(no subject)
If you are reading this, consider yourself lucky. If anything about this gets out to anyone who is not in the custom group, consider yourself banned. No ifs, ands, or buts. Thank you, and now you may proceed.
Dear Mike,
I’m not looking forward to writing this, but I need to be up front and forward with you, and tell you my truth.
I need to move on and start over without you in my life. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but I might as well be honest with you on that point. You have hurt me so much in the last three years of our marriage, I don’t even know where to start. When that detective came to our door, you swore to God IN FRONT OF ME that you never touched her, and I believed you. And for over a year, you denied, denied, denied it. And I believed you. Despite the naked toddler whose picture I found on the computer; despite the chat logs on Yahoo messenger asking a teenage girl what her little sister’s pussy looked like. And I stayed FOR YOU. I stayed because leaving would have been the easy way out for me. I stayed because I was so determined to make this marriage work that I didn’t think about what kind of effects it would have on me. After-effects. Because I might as well face it now, you’re going to have to register. I don’t want to be the woman that people are whispering about. “See her? Her husband touched a little girl.” And by me staying married to you, people are going to think that I condone your behavior, and the truth is, I don’t. Didn’t. It makes me sick. Your own niece. I love her like my own, and you violated her.
Don’t try to sugarcoat it and tell me that you were playing that stupid “monkey and snake” game or that “she asked you to”, because the whole truth is that you touched an innocent little girl and destroyed her childhood. If I was to have children with you, would I want to go through what Tim and Mari are going through right now? Oh, Lord, no. And I’m not going to.
I’m afraid that the main reason I married you in the first place was that I didn’t think I could do any better. I wanted to get out of Mom and Dad’s house, and marrying you was the only way that I thought it was possible. I can admit to you and to myself that getting married at twenty was not the right decision for me.
I need to get on with my life, and I feel like you are holding me back. All the time that we’ve been married, we’ve lived with your family in one form or another. This is not the life that I want for myself. I didn’t want to be twenty-seven years old and living in your mother’s attic. This is not what I wanted for myself, and I know that I can do better. I want to have kids, and with your crime, although it would be possible, what kind of life would that be for our child? I don’t want to put them through that. I don’t want to lay awake at night wondering when our daughter or son is going to confess to me that their father touched them in a bad place. And that’s part of why I’m leaving. I guess I should just be honest. I don’t love you enough to risk that.
You seem to do nothing but dwell on how terrible prison is. It’s PRISON. If it was supposed to be fun, they’d call it Happy Fun Chocolate Party Time or something like that. You’re not going to get HBO or rib-eye steaks for dinner, there’s not a communal karaoke night, and a Hispanic maid isn’t going to bring you a White Russian before you go to bed. I know this isn’t fun for you, but maybe you should take a minute and think about what life is like for ME out here.
Example 1: Your mom and I went to Mat’s funeral last winter. David comes up to her and says, “Who’s that with you?” Your mom responds with, “Oh, that’s Michael’s wife.” The response: “Why the hell didn’t Mike come? Too good for us?” I see Moodys that I’ve known practically since the day that we met, and without you., I’m invisible.
Example 2: I go to a family reunion on Dad’s side of the family shortly after you’re incarcerated. The whole family is asking me questions. I’m the one that has to keep lying to them…”Oh, he couldn’t get away today” or “There was something that he couldn’t get out of.” Two years later, the rest of the family automatically assumes that we’re divorced, and I just go with it because it’s easier than explaining, “Oh, he’s doing five at Coyote Ridge for molesting his niece.”
Example 3: I’m talking to Shawn the other night about something, and he looks at me and says, “Corrie, I can’t be friends with Mike when he comes home. With two nephews and a niece, I don’t want anything to happen to them. You can stay around, you’re cool. I got no issues with you. But I’m not going to risk their safety. Sorry.”
It’s not just Shawn with Sahvere. It’s not just going to be Brian with Dominique. It isn’t just going to be Stephanie and Nathan with Gavin. It’s not just Jeff with Bubbie. It’s not just going to be Emily with Aislynn. It’s not just Wes and Dawn with James. It’s going to be my brothers and their wives, my future nieces or nephews not being able to know their uncle because he’s a pedophile. That matters the most to me.
Yes. You are going to have a label. A big ol’ scarlet P on your clothes. And my letter will be a little bit smaller, maybe a less vibrant shade of red, but it’s still going to be there. And mine will say P.W. You know what that stands for? I thought so. You might not be high-risk enough to be on the news, but you are going to have to register and the neighbors will know exactly where the pervert lives in their neighborhood.
