I can’t let it go without mentioning that it was ten years ago today that I broke up with Marty (see Ten years ago part 1 and Ten years ago part 2). It felt like the worst day of my life at the time it happened. It’s easy to say now that it was really the best thing.

1998 was a very hard year for me. A couple of years earlier, I’d bought a four-bedroom house in my own name and moved my boyfriend and his two teenaged sons in with me. Then they all moved out toward the end of 1997 and I had to pay the mortgage by myself at the same time that I had taken a cut in pay to take a new and more promising job at the library where I now work. For most of 1998, I struggled financially, and I also struggled to keep my relationship with Marty together, despite his moving out.

On August 5, 1998, we had just returned from our third session of couples counseling. It had not gone well for Marty. Basically, the therapist, after hearing both our stories, turned to Marty and told him that he was wrong. As gratifying as I found this, I was by then savvy enough to know that this did not bode well for our future. After the session, Marty and I sat out on the patio in the backyard and discussed it. I don’t remember a lot about our conversation, except the moment when he turned to me and said, “I’m still mad at you for buying this house.”

That was the statement that made me stop my futile efforts to save the relationship, which had been an enormous drain on my emotional and physical resources. With everything I had sacrificed and compromised in the service of preserving it, it was finally clear that it was no damn use. He was stuck on the petty view that, as he put it, “a marriage won’t work unless someone is in charge, and if I get married, it’s going to have to be me.” I told him it was over, and he could take all of his stuff, including the radial arm saw in the basement, out of the house he resented me owning, and keep it all somewhere else. I didn’t care where.

If he saw me now, married to Bob, who is so much his opposite, I’m sure he wouldn’t know what to make of it. It was beyond his comprehension to think of a relationship where people are equals, and position isn’t determined by gender or (mis)interpretations of the Bible. (How DID I end up with this guy, anyway?) He’ll ever know what my life is like now; he died suddenly of a massive heart attack in early 2004, the same year in which I later met Bob.

Dang! That’s a hell of a way to end a post. Even though I am now happy in my marriage to Bob, there seems to be some processing I still need to do with the emotional remnants of my experience with Marty. Sometime soon, I want to post stories from the trip I took to Colorado with Marty to visit his extended family to tell them about how his stepfather abused him from the age of about three. How’s that for a cliffhanger?

Chris and Lars are two old-time musicians who like to play practical jokes. If you go to an old-time music festival and see a campsite with a bust of Elvis, it just might be them. Ten years ago, I had a party at my house, and many of my old-time music friends showed up, including Chris and Lars. The next morning, when Marty went out to get the newspaper, he noticed a golden calf sitting on our deck. I knew right away who left it. I was amused, and somewhat honored that I had received this attention from the boys.

Marty, however, was offended. He felt that it was the golden calf from the Bible, the idol that the Israelites worshiped in the desert. I told Marty, “Look at this calf. It’s reclining. It’s from a nativity scene, for crying out loud.” But Marty would have none of it. At one point, I suggested that we paint it red and put it in the garden so that it would attract hummingbirds. This was not acceptable to Marty. We had to get rid of it.

How does one get rid of a 70-80 lb. unwanted sculpture? Several possibilities ran through my mind. We could go to a lawn sculpture store and leave it outside the gate. Surely, that would not be a crime. I thought about leaving it on the lawn of the government library where I worked at the time. This was before 9/11, and there was not as much surveillance at government buildings as there is now, especially not out in the Maryland suburbs.

Ultimately, I knew that the easiest way to get rid of the golden calf sculpture was to leave it out at the curb in front of my house with a sign on it reading “FREE.” Marty didn’t like the idea because he found it embarrassing. He didn’t think anyone would take it anyway. But I insisted, and made him a bet: if the cow was still there after 24 hours, I would have to drop it off somewhere and take him out to dinner at the Outback Steak House. If it was gone before then, he had to take me to the Outback. We shook on the bet at 8:08 p.m. that night. He had to carry it out to the curb for me, because it was so heavy. Strangely, he insisted on wearing gloves while he carried it, he was so repulsed by it. Then, he left and went home to his apartment in Aspen Hill, where he had been living since moving out of my house in November 1997.

It was not even two hours later that I heard a car pull up to the front of the house. It was now about 10:00 at night. I heard a door open, and the sound of mariachi music streamed out of the vehicle. I ran to the upstairs window to take a look at what was going on. By that time, the sliding door of a minivan was slamming shut, and it took off. The golden calf was gone.

