The other night a friend offered me a ride home from Bible study. She is also my nutritionist. I think she's very, very good at what she does. When I have sat with her in her office while she talks about nutrition, I have enjoyed watching her face light up. She gets so excited about her work. The morning after Bill was diagnosed with cancer, he asked me if we could go see her. She spent the usual two hours or so with him, and talked and talked about what she knew. She does a lot of work with cancer patients, she's a friend of mine, and she wanted to help Bill. She also wanted to be a good witness to him.
As we were driving the short two blocks to my house, we shared our plans for Thanksgiving. Then I started talking about Christmas, I told her how excited Laura and I were about not having to be 'closet' Christmas freaks this year. I told her how Bill used to deride me for getting all excited about baking and decorating, singing carols and whatnot. I told her he had been the Scrinch. That's right, take Grinch and Scrooge, put them together, and 'Voila!', you have the Scrinch, aka my ex-husband. Then she said something that caught me off-guard. She said, "He was abusive to everybody." "How did you know?" I asked. She said, "Because he was abusive to me too. He knows my policy about cancellations but he would miss appointments and expect me not to charge him. And he bombarded me with emails." In some ways that is abuse, especially when it goes on repeatedly. I call it taking advantage, which pretty much sums up a lot of our marriage.
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