I don’t want to be the sole support for us after you come home. I want to go back to school and maybe get a degree…social work, maybe? Counseling? Teaching D.I?
Oh, I forgot…can’t do social work! Not in this family, not because Sue Elg and Shelley’s mother messed up Wes’s chances of getting the girls, not because some dirty social worker and Mari thought that Mandy needed counseling. Not because this family is an old hand at transference.
It’s always someone else’s fault, and you proved that to me when you told me that you did it because she asked you to do it. True or not, it doesn’t excuse it. Don’t make her the perpetrator here. She didn’t unbutton her pants and take your hand to her private parts and say, “Touch me here, please?” Did she? I don’t think so.
I said when this whole thing started that if Mandy had been my niece by blood, I would have walked immediately, after what happened with Brenda and Steve and the resulting estrangement between the family. And the EXACT SAME THING happened with us, Tim & Mari. I didn’t see the girls for a year and a half. I don’t want to lose the relationship I have worked so hard to rebuild when you come home. I don’t want to sneak around and go over there behind my back to see the girls because of your no-contact order. I don’t want to, and I’m not going to.
I will always love you as a friend. But I will never be able to forget the way that you lied to everyone close to us for years. I will never forget how when I tried to talk to you about what was going on, you’d snap at me and tell me that you don’t want to talk about it. I would go places with my mom and fall apart because she was the only person that I could open up to. I had a meltdown in the Safeway parking lot because I had all of this bottled up inside me and she was the one person I could tell. Not Matt, not Larry, not Jeff, not Shawn and Ami, not Logan, not Monica, not Emily, not even Keith. When I finally did tell him, we were at the lake and he said, “She must have made it up, because that doesn’t sound like the kind of thing that Mike would do.” How do you think it made me feel to confess to people that…guess what, it was true?
Going to see you takes everything out of me. I try to tell you that, and you start to act like a spoiled brat and snap back with something like, “I’m sorry that I’m such a CHORE for you.” You have no idea what visiting does to me. Three hours in the car and a three hour visit, and I can’t get a word in edgewise whenever your mom’s there, because she completely dominates the conversation. And I don’t feel happy that I get to see you, I feel pissed and frustrated that I’ve wasted six hours out of my day to listen to you and your mom talk. And it doesn’t really seem that you care that much about what I have to say, anyway. I tried to talk to you about something on Sunday and you tuned me out. A movie or something, it doesn’t really matter. But your mom talking about how many cars Mark sold the day before was apparently much more important than anything I had to tell you. How do you think that makes me feel? It makes me feel about this tall.
I’m sorry that I don’t write much. But when I do, if I feel guilty about going out and living my life…going to the midnight movie with Shawn and Ami, working out with Mom, taking the girls to Rocky Rococo’s, going to the lake with Angie and Keith always gets a pathetic “I wish that I could do that” from you. What do you think I’m doing out here? Do you think I’m being a martyr and crying out about how terrible of an injustice this is that you have to serve time for a crime that you lied to me about? Oh, no. I have a life and I am going to live it. I know mail is important to you.
For the past two and a half years I have lived in a prison that you helped put me in. And what’s sad is that I could have turned the key and let myself out any time I wanted to, but I did what I thought I should, and I was a martyr for you. I sweetly answered the recurring “Where’s Mike?” question, refused to answer any of my LiveJournal friends when they asked what put you in prison. Not because I’m afraid of how they would treat you, it’s because I’m afraid that I would be condemned for staying with you.
In the allegory you wrote, you compared me to a flower growing out of hardened earth. Very sweet, but this flower is getting too big for her pot. Her roots need their space. She is dying, slowly suffocating in the pot in which she doesn’t fit any more. Because on the sill that she sits on, there are two other plants and she is running out of room. This flower has a wilting leaf, and no one has come to clip it yet. And before the wilting leaf destroys the rest of the flower, she must find a way to clip it herself. And that’s what I’m doing.
I know I must have hurt you with this, and I’m sorry. But I’m done trying to spare your feelings. In the Bible, it says to do unto others as you would want them to do unto you. I know that if I was convicted of a crime, you wouldn’t want me to lie to you about it. I know that if I was in prison, I wouldn’t begrudge you living your life. And if you wanted to move on, I would be sad, but I would let you. Because if you really love someone, you will let them go. You will take the flower out of the pot which is killing her and plant her in a garden with many other flowers like her, instead of keeping her in a too-small pot and having her resent you in the end.
