Sable Monroe

You Divorced Him. Why Do You Still Think You Own Him?

There are people who leave relationships and still somehow believe the person they left is supposed to remain emotionally faithful to them.

My mother was one of them.

To be clear, my mother had every reason to divorce my father.

My father was a monster.

This isn’t one of those stories where, decades later, the adult daughter looks back and realizes her mother threw away a perfectly good marriage because she was restless or ungrateful. My mother documented her reasons for leaving him in their divorce proceedings.

I know because my father let me read the papers when I was around eleven.

Yes.

That happened.

My childhood had very few age-appropriate activities.

So when my mother divorced my father, I didn’t grow up wondering why she left.

I understood why.

What took me much longer to understand was why she seemed to believe that divorcing him meant she could move on, but he wasn’t supposed to.

She Remarried. He Wasn’t Supposed To.

Eventually, my mother married my stepfather.

My father also had another woman in his life, a long-term girlfriend he lived with in Jamaica.

At some point my father wanted his completed divorce decree.

My mother didn’t want to give it to him.

Why?

Because she didn’t want him to remarry.

I would like us to spend a moment appreciating the mathematics here.

My mother had already remarried.

She had a husband.

She apparently also wanted my father to remain unmarried.

I don’t know what kind of emotional timeshare arrangement she thought she had purchased, but apparently the property rights survived the divorce.

And this wasn’t an isolated incident.

It was a pattern.

The Man She Left Wasn’t Supposed to Upgrade

My mother’s second marriage became extremely volatile.

As a child living inside that house, I became frightened enough that I eventually suggested something that sounds insane without context:

Why don’t you go back to Dad?

It wasn’t because I had suddenly rewritten my father into a good man.

He wasn’t.

It was the calculation of a child comparing two dangerous environments and deciding that the danger she already understood felt preferable to the danger she couldn’t predict.

I knew my father.

I knew what kind of monster he was.

My stepfather frightened me differently.

So I encouraged my mother to contact my father.

I also knew something else.

She was still weak for that man.

I figured if I said the right things, it wouldn’t take much convincing.

I was right.

My mother wrote my father a letter.

This was before we had a telephone in the house, so a letter was how the conversation happened. She told him what was happening in her marriage. She told him about the abuse.

She told him she wanted to get back together.

My father wrote back.

No.

That was the end of my little escape plan.

For me, it meant remaining in a household I desperately wanted to escape.

For my mother, I think it meant something else too.

He had rejected her.

And eventually she would have to watch him build a life without her.

Then There Was the House

Years later, when my brother was around fourteen or fifteen, he got his green card and traveled to Jamaica with our mother.

We’ll call him Al.

My mother encouraged Al to spend some time with our father.

So he did.

By then, my father was living with his girlfriend in a large, beautiful house in Spanish Town.

Al came back talking about that house.

It was big.

It was nice.

There was even a maid’s quarters.

My mother was not impressed.

Actually, that’s a lie.

She was impressed.

That was the problem.

My father’s circumstances had improved considerably since their marriage.

He had a nice home. He was driving a nice car. He traveled between Jamaica and the United States frequently enough that my mother complained that he was taking airplanes like buses.

At one point she was even angry that he could fly to America and bring dog food back to Jamaica for his dog while we were struggling financially in America.

The dog food wasn’t the point.

The airplane wasn’t the point.

The car wasn’t the point.

The house wasn’t the point.

He was doing better without her.

That was the point.

And Then the Other Woman Bought My Brother a Pendant

While Al was staying with our father, my father’s girlfriend took him shopping.

My father bought him an expensive gold chain.

His girlfriend bought the pendant.

Al came home happy.

My mother was furious.

She hadn’t sent him over there for that, she complained.

He was supposed to spend time with his father.

He wasn’t supposed to get close to that woman.

Which raises an interesting question.

Why not?

If your child is spending time in another household, wouldn’t you want the adults in that household to treat him kindly?

Wouldn’t you want your son’s father’s partner to welcome him?

Wouldn’t you be relieved that she wasn’t treating him like an inconvenience?

Apparently not if kindness from another woman feels like competition.

Al didn’t return to Jamaica for years.

My mother said he was afraid of flying.

Years later, my father told me that he had sent another airline ticket for Al to visit.

My mother simply never put him on the plane.

Suddenly the fear of flying explanation looked a little different.

And Then There Was Princess Diana

I had almost forgotten this part until recently.

Princess Diana died in 1997.

I was twenty.

My mother was thirty-nine.

Like millions of people around the world, we watched the funeral and saw Diana’s sons walking behind her coffin. Prince Charles, her former husband, walked in the procession too.

My mother looked at that scene and somehow imagined herself into it.

One day, she suggested, my father would be walking behind her coffin.

The implication was obvious.

One day he would understand.

One day he would regret losing her.

One day the magnitude of his loss would finally become clear.

And even at twenty years old, I remember thinking:

Who the fuck do you think you are?

Not because my mother wasn’t valuable.

Not because my father had treated her well.

He hadn’t.

But because I was beginning to recognize something about her.

Leaving my father wasn’t enough.

She needed to remain important to him.

She needed him to know what he had lost.

And preferably, apparently, he would achieve this revelation during a dramatic funeral procession.

There was only one small logistical problem with this fantasy.

She would be dead.

She wouldn’t even get to enjoy it.

Some People Don’t Want Their Ex Back. They Want Their Ex to Want Them Back.

I think that’s the distinction I couldn’t articulate when I was younger.

My mother didn’t necessarily want to build another healthy life with my father.

She wanted evidence that she remained significant to him.

There’s a difference.

You can know someone was terrible for you and still resent watching them flourish without you.

You can leave someone and still be wounded when someone else occupies the place you vacated.

You can remarry and still feel possessive of your former spouse.

You can even convince yourself that your jealousy is righteous because of everything that person once did to you.

But eventually you have to confront the contradiction.

You cannot simultaneously demand freedom from someone and ownership of them.

My mother was entitled to leave my father.

She was entitled to build another life.

She was entitled to hate him.

She was entitled to never forgive him.

But she wasn’t entitled to reserve him.

And perhaps that’s why his improved circumstances seemed to bother her so much.

The story was supposed to end differently.

She was supposed to be the great loss.

He was supposed to understand eventually.

Maybe he was even supposed to suffer.

Instead, he got the big house.

He got the girlfriend.

He got the nice car.

He got on airplanes like buses.

Even the damn dog was apparently eating imported food.

And somewhere in America, the woman who had divorced him was keeping score.

Maybe that’s the strangest thing about some relationships.

They end legally long before they end psychologically.

The marriage was over.

The ownership wasn’t.

And somewhere inside my mother’s imagination, my father remained permanently cast in the final scene of her movie.

Walking behind the coffin.

Finally realizing what he had lost.

And thirty years later, I still have approximately the same response I had at twenty:

Ma’am.

Who the fuck do you think you are?