Tales of the Crazy

by Charles L Cole

  Jess is an extremely talented clothing designer, dressmaker, and seamstress. She could envision a design, create her own full-size paper patterns of the design, and make the dress. She was also a highly intelligent woman. I knew she was capable of doing great work, but I was worried about the finances and expenses of starting a bridal shop. Since I’m a white-collar electrical engineer with a bit of inner redneck going on, the fashion and wedding industry is completely foreign to me. There was little I could do to help her in this except for being the computer network nerd, web designer, and handyman.

  We did a bit of research, and there were already multiple bridal shops in the area close to Ypsilanti, Michigan. We had many discussions about how she could compete and be profitable. None of the other shops did custom design work, and that’s what Jess was very good at. I still was very concerned and knew failure would result in huge financial losses for us. I was not willing to commit to a lengthy and expensive commercial lease for her store with such competition and with neither of us having experience in running a bridal shop or marketing to attract clients.

  A few weeks later, Jess came to me and said she had a solution for the finances. She’d found a dry cleaner close by in Saline who was using only a third of the space he was leasing. She had negotiated a deal with him for a sublease where she could use half the space—not only that, but the increased traffic would be good for his business. This was something I could agree to only if we were not committed to the sublease if her business failed. The cleaner agreed, and Jess started up Formal Diva with no other business partners.

  If only I’d had a crystal ball to see how badly this would end up. Wow.

  Three

  Fertility Problems and Debt

  Two years had gone by since we were married, and we had not conceived yet. Jess was also experiencing pain in her lower abdomen. Her ob-gyn, Brad, was a member of our church, and he found some adhesions of scar tissue caused by a surgery she’d had in Thailand when she was eighteen. Brad removed the adhesions, and then he ran tests to see why she could not conceive. Jess told me one of her fallopian tubes had been detached in that old surgery. I asked her why she hadn’t told me before but got only evasive answers from her. Brad’s tests also showed that the other tube was blocked. It was medically impossible for us to conceive.

  This was very emotionally difficult for Jess. She was very family oriented and was beating herself up for not being able to have a baby. She wanted to “give” me a child—this was how she put it. To her, it wasn’t our problem; it was hers alone. We had many talks, and I tried to stress that it was about us having a child together as man and wife, not just her giving me a baby. However, I was the last hope of keeping the Cole name alive; the only other Cole male, my cousin Dave, had only girls. This fact about my grandfather’s lineage ending bothered Jess greatly, and she heaped more guilt on herself. Nothing I said could soothe her feelings of being a failure as a woman for not being able to conceive.

  We talked about options and adoption. She was dead set on only having a child who was our blood and didn’t want to adopt. We looked into in vitro fertilization. Wow—it cost $20,000 and came with no guaranteed results, and our medical plan did not cover this procedure.

  Jess had dual citizenship in the United States and Thailand, so she looked into having the procedure done in Bangkok instead. It was drastically cheaper at $3,000. We’d been planning to take a trip there anyway, and Jess was going to stay for two months to spend time with her family.

  We arranged the procedure and booked the trip, and Jess left first. She had to take hormone medication that would make her reproductive system produce multiple eggs instead of the normal one per month. After that, I would stay for two weeks, and we would start the fertilization procedure. After her eggs were fertilized, three embryos were implanted. Doctors froze the other embryos just in case the procedure didn’t work the first time. The frozen embryos could be thawed and implanted at a greatly reduced cost with fewer medications involved.

  The procedure didn’t take. Jess was absolutely devastated and sank into depression. It affected me, too, and I tried to reassure her that we would work this out together. I didn’t tell Jess about my loss over this and feelings that I would probably never have children of my own. Expressing my feelings to her would only increase her guilt, so I had to bear them alone. We had countless talks about this, but Jess kept focusing on her own pain.

  Her emotional state really sank to a low point one day when we were watching TV. The local news ran a story about the police arresting a prostitute addicted to crack. The woman had just had her sixth baby from a different father, and Jess started crying. She looked at me and said, “Am I so much worse than her that God will give her children and not me? Why is he punishing me?” It was shocking that she was comparing her self-worth to that of some prostitute on TV and felt that God was punishing her. That’s how deeply she was tormenting herself.

  My sister offered to try to carry an embryo to term since the first time with Jess did not work. Jess and I discussed this option, but she wanted to try it again herself. I joked with Jess that my inner redneck would be out there for all to see with my sister pregnant with my baby. Jess laughed about that, too, and it was wonderful to see her beautiful smile again.

  A year later Jess was in Thailand by herself and had the embryos implanted. She flew back and continued the medications, hoping it would take this time.

  The second in vitro procedure didn’t work either. Jess was more prepared this time, and it didn’t hit her as hard emotionally. We were both hurt by this news, but we talked it through. She wanted to go back for a third try, but her doctor here convinced her if it hadn’t worked the first two times, the third most likely would not either and that all it would do was cause more emotional pain.

