September 19

If yesterday was about ruminating on the one relationship I wish I got to do over, today is about the one relationship I wish I never had. If you didn't think God, or whatever higher power you believe in, does not have a sense of humor, my ex-wife's birthday is the day after my college girlfriend's birthday.

I hate my ex-wife. I know, as Henry Francis said to Betty on Mad Men, "hate's a strong word," but hey, if the shoe fits. It is not so much the prime years I wasted married to a psychologically abusive alcoholic that makes me hate her, it is the ending - the unjustness of it. The fact that after ridiculing and belittling me for more than a decade because I was not the earner she thought I should be, she happily took what money she could, burned every freaking bridge behind her, and dragged out her exit for as long as possible just to make me miserable.

I could tell you stories about how when we were married she accused me of sleeping with her then-18-year-old niece because that niece had the temerity to trust me with a secret and not my ex-wife or the habitual drunk driving she did, or  how she had to be taken home from a family event because she was so bombed, or about how she was convinced her failure to get pregnant had nothing to do with the fact that she was overweight, smoked, and had a uterus that was 90 proof b/c of all the vodka she drank, no, it could not be any of those reasons, it had to be because I, a physically fit man in his 30s who did not smoke or drink, <gasp> smoked pot 10 years earlier. And when I got checked out and the OB/GYN told my ex wife that the sample I provided was one of the most motile ones she had ever seen (that means my "boys" were Michael Phelps-level swimmers) the look on her face was just fucking priceless. Suffice to say that we never had kids was a true blessing for all involved.

But even after all of that messiness and drama, all of that mental torture, had she just left like an adult and not like a petulant child who thought she did nothing wrong, I might have just chalked it all up to two people who grew apart over time with one having a problem she needed to get help for and maybe one day would. But no, she did not do that, so fuck her, fuck her right in the ear. I spent a lot of time after we got divorced wishing her true ill will, some karmic comeuppance that might balance the scales of justice, but that shit will not happen any sooner than an apology from her for the emotional carnage she left behind.