When Hope Failed

Hope was living the life most every woman dreams of.  She had met her husband only five years earlier,long after she had determined she would probably never remarry.  While it wasn’t exactly love at first sight, there was an attraction between them too obvious for either of them to overlook. They soon became best friends and, with the exception of work,spent every spare moment together.  They married only six short months after meeting. While her husband Sam wasn’t a rich man, together they were able to create a very comfortable life together.

Only weeks after celebrating their fifth anniversary, Hope began to notice small changes in Sam’s demeanor and attitude.  It was nothing she could put her finger on at first, but that changed practically in the blink of any eye. He became belligerent and arrogant at the drop of a hat, and began having periods of self damaging and impulsive behaviors. 

Sam became cold and distant and started to have what she at first lovingly called “baby tantrums”.  These episodes soon escaladed into full fledged violent and irrational rages, alternating with periods where he returned to his gentle and caring self. He became verbally abusive and quick to blame or criticize Hope no matter what she did. Nothing she did was good enough; and nothing she did was right.

Where as before they had been able to talk about anything at all, now Hope found herself hiding her concerns and feelings for fear of setting off another rampage.  She had tried over and over to reason with Sam and try to figure out what was wrong, but inevitably he would close down and withdraw.  Soon, all communication between them consisted of total silence or raging arguments, with nothing in between. She deeply missed the long talks they used to have and the fun they had shared.

Hope became extremely concerned when Sam would take any words she spoke and twist and turn them against her.  How could this loving person have become an irrational monster seemingly overnight?  She would leave the house each morning with tears in her eyes, and feeling exhausted from yet another sleepless night.  Her pleas to seek professional help for Sam fell on deaf ears, and she no longer knew where to turn. Where she had once been Sam’s “golden girl”, it now seemed to her that Sam hated her more with every breath she took.

The past twelve months had been a year of hell for Hope.  She had exhausted all her energy (and most of her savings) trying to figure out what went wrong.  Many times she believed she was actually in the the middle of breakdown and Sam was always quick to confirm that he also thought she had “mental problems. She struggled daily to try to understand how and why things had changed so dramatically. She knew in her heart that she was a loving and caring person, yet had moments of almost self-loathing.  By now they had been sleeping in separate bedrooms for months.

Despite all their troubles, and the mystery surrounding it, the truth was that Hope still loved Sam very much, and, at least some of the time, believed that he still loved her as well. But Hope was tired.  She was tired of beating herself up and she was tired of shouldering the responsibility for Sam’s frequent rages and manipulative ways. She was tired of living “alone” in they home they had built together.  Although Sam was physically still in the home, emotionally, he had been gone for months.  Except for negative interaction, there was no real interaction or communication between the two any longer.

Fast forward one year….
Her shoulders shook with her anguished sobs as she left the house for the final time.  Her blood shot eyes contained the pain of a million wrongs; and the heartache of a love so cruelly misplaced. Only Hope knew of the deep rage building inside of her; a rage she feared might tear her to pieces and spit her out.

As she drove through the blinding rainstorm, it was difficult to tell where the tears left off and the rain started.  Hope was forever changed after the year she had just been through.  She had finally left Sam, her husband of nearly six years; a husband she had loved and cherished dearly.

Uncertain of her future and even more uncertain of where she could go, she drove aimlessly along the empty highway, reflecting on the past year.  Sam had changed and the past several months had been hell on both of them.  There were times she looked deeply into his eyes and only a hollow pain stared back at her.  She knew that in moments of clarity, Sam himself knew that something was wrong, very wrong.  But it seemed that he was unable to look beyond Hope herself to determine where the real problem was.

The emotional roller coaster they had shared over the past year had taken a toll on both of them.  Sam had aged a decade in just a few short months.  Hope had tried to talk to her family and friends about their difficulties, but they had only looked at her like she was crazy.  How could she get anyone to see that the sweet, gentle man they all knew had been dead for a long time?  In his place was a man filled with rage and violence.

His moods shifted wildly between great fits of anger. followed by deep hours of depression.  Sam had become so paranoid that he took everything Hope said as the most deeply personal insult.  He hurled accusations and putrid words of hate at her on a daily basis, and yet still looked shocked when she told him she was leaving. No longer able to believe that anything could possibly be his fault, Sam had long since tried to take any responsibility for his own actions. He truly believed that anything bad in their lives had to be Hope’s fault, and he had long since given up even trying to be civil with her.

One of his favorite mind control tactics was to get Hope to confess to any sort of weakness, and then turn around and use that “weakness” against her.  Sam just couldn’t escape his black and white world, and there was no doubt, in his mind at least, that Hope was all black. While he had never actually physically accosted her, the home had been the center of many screaming raging fights.  Yet, at other times, Sam seemed his normal happy-go-lucky self. It seemed to Hope that he could almost turn these so stridently different personalities on and off at will.

Hope was frequently ashamed of herself for “fighting back”, but the abuse grew so frequent and so increasingly hateful, that any resolve left in her just snapped.  She was a proud and intelligent woman and she shuddered when she realized how far down she had sunk.  Leaving Sam was no longer an option; it had now become a necessity. She recognized that small pieces of her were dying each day that she remained in that empty marriage.
What she didn’t know as she drove down that lonely rain swept highway, was that the real pain had yet to begin…


...to be continued