You have to understand where I was at twenty-eight. No college degree, no pedigree, no silver spoon lodged in my ass. Just a blue-collar, white-trash Cailfornia kid who worked himself to the bone. And it paid off. I got the title: Mechanical Engineer for Tokyo Sumitomo. I made enough to pay the mortgage every month, enough to feed and clothe one kid, with another on the way. Enough to support that kid’s stay-at-home mother, who was eight months pregnant with my next burden.
I worked ten, twelve-hour days without complaint, like a man is supposed to. I was the only source of income. The lights stayed on, the water kept flowing. I bought a house in Milwaukee, Oregon, and was remodeling it myself, every nail hammered, every dollar coming from my own goddamn salary.
On top of that, I was in the Mormon church leadership, a member of the goddamn Bishopric, investing thirty hours a week into that racket. I didn’t drink. I didn’t smoke. I didn’t look at pornography, didn’t even look at another woman. I didn’t complain about the sexless, joyless life I was living. My weekends were a blur of service projects: putting on roofs for old widows, helping people move, participating in Boy Scout crap. I’d get called out at all hours to go to the hospital and give blessings to the sick. On Sundays, I’d prepare lessons, pull men aside for personal meetings, run the Elders Quorum. Scoutmaster, home teacher to eight different families, knocking on their doors once a month to make sure their lives were okay. I even went out with the missionaries, trying to drag more poor bastards into the fold.
I paid my tithing. I went to the temple. I wore the holy Mormon garments. I voted Republican. I did nothing, nothing, wrong in my boring-ass life. I was the pure, uncut, quintessential family man.
And then one day, it all went to hell.
I come home, and there she is, my beautiful wife, the person I’d placed on a fucking pedestal. She’s lying on the couch, our unborn child in her belly, and I can see she’s in pain. Something’s troubling her. I’m still in my work clothes – slacks, shirt, tie, dress shoes. I get down on one knee next to her, touch her belly. “Is everything okay?” I ask, smiling right into her eyes. “How are you doing?”
I’m kneeling there, to my wife, my precious woman, and her whole demeanor changes. A coldness I hadn’t seen in a long time creeps into her face. It was there like some dormant virus, suddenly possessing her. Her head twisted just so, her eyes like chips of glass, and she unleashed a venomous rant. There was no direction to it, no single point of correction, no “here’s what’s bothering me.”
No. It was the kitchen sink. It was my mom. It was her mom. It was my grandmother. It was what a piece of shit I was, how we were ever going to get out of this mess, how I’d never make more money because I didn’t have a pedigree. It just went on and on.
I just watched her. Didn’t interact, didn’t intervene. I just watched her convert into something I hated, something I didn’t want anywhere in my life. This wasn’t an argument. This was something new. My mother argued this way. Her mother argued this way. It wasn’t about love or respect. It was designed to tear down, to rip apart, to destroy the other person by digging up every sensitive subject you know will get them, just because you’re angry and you need to lash out. I just watched her, my non-alcoholic, non-cigarette-stained fingers resting on my knee. I watched her for fifteen solid minutes rip every last achievement I had to shreds, give me no recognition for the world I had built for us.
And at the end of it all, when her storm of rage finally blew itself out, when all the venom was spent and she was just sitting there, panting in the ruins… you know what it was about?
The garbage disposal. The one I’d installed with my own two hands. It wasn’t working right.
All that poison, all that character assassination, all that history dredged up from the muck… it was all over a fucking clogged drain. What a thing to come home to.
And then it happened. Tears. Actual tears in my eyes. After everything I’d done, worked so hard to change who I was, to escape the cloth we were both cut from. And here it was, our past, our goddamn DNA, rising up to pull my partner away from me.
When it was all done, of course, I blamed it on the pregnancy. That’s what other guys told you. “That’s just how women get, be patient, be loving.” But those tears, they didn’t just dry up. They burned. And the hours I spent later, sitting on the toilet, just thinking, contemplating… that day changed everything. I’d look in the mirror for months after and tear up, because I felt like something had died.
Something did die that day. That was the day I lost my wife. The one I was married to, the one I thought I was happily married to. The love was gone, poisoned by that venom.
When the second child was born, there was nothing left between us. Even taking care of the kids, she was just… angry. There was the illusion, of course. Going to church, playing the happy couple. But at home, she was a storm cloud of rage. And she’d take it out on the kids. Mental abuse, some of it. She wanted to break our second child, who she said was “too spirited.” Make the kid’s life miserable until she conformed, until she was “doing the right thing.” The most stupid, fucked-up thing I’d ever heard.