  Jess would not let up. She began talking about trying again but this time using an egg from her sixteen-year-old niece, Phonphan. She really wanted a child from our family’s bloodline, and if her egg and my sperm wouldn’t work, Jess thought maybe she could carry to term an embryo created from an egg from her niece and my sperm.

  This idea of hers was way out there, but I didn’t tell Jess I thought it was crazy. I tried to put my reluctance in terms of it being too much of an emotional burden on a sixteen-year-old girl to do this. I also told Jess I didn’t want to see her hurt again if the procedure failed. I asked her to wait until her new business started generating profit—this would be extremely expensive. Using Jess to carry the newly extracted fertilized eggs from another woman required months of each woman taking expensive hormone medications to synchronize their reproductive cycles. Jess agreed and focused on her work. A few years later, Jess required a hysterectomy due to pain caused by old scar tissue and other medical issues.

  Her new business had been going on for a while, and she showed me promising financials. It seemed to be working out well, but the business was the beginning of severe problems in our marriage.

  Communication with Jess was becoming increasingly difficult. She became short-tempered, irrational at times, and complained about how customers treated or insulted her. She frequently vented to me, and her stress led her to magnify all my imperfections. She had multiple clashes with the cleaner over little issues, and Jess would not relent. She was right, and he was wrong, and Jess refused to find middle ground on many issues. Jess also kept pushing the limits of what she could do. She was encroaching into space she was not entitled to per the sublease agreement. I tried to talk to her, saying I understood her motivation but that this was a legal agreement: she didn’t have any right to use so much space. I was sucked in between them and had to be the level-headed mediator for Jess.

  Jess began accusing me of never standing up for her and said I was taking the cleaner’s side. I told her this was not fair and said she must know I wanted what was best for her and us, but everyone must adhere to the terms of the business contract. Jess refused to understand and still tried to push the limits on what she could do.
The frequency of her accusations about my never taking her side and never listening to her increased dramatically.

  After a couple of months, I noticed there was no improvement in the store’s financials, and I couldn’t get a straight answer out of her about what was really going on. There were no profits coming in, and her business drained all the money from my job. Finally, one day, she came clean: there was $20,000 in debt from her store. Damn.

  I was very angry and didn’t talk much to her for a few days. She had consistently fed me half-truths and had hidden the real story for all this time. A couple of days later, she wanted us to go to church so that we could talk about our marriage problems with Leo, the bluebird-of-happiness guy. Leo was the director of Christian education at our church, and we both held him in great regard. Jess trusted him completely, and this trust was well-founded. Leo was an all-around great guy, a man of incredible biblical knowledge, and he was highly respected by the congregation. He had great commonsense wisdom and wasn’t one of those fake churchy, preaching types. If someone had a thing against Leo, it was most likely that person’s fault, not Leo’s.

  We were talking about how we could reestablish good communication, strengthen our marriage, and get back to really enjoying each other. Jess began accusing me of not talking to her, not supporting her, and not taking her side. Leo had to stop her from these attacks and steered us toward moving on.

  Then Jess looked at me and said, “I want to tell you something, but I am afraid you will be mad.”

  Leo looked at me and asked if I could try to listen to her with forgiveness, if I could accept that we are all very imperfect and listen to her. I said I would try but could not promise I wouldn’t be angry. Leo asked Jess if she was OK with that since I was being fair and honest, and she said yes.

  Jess said the debt was not $20,000; it was double that at $40,000. I went numb and didn’t know what to say. She had lied to me again.

  I didn’t say much for the rest of the meeting with Leo. Jess did most of the talking. She tried to justify keeping the truth from me by saying she didn’t want me to get mad and had kept trying to lower the debt for both of our futures, blah, blah. She even stated she had worked hard so that I could retire early. I started tuning her out at this point and didn’t want to hear more excuses or her continual stream of blabbering justifications for lying to me.

  One of Jess’s greatest strengths as a salesperson was her ability to sell her point from all different angles. She was the best salesperson I had ever seen, and watching her convince a customer to buy something was truly a sight to see. I’m a typical engineer, who deals with facts, and have always worked with similar people. Jess was ignoring my need for truth and openness, and I was frustrated in dealing with her ability to completely ignore reality and justify actions with pure emotions. During the meeting with Leo, Jess was justifying her actions by coming in from all these well-practiced different angles.

  After Leo stopped her from coming up with excuses, he asked us how we could move on. Jess promised to tell the whole truth in the future. She said she knew the huge mistakes she had made and how she had wronged me. She asked for forgiveness so that we could move on and be happy in our lives. She even had Leo convinced that she was turning over a new leaf.

  When this talk occurred, we had been married four years. I still loved her greatly, and these problems did not seem to be a valid reason to consider divorce. We had many talks about her half-truths and the store’s financials, and our goal was for us to work together and fix this situation.

