I Closed My Eyes. Michele Weldon

the signal that I was now married to a man who would tell me he wanted vacuum marks on the rug when he got home from work. Who would tell me driving home from the doctor’s office in 1988, where I found out I was pregnant with our first son, that with this news he was sure my mother would now control our lives. This man would later tell me that my job was to take care of the house and the children and that everything else in my life, including my work and my writing, was mere distraction.

      Here was a man who would hit me on Christmas Eve. Here was a man who would hit me when I was pregnant with our first son. This man would tell me he didn’t want my friends from high school in our house. And here was the sign that the man I thought was perfect would wound me more physically and emotionally than anyone I would ever know.

      “Please, God, let me kill her,” he said nearly ten years later, six months before I obtained the emergency order of protection that led to the end of our marriage.

      But that August afternoon, with my friends waving and smiling and the photographer taking pictures, I entered into a life I could not have prepared for. This man’s presence would later make my stomach tighten and my heart pound just by hearing his key turn in the lock. This man would loathe me.

      Here was a sign. But I only saw the handsome man in the gray-striped cutaway morning suit telling the world he loved me and that he was triumphant. He won me. I was the prize.

      Card received on Christmas Day, 1989

       My dear Michele,

       I am so proud and thankful to be your husband. Not only do you inspire with your commitment to career goals, but your love of Little Man and the generous spirit you show others is beyond reproach.

       Our Marriage continues to evolve, though I often disappoint myself with regressive anger or an inability to sort out my feelings. Yet in the aftermath of those resultant fights, I see my love for you. At no time, even in the loudest or most stressful confrontations does this realization of my love for you waver. My hopes for this year are a healthy Little Man, a blessed new baby and growth for you and I together and individually. For you, I pray your dreams come true in a flourishing career as a writer and success with the outpouring of your ideas. God has blessed you with an unparalleled creativity that often awes me. I also pray that you learn to care for yourself with some of the zeal that you care for others. Perhaps frequent massages, naps, workouts and other important health habits could become part of your 1990.