July 27, 2007

• half a dozen comments

  Is it coincidence that some of my posts get more comments from men, while others get more from women?  That’s a rhetorical question.  I don’t believe in coincidence.  Yesterday’s memoir segment has so far received six comments, all from women, and all but one expressing some degree of disapproval or outrage over my teenaged first husband’s behavior.  Deerinwater0727 only expressed her appreciation for my storytelling ability.  (BTW, you could go wish her a happy birthday.)

  That guy I’m calling, “Ford,” in the hope that it somehow might mitigate any embarrassment or possible damage to his reputation from my telling our story, may or may not have garnered a reputation worth preserving in the decades since I’ve had any contact with him.  The pseudonym would be a thin disguise anyway, to anyone who has known him all his life, because f-o-r-d was, or he thought it was, part of his name back then.  Oh, well, that’s part of the story I haven’t gotten to yet.  It can wait.

  The nicest thing said about him in that half dozen comments was that he was a “jerk.”  That was spinksy.  She is generally a nice lady, with the accent on “lady.”  But ladyhood is one accusation that cannot be leveled against lupa.  She called him a, “bastard,” and, “lowlife scum.” 

  Empathetic as always, misunderstood47 has focused on the things, “that he did to,” me.  Furia_Fubar, too, expressed an urge to comfort and console the me-back-then.

  The harshest judgment was this from babykittyfrancais:

  Ford is some piece of work.  I’m sorry your real Dad wasn’t alive to
  put a bullet to his brain.  I don’t care how old you guys were he was
  still old enough to know better.  I’m sure you are way past this now,
  but when I read things like that I’m just *grrrr*

  Okay, my dears, now that we’ve all gotten that out of our systems, let’s get real.  First off, if my father had been alive, I would not have been getting married at age fourteen.  I would have been firmly on that PhD track, disciplined and focused.  The road my life took was established when my father died.  My addiction to orgasms began on the evening of his funeral, and my neurotic craving for “love” and validation was born of his absence from my life and my belief that I had killed him.  I told that story here and expanded on it here in response to comments.

  As for Ford’s knowing “better,” who can say?  He was a “piece of work,” all right.  His warped personality was partially the work of his stepgrandfather, who beat him and forced him to go out and beg for money for the old man’s whiskey.  Oddly enough, even at the time, I had been inclined to overlook or excuse Ford’s violence because he had such violence done to him, and that was long before my study of psychology revealed to me that abused children generally grow up to be abusive adults.

  Infidelity is another issue.   I think I understand it, but reconstructing my first husband’s personality so long after the fact is not too different from a postmortem psychoanalysis.  Hang in here with me and I’ll give it my best shot.

  The diagnosis of NPD, narcissistic personality disorder, was not in currency at the time.  He might have been called a sociopath for placing his own drives and desires above social mores.  Someone like him would not now be diagnosed with NPD even though his behavior is consistent with it, because of his age.  The personalities of normal adolescents go through a phase of narcissism that would be considered pathological in an adult.  Ford was sixteen when I married him, seventeen when he threw me out for that carhop he had met two or three days before.

  Here is how I reconstruct it:  Ford was growing weary of my insecurities and needs.  I was a tiresome crybaby, afraid of shadows, craving protection, validation, and reassurance.   I was also, then even more than now, a nitpicking ultra-Virgo perfectionist.    Even though he trained me early on not to criticize him, by slapping me or punching me in the mouth if he didn’t like what I said, he must have recognized that he was no shining hero in my eyes.

  I’d be willing to bet, also, that Sarah gave good head.  I had yet to learn how to do that.  The sexual mores I had absorbed from my mother and our culture judged oral sex to be a perversion.  I had not yet entirely liberated myself from Southern Baptist programming and my mother’s hangups.  Ford lacked what it took to teach me, whether that was knowledge, or motivation, or both, I don’t know.  He just liked to jam his little penis down my throat — and isn’t it fortunate for me that it was such a little one?

  Even in my relative ignorance, I must have been conscious of the penis size issue (but not yet aware that it was such a sensitive issue to some men), because I recall one day in our little old house in Vernon the previous winter, when we had a discussion of “average” penis size.  I don’t recall how it started.  I might have asked a question.  I have always asked a lot of questions.  Ford told me it was seven inches, the average, and proudly stated that he was “bigger than average.”  He used a ruler to demonstrate that his erection was more than seven inches.   He held the ruler along the underside of his penis, measuring the length across his scrotum, from his anus to the tip.   I questioned (a) whether it wouldn’t be more accurate to measure the topside, and (b) his eyesight — it looked closer to six inches to me.  He lost the erection.

  Who knows, really, what was going through his mind with Sarah?  I can make some educated guesses at what was going through his brain.  There was the dopamine, testosterone and norepinephrine cocktail that defines sexual attraction for all mammals.  That would have been on the wane for him with me.  I was pregnant, his biological work with me was done.  Presumably, his behavior was dictated by physiological, neurochemical cues, more than by his higher reasoning centers.   In stark mammalian reproductive terms, I was no longer the “beloved,” and she was.

  Helen Fisher writes:

  Elevated concentrations of dopamine in the brain produce exhilaration, as well as many of the other feelings that lovers report–including increased energy, hyperactivity, sleeplessness, loss of appetite, trembling, a pounding heart, accelerated breathing, and sometimes mania, anxiety or fear.   …Even the craving for sex with the beloved may be indirectly related to elevated levels of dopamine.  As dopamine increases in the brain, it drives up levels of testosterone, the hormone of sexual desire.

  Ford was also a risk-taker, an adrenaline junkie as I was, and the adrenaline buzz of illicit “love” and sex could very well have added to his quick addictive attachment to his new source of narcissistic supply.

  I find it ironic that I would be making apologies for my unfaithful husband’s loutish behavior.  It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it, and I’m someone.  There are no victims in this piece.  I had been warned.  I had chosen the “bad boy” type.  It was the only type that turned me on.  I was a dopamine – norepinephrine – testosterone (yes, females secrete it, too) – adrenaline – oxytocin -etc. addict, to an extent at least as great as Ford’s.  Stay tuned.  There’s more to this story.

  ---

  This is my son Doug’s twenty-sixth birthday.  The picture of us was taken half his lifetime ago, on his thirteenth birthday. 

  We went to Wasilla together on Monday, an early birthday outing for him because we were running low on some supplies and I didn’t feel up to making two trips in one week.  We had considered taking in a movie, both of us wanting to see POTC At World’s End, but it was already gone from the theater and not yet in Blockbuster.  We settled for two DVDs and a pizza at Greyfox’s cabin that evening, after having lunch together, the 3 of us, at Yukon’s Diner, and a few hours during which Greyfox stayed home while Doug shopped and I sat and waited for some tire work to be done (Doug had to change a flat tire before we got away from home that morning).

  He spent his birthday cash on books and games, getting bargains at a used book store and pawn shop, and has been hogging the PS2 all week with his four new games.  I baked his cake yesterday, his choice:  yellow cake with cream cheese icing.  It’s a good thing I got two boxes of cake mix, and fortuitious that cream cheese was on a “buy two, get one free,” deal, because we ate the first cake already and are both ready for another.  I have decided it’s time to bring this latest sugar binge to a halt… just as soon as the second birthday cake is gone.  This is public notice of that fact.
  

  • 5:07 pm
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