Day 244…
The hardest thing about leaving an abusive partner is deciding to do it.
Once that decision is made, there are plenty of awful days ahead, but at least you can meet them with a clarity that you didn’t have while you were still in the relationship.
Without going into it too deeply, Michael is actually my second husband.
I was with my first husband for nearly twenty years. We were only married, however, for the last couple of months of that time. Technically, after we separated, it took me another decade to get the divorce, mostly, I think, because after things calmed down, I was afraid to poke the sleeping bear.
We were in the first wave of people who got married when it became legal in Massachusetts. To get married there, we had to say that we intended to live there - which we didn’t really have any intention of doing. New York, at the time, however, did not yet recognize same-sex marriage so when I made inquiries about getting a divorce, I was told that I didn’t need to because I wasn’t legally married in New York.
Later, when I found my divorce lawyer, who specialized in same-sex marriage law, she told me that that was not strictly true.
The relationship had started out well but the last few years of it had become progressively more problematic. I had started to spend a great deal of time daydreaming about being single. I was never physically harmed, but there was a point that I felt that I was under enough of a threat that I actually called the police to intervene.
At any rate, it wasn’t long after that, that we were having a conversation on the phone that was rapidly escalating in tension and volume and I blurted out, “I don’t want to be a couple anymore.”
My mouth just said the words without checking in with my brain first.
This happened while I was working on Jersey Boys in La Jolla, California. Not long after that, I went on the road with Wicked’s first national tour.
It was a slow process for both of us to digest and accept what I had started. Some days were fine, and some weren’t. At one point, late at night, he called me and told me that he had burned all of my books and destroyed all of my belongings back in our apartment.
Alone in my room in Toronto I came to terms with that.
I realized that it was all just stuff and that it didn’t matter. Ending it was more important, whatever the cost.
It turned out that he was just saying that to make me upset. The only thing he’d really tried to destroy was a carved wooden Cherokee mask I had in the shape of a fox. When I was on the road with Phantom, another of the stage managers and I had gone hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains and I had bought it from a shop in the Cherokee reservation there. It meant something to me.
Later, after I had finally moved out and put all of my things into storage, I took the pieces of the broken mask and glued them back together. You can still see the cracks, but only if you look very closely. It was the first thing that I hung up on the wall of my new apartment.
I left the Wicked tour to start rehearsals for the move of Jersey Boys to Broadway. After we opened, I met Michael, or to be completely accurate, I re-met Michael. We clicked.
The fact that I was still technically married was a convenient reason to not get married again. In my head at least. It took me a long time to really trust that Michael would not behave like my ex. Finally, I did.
So, I prodded the bear, woke him up and initiated divorce proceedings. It wasn’t easy, but it honestly wasn’t as hard as I’d imagined either. Knowing what I was doing with a great lawyer guiding me took the fear out of it. It was a slog to get through it all, but we did get through it and then it was done.
The President refuses to concede.
He doesn’t need to concede. It would be nice if he did, but there is nothing that will keep him in charge if he refuses.
He could even barricade himself inside the White House. It won’t matter. It’s just a house. The President-elect could stay at a nearby Motel 6 for all it matters where he actually lives.
The General Services Administration may refuse to turn over funding and office space to Joe Biden’s transition team, but that’s not going to stop the transition from moving forward. It will slow down the work and make it much more difficult, but it won’t stop it. I am sure there are plenty of rooms at the Motel 6 and an Arby’s across the street. They will figure it out.
In 2008, when Barack Obama was elected President, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell made it his mandate to ensure that he was only there for one term. In an interview two years after that, the Senator explicitly said, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
Well, that didn’t happen.
Throughout President Obama’s entire eight-year time in office, though, the Senator from Kentucky did not legislate. He obstructed. Yesterday, he signaled that he plans on doing the exact same thing under President Biden.
In a speech from the Capitol he threw his complete support behind our current President’s refusal to concede. This, despite the fact that there is no evidence of any tampering or confusion in terms of the election results at all. The Senator does not want to give up his power any more than the President does.
Because of the run-off Senate elections in Georgia, the balance of power in the Senate is in question which means his leadership is in question. If those two seats go blue, then he becomes Minority Leader rather than Majority Leader. He has just this morning been re-elected Leader of the Republican side of the Senate.
He is not going to do a single thing that might stop the President’s Georgian supporters from coming out and voting red in January. He is going to stick fast to the President to the bitter end, whatever the harm done as a result. He is not, and has never, acted in the best interests of the country. He has always acted in what the best interests of the good Senator from Kentucky were. He wants those seats more than anything else.
The President’s other enablers have flocked to his side for the same reason.
Senator Lindsay Graham from South Carolina, who just narrowly won his re-election recently said, “If we don’t do something about voting by mail, we’re going to lose the ability to elect a Republican in this country.” Historically, the higher the voter turnout for an election is, the worse the Republicans do.
Attorney General William Barr, in support of the President, has authorized investigations of “specific allegations” of voter fraud before the election results are certified. By doing this, he is subverting long-standing Justice Department policies designed to keep law enforcement away from affecting the results of an election. In the weeks before the election, his department lifted a prohibition they had on investigating voter fraud before an election. He doesn’t want to lose his power either.
Not all Republicans are acting in this manner.
The two Republicans in the race for the Senate in Georgia have, without anything to back them up, called for the Republican Secretary of State of Georgia to resign. The Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger has refused. Today, he said, "As Secretary of State, I'll continue to fight every day to ensure fair elections in Georgia, that every legal vote counts, and that illegal votes don't count."
In the Justice Department, Richard Pilger, the director of the election crimes branch in the department’s Public Integrity Section, has resigned in protest of The Attorney General’s actions. He called Barr’s edict, "an important new policy abrogating the forty-year-old Non-Interference Policy for ballot fraud investigations in the period prior to elections becoming certified and uncontested."
Hopefully, there will be more.
Michael and I got married on November 9, 2015. Yesterday was our fifth wedding anniversary.
Wood is the traditional gift for five years together. Salacious comments aside, it signifies the strength and durability of a union. Like a tree, the relationship has begun to develop strong roots.
I don’t regret marrying my first husband if only because of what I needed to learn while I was divorcing him. As a nation, we needed to learn what the last four years have taught us.
We live together in profound inequality. Like termites boring through wood from the inside, racism and bigotry has weakened the structure of our great nation. We have learned that what we once thought was immeasurably strong, is actually quite fragile.We need to tend it and take care of it.
This Administration has pulled that pestilence into the light. It couldn’t be fought at all as long as it remained hidden.
The simple act of creating a science-based task force has already given us all something concrete to focus on in the war against this virus. We are close to striking the very first blow in this war since it began.
The next two months before this Great Divorce are going to be difficult and, at times, scary. We will get through it. Whatever gets broken, we will glue back together as best we can.
We have taken that first and oh so important step. We have stood up and said “No.” It’s been said. It can’t be taken away.
The power is shifting. It won’t shift smoothly.
There are days ahead of us where while it may not seem like it, we have decided to go towards the light and that’s where we are heading.
Happy Anniversary, my love.
Here we go.
Happy Anniversary to two gorgeous men in their own right who complement each other in union. I loved this post!
❤️💙❤️💙❤️❤️💕💕💕Happiest Anniversary to two loves 💙💕💕💕💕💕