Finnegan's Story

My story began roughly 20 years ago, and I am only just now processing what happened, how damaging and painful it was. So much of it was so humiliating and hurtful that I just stuffed it, never told anyone, just pushed it down, but it was always still there, festering.

I have nightmares about it, what he did, what he still does, I suffer from anxiety and go on and off of antidepressants when he hoovers (yes, even after all these years). He is the father of my son. He still comes around looking for supply, even though I am now married to someone else. I know I have to get this poison out to even begin to heal. I know this to the depths of my soul.

When I met T, I was a student at a local university. He was given my number by my classmate who was one of his co-workers. I had been looking for an internship. He called (on a Sunday afternoon – odd for business, I thought) and we set up an interview for the following Thursday at noon. He was tall, tan and bite-your-bottom lip beautiful. All during the interview he kept talking about personal things and kept telling me how good looking I was. I thought it was really inappropriate for a job interview, but he was so damn hot, that I just smiled. It turns out there was no internship available; it was actually a ruse to meet me – the first lie and red flag that I ignored. We began dating.

He told me he went to the University, which, you guessed it, was not true. He hadn’t even gone to college -- he hadn’t even graduated from high school! I found out much later that he was working under another’s license. When I confronted him about it several months into our relationship he made up some nonsense about needing to get reciprocity from the state we were living in before he could get his license here. Yeah, right.

He also lied about the house he was living in, he had said he owned it, but it was actually owned by the company he was working for and they were doing him a favor by letting him stay there as is wife had asked him to move out. He said he was already divorced but he didn’t actually file for his divorce until three days after we started dating. He said he didn’t smoke cigarettes, but I could smell them on him, and he smoked weed, too. I learned all these things months and years later.

He said he had been in a famous band; I recognized the band’s name right away. He would “play” the guitar for me. He couldn’t read a single note of music, couldn’t play a single recognizable song, or duplicate any of the “songs” that he did “play” for me. He owned six guitars, but his music was so hard to listen to that I was embarrassed for him and I would pretend to fall asleep so he would stop. I think that’s where they get to us – our compassion, we hurt for them. I naively chalked it up to not understanding the grunge genre.

We had been dating a few months when it was his birthday and we made a weekend trip. That night in the hotel room we had amazing sex (he prided himself on his sexual prowess) and he told me he was falling in love with me. We fell asleep cuddled together, but I woke up alone around 11pm. By 3am I had called the hospitals, the highway patrol, and the local jail, thinking something had happened to him. By morning I was convinced he was just an ass-turd and I had already packed my things and was in the coffee shop downstairs eating breakfast trying to figure out how I was getting home, as we had driven up in his truck. He sauntered in with some BS about needing to think about us because everything was going so fast. I took him up on his offer for a ride back home but I couldn’t get the strangeness off what he had done out of my head. I kept thinking… “Does he have a gambling problem? Did he meet up with another woman? Did he go find a hooker”? I was still fairly healthy at this point in our relationship, so broke up with him a couple of days later.

He was crushed. For two months straight, he sent me gifts and poems and tapes of him playing his guitar. He bought me presents, and flowers and called incessantly, multiple times a day. Thinking that he must really love me, I took him back. This was around Christmas.

We made plans for New Year’s Eve. We were going to fly in a private plane for a party with some friends of his. I drove to his house around 4:30pm on New Year’s Eve, really excited and ready to go. He met me outside at my car and announced that I was no longer invited, and that he was breaking up with me. I felt like I had been punched. I was too humiliated to even tell my friends. I spent that New Year’s Eve alone and cried all night. He admitted later that he had sex with someone else that night.

I was still in college and the spring semester began two weeks later. In one of my classes was this really nice guy that I began studying with. I had met him the semester before and we were beginning to spend a lot more time together. It turns out he really liked me and I was starting to like him, too.

The N hears though his co-worker friend that I’m dating this other guy and out of the blue he calls… his house has been burglarized, and he desperately needs me to take his kids for a few hours, so that he can call the police and clean up his ransacked place. The kids are three and six at this time, and I’m too nice. I watch his kids. He uses this as an opportunity to beg and plead for another chance; his divorce is making him “a train wreck”. I agree to give him another chance.

For the next year or so, he lies, cheats, breaks up and makes up, destroys my self-esteem and gives me an STD… then lies some more.

I then find out I’m pregnant, even though I am on DepoProvera. My doctor tells me this is rare but possible and potentially dangerous for the fetus because of the possibility of birth defects. I am devastated and scared… scared for my baby. The N completely flips at this point. He alternates between telling me we can work it out and be a family, stroking my belly and praying for our child with me, to screaming at me to get an abortion because I am “out of [his] league” and he ‘doesn’t want to have a baby with” me. He then tells me in tortuous and cruel detail how much he wanted to have children with his ex-wife and proceeds to recount the sexual activities that conceived his daughter. I was so hurt I couldn’t move. I told him that I couldn’t get an abortion, so he resorted to contacting adoption attorneys and forwarding me the information. At this point I am practically suicidal. We part ways when I am about 5 months pregnant.

I called him when I went into labor. He never came to the hospital because, according to him, he had a new girlfriend (flavor-of-the week) and he didn't want to upset her (she only lasted a few months, BTW.)

A few weeks later I drive to his house so he can meet his newborn son and he slips me an envelope with a note in it. I think… an apology? Perhaps, a child support check for our son? No, it’s a little note about how hot my friend Terri is and could he get her number. I leave his house in tears with my infant son, mentally kicking myself for even going over there in the first place.

Over the next few years I become very involved in my church. I ‘m feeling healthier and happier but he continues the lying and the push-me/pull-you game. And yup, I took him back… more than a few times.

Eventually, I met a nice guy at church. He was my son’s t-ball coach. We ended up getting married when my son was four years old and we are still married.

Immediately after I got married, the N who had been an unreliable flake with his son and me becomes the father-of-the-year and is deeply wounded because he “always loved [me], didn’t I know that”? “It was the pot”, but he’s quit now, he has seen the error of his ways. “How could I marry another man?” I’m “the one [he] always loved”. He tells me that I need to file for a divorce and give him another chance. I didn’t.

My son is now 18 years old and for 14 years my ex has been hoovering non-stop… hasn’t missed a beat. The child support is never late. The N calls me on every holiday and my birthday, first thing in the morning – he wants to be the first one. He writes me beautiful cards and allows my son to spend a small fortune on my birthday and Mother’s Day. He shows up at my family’s holiday events (my mother is too “peace and love” to kick him out in front of his son). He often (at least once a week) calls me to just to “chat” as he is on the road for work (when we were dating we used to talk on the phone for hours whenever he was driving to or from working out of town). And, I swear, I must be brain-damaged, because I talk to the idiot.

He also calls me every time something goes wrong in his life, and refers to me a “his best friend”. He swears that he hasn’t dated anyone or had sex in 15 years “because of [me]”. He was “waiting” for me. My N-ex will be 50 years old this year. He just got a vasectomy a month ago according to our son. Funny, why would a celibate go to all that painful trouble? He really is a creepy sick-ass liar!

In short, he still hoovers and still lies and it still bothers me. I need to not give a damn anymore. It keeps me off balance and reminds me of all the painful things he did.

I went NC on Saturday after completely losing it and screaming at him. Argh, I can’t believe I gave him the satisfaction.

Thank you in advance for your support. I am so glad I found you all and this site.

Finnegan

BTW… my moniker, Finnegan’s Wake was my late father’s favorite book. The book was originally titled “fragments from a Work in Progress”... It seemed appropriate.