I am going to repost this piece. When it first came out, a couple of my friends roasted me over it, calling it unloving and without charity, so I took it down. But since then, I have had others tell me that it is the truth and it is the reality of my life, therefore it has worth.

I know because I give so many examples of how difficult Elizabeth can be, that it sounds like I am trying to paint her in a bad light. I am not. She is a good-hearted person with painful emotional scars, some of them quite deep. My purpose in posting this is A). to give a true picture of how difficult she has been to deal with and B.) to show that sometimes God gives us not what we want, but what we need. I needed Elizabeth because I needed to learn to love. That’s what this is all about.

And don’t miss one other point – I am no prince of charity myself.  If I wrote a blog piece on all the dirt, filth, and evil I have willingly, and with zeal, engaged in during my lifetime, you wouldn’t want anything to do with me. Yes, it’s that bad!

LIFE WITH A DIFFICULT WOMAN

I have been thinking about writing this piece for some time now. My hope is that it will be an encouragement to someone who is going through a difficult marital situation.

My first wife, Karen, passed away in 2006, the victim of over forty years of smoking that turned her lungs into non-functioning mush. After Karen died, I tried to continue working, but I was just “mailing it in” in regards to my sales job, allowing my repeat business from faithful customers to carry me. After a year, I called the district manager and told him I couldn’t do it anymore. I was burned out, confused, and tired. Karen and I had become estranged the last ten years of our marriage, so much so that I didn’t even cry at her funeral. I stood at her closed coffin, prayed the Rosary, and wondered where I would go from there.

There were two Carmelite nuns at my parish who had encouraged me to visit our monastery in Butler, Pennsylvania. I had been there three times and always found myself very much liking the quiet life of prayer and solitude. In March of 2008, I went back to stay for three months, wondering if perhaps I was called to this life now that marriage was over and my children grown and on their own.

On the last evening of my stay, I had a profoundly deep experience, quite unpleasant, which redirected my life. While reading a book by Thomas Merton during the time of evening known as “Great Silence,” I suddenly had an experience of a deep inner knowledge. My thoughts went to Karen and how we had drifted apart over our marriage. Memories came to mind of how I would come home from work, and instead of being with her, would fix my dinner, go downstairs to the room where my computer was to spend the rest of the evening. As I was having these thoughts, I visualized her sitting by herself in front of the television, lonely and sad. I realized that instead of doing something loving such as simply sitting beside her and watching TV with her, keeping her company and making her feel loved, I had become a totally self-centered and selfish person. I cannot really put into words how terrible and condemned I felt as I was made to see the person I had become. All falsity, all vain self-image, was stripped away in the face of this searing truth. It was a devastating night of seeing myself not as I imagined myself to be, but in the reality of truth.

I spent most of the night weeping and begging God to forgive me.

When I left the next day, I realized why I felt so at home at the monastery. It was an extension of my life of self-imposed isolation in which I did not have to really interact with others, either family or friends. I realized that I was being sent back into the world to learn how to love.

A few months after my return, I entered the world of various Catholic dating sites, thinking that perhaps remarriage would be the place I could learn to be the loving person God calls us to be. From I listening to CDs explaining the THEOLOGY OF THE BODY lectures given by Pope John Paul the Great, I had come to understand love not as emotions, but rather as a sacrificial self-giving to another. To be married again might be that opportunity to learn how to really love. I longed to find a woman who would give such love to me and I would return it in response. But alas, month after month went by with no response.

Until Elizabeth.

STOP!!

Before you  read the next part, go back and re-read again the description I gave of myself.  I am no saint. Have not been, will never be. That is for sure. When I give the following examples of how difficult Elizabeth can be to live with, it is not to try to make myself look good or to dirty her up more than necessary. I eliminated several paragraphs from the original writing because I thought it went into overkill. But I want you to understand, dear reader, this has not been an easy journey for me. In order to do this, I have to give an accurate description of what I have been through.

After two fruitless years of checking my inbox on the dating sites, Elizabeth contacted me out of the clear blue and expressed her interest in getting together with me. For the sake of space, I will summarize our two years of dating: she pursued me like a bull charging a red flag.  I kid you not! Within the first month of our dating, she told – didn’t ask, told –  me I should stop contacting and seeing any other woman on the dating site. She was very intense with expressions of physical affection, and while we never crossed the line sexually, we got awfully damn close, so much so that I felt the need to go to Confession. She went out of her way to cook for me when I came down to her house in Virginia to be with her for a weekend. She bought me gifts. We went places and had fun together. I was eating it up! I was the center of her attention and I was loving it.

