In which I talk about really old stuff.

The fact that I’m still wasting processor cycles on this pisses me off. I shouldn’t care. I don’t care. I couldn’t care less.

But.

When I left my husband, I moved into town and my good friend AmmZon let me live with her. She even let me crash rent-free for a few months. She was dating Joesus at the time, and she and I commiserated together about red headed men more than once.

Flash back a couple of years:

The very first time I met her, she was dating BoSe and he’d brought her out to the farm. When I saw my husband and AmmZon meet for the very first time, I knew that those two were the best match of any combination of any of us. The Ex flirted baldly with AmmZon every chance he got for the next few years. It really pissed her off because she thought he was an asshole.

Flash forward five years:

After I left Iowa, AmmZon and Joesus broke up (which was no surprise to anybody but Joesus) and a couple months after that, maybe as much as half a year, AmmZon and The Ex got together. The consensus was that it was a rebound relationship, but hey – they’re still together. I think they’ll stay together.

None of that bothers me. I quit wanting my husband a couple of years before I left him, and I hope the two of them are madly in love and having awesome monkey sex. I like him and would like to see him in a good relationship. I like AmmZon too, and she’s probably the only chick I’ve ever met who has balls big enough to deal with a man with a skull as thick as The Ex’s. They have tons in common (OMG I could write you a list twelve feet long), they’re the right ages for each other, and they should probably get married and breed as soon as possible with my blessings.

What bothers me, stupidly enough, is the farm house.

Fifty-eight minutes ago, AmmZon posted a picture on Facebook of her dinner. I clicked on it and ended up looking at her albums, and, of course, there are pictures of the farm in there because, hello, she’s dating my ex-husband.

Apparently she fixed the rotting, falling down old arbor and trained the grapes back up off the ground. I never did that myself because I didn’t give a shit about the grapes. They didn’t produce, I didn’t know what I’d do with them if they did produce, and what I know about viticulture would fit in a thimble.

There’s a picture of something she’d bought on the counter from my old kitchen. My old kitchen. The only kitchen I’ve ever owned. My shitty, ugly, fucked up old kitchen.

There are pictures of the new kitchen and living room. The last time I was at the farm, I’d driven out to get my stuff shortly before moving to Washington. Much of what I wanted was ruined from having been in those rooms while they sat, half demolished and untouched, for a couple of years. He’d just piled all my crap into the future kitchen and left it there, exposed to the elements. My leather jackets were rotted with mold. A couple of computer components were ruined from exposure. Everything was incredibly filthy. You’ve never seen stuff this fucking dirty, and it was inside the house that I’d lived in for years.

That’s the house I moved out of. A house he cared nothing about. A house he’d ripped apart and then ignored. A house whose intolerably uncomfortable, filthy condition he blamed on me, because, as far as I can tell, I didn’t fuck him enough.

No, honestly. That’s not a joke. I don’t know what happened, but we moved out there and began this awesome remodel with enthusiasm and energy, and then the next thing I knew he’d been lying on the couch doing nothing for two years and he resented me damn near as much as I did him. The house was ripped apart and he wasn’t doing anything at all to fix it, and somehow it was all my fault. I was the lazy one.

I gave up my job to wait on him. I had half a dozen miscarriages with him. I washed his socks and cooked his dinner and took his dog to the vet. I paid his bills and ran his errands and he got laid at least twice a week (I know because his accusations were so upsetting that I kept a calendar), and yet he was so unhappy that he couldn’t work on the house.

The house I moved into was funky but livable. The house I moved out of looked as if it should be condemned.

Well, now it seems The Ex has gained the equilibrium he needs to be able to work on the house. The room I rescued my things from is now plumbed and has electricity and is drywalled and has windows and sills and appliances in it. It looks really nice.

The Ex, for all his flaws when I’m around, is a master fucking carpenter. His custom work is gorgeous and if he lived anywhere other than Iowa (and had the discipline and patience to get the licenses he’d need) he’d be up to his eyeballs in high-end custom work.