This is such a silly story, but it shows how irrational Marty could be, just in order to get his way. He wasn’t that stupid a man, but he could dig his heels in on an issue if he wanted to, and no logic would work on him. I remember when we were arguing about the boys, and he told me that everyone he knew agreed with me that the boys needed to be out of our home and on their own. One of his best friends actually despised me, and the feeling was mutual. He was a misogynist pig asshole, and I was a liberal feminist. Yet, Marty admitted that he had said this to him: “Marty, I don’t even like Julie, and I agree with her. In police work, that is known as a clue.” And yet Marty said he couldn’t help it, though, and went ahead and moved out with the boys.

The strange thing about going back into my journal from ten years ago is seeing how hard I was trying to make this relationship succeed. There wasn’t a future in it, but I just didn’t know that then.

http://juliemangin.com/ten-years-ago-part-1/

Every year, I go down to Charlottesville for a weekend camping in the woods with 200 or so of my friends. We play music, dance, eat, drink, and best of all, laugh. If I didn’t have this party to go to, how would I measure the quality of my life? This is the best, the place where I feel most welcome. Even if the rest of my life isn’t quite this grand, it’s important to know that the possibility is there.

This is the twenty-second year in a row I’ve done this. Bob has come with me the last three years, and it’s so wonderful that he gets it, too. Now that he’s got the hang of the ukulele, he was even jamming with us. Who knows how good he will be next year?

I haven’t been playing that much this year, but somehow, my fingers got themselves in gear and I played my banjo faster than I have ever played it. Thanks to Sheila for inviting me into that jam. It was a ride of a lifetime. I’m still popping ibuprofen for my shoulder.

Paul and Susan are my camping buddies. At first, it was just Paul and I. I don’t even remember when I first met Paul. We like to camp together at parties and festivals like this. He used to always bring the women he was dating to this event. If they didn’t get it, then he didn’t see a future for them. Susan took to it like a duck to water the first time he brought her. Not long after that, they became engaged. I really enjoy her company. The best thing is that when Bob came along, he fit in perfectly. So, now we are two married couples that share a campsite. It feels so warm and welcoming.

Hugh and Anastasia show me how to have a good time. Their campsite is always filled with people, food, instruments, and toys. We held the second annual Ukulele Summit there. We shared charts and tunes and tips for playing. Hugh got out his steel guitar, and we sounded really Hawaiian! Anastasia sang, and Steve sang and backed us up on guitar, too. Steve invented the “capon,” which is a capo with a small rubber chicken on it. It’s definitely a tacky treasure, and I’m going to enter it into the Tacky Treasures Road Show for him.

We’re on the banks of a river, and a walk down the rocky shore is always a treat. People are swimming, fishing, and building cairns with the river rocks. I found a tree where a pair of downy woodpeckers are building a nest hole. It was amazing to watch them work, and I was happy to be able to share what I found with Bob.

This was the thirty-fifth year in a row that this party has been held. There are only three organized events connected with it: silly skits on Friday night, at the end of which they sing the theme song of the party; tee shirt and raffle ticket sales on Saturday morning, to raise money to defray costs; and the raffle on Saturday night. Everyone is happy for the winners. I’m happy for all of us.

See my photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tackyjulie/sets/72157605129657095/

Yesterday, I pulled out one of my old journals from 1998, just to see how different my life was back then. Looking at where I used to be helps me appreciate how far I’ve come.

Ten years ago, I was living in this same house, alone. When I bought it a couple of years earlier, I had moved into it with a boyfriend named Marty with whom I’d already lived for about two years. He didn’t want me to buy the house. He said, “I don’t think you should buy a house until I am ready to buy it with you.” I asked him when he thought that would be. I thought if there was something he was waiting for, something that we could work toward together, I might be willing to put it off buying the house. He said that he didn’t know when he’d be ready, or if he’d ever be ready, but he still felt that I shouldn’t buy a house without him. Because owning a house had been a dream of mine since before I met him, and because his answer lacked any room for hope or compromise, I went ahead and bought the house in my own name. He didn’t like it, but he still moved into the new house with me.

By April 1998, he had moved out, although we were still trying to stay a couple. Over the two years following my purchase of the house, both of his sons had moved in with us, having each separately been kicked out of the Navy before completing boot camp. Marty’s children had been living with his ex-wife. As soon as they turned eighteen, she had them sign up for the Navy to get them out of the house. When each of them managed to be asked by the Navy to leave, she then gave them plane tickets to D.C. to live with their father. Marty was as unwilling to parent these nearly grown men as I was unprepared to deal with their living habits.