And somehow, I don’t know if it’s in the female DNA, but she could gaslight me like no one I’ve ever seen. Slippery as hell. You could never pin her down, never get her to admit anything, never get a “sorry.” Everything was your fault for even thinking she meant what she said. Or she’d deny saying it, but still never apologize. A rollercoaster of crazy, over and over again.
You mix that with a loveless, joyless, sexless existence. You mix that in with her goddamn entitlement. My marriage was never the same. It just got worse, year after year. By the time I was thirty, I hated going home. I started to hate being married. I was living unhappily, still hoping she might change. Maybe if I bought her a new house in Bend, Oregon, paid in full? Maybe then? I couldn’t figure it out. But I knew I couldn’t fight back, not her way. And I didn’t have the tools. With my mother, I could just run away. With this one? I had kids. I was trapped.
Maybe if I paid for her to stay home, she’d like me. Maybe if I paid for the vacations, for her hobbies, for bigger lenses for her camera, for an Apple computer… Maybe. You know what? With all those things in place, a self-made millionaire busting his ass for her, you know what I got out of it? Not a goddamn thing. None of it worked.
So, I started drinking. My wife didn’t want to date me, didn’t like going out with me. So I started dating my kids, taking them out, which I still do. I started having friends over, we’d go out drinking, go ATV riding. I’d spend weeks in Baja with my father. I bought a car in Florida and took two weeks to drive it back, just to be away.
I retired at thirty-five, thinking, “Maybe I’m working too much. Maybe if I just stay home, things will get better.” They didn’t. They got worse. At thirty-five, I watched her morph into this two-faced creature. One side for me, the ugly side. And another for the public, the illusion: “Look at me, I’m so great, I’m a super-mom, I’m the greatest mom,” all of it, of course, financed by me. Years of neglect, years of never being rewarded for anything. So yeah, was I going out drinking with my buddies? Yes. Because there was nothing left for me in that house anymore.
And let me make this crystal fucking clear to anybody listening. My marriage didn’t go to shit because of my drinking or my dickin’ around. My marriage went to shit when I was twenty-eight years old, a hardcore, temple-going, converted Mormon father figure, pure marriage material. Everything I’ve done in my life that you could call “negative,” has been a reaction to that action.
I left the church because of the bitterness of my marriage. I started drinking again to find some kind of happiness, any source, to wash down the negative shit I was force-fed at home. I hung out with other people so I could stay out of the house and away from my pissed-off wife.
And then, to make her happy, thinking maybe this will fix it, she talks me into having a third child. A last-ditch effort to save the marriage. “I’m gonna do better now,” she said. “I’m gonna be a wife.” Bullshit. You can’t be a good mom if you don’t have a husband who loves you. You shouldn’t get the badge of being a “good mom,” you shouldn’t get a goddamn gift on Mother’s Day, if the man of the house, if the father, if the husband is unhappy. That’s the basic fucking foundation.
Once the third child was born, I spent the next six years sleeping in a separate bedroom. My drinking became a problem. Marriage counseling didn’t help. I had no control over the situation, and it was just getting worse. She was trying to box my daughters and me into the same system of punishment, trying to make us conform like it was some goddamn Catholic inquisition. She started collecting binders. Binders! Full of all the bad things we did, me included. Binders on our kids, binders on her friends. And during an argument, she’d bring them out, point to them. “This is what you did here. This is what you did then.” Something psychologically wrong with that, as the marriage counselors pointed out, repeatedly.
Eventually, I opened a tequila bar. A place where I could see how normal people worked. Women seemed to like me. People were thankful just to have a job. You give good service, you get a good tip. Simple. And she would come into my restaurant, Amalia’s, with that illusion of hers, talking to people, smiling and laughing with other men. But with me, when we got home? Silence. Nothing.
The marriage counselor eventually just became my counselor. We started talking every week on the sly, without the wife’s knowledge, because she’d refused to go anymore. Why? Because the therapist had gotten too close to the bone, peeled back the skin and exposed the raw, ugly truth of the matter.
The truth was this: my wife admitted she didn’t like me. Oh, she “loved” me, sure. She loved the money, loved the house, loved the goddamn lifestyle. But the man providing it all? She couldn’t stand him. The therapist called her out on it, pointed out her whole sick game of setting me up for failure just so she could stand over the wreckage, hands on her hips, and get the satisfaction of saying, “I told you so.”
