Brave Little Gerda, So Chilled She Could Not Speak

[Gerda]

Thank you, Kate. I really appreciate the compassion. I am leaving out half the story, my life is truly impossible right now. I sometimes feel like I can't move.

But to all -- I already got an offer from his lawyer, but it really weaponizes the children, just like DnJ said. They started the whole thing demanding 100% custody, alimony and child support and now already it's visitation (too much but still) but says it will all only start when I either sell my house or buy him out. It's so openly using the children that it's frightening.

And I keep hearing from so many people that no one cares if he is crazy, etc., that it is his right to have them half the time no matter what. I have to talk to my L to ask her what the worst case scenario is to decide what to do next.

But overtime I get a letter from him or his L, my heart turns to lead. I was so chipper all day and then as soon as I see that, I just become paralyzed with sorrow. I still can't believe this is happening, keep thinking he will not go through with this.

Probably no point in posting this but I thought it was interesting that he could not bear to admit that he is leaving the marriage so he had to write this long essay proving that we don't have a marriage. I thought this might be useful for others to read such a clear example of the MLC mind.

But it still hurts. I don't take it seriously or to heart, per se, I don't think anymore that it's really my fault. But even after 5 years, it still hurts to be rejected by him, I still want him to wake up, I still read this and feel so sad at his mind so overthrown, and I still shudder to think of the children having to face what is coming.

On Jan 16, 2019, at 7:48 AM, H wrote:
(Uses my most formal work name),
I am not leaving a marriage but literally leaving feudal arrangement, an invisible —invisible to you — texture of servile dependency — a maladaptive and dysfunctional habitus of family and of home and of love and of vocation which you would wish to solidify for the rest of life.
Let me explain: A marriage can be said to be happening when two people stand — naked, vulnerable and at great mutual and equal risk — in an absolute and unequivocal relation of equality before the powers of decision-making on all matters and manners of thing that we own/ share together, including the kids.
Therefore, I am not in a marriage: you are very ready for me to absorb the risks of your unilateral-preemptive (Type-A) decisions but you are absolutely not ready to absorb the risks of another decision maker who (me, your husband) in the context of a so-called “marriage” should be an absolute equal and not an adjunct, an emissary, an errand boy.
I did not come into existence to be an errand boy, and to have all my agencies — as a husband, homemaker, father — micromanaged and unto a point impotency. Admit to yourself, Gerds, that you want someone with whom to be married who takes orders and who shuts up as a whole universe of action ceaselessly unfolds around him, unilaterally controlled by you, and of which he often has no agency to alter and with which he has little affinity. Convenient for you who has no bandwidth to take order and orders and all and only bandwidth to make order and orders. Please really see yourself, Gerds. We don’t have eyes behind our heads. We have to ask people to show us our true selves.
You are very ready for me to quietly passively servilely absorb the risks of your unilateral-preemptive (Type-A) decisions on matters of finances, your unilateral-preemptive (Type-A) decisions on the manner of how an ordinary family day and an ordinary family life may unfold and feel like, unilateral-preemptive (Type-A) decisions on the matter of what is and is not an “education” and is and on the matter of what is not and is not an exposure to truth and beauty and goodness, and very ready for me to quietly, passively servilely absorb the risks of your unilateral-preemptive (Type-A) decisions on home renovations, food shopping, kids menus, S13 spending tens of thousands on trivial things of commodity culture, on the matter of the narration to the kids on the meaning of life—- but you are absolutely NOT ready to open your obdurate borders and Gerda orthodoxies enough to expose yourself to the risks of another human’s (your very own husband’s) powers of seeing, feeling, and decision making on all (not some) matters and manners of things that we allegedly (but not actually) share.
I am not leaving marriage. A marriage (to perhaps my own idiosyncratic mind) belongs to two people who stand equally, nakedly, vulnerably at risk before the powers of decision-making on not only all matter of animate and inanimate thing they possess together but also on “the meaning of life” from which flows all powers of decision making. Again, it’s been very convenient for you to instantiate — to despotically and muscularly insantiate — a reality in which I am silently and invisibly called to absorb all the risks of your decision making, but the very notion — a beautiful notion to me — that you might be called by God, by the universe, to bear the risks of decision making by another is - in my lifeexperience with you— entirely beyond your emotional and intellectual and spiritual bandwidth to comprehend. I am not leaving a marriage.
- H

Then added another e-mail --
PS— it has been said, Gerds, that the “Clash of Civilizations is a Clash of Definitions”—the clash of all of the identities of things and that make up the identity of one and not another civilization. Our so-called “clash”— as I feel it and know it — is a clash between one and another definition of what a marriage “bond” is, entailing the question of whether a “bond” is feudal or equal. (See Cordelia’s use of the word “bond” with Lear.)

But here I importantly add that I have finally — after many decades alone and with you — have arrived at phase in life in which I want no part whatsoever in a “clash” mentality. And it is because every single time I gestured in the direction of a radical “equality” milieu, I experienced with you nothing but “clash,” combat, a clash of definitions: for I unremittingly was violently hostilely shut down, disavowed, Grendalized for urging toward absolute unequivocal marital equality and absolute equal risk before the powers of decision making on all we share together.

Which was for me to urge a new paradigm, a new healing definition — my own definition — not only of what marriage is on paper but also what it can and must and will be in practice. It is because I refuse to participate in a “clash” mentality anymore that I am doing what I am doing: getting a so-called mediator who solely exists to give rise to “the new,” a conversational milieu of equality and to vanquish “the old,” a conversational milieu of “clash” that over and over went always in the direction of what is (despotically) favorable (in a feminist-liberated epoch of history, the epoch that despotically owns all our “definitions”) to you, Gerda.

I am in other words, leaving a clash-of-civilizations mentality to embrace the reality that there is (for better or worse) only one civilization with an illimitable variety of different definitions for the identities of things in it. And yes, while I axiomatically assume that some definitions and practices are better, truer, more beautiful than others, I also trust that the lesser-lower (and least poetic, and more totalitarian) definitions and practices can coexist alongside the other higher ones (albeit they are the subaltern dissenting ones) in one reality of civilization, in one reality that doesn’t require the necessity of “clash.”
- H