I love you, Mike, but I can’t keep living like this.
Corrie
Dear Mike,
I’m not looking forward to writing this, but I need to be up front and forward with you, and tell you my truth.
I need to move on and start over without you in my life. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but I might as well be honest with you on that point. You have hurt me so much in the last three years of our marriage, I don’t even know where to start. When that detective came to our door, you swore to God IN FRONT OF ME that you never touched her, and I believed you. And for over a year, you denied, denied, denied it. And I believed you. Despite the naked toddler whose picture I found on the computer; despite the chat logs on Yahoo messenger asking a teenage girl what her little sister’s pussy looked like. And I stayed FOR YOU. I stayed because leaving would have been the easy way out for me. I stayed because I was so determined to make this marriage work that I didn’t think about what kind of effects it would have on me. After-effects. Because I might as well face it now, you’re going to have to register. I don’t want to be the woman that people are whispering about. “See her? Her husband touched a little girl.” And by me staying married to you, people are going to think that I condone your behavior, and the truth is, I don’t. Didn’t. It makes me sick. Your own niece. I love her like my own, and you violated her.
Don’t try to sugarcoat it and tell me that you were playing that stupid “monkey and snake” game or that “she asked you to”, because the whole truth is that you touched an innocent little girl and destroyed her childhood. If I was to have children with you, would I want to go through what Tim and Mari are going through right now? Oh, Lord, no. And I’m not going to.
I’m afraid that the main reason I married you in the first place was that I didn’t think I could do any better. I wanted to get out of Mom and Dad’s house, and marrying you was the only way that I thought it was possible. I can admit to you and to myself that getting married at twenty was not the right decision for me.
I need to get on with my life, and I feel like you are holding me back. All the time that we’ve been married, we’ve lived with your family in one form or another. This is not the life that I want for myself. I didn’t want to be twenty-seven years old and living in your mother’s attic. This is not what I wanted for myself, and I know that I can do better. I want to have kids, and with your crime, although it would be possible, what kind of life would that be for our child? I don’t want to put them through that. I don’t want to lay awake at night wondering when our daughter or son is going to confess to me that their father touched them in a bad place. And that’s part of why I’m leaving. I guess I should just be honest. I don’t love you enough to risk that.
You seem to do nothing but dwell on how terrible prison is. It’s PRISON. If it was supposed to be fun, they’d call it Happy Fun Chocolate Party Time or something like that. You’re not going to get HBO or rib-eye steaks for dinner, there’s not a communal karaoke night, and a Hispanic maid isn’t going to bring you a White Russian before you go to bed. I know this isn’t fun for you, but maybe you should take a minute and think about what life is like for ME out here.
Example 1: Your mom and I went to Mat’s funeral last winter. David comes up to her and says, “Who’s that with you?” Your mom responds with, “Oh, that’s Michael’s wife.” The response: “Why the hell didn’t Mike come? Too good for us?” I see Moodys that I’ve known practically since the day that we met, and without you., I’m invisible.
Example 2: I go to a family reunion on Dad’s side of the family shortly after you’re incarcerated. The whole family is asking me questions. I’m the one that has to keep lying to them…”Oh, he couldn’t get away today” or “There was something that he couldn’t get out of.” Two years later, the rest of the family automatically assumes that we’re divorced, and I just go with it because it’s easier than explaining, “Oh, he’s doing five at Coyote Ridge for molesting his niece.”
Example 3: I’m talking to Shawn the other night about something, and he looks at me and says, “Corrie, I can’t be friends with Mike when he comes home. With two nephews and a niece, I don’t want anything to happen to them. You can stay around, you’re cool. I got no issues with you. But I’m not going to risk their safety. Sorry.”
It’s not just Shawn with Sahvere. It’s not just going to be Brian with Dominique. It isn’t just going to be Stephanie and Nathan with Gavin. It’s not just Jeff with Bubbie. It’s not just going to be Emily with Aislynn. It’s not just Wes and Dawn with James. It’s going to be my brothers and their wives, my future nieces or nephews not being able to know their uncle because he’s a pedophile. That matters the most to me.
Yes. You are going to have a label. A big ol’ scarlet P on your clothes. And my letter will be a little bit smaller, maybe a less vibrant shade of red, but it’s still going to be there. And mine will say P.W. You know what that stands for? I thought so. You might not be high-risk enough to be on the news, but you are going to have to register and the neighbors will know exactly where the pervert lives in their neighborhood.