Elizabeth appeared to be all I had been dreaming of – a woman with whom I could have an relationship of giving and receiving and someone who was a devout Catholic. But at the same time, there were red flags waving alongside the road upon which I was walking. My nun friend, Sister Rose, warned me, “She’s selfish. You need to be careful.” Elizabeth had some odd habits that should have made me stop and think, like washing her hands over and over and over, many times a day, or grabbing my hands after the Sign of Peace (shaking hands with others in the parish) and squirting disinfectant in them. Remember, I was still in rebound from a disastrous and sorrowful first marriage and filled with guilt regarding my failure as a husband (and as a decent human being in general). This whole combination was a perfect storm for disaster. I saw the red flags, but thought that they were not particularly that bad. After all everyone has little peculiarities.

And the Titanic just hit a little piece of ice in the ocean.

Elizabeth is a deeply troubled person emotionally. After about three months of marriage, the monsters in her emotional closet picked the locks and came out. She is very – VERY – OCD. Washing her hands forty times a day is just the beginning. Everything, everywhere has germs on it. She goes through a couple of tubs of Clorox disinfectant wipes every month, coming down stairs in the morning to wipe down everything in the kitchen as a start. Refrigerator handles, counter tops, stove top – everything gets a good wiping down. When I would handle money, she would get extremely upset if I happened to touch anything of hers before washing my hands. And in hot, hot, hot, hot water. Yes, that’s the way she said it, as if one “hot” would not be enough.

She is also an immense control freak. Everything has to be just so. Move one thing out of line and she goes into a tizzy. When I was cleaning out the garage, which honestly looked like someone had backed up a 20 cubic yard dump truck and emptied it, I threw away some checkbook stubs that were over 15 years old. She was furious for three days. She imagines things that do not exist, such as me having bad breath. We were in a hotel, traveling to Houston to visit her sister, and she raised such a ruckus about my imaginary bad breath that I got dressed, went down to the front desk, and (I have to laugh at this now) told the desk clerk that my wife was insisting that I have bad breath and would you please smell my breath and tell me if I do? Two clerks on duty chuckled and then obliged me, telling me what I already knew – my breath did not smell.

I was washing her van for her one day and she saw that I had taken a crate out from the middle and placed it in the street in order to clean it. She raised her window and loudly complained, soundly berating me for putting her container in the middle of the dirty, nasty street. In fact, I would say that complaining is one of the main things that she does in her life. Nothing pleases her in her exactitude. When I went to set up some bird feeders, she complained that the birds would poop all over the deck. She has complained about me cooking my meals because I get the stove dirty. When I moved the boxes in the garage to organize for some space, she bitched about that. She complains about the work items I have in “her garage.” It wasn’t long before I felt more like she wanted not a husband, nor someone with whom to share her life and care for, but rather a trained monkey who would be there to do all the things she wanted done, when she wants them done, and exactly how she wanted them done. Every chore she wanted me to do was an emergency that needed to be done right away, and if not – more bitching.

When traveling to Houston, I stopped at a burger joint and used the public restroom (she uses a porta potty when traveling) after getting our meal. Elizabeth flipped out on me, calling me a “pig” and saying, “You are filthy. I want a divorce.” She has, in fact, told me over two dozen times (yes, I have kept count) that she wants a divorce, usually in the middle of some ranting complaint about something I have done. Some days it seemed like she just wanted to find an argument. I remember her complaining that I was allowing the water to run while I was brushing my teeth. She complained about the waste of water, even though we were in a motel room and it wasn’t costing us money for me to run the faucet. I found that very odd.

The hardest part of living with Elizabeth is that she never asks me – she orders me. I recently went with a friend to participate in a bowling tournament in New Jersey. When I returned, the first thing I come in the door – no greeting. Dead silence. Finally, she said,  “I hope you won a lot of cash because I am having the front lawn done.” I have had enough of this so I respond by saying, “And you didn’t ask me, you are telling me.” Now it’s my turn to complain. To which she says, “I can’t wait for you.” This is pretty typical. She will order to me to do things instead of asking, and if they are not done right away, will threaten to call someone to come in to do them, then expect me to agree to pay half the bill.

She goes on about how sick she is and she needs someone to be here. She says “You are up in Atlantic City fooling around with bowling while I am down here sick.” Then she says that I am selfish because I won’t stay with her all the time. I tell her that if she is that sick, she needs to be in a nursing home if she needs someone to be with her 24 hours a day. She tells me – TELLS ME – that I am not going to go on another overnight because she needs someone to be with her all the time.

There is a whole lot more, but as I said, more would be overkill at this point. I’ve made my point, I think. This is pretty much typical of how she has been to me. And not only to me, but to her own kids. I remember one day her daughter simply walked out of the house in the middle of a conversation after Elizabeth would not stop referring to her as stupid over something the daughter had done. Becca said, “Don’t say that to me.” Elizabeth ignored her and said it again five minutes later. Becca got up and left without further comment. Then Elizabeth got on me when I suggested that maybe Becca had a right to be angry.

With all this, dear reader, you are probably saying to yourself right now, “Good God, Ed! Why would you put up with this?”

Well, there is a reason. And it has had what I would call a good outcome, as you will see in Part Two of this narrative.