I knew this had to happen. One way or another, The Ex had to make the place livable because he could never sell it the way it was, and not even a man could live there like that for long. And yet, for some reason photographic evidence of the house’s transformation makes me angry and sad and resentful.

That was supposed to be my house. I helped buy it, I signed the paper work. I ran that place and took care of The Ex for years so he could work on it, just like he asked me to. I’m still paying off the marriage’s debts.

The fucked up thing about this resentment is that I don’t even want to live there, regardless of the house’s condition, because I don’t like Iowa, or gardening, or solitude, or even living with The Ex. But here I am, all tied up in knots because the world is progressing!

No, that’s not it. I’m not mad because the world is progressing. I’m mad because he wouldn’t do that stuff for me, and I really needed it. I really needed a home that wasn’t filthy and freezing and exposed to the elements. I really needed him to care enough about me to match my sacrifice with sacrifices of his own.

Instead, I got a husband who laid on the couch doing nothing while accusing me of being lazy. I gave up most everything that mattered to me to do housework in a house that could never be clean, and he had the nerve to resent me for it. (A good friend of ours once told me, upon visiting the farm house for the first time, that I must be “a saint or something,” because he didn’t know of “any other woman who would put up with this shit.”)

I kept my end of the bargain, even after I learned that I didn’t want to live in an old farm house in the country. I busted my ass trying to be a good wife. I did everything he asked of me, and in the end, he was only barely trying to make the house livable for me. When I left him, he was surprised and hurt.

Fast forward half a year:

At our divorce party in 2007, I went into the house and I saw he’d hung a cabinet in the downstairs bathroom. It was an old, shabby cabinet, but he’d actually done something to improve the space… only he hadn’t done it for me. He’d done it for the woman he was seeing at the time, probably because she, unlike me, wasn’t going to tolerate keeping bathing towels out in the open in an environment so unfinished and dirty.

I kept my towels out in the open in that shitty basement bathroom for what, five years? Because I figured my husband, who loved me, would get around to hanging a cabinet as soon as he had time.

Later, when I realized he didn’t even have time to take out the fucking garbage, I never bothered to ask. I’m not stupid. He didn’t hang cabinets in the bathroom because he didn’t fucking want to, and there’s an end to it.

I told AmmZon when I was living with her that I’d always thought she and The Ex would be a good couple. She rolled her eyes and basically told me to go fuck myself; she’d been witness to too many of the fights between The Ex and her then-boyfriend Joesus, and she knew what an asshole The Ex could be. She wasn’t having any of it.

Except now they’re together and turning that crappy old farm property into a real home together. I suspect that they’ve probably built a smug new story in which Joesus and I are the assholes; me for being a lazy, frigid bitch and him for being an alcoholic loser… The Ex was always fond of building stories in which even his closest friends were assholes. Now it’s probably me, who never did anything wrong. I swear, I tried as hard as I could for as long as I could, and I told him over and over and over what I needed. I’m not the asshole here, and you know I’d admit it if I was. I’m the one who left when it was clear there was no salvaging anything and took the blame; I’m the one who signed the property over to him when he asked me to; I’m the one who’s paying off all our debts. I am most emphatically not the asshole in this story.

Hell, he didn’t make a real attempt to meet me halfway until after I’d decided to leave. For eight years, he lived as if I were a combination housekeeping service and sex worker; he handed me his paychecks and spent his free time on the couch. At the end, he still wasn’t contributing to the day-to-day maintenance of our household but he wasn’t even handing me checks any more.

Ah, fuck it. We were a terrible match. My own mother told me on my wedding day that The Ex would “make a good first husband.” I’m writing this not because I’ve changed my mind but because I was shocked and amazed at the intensity of my reaction when I saw the breakfast bar in the new kitchen: it’s a nice room now, that room in which my stuff once sat and rotted for nearly a year.

The world is weird, but not as weird as the human heart.