will, I think. He irks me. Since then, our communication has really gone up in flames. Even now, if I have to talk to him, I feel like I have to be superdefensive. Always on guard. Ready to fight for my right. Like he's a dad to me or something. We've seemed to have gone to every communication extreme. He's had in depth philosophical conversations with me, he's asked me my opinion on things. He's called me to tell me where he was and where he was going to be. He's gone through phases where he doesn't call me for like eight to ten to even sixteen hours after he was supposed to have gotten off work, and I think he has died or gotten arrested. He's cried and begged me to just talk to him. He's screamed at me to stop being so stupid and just shut up. He's done his thing where he wouldn't ever answer me and when he did I could have sworn he was on drugs or something cuz he would just say "green" or "Chinese" or his very famous reply, "four." Don't ask me where he gets that "four" reply from. He thinks he's so cool. He says he controls people by saying four. He says that people that he was living with at one time called him "four". I think he's a crazy fucking lunatic.
I will probably discuss him further every now and then. Until then, Joel, like, I don't know, you know, you're just, like, STUPID.
The End.
