My third life - The Beginning

My life began with his midlife crisis. To be brief, he woke up on his 50th birthday, and realized that he didn't love me, had never loved me. He had married me for my money and because I was a good screw. I didn't really have that much money, but marrying me for my indefatigable sexual appetite probably made some amount of sense.

So he spent the money, and stopped fucking me - and then waited 20 years and 1 toddler to make his grand announcement. He claims now that guilt held his tongue.... I imagine there is some truth to that. He also says he was wrong - he had loved me all along, he just didn't know it. I imagine, as well, that there is some truth to that. The biggest truth, however is that his life was better with me than without me... As it turns out, my life without him is better than I ever imagined it would be when he ended the life I was living.

Like any good cat, I have the ability to live many lives.

My first life began in the suckhole of the Midwest. It was not a good life.... As a matter of fact it was one of those lives, that when I recount it, causes people to murmur sympathetically - to find tears in their eyes for the child I was. It was full of alcohol and pedophilia and beatings and guns and suicides - the sort of thing that is written about in penny dreadfuls, or in artistically successful though commercially rejected novels.

I won't bore or horrify you with the details - not unless they matter. I believe that my childhood was not so uncommon for an American.... Fascism requires obedience, a people who commit torture on the world stage are not an aberration - they are a culture. America's culture of violence comes from somewhere - we are taught violence the same way we are taught patriotism, religion, and bigotry - at the end of the stick of fear.

I escaped that life on a greyhound bus at the age of 17 or so.... And headed, as all runaways head, for the coast. I wandered about, I tried on new masks, I tried to raise myself - feral as I was - as a good middle class girl. I did not want to be one of the grubby street kids, living under freeways and panhandling for change. It did not suit my intellect.

I wandered the coast from Spokane to Monterey - hanging out on college campuses, finding people who could care for me, working when I could. Fucking a lot.... (this is where the earliest part of life 1 matters. When a girlchild is taught that her worth lies in her cunt, we believe it.)

I was just a girl who couldn't say no.

Furthermore, I wanted to reject all the common American paradigms about good girls - if I had been a good girl, my stepfather wouldn't have been fucking me. But, since I WAS a good girl, the paradigm was obviously false, and I set out to prove it. Add to this, of course, the fact that fucking is great, pleasure is good for you, and I - to this day - like sex better than just about any other thing.... Well, I was and remain a bit of a hussy.

My first life blended into my second life nearly seamlessly. There was no dramatic ending with another dramatic beginning. I didn't even really notice the life I had left and the one I began. I only know that I died along the way with benefit of hindsight.

I met a man - I fell in love on our first date. He was the very first man who never said "you want me to do what?" when I expressed all the kinky and perverted things I dreamed of. Nope, as a matter of fact, he pushed me to do kinky dirty things I had never even considered. It was love. I was his slave, and it's all I ever wanted to be.

In addition to the great sex, he was much older than I, strong, and blonde - and a bad boy - and, I knew him. It was clear to me that he was my lifemate, my soulmate. God told me to do it - really, I am serious about this. Somehow I managed not to notice that he was a con man, a liar, and really didn't love me. I thought I could change all that. For a while, I guess I did. But the truth seems to be that bad boys grow up to be bad men. They just can't help it.

Some 20 years later, I found myself still in love with him - believing that I was living in the happily ever after. My life was Cinderella's dream come true. One love, one lifetime - I believed in this like a Catholic believes in the resurrection.

I had everything I thought I had wished for.... A home, an income, a new baby --- the fact that I was horribly unhappy, addicted to antidepressants and suffering from paralyzing anxiety attacks I chalked up to my miserable childhood. I never once considered that perhaps I was leading a miserable adulthood.

Then he made his announcement. "I don't love you. I never loved you. I married you for your money and because you were good in bed. You knew it all along - and if another man would have you, you would have left by now. "

Suddenly, the years of subtle psychological abuse became clear.... The suggestions that I was fat, ugly, unlovable, a bitch, a harpy.... unfuckable and disgusting - the things I thought he was kidding about, resonated in my ears.... And I found myself with nothing.

I died that day. I watched my own death. I stood in the shower, and I collapsed, water pouring over my body as I sobbed that life out of me while he looked on, horrified at what he had done - what he could not and would not undo.

I will someday thank him for this.