For a while, it was just Marty, me, and Son #1, whose living habits were poor. He didn’t clean up after himself, he was marginally employed, and had no interest in college or anything beyond country music and NASCAR. Once we ran out of bath towels and found all of them dirty and piled waist high in his closet. He left a pornographic videotape in the VCR which I discovered accidentally because I thought it was the tape I had put in to record a TV show. Ironically, I was attempting to catch the episode of “Ellen,” in which she comes out as a lesbian. When I turned on the tape, I could see two women doing something, and then I realized, “Wait a minute; this is way too explicit for broadcast TV.” Marty wanted to punish his son by keeping the tape himself, which showed how seriously he took my feelings about this offense. Once, we came home from a weekend trip, and Marty couldn’t find his toothbrush. Although I suggested that his son might have taken it, he refused to believe it until I went to the boy’s bathroom and located it hidden in a drawer in the vanity. Son #1’s explanation? He had had an overnight guest and she had forgotten her own. Marty couldn’t understand why I was so offended. I asked, “Do you think, when he was invading our private bathroom, somewhere he was told not to go, that he knew it was your toothbrush he borrowed? It could have been mine!” When Son #2 moved in several months after the first, things got worse.

Marty didn’t feel compelled to do much about their behavior. If I brought it up, he reminded me that he hadn’t wanted to buy the house, and since I was the head of the household, I would have to deal with them. Both sons were quick to figure out that if their father wasn’t willing to back me up, they could do whatever they wanted. When Son #1 ran up an expensive phone bill calling a 900 number for a psychic, Marty just paid the bill, and I put a block on outgoing 900 numbers.

That’s how the situation deteriorated to the point at which I said to Marty, “You can stay if you want to, but your kids have got to go.” I felt that whether or not they were ready to live on their own, I couldn’t have them living with me any more. I’d come home from my new job and the Library of Congress exhausted mentally from trying to succeed in an organization larger than any library I’d ever worked in before, with a unique culture, new responsibilities, and people who didn’t seem to be able to relate to me yet. At home, I was the only one willing to take on many chores that should have been split up between four ostensible adults. I felt like I was headed for a breakdown unless I reduced the stress in my life. Of the two main stressors in my life, work was the one I simply couldn’t give up. On the other hand, Marty and his kids could have done things to reduce the stress on me, but wouldn’t. The choice was obvious.

Marty found a place for all three of them to live, and moved them all out of my house. He provided them with a safe, comfortable place to live, but didn’t plan on paying for a telephone or cable TV. After only a month, the boys informed him that they’d found their own place to live, and that they were moving out. That’s how, in April 1998, Marty was living alone in his apartment and I was living alone in my house. We were still seeing each other, but our relationship was tense. Ten years ago in April, the inevitable hadn’t happened yet. Maybe I’ll write about that in August.

At the same time that I was dealing with this personal drama, I was also taking a writing workshop at the Writer’s Center. My goal was to write about the years just before and after I became disillusioned with the religion in which I was raised. I have still have notes from ten years ago, including some supportive remarks on one of my drafts from my instructor, Sara Taber. She wrote a lovely memoir of her years living in Patagonia, and I hoped that I could learn to tell my story as artfully as she told hers. But as my struggles with my personal life worsened in the months that followed April 1998, I did not have enough energy to pursue writing and also make the tough choice I needed to make about my relationship with Marty.

Even now, writing about myself for the world to see scares me. I’m going to post this message, not knowing if people will think badly of me for kicking Marty and his kids out of my house. I’ve decided that if anyone does feel that way about me, it is due to my failure as a writer to express all that was going on, both in my house and in my mind. But I won’t think it’s because I’m a bad person, or that I was wrong to do what I had to do for my sanity.

In the same way, I’m afraid if I write my memoirs, people will question my version of events or be offended by my negative opinions about organized religion. I suspect it will be harder to convince people to agree with my convictions about religion than to convince them that it was the right thing to do to break up with Marty. I doubt the lack of approval for either will change my mind. Looking back, I realize that the choices I made in the past opened up the possibility of me as I am now.

A lot has happened in ten years. After Marty and broke up for good, I was sad and depressed a lot of the time. If struggling in a bad relationship made it hard for me to write, then it was even worse afterwards. I haven’t worked as hard on my story since the break up as I did before. Once in a while I try, but I haven’t yet been able to sustain the effort. At least now, I have a better excuse: three and a half years ago, I met Bob, and we just got married in November 2007. I find it hard to summon up the energy for my career, my significant relationships, and also creative writing. Usually, it’s writing that gets the short shrift. The good news is that however much energy I think I’m putting into my relationship with Bob, I’m getting an exponentially better payoff for it than I did with past relationships. The fact that I’m writing for this blog is a sign that Bob and I are giving each other the space we need to pursue our individual artistic interests. In fact, as I write this, he’s in his studio working on a painting.

Ten years from now, who knows where I’ll be?