MY MARRIAGE... MY FAIL...

HOLIDAY BREAK!

          I am hoping to have stumbled out of my Info Systems class with a ‘C’.  As for my  Composition course… I did receive a 93 on the one essay, the second I am not so sure.  The main thing is I am sure that I have passed both courses and am on to the next term… Comp II and College Math.

Having a break like this makes me long for some foresight… I’d have asked if I could crash with Nixxie and KT for a few days and flew home to Carolina for a week.  Might have even caught the bus back to the Motor and hung about my Dad’s place and try to see if Skye felt compelled to see me.  At any rate, I can pencil in an activity for this time next year.  Right now, these two weeks will represent a very welcomed break.

One of the things that I found surprising was my activity regarding the blogosphere.  I found a way to either post or comment nearly every day that I was working on something.  Chalking that up to being glued to my laptop and awoke getting stuff pushed around, I won’t make more of my schedule than it already is.  Still, I found it surprising that kind of time.

Now, to pick up where I left off…

BECAUSE RESULTS MATTER

Which is why I take more than an equal share in the fail of my marriage and my engagement with Mookie Dee because of the results of both relationships did not reach the aim of either.  Being hard on myself?  Maybe, but sometimes coaches get fired from their position even though they seem to have done a good with their teams.  Doesn’t mean that they aren’t a good coach… New England Patriot coach Bill Belichick was fired before he ascended to his current level of super-genius, so it isn’t like I hold the fail of either of those relationships against me as a negative or even as a future indictment.  You live and you learn.

The things that I failed to provide in both relationships were the intangible traits of leadership.  In my mind, the biggest mistake that I made with my marriage was one of overconfidence; with the latter it was less a mistake as it was a ‘scheduled stop’ on my way here.  So for once, my focus will be on my problems with my ex-wife.

Blah, blah, blah, on some of the obvious issues going into the marriage, such as our glaring lack of maturity between us and the short amount of time we spent getting to know each other prior to our going to Toledo.   Some of the classic signs that ‘she wasn’t the one’ were the lack of respect that she had not only for men, but for me.  Her diss of Thomas Hearns in my Mom’s house was emblematic of her regard for what mattered to me or what I thought was important.

She also had ‘ghosts’ that were haunting her that kept manifesting in our relationship.  I saw evidence beforehand but in another football simile, the biggest difference in the San Francisco 49’ers this season is their head coach.  Even with the issues that arose because of the player strike this past summer, Jim Harbaugh was able to replace Mike Singletary and take the same players who struggled the previous season, and turn them into the biggest surprises of the NFL season.  So why shouldn’t I have thought that I could do the equivalent in my marriage to my ex-wife?  There were other signs that she would not be responsive to my participation in our relationship, such as the adversarial pose that she (as well as many otherwise well intentioned women) she’d strike in our marriage even as she yearned for a loveship to share.

That is the kind of bad logic she used and by trying to make sense out of that warped thinking is another reason that she has to take a lot of the blame for demise of a relationship.  But again, had I been able to have provided her with the emotional security that too many relationships lack in the African-American community, I always wonder what if…

For instance, her worries about our finances and how (she’d) we’d reach our goals… I did not convince her of the process that I had lain out and that there were important roles for her to play.  I have always crystallized her reluctance in her refusal to cook breakfast (after all, it is the most important meal of the day!) while I was out doing roadwork was, to me at least, something she could have done to have helped me help her out.  Using that kind of circular reasoning, we’d have helped our marriage out.  But I failed to convince her of the importance of breakfast, given our schedules and daily activities.  Meanwhile, whatever our oldest daughter needed, getting her up and off to day care or to be soothed after a thunderstorm, I was there for that.  It was as though she could take ‘off’ from not just some of her childcare but her marital obligations regarding the division of labor.

ANYWHO…

Some of the characteristics that she displayed in our marriage would cause me to look for what I thought that I had with her.  It did not help that she was always jealous of women, considering how beholden she was to the idea that we (black men) were all low-down scoundrels, looking for a new leg to hump on.  When I did step outside of the marriage to find the kind of relationship that I had hoped to find with my ex-wife (…life, once again, say hello to the Fly Skimmie… Fly Skimmie, welcome again to my life…) those acts would only reinforce her poor reductive reasoning and justify her physical abuse in our marriage (yes ladies and gentlemen, I MADE HER JUMP ON ME).

As easy as it would be to say that she had problems beyond my capacity that in aggregation, negatively impacted our relationship, I wonder if I had really stepped up to the plate, and tried to fill the role of ‘the man in her life’?  At my darling brother’s memorial, my FIL and I spoke, as we had a cordial relationship; he told me that he remembered how I would come to him for advice.  I nodded and we kept on with the small talk; and the conversation again reaffirmed my decision.  Not saying that I went about reaching an irreconcilable difference with his daughter the right way, but I did leave her with few, if any, stones unturned in search of a solution to our problems.  Yet I feel as though had I stepped up and ‘manned up’ at the beginning of our relationship, had we still proceeded ‘down that aisle’, we have had better results.  And just as challenging as it was for me to type this, it was prolly less challenging for me to have been a better husband for her.