What went Wrong?

This is purely fiction. Names were changed to protect my butt.

*

I am sitting at my kitchen table trying to relive the past forty-four years. Trying to figure out just exactly went wrong. Hoping to gain insight as to "was it me" or "was it her." When we got married forty four years ago I had really hoped this was the right woman for me as I had hoped she was thinking this is the right man for me.

My name is James "Jimbo" McDonald. I stand five foot seven inches tall. I have or at least had wavy blonde hair and only weighed one hundred forty nine pounds when I married my now ex-wife. Now I weigh two hundred ten pounds and have gray balding hair with the typical horse shoe hair cut a lot of men my age have. Both of my knees have just about out given out on me because of the work I did and probably the sports I played while growing older. So yeah, I am physically a wreck on two feet.

My now ex-wife is Jane. She stands around five foot six inches tall. She had beautiful full bodied brown hair, which is now gray with a hint of her former hair color. When we married she weighed in around one hundred thirty five pounds but she too gained some weight growing older. I am not sure what her current weight is now but let's says she is probably one hundred ninety pounds or so, give or take ten pounds.

When I was in my mid forties I developed bad knees which forced me to ease up on my sports activities. Otherwise I would pay for it in the form of pain for at least three or sometimes four days. Having two children helped me to stay somewhat active. It was not until I was in my mid fifties that I put on the extra weight I now carry around with me.

Both of my children were active in sports or school band. We went to nearly all of their activities together. The only time I would miss out on a junior high or high school football game is when I had to work. My daughter was a band geek and my son was the jock. My son also joined the high school rodeo group. He became a bull rider and bareback bronc rider. Not to brag, but he got pretty good. He was the younger of the two. My now ex-wife would go to as many high school rodeos as she could stand. She did not like seeing him or any of the other boys get hung up on the bulls they were attempting to ride. I would record as many of the events as I could. A couple of the other kid's parents would ask me to also record their son when they rode and even offered to pay me for the trouble of editing and compiling their child's rides. I even filmed the junior high and high school football games for us all to enjoy.

I say all this because, as I mentioned earlier, I am trying to figure out what I or she did wrong. What caused us to drift apart and get to the point we are today. Since both of us were going to the football games to watch our daughter play and march in the band and our son on the football field doing his thing as a ball player, I really thought we were doing the right thing. It was a rare occasion that either one of us missed a game. If someone missed a game it would be me because of my job responsibilities. After all, someone had to earn a living to keep us going like that. By the way, my wife did not work outside of the home. I was fortunate enough to earn enough money that she did not have to work.

As the children grew older of course their wants and desires changed, as they had changed too with my ex-wife and me. Both children had more expensive hobbies and with that I had to earn more money so I started working more overtime as the job would bear. All during the adolescence and teen age years of both children we also camped a lot or at least as often as we could. We have had tongue drag campers of various types. Some pop-up campers and small self contained campers were now part of the upkeep I had to do. We even had one motor home. Keeping up with the yard during the week and the camping on weekends took its toll on me also. It seemed as if I had a whole lot of extracurricular activities to do now.

I never coveted my neighbors for any reason. I was genuinely happy for them because of their successes. Well except the one time a neighbor bought one of those zero turn radius mowers to mow a mere three-quarters of an acre and I was mowing three acres. It would take me nearly eight hours a week just to mow using my forty-two inch mower and the neighbor would knock his yard out in fifteen minutes. Oh the pain of watching him finish so soon while I was still trudging along on the mower I had to keep together using bailing wire and duct tape. Oh well, it did make me want one all the more. My mower was broke down one weekend when he dropped by to visit and I was working on the green-devil as I often referred to the mower. He visited for a few minutes and then left. The sucker came back in ten minutes and started mowing my yard for me. Took him all of an hour and fifteen minutes to knock out what would normally take me eight hours to do. Now I knew why I wanted one of those things, but it would never happen.

I do have a brother that was fortunate enough in business to earn enough money to become financially independent by the time he was forty-five years old. I was genuinely happy for him. Even told him that if he had a few extra bucks to throw away, toss it my direction. We had a good laugh about it because he did work hard to get there. He went through a couple of marriages to get there but there is always a price to pay for some of things we do. That was his price and that was his doing. Both of his ex-wives told him to watch and learn from his brother, me, because he, meaning me, was happy with what he had, as they both put it.

Looking up what the seven deadly sins in the bible would be I found out that lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride compile the list. I have already ruled out envy and greed. Can I now rule out the other five and come up with an answer to the problem I am now currently saddled with? I'll try to figure these out too.

I am putting envy (1) and greed (2) in the back ground when it comes to my wife and children. They were first and foremost in my life. Well, OK, they came in a close second behind God. I have always felt that the priorities in my life were God, family and then job or career and in that order.