I don’t want to be the sole support for us after you come home. I want to go back to school and maybe get a degree…social work, maybe? Counseling? Teaching D.I?
Oh, I forgot…can’t do social work! Not in this family, not because Sue Elg and Shelley’s mother messed up Wes’s chances of getting the girls, not because some dirty social worker and Mari thought that Mandy needed counseling. Not because this family is an old hand at transference.
It’s always someone else’s fault, and you proved that to me when you told me that you did it because she asked you to do it. True or not, it doesn’t excuse it. Don’t make her the perpetrator here. She didn’t unbutton her pants and take your hand to her private parts and say, “Touch me here, please?” Did she? I don’t think so.
I said when this whole thing started that if Mandy had been my niece by blood, I would have walked immediately, after what happened with Brenda and Steve and the resulting estrangement between the family. And the EXACT SAME THING happened with us, Tim & Mari. I didn’t see the girls for a year and a half. I don’t want to lose the relationship I have worked so hard to rebuild when you come home. I don’t want to sneak around and go over there behind my back to see the girls because of your no-contact order. I don’t want to, and I’m not going to.
I will always love you as a friend. But I will never be able to forget the way that you lied to everyone close to us for years. I will never forget how when I tried to talk to you about what was going on, you’d snap at me and tell me that you don’t want to talk about it. I would go places with my mom and fall apart because she was the only person that I could open up to. I had a meltdown in the Safeway parking lot because I had all of this bottled up inside me and she was the one person I could tell. Not Matt, not Larry, not Jeff, not Shawn and Ami, not Logan, not Monica, not Emily, not even Keith. When I finally did tell him, we were at the lake and he said, “She must have made it up, because that doesn’t sound like the kind of thing that Mike would do.” How do you think it made me feel to confess to people that…guess what, it was true?
Going to see you takes everything out of me. I try to tell you that, and you start to act like a spoiled brat and snap back with something like, “I’m sorry that I’m such a CHORE for you.” You have no idea what visiting does to me. Three hours in the car and a three hour visit, and I can’t get a word in edgewise whenever your mom’s there, because she completely dominates the conversation. And I don’t feel happy that I get to see you, I feel pissed and frustrated that I’ve wasted six hours out of my day to listen to you and your mom talk. And it doesn’t really seem that you care that much about what I have to say, anyway. I tried to talk to you about something on Sunday and you tuned me out. A movie or something, it doesn’t really matter. But your mom talking about how many cars Mark sold the day before was apparently much more important than anything I had to tell you. How do you think that makes me feel? It makes me feel about this tall.
I’m sorry that I don’t write much. But when I do, if I feel guilty about going out and living my life…going to the midnight movie with Shawn and Ami, working out with Mom, taking the girls to Rocky Rococo’s, going to the lake with Angie and Keith always gets a pathetic “I wish that I could do that” from you. What do you think I’m doing out here? Do you think I’m being a martyr and crying out about how terrible of an injustice this is that you have to serve time for a crime that you lied to me about? Oh, no. I have a life and I am going to live it. I know mail is important to you.
For the past two and a half years I have lived in a prison that you helped put me in. And what’s sad is that I could have turned the key and let myself out any time I wanted to, but I did what I thought I should, and I was a martyr for you. I sweetly answered the recurring “Where’s Mike?” question, refused to answer any of my LiveJournal friends when they asked what put you in prison. Not because I’m afraid of how they would treat you, it’s because I’m afraid that I would be condemned for staying with you.
In the allegory you wrote, you compared me to a flower growing out of hardened earth. Very sweet, but this flower is getting too big for her pot. Her roots need their space. She is dying, slowly suffocating in the pot in which she doesn’t fit any more. Because on the sill that she sits on, there are two other plants and she is running out of room. This flower has a wilting leaf, and no one has come to clip it yet. And before the wilting leaf destroys the rest of the flower, she must find a way to clip it herself. And that’s what I’m doing.
I know I must have hurt you with this, and I’m sorry. But I’m done trying to spare your feelings. In the Bible, it says to do unto others as you would want them to do unto you. I know that if I was convicted of a crime, you wouldn’t want me to lie to you about it. I know that if I was in prison, I wouldn’t begrudge you living your life. And if you wanted to move on, I would be sad, but I would let you. Because if you really love someone, you will let them go. You will take the flower out of the pot which is killing her and plant her in a garden with many other flowers like her, instead of keeping her in a too-small pot and having her resent you in the end.
I love you, Mike, but I can’t keep living like this.
Corrie