Requiem for a Goldfish

None of this was his fault.

There is no doubt that, in many ways, I married my father. My husband is a hard worker, a straight talker, and fervent protector of the people and things he loves. He also loves fart jokes. 

I was lucky enough to get to spend time with my future husband and my father before my father passed and their interactions were amazing to behold. My 6’4”, 300ish lb father, who no one ever said no to – well, except my mom – was now doing whatever my husband told him to do and even asking him to drive his car. Holy shit, no one ever drove my dad’s car except my dad.  

It’s somehow logical then, that before dating my husband, who is an awful lot like my father, I had to date a man who was an awful lot like my mother. 

I met Jon (not his real name) at a bar with my best friend at the time. I literally saw him across a crowded room. Let me tell you what I now know you should do when you lock eyes with someone across a crowded room: you run like hell and find the first therapist you can. You can find a better therapist later, just get in there and start talking about your childhood. 

Or, you can do what I did, which was take my former best friend’s advice that this dude was totally cool and continue to have a hellish two year relationship with him. I’ve always preferred to learn my lessons the hard way. 

I hadn’t really dated anyone in a long time before Jon. I had a lot of trouble getting over my first love and then I threw myself into grad school and traveled and generally tried not to think a whole lot about love at all. So when he asked for my number and called me up for a real date (a real date! Liz Phair said no one did those anymore), I was ripe for the proverbial picking. 

If you had asked me way back then in 1999 if this guy was like my mom, I would have just laughed. First, I didn’t know then that there was anything wrong with my mom. I hadn’t gone to therapy yet. Second, I couldn’t admit to myself that there was anything wrong with Jon for two years because, you guessed it, I hadn’t gone to therapy yet. 

Of course things were lovely at first. We did go on a real date, several actually, and we found we had a similar taste in music and movies. This was shortly before Christmas, and not knowing what to get someone who I had just started dating for Christmas, I asked my friends. They immediately suggested a goldfish. This struck me as funny and cute and so I did. 

That goldfish should have been my first real red flag. Jon freaked out when he saw it. He asked how I could have been so thoughtless to get him a fish when he owned a cat. He asked me how in the world he was going to find a tank for the fish to live in. I didn’t understand why it needed a huge tank and he told me that he obviously couldn’t live in a fish bowl, that it was cruel. I offered to keep the fish at my house, but he wouldn’t have that either. There was nothing I could do to make things right. 

As suddenly as he had gotten upset, he got happy, thinking about the other creatures he could put in a tank with the goldfish, and I pushed my concerns aside to have a boyfriend on New Year’s Eve for the first time in years. 

I don’t really remember how we went from casually dating to seriously dating, but I think it must have been around Valentine’s Day. Jon planned a big night out, complete with a soundtrack. I had never been courted like this before and it was enthralling. Someone who paid all of this attention to me had to be an amazing person, right?  Plus, all of the flowers and music and dinners more than made up for the awkward moments in the beginning. 

Although I don’t remember when things got serious, I do remember when things got weird. I had a job then working for a software company and Jon called me one day, saying he thought he was going to die and that I needed to come to his apartment. My boss overheard the conversation and the panic in my voice and told me to go see what was wrong. 

I drove to his house and knocked on the door, but he didn’t answer. I was worried that he was inside and hurt. I had no idea what was going on. After a lot of phone calls, I finally figured out that he had been taken to a nearby emergency room. It was there that I went to pick him up. He didn’t have shoes or a shirt on, because he hadn’t had them on when he called 911. They told him he had had a panic attack and that he needed to see a therapist and consider medication. 

It was an awful night. His normally bright mood was now overcast and threatening storms. I wanted to help him, but he didn’t want me anywhere near him. I went home, full of anxiety about what I could do for him. 

I remember calling a male friend that night and asking him what I could do to get help for Jon and my friend saying, “I’m more concerned about you getting help for you.” I didn’t know what he was talking about. I was fine. I didn’t have a problem. Jon had a problem and it was my job to help him with it. 

Jon did wind up going to a therapist and also wound up taking Paxil for about two days, before saying it made him feel “brainwashed” and he felt tons better and what happened was probably an isolated incident and he didn’t need to go to the therapist anymore either. I wanted so badly to believe this that I just believed it. 

I wound up losing my job that year when the tech bubble burst. Jon lost his job as well, though I had my suspicions that it had more to do with his attitude than anything else. His verbal outbursts had gotten more heated and closer together. Small things would make him crazy. One time I washed his Nalgene water bottle and when he found out I used soap (SOAP!), he railed about how it was ruined and he might as well throw it away and how could I be so stupid. I cried and apologized and he wound up storming off in a huff, leaving me feeling like I had ruined everything, although I wasn’t quite sure how. 