My wrath (3) or anger is sometimes high on the list of things I am able to control, at least somewhat. If things do not go as I planned and I find out it is my fault then I have only myself to blame. If things went wrong because of something my ex-wife or my children did then yes, I would get upset but never to the point of physically hurting or mentally hurting any of the three. I would usually go outside and vent my anger in my wood shop or some tree that needed cutting down. It was rare occasion that I actually verbally assaulted any of the three. So maybe there was some wrath involved in her decision to leave. I'll never really know because right now she does not even talk to me. OK, I'll leave that as a possible reason.

Lust, (4) on the other hand. WOW now this is a hard one to define in my life. I did have a lust for life. I enjoyed the camping, football games, rodeos and anything else we as a family could do. I had a passion for doing my job well but I cannot for the life of me even believe there is something there that would cause a problem. OK well maybe once or twice or a few more times, I did work overtime to help pay the bills.

I did have what was called an emotional affair. That one being defined as something one would do from afar. Yes I knew a woman that I would call and talk to on occasion. I could get her to do things she would not do for her husband. We never and I repeat never got together for any coupling that would be defined as sex. Even as one of the former Presidents of the United States was defining sex, it never happened. It was always long distance. How I met her is not important, but we never got together. OK, that would be a weak two as points pile up against me.

As far as gluttony (5) was concerned, the only thing either one of us would do that would possibly fit into this category was eat. We both loved a good meal. We never accumulated a lot of material things except nick-knacks from the various destinations we went while camping or on vacations. After forty-four years of being together taking our vacations and camping trips one can still accumulate a lot of "junk". We were no exception to that rule either. Our largest and most domineering collection was the photographic memories we had. So can gluttony be ruled out, possibly? At least here, I am going to rule that one out.

Pride (6). Now this one is something to be defined in a varied manner. From being proud of our children, being proud of our home life, being proud of hers and my families to being proud of all the accomplishments of others we both know, I really do not feel that pride is or was to be considered in this matter. Of course we were and are proud of our children. They accomplished what they set out to do. Generally they did well, but they learned from their mistakes also. So ruling out pride can be done here too.

I think that sloth (7) would also be counted against me. Yes sometimes I could be slow to respond and slow to react in certain circumstances but it was never meant to be a detriment to anyone. Perhaps I was slow to recognize some of her accomplishments too. While not done on purpose, I still believe that this may be one of my problems. With that being said, four out of seven for the good and only three out of seven for the bad. There were many times that I was merely tired and did not want to go out to eat with my ex-wife. She may have thought I was being unfair to her. I mean after all, I was gone while working, I was not inside helping her with the house work because I was spending a lot of time outside doing my chores or I just wanted to sit and watch some movie on the television.

Well that covered the seven deadly sins from the bible. What about the one of being intimate with your spouse? I almost always initiated any intimacy within our home. She was not then nor is she now the one that would initiate any sort of love making. There eventually came a time that I just gave up on trying to coax her into anything that remotely resembled sex. Did that cause a problem with us? Of that I am sure it did. I always tried to put her on a pedestal to be worshiped. Maybe that made her believe she was some sort of goddess or something of that nature. Then when I quit trying, she may have felt she was no longer loved and worshiped as before. That could be further from the truth as anything could be. Yes, I loved her then and I still love her now. But when she left, she just left. The only thing she left was a note telling me goodbye. No rhyme or reason for her departure, no explanation for it, no nothing, just left. She did leave a forwarding address so I would know where to send her the things that she had left and that was it. So right now I am at a loss. Maybe one day she will finally talk to me and at least then I will know what I did wrong and possibly why I did them. Maybe she thought I was having an affair with some other woman and to be honest, I may have thought about it but I never acted upon it. I just felt it would cost me more in the long run that it was worth.

Her Side of the Tale

I left a note to my now ex-husband of forty-four years merely saying goodbye. That was it. I also left a forwarding address for him to contact me. I changed my cell phone number and told the children not to let him have that information. I wanted out of this marriage more than I want into it forty-four years ago.

I have tried to analyze the why and what for and any other column I could put into my little spreadsheet in my mind. There was not just any one thing that made me leave, but it appeared to me that there were many things which just added up for me to make that decision.

I only caught him having an emotional affair one time. It lasted about four to maybe six months. It took me a while to get over that. He told me he could get her to do things for him that I would never do. Truth be known, he never asked me to ride down the road naked at night. I might have done that, now we will never know. I also believe that was not the only time he did something like that. I also believed that since he had stopped romancing me that he was having an affair. I just could not prove it. I could not figure out when he had time for that. I believe he was and there was nothing he could say to change my mind about that.

