Bonnie Kaye's Straight Talk (37 page)

My recommendation to those who contemplate leaving their gay spouses, is to get a safe deposit box and put cash in it, so that you never go hungry or go without gas for your car, etc, etc. I also recommend getting a PO BOX for your mail so that he doesn’t get into your business. I got a separate checking account when the financial abuse and control started-etc about 11 years ago.

Also, get the best lawyer you can. Not necessarily the best family law attorney, but one who is ethical, honest, with a good reputation in the community-i.e. not one to just keep things churning to make the price go up. I got a recommendation from a mother of my son’s friend who is an attorney. My attorney happened to be a former elected state attorney. I actually interviewed 3 and was especially comfortable with the one I chose.

I hope this helps.

D.

Hi Bonnie,

I’m another one from an extremely dysfunctional but small family. My father is a pedophile. He swears he has never acted on it and only fantasizes (Yuch!) But he did try, for a period of time, to act on it when I was a budding adolescent. He later went on to tell me he could have nothing to do with me and my daughter when she was a budding adolescent because he was having fantasies about her. Wasn’t that nice of him to share that with me?

When he started to try to get close to me I had thought that he finally loved me as his daughter. I was 13 and 14 and it was the early sixties and I was naïve, naïve but not without intuition.

He rejected me when I was a baby, toddler and in my childhood up until I started to bloom. So, when he started to want to talk to me warmly, I thought he was finally caring about me. However, it FELT creepy. That was the clue, how I felt. He was an alcoholic and when he was sober, a very backward person. He would come into my room at night after being out in a tavern all night and lean over me and talk with a creepy smile on his face. I didn’t like it but I thought what if the creepy feeling is wrong and he really just cares about me? So, I let it go on. He didn’t touch me or proposition me for quite a while. Later, he did and the very next day I told my mother I was moving to my grandmother’s. She begged me to stay and that she would do something. Well, I had to be alone with him in the house every school day for three hours until she came home from work and it was a small house we lived in. I hated having to be alone with him. He never tried anything again, but it was awful having to be around him. Finally my mother divorced him and when he was gone it was like we just let out a giant sigh of such relief.

My mother, grandmother and my aunt have told me so many things he did to neglect and to hurt me. He slapped me when I was 2 and a half and made my eye bleed so badly it was squirting out blood.

My mother left me alone with him when I was very little when she went to church. Well, my father was in bed sleeping off his drunk from the night before and didn’t bother with me at all; I had newspapers spread all over the apartment and every gas jet on the stove up full force. The house and he and I could have died.

Once I fell in the toilet, while my rather stupid mother left me with him, and he would not get out of bed to fish me out, my aunt had heard me from downstairs and came up and got me out.

When I was a baby my mother left me with him when she went to church and when she arrived home she said I was screaming at the top of my lungs and my crib and me were just sopping wet. She also so there was a big mess on the floor and the wall. I guess he tried to give me a bottle and I didn’t want it so he just threw the glass bottle crashing against the wall and left me to scream and soak.

And he used to take me for car rides to a little lake near our home and sometimes to a forest preserve and we would just sit there. He never talked to me. Now, I wonder whether he was thinking of how he could maybe kill me or just leave me behind.

My mother was so wrapped up in her own misery alternated with her escaping the situation that I think she forgot that this might not be the best thing for me to have to live with my father. And this was the day and age of worrying about what the neighbors, family and the church would think, so she wanted to keep up “appearances”, Oh God, I am so glad those days are gone.

The bottom line is since my father was sadistically rejecting and neglectful of me I worked at not having men rejected me all of my life until I married my gay husband. I was depressed when he bounded into my life and my home and maybe by that time by subconscious just told me I didn’t deserve anything more than to marry a man who couldn’t give me the love I needed.

My father also left the area right before my gay husband made way into my life. No one knew where my father went to. That to me was the ultimate rejection. Why? Because now I had been an adult for quite a while, he had gotten sober and was in AA for at least two decades and we were good conversation friends. (My father is also very intellectual, and aside from his mental illnesses, a very interesting person) So, now I took that as I was still a big nothing, he didn’t even bother to tell me he was leaving and where he was going.

There are so many other things, but this is where I will end. You’ve gotten the picture by now.

I actively staved off being with a man of terrific dysfunction, but there were too many things that occurred within the same time frame that set me up to allow Jim to come into my life and just take it over for his own use.

