Whose reality?

I always thought reality was easy to define. After all, it’s a pretty standard thing. Two people standing on a street corner generally see the same thing. While we may each focus on something different, you may see the crowds hurrying across the busy intersection while I focus on the man in the overcoat glancing surreptitiously around as he drops a brown package in a mail box, we can both agree that at this moment the streetlight facing us is green.

With my husband, this was not true. Reality molded itself to his whims; events changed over time to suit whatever point he was attempting to make at that moment. He would say something and later say he never said it, do something and later say he never did it or complain that something wasn’t the way he needed it to be and then throw a fit when I changed it.

It was like living on shifting sand. At one moment there was an oasis off to my left, the next a snake. I would expend great effort looking for landmarks and fixing them in my mind only to find out that they had disappeared overnight. I woke each morning with a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach as if I were seasick. I would open my eyes and see the familiar outline of my son’s room, the dresser, bed and bookshelf, reassuringly solid and stationary. Then I would gaze at my son’s sleeping face, eyelashes closed over soft pink cheeks, and frantically try to remember where things stood: what my husband had declared to be reality the night before, how angry he was and what part of the cycle of violence we were in.

Every morning I desperately tried to fit the pieces together to form a picture of what I needed to do to keep his world (and thereby ours) from spiraling out of control. I would desperately replay his words from the night before, poking through them, shaking and sifting them, hoping to find the key; hoping to find the one thing that would make him okay, or at least well enough to leave us alone.

Sometimes Ed would make it easy by complaining after-the-fact about something I 'should have known': "This carpet is trashed! It needs to be shampooed once a week! Don’t you know that by now? Even a blind woman would know it stinks so bad!" But most of the time I couldn’t figure out what had set him off, or what I could do to help him stay calm. He was just angry.

When I pointed out the contradictory things he had said or declared I needed to do in order for "things to be ok," he turned it around on me. He said I was crazy. He called me lazy and irresponsible. He denied things he had said, demanding I ‘admit’ that entire conversations had never happened. Being left with two contradictory statements—while he declared that things would be okay only when both were true—drove me crazy. He said things would be ok if I took out the trash, but then he’d insist that the trash couldn’t go out until next thursday. Being so unable to fix the problem made me powerless to help him.

This constant confusion got so bad that, finally, in the middle of an argument about who had said what, I exploded, "I need a tape recorder! Maybe then I can figure out what the hell is going on!"

But most of the time—when he was working, calmly watching the news, sitting out back with me guessing how many oranges the tree was likely to produce this year—I denied the insanity. I refused to see that I bounced around my husband like a fish on a hook, tied to the need to "understand," to "have compassion," and to "support" him.

I couldn’t see that I was adrift in the gulf between his version of reality and mine, alternately trying to believe that he was the wonderful, concerned, compassionate husband he told me he was and what my eyes and ears told me. I believed with all my heart that marriage was a '50/50 proposition', that relationships are 'give and take' and that 'it takes two to fight'.

And I also believed in his innocence, in his basic claim to humanity. After all, what kind of monster would try to control someone he loved to the point that he would actually attempt to define reality for her?

Apparently, mine.

My disbelief that my husband could in fact be such a monster was finally shattered when, in the middle of an argument about what I "should have done" because I "should have known," his eyes narrowed and he spat, "That’s not reality! And I’m going to tell you what reality is!"

I took a breath and I picked mine. I chose to believe what I saw instead of what he said. And I didn’t like what I saw. So I picked up a journal and began to write. I kept a record of what I saw, and I refused to let go of it. Never again would I allow the sheer force of his conviction to determine what I thought. Never again would I flounder in the grey area between his reality and mine. And never again would I be hooked.

Copyright Ó 2002 Dianne Kelly. All rights reserved.