Not Me

Expectations had been building up for quite a while. To her, the expectations were legitimate,...real. It was all she knew. She demanded him to work three jobs and bring the money back home to her. “The kids need clothes”, she said. “You don’t make enough money. I’m not sure how I ever got involved with you.”

He would drink whenever he could in between jobs and even at his jobs as well. It kept him going so he didn’t have to feel because all he felt was him being responsible for all of it. They were married and had three young children to take care of. It was true that he didn’t make enough money, but he didn’t want to put that kind of effort into these jobs that he cared nothing for, so the job cycle continued, it was all he knew anyway, this was how it was with his mom and dad as well.

The story of their relationship was buried under many years of mask upon mask. The masks that they wore, that their parents had worn, that their grandparents and great grandparents had worn.

They broke up in a pretty awful way. They fought, insisting that they were right, and the other wrong. The kids suffered in between. There was infidelity. There was desertion, lies and manipulation. Their new temporary partners suffered the same fate from them. 

Each of their ancestors were always screaming into their ears how they are right and should not give in because the other was wrong. When they were finally divorced, they repeated the cycle with new partners. She blamed his new girlfriend, he blamed her new boyfriend, and everything that had happened between them never seemed to have anything to do with either of them personally, it was always the other’s fault.

Their prickly defensiveness shot out whenever anyone pointed it out to them. Their continual avoidance of growth and the momentum of their unconscious desires, put them on the path to living miserably ever after.

So what would it be?

~Janice M. Burke

Image by Janice M. Burke