My mother still doesn’t understand, but by now I know she has herself wrapped in many layers of denial so that she won’t experience any guilt…it would be just too traumatic for her, I suppose…she herself was molested repeated by her own alcoholic father before she was ten years old! And she never told a soul until she told me when she was in her mid forties! Her father and her silence and maybe a displaced sense of guilt as a child really screwed her up….this all really messed with her mind because she doesn’t face realities the way most people do…she always pretties things up…and this just creates a fiction of the truth. She isn’t a liar…she just changes nasty realities into niceties. Because she raised me…I used to do the same thing and didn’t really realize this until I was in counseling in my early twenties. My cousin and I were like joined at the hip since I was born 8 months after her and she would make fun of me and my all-too-sunny outlook that was a clone of my mother’s.

Life is a hell of a lot of work, isn’t it Bonnie? I hope this helps.

Take care, and love to you and your readers,
Lynda

Bonnie,

In response to Di, the reader who wanted to know how and what to tell her children about her impending divorce...

I don’t remember the names of the books I found, but there are plenty out there on how to tell children in an age appropriate manner. (Our children were 7, 6 and 3 years of age when we told them about the divorce.) Having found some of those books at the library, we used what we read and told them that we had been unhappy for a long time, we tried all we could to make it better, but it just wasn’t going to work so we were going to divorce and daddy was moving out. We also reinforced that it had nothing to do with them and there was nothing they did or could do to change the situation. We also told them we still loved them and we would both be involved in their lives.

It was very confusing to them because we weren’t arguing. They had no outward sign that there was a problem. (We got along pretty well, actually. But toward the end, we were walking on pins and needles around each other.) They didn’t have many questions at all, other than ‘why?’ To that we repeated the same information and that seemed to appease them... for a while. They took the news pretty well. I think the truth of the moment was harder for us than it was for them because they didn’t really understand what was happening. The oldest said “Yeah! We get a new dad!” (Which of course he didn’t mean, but he was nervous) The middle child cried, but not for long. The youngest was clueless.

As with anything, this took years of reinforcement because it would pop up time and again. We had to continue to repeat the vague reasons we made the decision to divorce. When the older two were around 10 and 9, I began dating again. This caused them to kick up the volume about our divorce, and had them stretching to find a way to blame one of us (i.e. Me). I COULDN’T HAVE THAT. I couldn’t have their incorrect assumptions damage their opinion of me as a mother, so I had to tell them the truth (because their dad wouldn’t do it). By that time I felt they were ready for the truth. And, again, it was in an age-appropriate manner. Such as... Dad wants a boyfriend, not a girlfriend/wife. I won’t share my husband with anyone else, etc. I never brought up the subject of sex or intimacy, and they never asked. Which is just as well, because the sex aspect or lack thereof was just a symptom of the problem anyway, and not the deal breaker.

Best of luck to Di and all others facing this situation.

Jill

Dear Bonnie’s Readers (and my personal sisters for life)

I want to share my story with all of you. Here I sit, one year after I discovered my 7 year marriage was over. I discovered my husband was Gay. He moved to Florida (in order to set up “our” new life) when in reality he was running from it. We bought a beautiful home on the Gulf, while I stayed behind (as usual) to “do” everything because I could.

I’m not sure if I was angry at finding out he was Gay, or the fact that he had no compassion for the hell he had created in my life (left behind). I had taken care of all of his needs during our entire relationship. That’s what women do. We nurture, we enable (with a positive approach, not negative). I have no children, but I know what it feels like to be worried sick, sacrifice my own happiness and accommodate the needs of someone else, because I could and I wanted to.

Without going into the obvious (disbelief, anger, confusion, anguish, grief, acceptance and finally not giving two Shi***ts) I want you to know that I did come out of the most devastating period of my life. And anyone who is reading this should please believe that you can to. (I never did, while it was happening to me).

I left my business 24 months ago. For the first time, dependent on him! He couldn’t just leave. He had to “take me down” with him. I never could understand that. Now I understand that it is because Gay men prey on anyone they think they can manipulate. Your misery is their pleasure. It “justifies” them somehow. (“Look at her…so pathetic and weak, she
deserves
this). Trust me their manipulation knows no bounds. If I sound harsh…replace yourself with your own daughter and re-think what I just said.

Gay men that steal straight woman from successful hetero relationships have no compassion. No acknowledgement. They will never admit that they wronged you because they are living a lie.

One year ago, I was living off my credit cards and crying my eyes out in a bottle of wine every night. Today, I am closing $2.5 million in business and the top “dog” in my Company. Today is my best day ever. Not because of the money…but because his “problem” didn’t take me down with him. I would never have made this difficult journey were it not for discovering Bonnie. She doesn’t even know me and she saved me. Reach out without shame and let your fears and suspicions become real. We can’t hide the boogie-man. But we sure as heck can expose the liar without shame. Question: If your child came to you and said “Mommy, I’m afraid of this man because he doesn’t make me feel happy or good about myself.” Would you tell her to “hush” be a good girl?