one example of what an ass he was . . .

My ex-husband was severely abusive. Our PhD marriage counselor, with whom I continued in individual therapy when we gave up on counseling so I could get well enough to get out with my baby, testified in his deposition that my ex was the cruelest human he had ever met in over 20 years of marriage counseling -- this under oath. He said "Most people have a certain threshold of decency beneath which they will not sink and this man has no threshold of decency." He said a lot more, enough so my ex dropped his custody petition. And I have written about those chapters of my life many times already.

I was working when I got pregnant but my pregnancy was a particular tough one. I was hospitalized three times, for a week and once for two weeks, before I went into hospital to have my daughter. Hyperenemesis is the name for what was wrong but in 1981-82, even my obstetrician seemed to think my nonstop barfing, dry heaving and huge weight loss (whereas most pregnant moms gain weight! at least the weight of the baby -- not me, I lost a lot and I wasn't fat when I got pregnant). So I was home.

And I stayed home with her for awhile. Not all that long. She was only 18 months old when we separated and I went back into the work force. During the pregnant and then her first 18 months, I did quite a lot of work inside the house.

Most of the windowsills were badly weathered, beyond restaining. So I painted all the wordwork in the house, and all door frames, window frames, cupboards, shelving were wood, with a white enamel. A ton of hard work. And I did a lot of it while pregnant for we bought the house during the pregnancy, it needed some cosmetics.

I also painted the worn out kitchen cabinets, with offwhite enamel.

I learned that painting with enamel is harder than painting a wall with water-based wall paint. I had to use small brush strokes and work slowly to ensure there were no drips. Enamel dried fast and sanding little drips was more work so I learned to paint carefully.

I did other home improvement projects. On his good days, my ex sometimes bragged that he had not known he had married a housing contractor. I got the home improvement skills from my mom. She always had projects going in every house she ever lived in.  My dad was like my ex:  he never did anything in the house.  I was expected to be a modern working mother, bring home a paycheck but also do absolutely all of the home work, including lawn mowing.

I digress.

What I just remembered, with a sting coming to both my eyes, is that he insisted that every night before he came home, I removed all signs of any work I had been doing that day. I could not leave my paint cloths in view, my rolling pain out. He said he deserved to come home to an immaculate house.

I explained to him, even pleaded about this, that making me clean up my painting, sanding, wallpaper projects every day before he came home almost doubled my workload and slowed down the projects. I had to spend needless time getting everything set up again the next day and more needless time hiding it from the king of that castle.

What an asshole. What a male entitled white prick.

If I am attracted to a man, all can correctly assume he is an asshole, probably an intense narcissist (as our marriage counselor had diagnosed my ex, along with some other disorders -- doc said my ex needed extended psychiatric hospitalization to have any hope of normal, although he, the doc, doubted that five to seven eyars would show any improvement in a man with no threshold of decency. His three personality disorders were so severe.

All these years since my daughter shunned me while she was still a teen, never giving me a chance to be an adult friend to the adult I assume she has become, it only recently occurred to me that maybe she, like her father, has no threshold of decency. Maybe she, likd her dad, is severely narcissistic. I know for certain she is intensely OCD and has anorexia. But I only recently considered severe narcissism.

I have been remembering comments from her in which she was cruel to me. My sister was always telling me my daughter was cruel to me and that she thought it might kill me. But I didn't consciously perceive her cruelty. Lately, I get these flashes of my daughter saying very unkind things, refusing to do very simple things for me even while I was in the middle of doing huge things for her. Like this: she had to leave campus so she came to stay with me for some school break. And I drove her back, aobut five hours round trip for me. I could have put her on a bus.  I could have let her figure out and finance how to spend a week without the dorm to stay in. But I picked her up, fed her, took her shopping, treated her to all kinds of things and then undertook the five hours, approximately, to take her back to her dorm. As we got close to her campus, off the interstate, on two lane curving roads lined by trees, I asked her to sew a button on my winter coat. She had learned how to properly sew coat buttons in Waldorf. We still have another hour or so of driving and she could have sewn on that button in a few minutes.

She was furious that I had asked her to sew on a button, and she sneered and snarled at me, excoriating me to expecting her to do something for her. Forget that I had just feted her, spending money on her all week, and preparing food for her OCD anorexic self (a special kind of hell, food prep for a person starving themselves).

At the time, I may have pointed out that I was driving several hours as a favor to her. I may have pointed out, but I don't remember if i did, that I could pull over to the side of the road, far from her destination and just drop her there. If I didn't say such things, I was thinking them.

When I remembered not just her refusal to sew on one damned button for her mother, who had paid for clothes on her bed, food in the college cafeteria, the college dorm by selling my investment duplex Victorian, but her sneering nastiness. Her anger for me was so alive for her. And I see, now, that I coped with it as i coped with the serious abuse I had experienced in childhood and in my marriage to her father:  I blocked it out.

When I recently remembered her sneering, nasty, even vile refusal to sew on that button, I remembered how I had felt when she sneered at me about it. And I cried long and hard, as I am doing now as I write.

Like father like daughter?  did she turn out to be someone with no threshold of decency?  No mother wants to believe that aobut her daughter and I don't quite believe it. But I was not abusive to her and, I am remembering, she hated me almost always. What the fuck did I do to earn her angry revulsion towards me?

Oh another one of her narcissistic delusions:  she believed she was tidy and I was not, that if a few things were scattered around the house, it was due to my laziness and sloppiness. Yet when she would go away, like to summer camp or class camping trips or whatever, my house stayed tidy the whole time. I had bought her bullshit, that she was tidy and I was not but when I was in that house alone, it stayed tidy.