  A couple of weeks later at church, the pastor gave a talk about truth and the way people ignore real truth and substitute their own. He also spoke about lies of commission and lies of omission. This really affected Jess, and she was very uncomfortable listening to this, due to her own guilt. I had forgiven her for the store situation, but she had not forgiven herself. Later in the day, she accused me of not forgiving her. This was due to her own guilt tearing her apart. She had so much guilt built up that she couldn’t realize how others could forgive her.

  One of Jess’s ongoing issues that slowly got worse was her problem with forgiveness. She held things against people and did not truly forgive them. Her pride was so great that she could not let go. She demanded that people make reparations on her terms, or else she would not forgive them. She gave lip service about how she forgave, but deep down in her heart, she did not. Something within her prevented her from giving true forgiveness toward others.

  She started holding my mistakes against me. I’m far from perfect and made plenty of mistakes in our marriage, but she could not forgive me as I forgave her. She also did this to herself. She accumulated so much guilt for what she had done in the past that it tore her up. We tried working on this together and took many classes, but nothing worked. She built up what I call a “hurt bank” and could justify holding a grudge against someone by pulling out the list of grievances she felt the other person had not corrected to her satisfaction.

  We remortgaged the house to pay off the debt. It was either that or close the store, and we absorbed $40,000 in debt along with all the other investments in the store. She assured me there would be no more lies about finances and promised to show me everything, and we worked together to try and recover the losses. At this point in our marriage, I had accumulated $89,000 in equity in the house, which I had bought four years before we were married. The new mortgage was for $110,000 to pay off the existing mortgage, and the remaining funds went to her debt and for operating cash. What a mistake that turned out to be. I would have gladly accepted only $40,000 in losses had I known the extreme financial calamity that would later occur due to her lying again about the finances of her store.

  A few months later, I got a frantic call at work from Jess. The dry cleaner had not been paying rent to the landlord, even though we had been paying him the sublease fees. Jess saw an eviction notice taped to the door. Her business was established and growing at that location, but now all that would be lost.

  We had already suffered huge financial losses. We talked about this, and the only option to recover the $40,000 and all other expenses was to take over the lease of the whole space. Jess really pushed this and showed me promising financials. The store could become a full-fledged bridal shop, which would attract more customers. Looking back on this decision, I should have known better. At this time I still deeply loved and trusted her, believing we had worked out the past issues. I took my marriage vows very seriously, but seeds of doubt in her were in the back of my mind.

  In addition to the store, Jess wanted to import and breed three Thai Ridgeback dogs from Thailand. I was completely opposed to this, but in her typical manner, she would not relent and pressured me for weeks. I caved, but it was with the understanding that I had no part of this and that it was 100 percent her responsibility. What a fool I was to agree to this, based on her history of failures to follow through. Part of the reason I relented was because I was tired of listening to her go on about how I didn’t support her decisions.

  The dog situation turned out to be a disaster and almost broke our marriage. Just like everything before, she utterly failed to follow through. She would not try to sell the eight puppies, and she would not train them. All the dogs were destroying our home. She responded to only a few people who came to us from ads I had to place. I pleaded with her to try harder to sell the dogs, but she didn’t place a single ad. It really pissed me off that she did this and did nothing to correct the problem.

  The stench of urine and feces hit me right in the face every day when I got home from work. I had to build gates to keep the dogs contained in the kitchen. I even put up a small fence around a small portion of the backyard. There was no more money available to fence in the entire yard. We started getting complaints from neighbors and the homeowners’ association about running an unauthorized kennel.

  Thai Ridgebacks are a very difficult breed to train and control. Jess tried at first to train the male, but she didn’t follow throug
h with the training. I even paid a dog handler to give Jess private lessons about how to train the dog, but she did not follow the trainer’s recommendations. She would beg the dog to act correctly instead of being a pack leader. The trainer even told her she had to be trained to be a proper leader to the dog.

  It was very bizarre watching Jess interact with all the dogs. She seemed to get an emotional fix when they greeted her. She was all smiles when the dogs were all over her, wagging their tails. All the other issues, the smell and destruction of our once-happy home, went away from her for a brief moment. Then she sank into her mode of being unhappy and ignored the reality of the situation. I had to place all additional ads since she did nothing, but only three of the eight puppies were sold.

  Finally I’d had it. I took a couple of the dogs to the local shelter. They saw just how wild they were and how rare the breed was, and then they told me they would most likely euthanize them, as no one would adopt them due to the rareness of the breed. I brought them back to the house and told Jess about my visit to the shelter. I gave her an ultimatum. It was us or the dogs. They had to go—they were destroying our marriage and our home.

  Jess knew deep in her heart that they had to go, but she completely shut down at this point and could not deal with the problem. She only wanted an emotional fix from dog kisses. She ignored the severe harm the dogs were doing to our relationship and home. I pleaded with her again to put in an effort to sell or give them away. I told her she had to do something or I would have no other option than to take them away.

  Jess assured me she would act, but she did absolutely nothing. It was incredibly frustrating for me to know she had broken so many promises and was willing to let this horrible situation continue. I didn’t feel valued in our marriage. I felt that I was secondary to all the things she was doing and the problems she caused.