The Case for the Atheist

I guess if you really want to know the truth, if you really want to know what it's like to be a teenage bride, I should tell you straight off that it rubbed me the wrong way. I was never one of the those dumb girls who sat around and day dreamed about dumb things like prince charming, but it happened to me that a guy who I thought was prince charming came along and I made the mistake of marrying him. But I got out of that one with my life intact, just a bit shaken and distrustful I guess.

         Mick says he doesn't believe in God, and it hurts me to no end that he could think that. He's pretty innocent, that one. I feel bad that he's gotten mixed up with me. The first night that he kissed me, he was nearly thirty and said it was the first time that he'd ever kissed a girl. I took his virginity that same night. Me, the one who does believe in God, the one who was probably too fragile to want to do something like that after escaping, but I did and I have held on like hell ever since knowing that if he realized how not jaded he is, how little it has taken for him to not believe in God...if he  should find me out, it would probably shake me down to the core. It just wouldn't take much to do that these days.

         Mick bought me this heart necklace for Valentine's day with a little purple gem in it and I wore it all the time. I changed it out once, and he noticed and asked me about it. Mick notices things like that. It's kind of obvious that I'm his first girlfriend. His sense of hygiene can be kind of bad sometimes. Like he went out of town one time and two days later he still hadn't unpacked his tooth brush. I had to kind of get on him about that. But overall he's pretty sweet. Like he'll pay for dinner almost all the time and he rarely asks me to treat him to anything even though we're past the part of our relationship where  he's supposed to be doing that. He'll always give me a kiss before he leaves for work in the morning, even when he thinks I'm asleep and won't remember.

         I sometimes think that I am cruel to him. The way I break down out of nowhere and start crying thinking about what it was like when I was married. I get really upset. I'll start saying, “I hate him so much, I hate him so much,” just over and over. I don't think that I would like it so much if he had such strong feelings for someone else, even if the feeling was hatred. I know it's not right but it's not the sort of thing that you can take away. I was in nursing school when I was going through the worst of my marriage, and they teach you all about helping people, recognizing the signs of abuse, helping the disenfranchised. But nobody noticed me. That I wasn't eating, that I slept in class all the time, that I didn't speak unless spoken too, that I was constantly on the verge of tears. It was interesting hearing the training that people who were supposed to help me received. I think that was part of what hurt me the most; just simply, nobody noticed. And I hated my ex husband for that, for keeping me quite and afraid for so long.

         I remember in nursing school we had to do this interview about religion to find out what it meant to people. I interviewed my husband and he said that he felt that religion should be practiced in the open for other people to see. He said he didn't really think about God too much on his own. Later, after we separated, he said that he had found God, really found him. He said that he was thinking about becoming a pastor, and all I could imagine was one of those zealots on television asking for money in the name of our Lord, then running with the cash. And he would have done it too, I believe, had he had the patience to just keep right while setting the whole scam up.

         When my husband left, I realized he had stolen thousands of dollars from me. He had told me he had been taking the money from my paychecks and putting it into a savings account, and when I finally got him out of the house, he admitted that there was no money. He had wasted it all. He would have stolen every last penny he could even if it meant praising God while he did it. At least Mick didn't care about people watching him. Didn't have some ulterior motive or want; didn't want something he didn't already have. 

         The way I felt wasn't static. Some days, I didn't think about being a divorce', other days it illuminated every cell in my body and I  felt that everyone must see the dirty secrets I carried: how I let myself be treated, how little I thought of myself, how stupid I was for being with a man so evil and with so little regard for others. I thought if I just came clean to people and told them what had happened, maybe I wouldn't look so dumb. When I first got out, I thought that if I told everyone what had happened, it would hold me accountable to not returning. He had me convinced for a year out that I needed to mind him and keep on his good side otherwise bad things would happen to me . Had people around me not known the evil things that he had done, I probably would have succumbed to his pressure to take him back once he realized what  he had done to me and wanted me back. In his mind, I really didn't have a say in the return; he was shocked as hell when he realized why I had told everyone every dirty secret, every mean word, every financial hard ship, every infidelity that had taken place inside our breaking marriage. Not because I wanted to look like his victim, but because I knew that it was the only way that I would never be able to return to him.

         I think that the lowest point for me being divorced was meeting Mick's parents. His dad had left the Catholic church to marry his mom and they had been together nearly thirty years. Mick's brother and his girlfriend were expecting a baby, I remembered telling Mick all teary eyed that we would never be like them, he would never be my first husband and it just changed things in ways I didn't know how to explain. Mick's parents asked me about my divorce one time and I tried to explain it to them, and his dad said it was good that I got out while I was still young, and I wanted to say to him 'you don't know anything. You've never been divorced and you don't know what it's like to be on this side of a marriage.' They asked me why I had decided to become a nurse and I told them that it was because I wanted to help people. They said that Mick's brother's girlfriend wanted to be a nurse too, but I figured she didn't know anything either.

         Six months after we had been apart, my husband said that he had cancer and that he was dying. He told me that he wasn't afraid of dying and that he knew that there was a place in heaven for him. He said that he was apologizing to those people to whom he had done wrong to, and he said that he felt bad about how he had treated me. I asked him if he realized he had abused me, and he said he did with a smile. I told him I didn't forgive him. I told him I hated him and he deserved to die. I told him there was a special place in hell for him. I found out later that he never had cancer. He made it all up. I guess he just wanted the sympathy, the same way he wanted the attention for being a pastor.

         People told me a few times that in God's eyes, my husband would always be my husband. Once you make a promise in front of God, you can't break it. Even if I were to marry someone else, it would never be a true marriage. A very small part of me deep down inside believed that to be true. People would tell me that I was lucky that my husband and I didn't have kids because it meant that I didn't have to have him in my life, but I felt like no amount of time would ever really get him out of my life.          

         When I asked Mick about being an atheist and what he believed happened when you died, he said he figured your body just decomposed and became part of the earth. He said he supposed earth came together by some cosmological miracle and when each person passed away we all just blended back in and there was never any sort of real right or wrong too great that would stop that process. That years from now, maybe even in our children's lifetime, our greatest triumphs and failures would be just that, ours. And nobody else would know about them, or care about them. And even if they did know about them, so what? It wouldn't keep us from being absorbed away back into earth. It was all just moving, evolving, changing time. But he said he was glad he had me with him for it. It felt kind of lonely and unjust, Mick's idea of God. But at least it was his.