She had fallen back to her factory settings, reverted to the default person she’d been programmed to be in her own miserable childhood. She was no longer the “pick of the litter” I thought I’d married; she was just her mother, redux. Scheming, bitter, manipulative. And when confronted with that ugly reflection? She ran from it. I stayed.
We’d had other marriage counselors before, too. A whole goddamn parade of them. And each one, after a few sessions, caught on. They saw her slipping back into her mother’s skin, saw the games, and they’d offer to see her one-on-one, to try and fix that so we could work on the marriage. She refused every time.
Sad, isn’t it? The lengths some people will go to just to stay broken.
So I would contuine seeking the counsolr once a week, best $100 I would send, in every session, the counselor would say, “James, it’s not going to get any better. Just leave.” And I’d tell her, “I can’t. This isn’t a hanging offence. Maybe next month will be better. Maybe next year.” I spent six years sleeping in that guest bedroom. I was in a sexless, joyless marriage. That was the raw core of it. We weren’t married for those six years. We were just… there.
At the ripe old age of forty, right after our twentieth anniversary, I finally asked for the divorce. That anniversary, that was the last time we ever touched. It was a pitiful affair – soulless, loveless, dead as a doornail. I think I even faked an orgasm, just to get the goddamn thing over with. That’s how far gone we were.
And once I pulled the pin on that grenade? It took five years for the shrapnel to stop flying. She didn’t want a divorce; she wanted a goddamn war, a public crucifixion. She made sure to send copies of every slimy court paper to my family members. Little updates for my mother and father. “See what your son is doing? See what your grandson is doing to us?”
My kids were her primary weapon. Turned them against me, poisoned the well until they couldn’t even talk to their own father without feeling like traitors. My oldest daughter, the one who’d been my best little friend in the whole damn world, she turned on me completely. Believed every lie she was fed.
And the lies were everywhere. The kids’ school was a gossip pool, and she swam in it like a goddamn shark. The story raced through the PTA, the Girl Scouts, the Mormon church, probably the Red Cross for all I know. The official narrative? I’d run off with a million dollars in cash and left her and the kids with nothing. She’d lay out this sob story for anybody who’d listen, and I mean anybody. One day, she’s at the goddamn dental office, and the receptionist (who I had slept with) just asks, “How are you doing?” An hour later, the whole office has heard her tale of woe, this tragic story of the abandoned mother. It wasn’t just her or a one time thing; this happened to several of my friends, the same damn playbook. A woman scorned, weaponizing the world’s sympathy.
We spent five years in court. Five years. The case files were fourteen folders thick; goddamn murder cases have less paperwork. She changed tactics like a cornered snake, undermined my business, bled me dry through lawyers. Over three hundred grand in legal bills alone. And at the end of it, I lost.
I lost everything. I mean everything. I lost the toys, the house, the cars. I lost my kids. I lost my identity. I lost my life as I knew it. I lost my money.
Everything.
And you know what? There’s a reason divorce is so goddamn expensive. It’s because it’s worth every single penny. I’ve never been happier.
But the saddest part of this whole story, the part that still gets me, that still gnaws at me to this day, isn’t the money or the public humiliation. It was losing my partner, that incredible person I thought I knew. It was like watching cancer, a slow, creeping thing, eating away at her soul until the woman I married just… faded. Faded into some bitter stranger I didn’t recognize.
That’s what I mourn. Not the marriage, but the death of that woman, years before the divorce papers were ever signed. I’m scarred forever from having to watch her turn into her own goddamn mother, right before my eyes.
Author’s Note
What you’ve just read is a story about the slow, grinding death of an American dream. It’s not a pretty story, and it’s not meant to be. This isn’t about finding a villain or a hero; there are none here, only casualties. It’s an attempt to articulate a very specific, often unspoken, male perspective on love, duty, resentment, and the quiet desperation that can build behind a placid suburban facade.
The voice is intentionally raw, cynical, and steeped in the language of a man who feels he was pushed to the brink and then shoved over the edge. It’s a story told from the foxhole, full of the grime and fury of a long, personal war. The intent isn’t to justify the narrator’s later actions – the drinking, the anger – but to trace them back to their source: a single moment, a single rant over a broken garbage disposal, that he identifies as the death of love and the birth of a long, cold resentment. It is, at its core, one man’s bitter and unapologetic truth about losing everything to find himself.