After Jon lost his job, he moved in with me. This was partly because he couldn’t pay his rent and also because I was needy enough to want him there. We had good times: making Indian food and watching old episodes of Columbo, listening to great music and talking about life. 

We also had more terrible times. While Jon used to storm off in a huff, he now disappeared completely for 3 to 4 days at a time, sometimes after a fight, sometimes with no warning at all. I would be sick with worry during these times. After the first disappearance, I learned there was no point in calling his family or friends. No one ever knew where he was. If he had left as a result of a fight, he would walk back in the door three days later like nothing had ever happened. If I tried to talk about what had happened, he acted like I was crazy. Hell, I was starting to think I was crazy. 

The most memorable of these disappearances started in early September 2001 and ended on September 12, 2001. This is how I came to spend September 11th alone, after watching the second plane hit the second tower at one of my 3 teaching jobs. I came home and stayed up all night watching ABC news and Peter Jennings. I wasn’t a huge news person, but watching Peter Jennings was the only thing that soothed me for the next 24 hours. We didn’t know what had happened and we didnt what was yet to come. And I was alone, worried about a person I loved. 

Jon came home the next day, whistling, as he was wont to do when he was in a great mood, with no idea of how the world had changed. He had somehow managed to not talk to anyone, listen to the radio, or see a newspaper in two days. I was disgusted. I was confused. I was scared. But just like I always did, I found a way to rationalize his behavior so we could stay together. 

As our relationship approached the two year mark, there were no more flowers, no more romantic songs, no more dinners out. There were just good periods in between bad times. I lived for those good times. Sometime in one of those good times, we decided we would get engaged. It was actually after we watched the movie, Requiem for a Dream. I mean, it is a super romantic movie. I remember Jon called my dad to ask him for his blessing, and when he did, my dad said, “Why the hell would y’all want to do something like get married?” Dad had a point, but I couldn’t see it at the time. 

The truth was that I loved Jon, but more than that, I felt like I was trapped there with him. I honestly didn’t see leaving him as a choice. One night, we had friends over and Jon proceeded to try to humiliate me by playing a video he had made of me singing an Air Supply song in the car. I begged him to turn it off and he refused. This was before cell phones with videos and this wasn’t something I was used to. He had used an actual video camera and hooked it up to my TV. 

Horrified, I went into the kitchen to escape and wound up having a conversation with a guy I had seen several times and who I had always thought was cute. He asked me a question about a set of salt and pepper shakers I had that Jon hated. He said they were cool and asked where I got them and when I answered, he really listened to me. I thought to myself, “THIS is the kind of guy I want to marry.” But somehow that thought didn’t make it from my head to my heart. I went back out and pretended that everything was OK with Jon. 

Things finally came to a head one night in December. I don’t remember anymore what we were fighting about. It could have been anything. For his denouement, Jon started talking in a British accent, took off his shoe, threw it at me, and left. 

Stunned, I stood rooted to the spot for a good 5 seconds before I burst out laughing and fell to the floor in exhaustion. “Oh my god!” I said out loud to no one, “He’s just fucking crazy!” This obvious truth finally hit me, along with the shoe, two years after the craziness had started. 

The irony of this whole relationship was that he wound up leaving me the next day. I don’t know that I wouldn’t have broken up with him, but he beat me to the draw. I was still processing the fact that he was truly insane and none of the things he had ever accused me of had been my fault. 

This revelation may seem obvious to an outside observer. During this same time, I saw friends in horrible relationships and I encouraged them to leave. I could see their patterns, but I couldn’t see my own. 

It took years in therapy to understand that Jon’s behavior was a lot like my mother’s: everything was about him and he projected all of his negative feelings about himself onto me. He could also switch from carefree to cruel in the blink of an eye, seemingly with no cause. He was a master gas lighter. I was the perfect receptacle for his bullshit because I had been raised with it. 

In the weeks that followed the break-up, I oscillated between heartbreak and relief. I have also felt this same feeling with my mom. I will always love her, but the relief of not being tethered to her sinking ship is immense. The relief of not having to worry about when Jon would blow up or what would set him off quickly overcame any sense of loss that I had. 

It did not, however, drown out the feeling of what an idiot I had been and how I could have let that relationship go on as long as it did. Today I think it had to get as bad as it did so that I would recognize the pattern. I had to hit bottom with someone so I could go on to something much better. 

I’m lucky that it ended the way it did and I got out clean. I understand now why people stay in abusive relationships and the terror they feel at being so stuck in their situation. 

I’m also lucky that when my parents divorced 9 months later, I was able to go and pay for therapy. I also had another really good reason to go to therapy: I started dating that boy I had talked to in my kitchen that night. The one I thought was like someone I’d like to marry someday. The one I’m married to now, 20 years later. The one who, while not 6’4” or 300 pounds, is like my dad in all the best ways.