Memoir and Peanut Butter & Jelly
In which pb&j enters my story.
During my second marriage, we fought. Or rather, we argued. We argued often. Or rather, she argued.
Now I’m not saying the arguments were all one-sided. No, I took the bair. I argued back. But most of my arguments were of the variety - “why are we arguing? Why are we arguing about nothing? Why do we continually come back to arguing about things that we’ve previously resolved? Why this score-keeping? Why this going back to the past? When can we resolve something and truly let it go?” Despite all the fighting, I thought we had a good thing going.
We’d resolve an argument in counseling, and the next week or month, we’d circle back around to the same. old. tired. arguments. Who is doing the laundry? Who is doing the cooking? When will we have sex? Why this urge to always have sex? Is step-daughter on restriction or not? When will you stop studying and working and pay attention to me? When will you let me have space to study and work? The counselor would be flabbergasted as well, thinking we had covered this ground and had moved on. But no.
When I’d had enough, when I made steps to end the arguing by not taking the bait, by saying, “stop it, I’m not arguing anymore, I’m going to work or study or play this game,” in short, when I disengaged, my ex would grow desperate, like a hungry animal. That’s when she’d trot out her favorite saying:
I love you. I don’t want to fight. I’ll eat peanut butter and jelly with you forever, in the streets if we have to.
Mind you, we weren’t rich. We were graduate student poor. But we had a stable income and roof over our heads. We were never in danger of living on the streets.
In Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir, she writes, “I try to normalize the strange so the reader can access it.”
I think most people understand the discord that can come with relationships. But our arguing was strange, nonsensical, with arguments out of left field, and situations that can never be summed up by logic, no matter how hard I tried. It didn’t matter if things were going well or badly, she would argue and fight and apologize with a regularity approaching fascist Italian train schedules. Until she didn’t anymore.
In my background, I grew up in a loving, caring home and never saw or experienced much conflict at all. Siblings and parents didn’t argue and fight. We didn’t yell or call names. We didn’t pout and throw tantrums. There was harmony and good will and a conscious desire to support each other and see each other succeed. Not so with my ex. The drama was constant and real and threatening to harmony for all.
Because of the harmony in my nuclear family, I wasn’t prepared for the discord I experienced in marriage #1. When my wife #1 said about her family (half Puerto Rican, half Italian), “It’s what we do, we fight and yell at each other, but we continue to love each other and stay together,” I saw a series of fighting through my life that wasn’t my idea of a harmonious marriage and I ran from it. I couldn’t wrap my head around how anyone could love deeply and fight like a cornered bobcat in the rain.
Marriage #2 offered renewed love and fulfilling intimacy. What I thought were growing pains at the beginning of the relationshop, an adjustment period as we got to know each other (we met online, and were living together after 6 weeks - she moved across country, 11-year daughter in tow, leaving a marriage and a wake of destruction behind her from her own marriage #2) - were actually red flags, warnings of what was to come and what was to escalate.
Cognitive Dissonace
At the conclusion of each fight, my ex- would cry, approach me with tear-stained face, wring her hands and press her fingernails into her palms hard enough to make half-moon indentations. And she’d proclaim:
I’ll eat peanut butter and jelly with you forever, in the streets if we have to.
Translation: I love you and don’t want to fight with you, even if we’re poor.
Real meaning: I’ll say anything so you don’t disengage, even if it’s untrue.
What I didn’t know at the time, the click that made everything make sense, much later and after more than a decade of this circular arguing and apologizing - she suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder.
No wonder we didn’t make any headway in counseling.
We did everything wrong.
To top that, her own counselor and the psychiatrist she saw to get her prescription filled for anti-anxiety meds, had diagnosed her with Borderline Personality Disorder, five years before they told her and before I found out.
Let me say it again: Her counselor and psychiatrist diagnosed her with Borderline Personality Disorder 5 years earlier and didn’t tell either of us.
My ex’s counselor only told her when my ex- threatened to (and did) fire her counselor. My ex- started making noise about leaving the marriage, and her counselor balked at that. And when my ex- fired her, the counselor in desperation said, “You can’t fire me. You have borderline personality disorder.” My ex’s reaction was, “Watch me!”
We were headed for divorce already, and my ex- picked me up in the one car we shared and said, “Do you know what borderline personality disorder?” I said I didn’t. “Well, my counselor says I have that. But I think it’s what my daughter has.” As she’s driving she calls her daughter a half a continent away and says, “Daughter, you have borderline personality disorder.” I’m sitting in the passenger seat saying, “You can’t say that or do that to your daughter! You’re not a doctor. It’s not right or true.”
When I got home, I looked up borderline personality disorder. The first forum I saw, a support group for people whose loved ones have BPD, there was a post that said, “Know someone with Borderline Personality Disorder? RUN THE FUCK THE OTHER WAY!” That was my introduction to BPD. My reaction was, “Too late. It’s been 14 years.”
I read all I could get my hands on about BPD and was horrified. All of the literature read like someone had video recorded my life through an open window. The patterns, the cyclical fighting, my ex’s behavior compared to the 9 criteria for BPD — all of it were exact matches of my own life for almost 15 years.
In my defense, I didn’t know.
In my defense, the doctors withheld valuable information from us - her diagnosis - and we did everything wrong in counseling.
In my defense, pledging love and fidelity and eating pb&j on the streets is antithetical to senseless, cyclical arguing. I couldn’t reconcile the two then.
Now, I understand where it comes from. Now it’s far far too late. But I still have a story to tell.
Telling this story means telling it the way I experienced it, without knowledge that my ex had BPD. The challenge is to be true to the strangeness of the frequent arguments and true in that, despite the frequency of turmoil and discord and fighting, there was no talk of splitting up. That wasn’t on the table. We did lots of counseling, but even that was a farce. I was mostly quiet, trying to learn and understand about this fractured dynamic, while my ex- complained about me and everything and by the end of counseling she’d cry and say she wanted to stay together and “eat peanut butter and jelly with me, on the streets if we had to.”
As we walked to the car, I’d get someone else. Her tone would change, her voice deeper, and she’d accuse,
“Good performance in there.”
“Don’t,” I’d say. “Just don’t.”
And the arguing would continue on the car ride home.
My sight grew distorted. Living with someone with Borderline Personality Disorder for years without knowing it, you learn to cope, to modify your own behavior to survive. I didn’t know that I was walking on eggshells, but that’s exactly I was doing to avoid a fight. It wasn’t ever clear what would set off the next round of arguing, but I always got blamed for it, though I rarely picked fights. It’s not my way. I’d stand my ground on what was right, however. And thus, it looked like I was arguing aggressively. My arguing, however, was purely defensive.
One of the best books I read about Borderline Personality Disorder makes it clear from the title what happens to someone when a loved one has BPD. The book is titled: Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care About Has Borderline Personality Disorder, by Paul T.T. Mason and Randi Kreger.
It took me a long time and another failed relationship - influenced by my distorted sight - to get my life back. It took writing my memoir to set my lands in order and understand it all.
Thank you for reading. I’m writing to support my efforts to earn traditional publication for my memoir, My Own Private Waste Land. I am currently querying agents.
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