He always provided for me and the kids. We never lacked for money or time with him. I generally knew where he was and when he would be home. Sometimes he would call and let me know he would be working over so it was not a problem with me. We had football games with our kids that we both would attend and he would always pay the attention during the games.

We would go places for vacation like camping or hiking or some distant place we wanted to see. Jimbo always went to our son's rodeo events. I could not handle watching those teenage kids hung up on the bulls or when they dismounted their animal they would literally fly through the air like a trapeze artist. The girl's barrel racing was my favorite. Thank God there were clowns to help out during any event in the arena. Those guys were professionals. The other parents in the group of kids became close. We even had a high school rodeo party at our house. It was lots of fun.

Our intimate time together was strained due to the lack of quiet time. This is where I think we drifted apart. He wanted it and I did too but I was always just too tired. Was I being too demanding on him to stop or was he being too demanding on me to go? Either way, I just did not want to get intimate mostly because I was tired.

I think Jimbo was and probably still is a good man, just not for me anymore. I want more out of life than I have been getting. I wanted someone who would be with me more than with others. I also wanted someone to pay attention to me. I felt I owed that to myself. After all, I had given this guy forty-four years of devotion to him and him alone. He would not even acknowledge when I got my hair all done up.

Well, there was that one time back when both kids finally left the house. The empty nest syndrome is what it is officially called. I always called it the empty nest blessing. Of course we had a lot more time on our hands but I felt somewhat empty. Since gambling was not legal where we lived, I discovered it was only an hour and a half from the house. He would get up, leave for work and I would get up and head to the casinos. I would lose some and I would win some. Apparently after twenty four months of gambling I lost more than I won and our finances would come tumbling down around my ears. Just how was I going to explain this to Jimbo and the kids?

I was not really too worried because I could always count on Jimbo to bail me out with the household expenses. But now I was almost seven months in arrears in paying the house note. When I received a letter with the intent of repossessing our house, I panicked. I knew I had to tell him what was happening. As usual he was able to fix things. I also knew I could never enjoy those trips again. That is what Gamblers Anonymous told me. Since then I have not been that stupid. He borrowed some money from his brother and when we got the money out of our 401k we paid it all back. His brother did not ask for any interest but we at least took him and his wife out to eat.

As far as our personal appearances goes, we both tended to let ourselves go. He weighed about one hundred fifty pounds when we married and I only weighed around one hundred thirty pounds. Somewhere sometime during our marriage he had gotten up to two hundred sixty-eight pounds. He decided to lose some weight and he lost down to around two hundred ten pounds while I had not lost any weight. If anything I gained more weight because of the self imposed the funk I was feeling. But I knew there had to be a better life out there for me. And by golly I was going to find it. I did not care what it cost me, I wanted it.

Jimbo had become almost demanding in his demeanor. He wanted things done his way or no way. He would not even falter on the subject of selling the house and moving into an apartment somewhere. I argued that by doing this we could have more time to be together. He simply did not want that. But somewhere down the road, I'm guessing about eight months passed and he told me he had a buyer for the house and we had possibly three months before we closed and had to move out. I was shocked. Even though this is what I wanted in the beginning I would never have though in a million years he would sell that place. And sell it he did.

We sold everything, lot, stock and barrel. We sold the furniture, the appliances, yard decorations, his outdoor cooking stuff, even the Christmas decorations that took us over thirty-five years to accumulate. Everything was gone in the garage sale. What did not sell at the garage sale the new owners said they would take and they would pay us for that stuff. So we sold everything and moved into a two bedroom apartment. We bought all new furniture and everything for the apartment. I thought for sure we would start doing things together now. I could never have been so wrong.

I had taken a job as a tax professional with one of the nationwide tax services. I would work from the first of the year up until the tax deadline. It was good money and Jimbo was retired. He was doing the Mr. Mom thing and I was now earning money. Of course we had his retirement to live on also. So my job was just extra money. I got so absorbed in my work I would forgot about the problems at home. Well almost forgot anyway. I had the thirty minute drive from work to home to think on those problems.

Even though I could never really pin it down to a single thing he was doing I knew I still deserved more. Could I live on my meager earnings along with my social security retirement is something I did not yet know. I was putting it all together one day and figured out that I could do just that. When tax season came to a close, I packed what things I knew I wanted, wrote the note and left. I was finally able to pursue the life I wanted without having him to slow me down. I hoped I had made the right choice.

Jim's Final Thoughts

Well it has been seven months since the divorce. I am now convinced I had done nothing wrong. So it must have been her. She had to have been unhappy about something but would not speak to me about it. I knew I had to go on with life or just end it. I decided to go on with life and see what comes. I sincerely hope I have made the right decision. What are your thoughts?