I’ve been away from the blog for some time now. Every time I wrote I felt sick to my stomach. I even felt somewhat like I was back in the abuse. I was having much worse nightmares than before and past events started to bombard me. So, I needed to step back to figure out what was causing these things to happen.
I came to realize that the problem was coming from my writing posts to protect “Scott”. Over the time I wrote the blog, I changed what I called him three different times to keep his identification safe. I went from calling him “the one I loved’ to “my husband” and lastly calling him by his middle name, Scott. I had lived my life hiding what was really going on and who he really was in private to protect him. It was also so I wouldn’t have to reveal what my life was really like in our marriage.
“The one I loved” was how I referred to him in the beginning because I did love him. I had thought of him as my best friend since we were in high school. During that time, he seemed to care so much for me and pursued me to date him for years. Unfortunately, once he “caught” me, things changed. His interest definitely waned and how he interacted with me was different after we started dating.
After he died, one of my college friends told me that after our double dates, she would tell her then boyfriend (now husband) to please never talk to or treat her like Scott did me. I was surprised when she said it. I’d always had an abuser in my life, so I thought I’d recognize abusive words when I heard them. It turns out, I couldn’t recognize his abusive words because they sounded very different from the words directed at me previously. I remember telling him after we got engaged that if he ever said the phrases that had hurt me up until then, that I would leave him. I would not put up with hearing those things for the rest of my life. He agreed and he was true to his word.
He simply said other damaging words that I wasn’t used to hearing.
“The one I loved” soon became much too hard for me to type, first, because it made me feel like a complete and utter fool for loving him. And I did love him. I wouldn’t say that he was the love of my life, but I loved him for the best friend I’d known him to be. Unfortunately, evidently he did not love me in any way. I believe I’ve said it before, but I can honestly say that I’m not sure he knew how to love.
The other issue with referring to him in this way was because I had learned so much more about him and the things he had done while we were married. So the love I had for him was turning into anger and other negative feelings. This is when I started referring to him as my husband. My thinking was that he had legally been my husband on paper.
Unfortunately, he had never really been my husband. My definition of marriage is that you stop dating other people. He never stopped. In fact, he dated more people after we were married than he had ever dated before. I also believe that your spouse, after God, becomes your top priority. In addition, I believe that you look out for their best, try to be there for them and protect them. He did not believe the same way I did. In fact, he did the opposite. I know I’ve referenced this before, but after he died, I found something he hand wrote saying that he set out to hurt me the night before or morning of the day he planned to do his extramarital activities. He knew that I froze when I was attacked with words and so, if he wounded me, he knew I would not try to contact him throughout the day and interrupt his plans.
That’s why I finally landed on his middle name. It was easier, but I still knew it wasn’t right. It made me angry and hurt every time I typed it and edited the drafts. Something was definitely wrong in using Scott, but I truly believed I was supposed to write the blog. So I continued…until I couldn’t anymore.
But now I am stepping into the truth. I am going to call him by his first name from this day forward so that I can write authentically and not keep wounding myself. I have no idea why this scares me, but it does. It’s probably because I’ve never felt I was able to be completely honest in this area and I’d been quieted way too many times. That needs to stop. So…
His name was Matt.
~ Joanna Lynn
