The Saddest Day of My Life

The saddest day of my life was in January of 2016 when my wife packed her car and left me and our two daughters standing in the garage. All we could do was watch her leave. To this day, I do not understand how she was able to do it. I know that I will never understand, because even if I asked her, she doesn’t know. That’s how these things go. A big challenge of living with it is learning that there are things I will never understand, that nothing the other person can say will further my understanding. I knew at the time that that was it for my family, that it would never be whole again.

I missed her so much. When the girls were with her every other week, I sat in that big empty house, and I learned what a deafening silence sounded like, because they were young and they played and giggled and they always needed something, and there I was sitting on the couch, all alone except for a half-pint of Tennessee whiskey, listening to silence. I struggled. Struggle isn’t the right word. It’s too weak, but it will have to do.

I struggled so much, and I needed to figure out why. Nobody has anything to say about it. Nobody can help. They can’t help it, either. There’s no words that could help. The only thing to do is be alone. It was more than I could bear. I drank a lot because when I was drinking I didn’t care as much. I could bear it. Alcohol is poison, but it is the only thing available off the shelf that can effectively anesthetize you against the pain.

I picked myself up one centimeter at a time. One day I was in the library and I picked up a book about physics, you know the kind of book that is about physics but written for the layman, and I flipped through it and landed on a page and I read. I have no idea what the title was, the name of the author, but the passage I read was about how the atoms that compose the human body turned over about once a month. That means that the actual atoms that make up a person’s physical substance are continually in motion, moving in and moving out, so that the physical stuff of the person you love is different month to month, and that hit me hard, resonated with me. I asked myself, if it isn’t the physical substance that I miss about my ex-wife, what is it that I miss? The next thought was her pattern. To this day, this is one of the clearest insights I’ve ever had, and it turned out to be a bit of information that helped me quite a lot, because this had nothing at all to do with her, her physical presence. It was entirely happening inside my own head. All of my pain was coming from me, not her.

You see, she and I had gotten married in our early twenties, but we had dated a couple of years previous, and that is key. When you are young, you are meant to pair-bond with someone. I’m talking about me here, not her. I don’t think women pair-bond in the same way as men, if at all. Certainly, she had moved on and was remarried in no time at all. It just didn’t seem to have much of an effect on her. For me, though, that woman I had pair-bonded with, had children with, her pattern was deeply imprinted onto my brain, hard-wired into into my neurons, because I was her protector, her and those children. I was the one who would give his life for them, who would fight to the death to protect them. Evolutionarily speaking, I know this to be true.

My best friend’s dad abandonned his family wholesale when his marriage failed. He left, cut off all communication, and started a new family. He’d been the bad guy in my thinking all that time, but now I completely understood why he did that, and I couldn’t fault him anymore. The children and their mother are a package deal; the patterns are linked. If I had done the same thing, packed up a car and just left it all behind, I would have gotten over it sooner. The weeks that I had the children, the scabs got ripped off anew every single time. My brain expected the mother to be with her children, you see, and it couldn’t make any sense whatsoever of those kids appearing without her.

Her pattern was absent, and my brain was having none of it. The sadness would not stop. I did my best, my dead-level best, to be a good dad. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was becoming something else, and I started to understand that my task was to bear it. I just had to sit and miss her. I ached. I can’t really encapsulate how I felt in words. It was painful, and it continued, day after day, but the insight from the physics book told me that I wasn’t missing her, as in, her physical body. I was missing her pattern. My brain demanded that she be there, and I started to understand that I was engaged in a battle between my consciousness and my brain. I was living through my brain re-wiring itself to create a new world in which she was gone, no longer my mate with whom I had a pair-bond. I grew determined to win this war with my brain.

It took five years for my brain to re-wire itself. There’s lasting repurcussions, though, and that’s really why I was moved to write about this today. I know that I will never have a pair-bond with another woman, that is it impossible. I date women, sometimes longer term, and I can’t care about them in the same way. I’m not a robot; I care, but not in the same way I cared about my wife. Not even close. I think that is a result of having pair-bonded with her when I was young, and then having to re-wire with my children minus her pattern. The brain probably isn’t as elastic, able to receive such programming at my age, or something like that. I’ll never feel for a woman like I felt about her.

The crucial part of having to live through this process is that today, as I write this, I don’t care about her, either. This became clear to me when we had a co-parenting conversation on the phone the other day, and she had context to tell me that she still cared about me, and that she always will. I think she was probably being truthful, that women go through these things quite differently, but I didn’t respond to her with the truth from my perspective; I remained silent, but if I had said something I would have said that I don’t care about her at all anymore. That’s not posturing or wishful thinking. It is true. You see, having lived through the brain re-wiring, I got to the point that when I’m around her, there’s something alien and off about her now, like it looks like her, but it isn’t her, not the her I remember. I feel absolutely nothing. Back when I was going through it, I hated her, not really, but that’s something I told myself, how much I hated her for what she had done. I didn’t want to be around her because it was a flood of emotion and it hurt. Today, there’s nothing. She’s not the person I used to know. She’s somebody else.

I mean that quite literally. Her pattern is different now. My brain doesn’t recognize it.

All of those five years, I just wanted to get to this point, where I am now. I got there. I survived it. My brain rewired. I lost, but I also gained something else. I became a far better father than I ever would have been had she never left. I bonded with my daughters in a way that I wouldn’t have if she had never left. I got stronger, but that strength came at a price, as it always does. I lost the ability to trust women, to pair-bond with them, and some people might find that sad, but I do not feel sad anymore, and if you look at the state of women out there, all of them glued to their phones, what exactly is the advantage to having a relationship with them? Sharing them with every stranger on the Internet? The occasional use of a vagina? That’s a post for another time. Not needing them, though, I suspect that is what masculine strength actually looks like, and I’m living it now.

As put by Lord Tennyson:

I hold it true, whate’er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; ‘Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.