I met Norman the Sunday before Mardi Gras, 2004. Our first date was the next day, on Lundi Gras. For the rest of our relationship, we treated Lundi Gras as our anniversary, irrespective of the date on the calendar. I couldn’t even tell you the actual date that we met without googling it.
After 19 years of belittling, bullying, and bullshit, I spent the summer of 2023 leaving Norman. Yes, it took all summer. I had given him half of my life. I had completely rewritten my entire personality and given up my own goals to suit him. I was who he said I was, and that’s a hard thing from which to separate.
I was not well. I had stopped being well years before, and by the time I got on that train my descent into madness was complete. It’s not like Norman didn’t know. Everyone knew. He just chose to ignore my struggles. As long as I kept the money coming in, he didn’t care what I did or how I felt.
Norman only listened to me when listening to me gave him ammunition to use against me. After I left him the first time, the marriage counselor told me I should let Norman experience one of my panic attacks with me. Previously, whenever I tried to discuss my mental health issues with Norman, he would dismiss them and tell me I had no reason to be anxious and I just needed to choose to be happy.
I can’t count the number of times he told me that taking medication for mental health issues was weak. Nonetheless, I medicated myself into a zombie, because it was the only way I could stand life with him.
But the therapist said it was important for me to show Norman my vulnerabilities and give him an opportunity to be supportive. So, on May 30, 2023, when I woke up from a night terror having a full-blown panic attack, I woke Norman up, too.
I cried as I told him that my biggest fear was that he regretted having children with me because I’m too crazy. He’s been telling me how crazy I am since I met him. It was a legitimate concern. He assured me he loved me, and would never regret being with me.
On June 1, 2023, less than forty-eight hours later, we went to counseling again. In the session he smiled and nodded and agreed with everything that was said. I thought he was finally listening to me, that my voice was starting to matter in my own life.
On the drive home he told me, very calmly, that if I didn’t get back on the meds that made me feel like a zombie and “learn to be happy” he would take the kids and leave me.
“You’re too crazy to be around MY children,” were his exact words.
HIS children. I will never forget or forgive that word in particular. I grew them. I fed them. I supported them, financially and emotionally. He loves to paint me as an uninvolved mother, but I did all the invisible labor in the house and cooked dinner. And I read to them. Every single night, I read to them. I miss that more than anything. That time before sleep when I read to them in bed.
Norman never raised his voice to me, even when he was giving me that final ultimatum. To this day, he remains proud of that. He insists he can’t possibly have mistreated me because he never shouted at me.
Silence can be abuse.
Hearing my fears twisted around and used as a weapon to control me broke something inside of me. Speaking just as calmly as he had, I said, “I hate you.”
I meant it. I still mean it. I haven’t been able to pull up any feelings of affection for him since that moment. I can’t remember what it felt like to love him.
I’m no longer sure I ever did.
Anyway… Mardi Gras. I first got involved with Norman over Mardi Gras weekend. Twenty years later, I nearly killed myself over Mardi Gras weekend.
I was already having a hard time approaching Mardi Gras of 2023. I was starting to suspect that Charles didn’t actually know all the things he claimed to know, or have all the skills he claimed to have, and that was terrifying because I had thrown literally everything I had left in the world into a fantasy business where we would make movies together.
Charles’s friend, Kolin, had gotten him a job working at a bar in the French Quarter that Mardi Gras. In spite of being so broke he was about to lose his apartment, Charles was pissed about this because he thought bartending was beneath him at that stage of his life.
I would say he would rather have starved than get a real job, but the truth was he knew he was never going to starve because his mother is a millionaire and she has no problem writing him checks for thousands of dollars. The best part is that Charles would scream at me about how he would rather live in a gutter than take money from his mother, as if I didn’t know that he met with her every few weeks for the sole purpose of getting money from her. Then he would come home and complain about how she was a terrible person and he hated being forced to spend time with her.
Charles Lucia is such a piece of shit.
My head was in a really bad place that weekend because it was the twentieth anniversary of my first date with Norman. To make matters worse, Charles insisted on allowing Norman’s self-confessed mistress to use the house I was sharing with him as her home base for Mardi Gras parades. When I told him it was difficult for me to be around my estranged husband’s mistress on such a meaningful date (or, you know, at all) he informed me that he had known her longer than me so she came first.
This from the man who told me I was his soul mate, the best thing to ever happen to him, the woman he had been waiting for his entire life. He didn’t even care enough about me to tell the woman my husband cheated on me with for years to find another place to pee for a few hours.
You would think the woman herself would have understood that it was hard for me to be around her, but she was convinced we were destined to be besties. I locked myself in the bedroom before she arrived, and she spent several minutes knocking on the door and trying to get me to come out. Charles even sent me a text that said she thought I was mad at her.
I wasn’t mad at her. It’s not her fault my husband broke his vows. But I also didn’t want to hang out with her. Especially on such an emotionally complex day.
I wanted to be at the bar with Charles, earning money to keep a roof over our heads, but I couldn’t because Kolin was pissed at me for destroying some paintings he had stored in the basement. Fun fact: I didn’t even know the paintings existed. Charles’s ex-wife was the one who cut them up. But she was on another continent and it’s so much easier to punish someone who is right in front of you than someone who is on the other side of the planet.
So instead of working I was locked in a bedroom, crying and drinking. I sobered up long enough to call my kids, which made my weekend so much worse.
Thing1 asked me if I was going to see Norman that weekend. When I said I was still in Louisiana, he innocently informed me that his father was in New Orleans, working on an album.
Norman left my kids alone with his mother, thousands of miles from anyone who could legally make decisions should something happen, without telling me. Unsurprisingly, that fucked me up even more.
In the course of trying to cope with all of this, I didn’t do the dishes.
That’s such a small, innocuous sentence. I didn’t do the dishes.
I picked Charles up from the Quarter around four o’clock in the morning. He was angry, as usual, so we didn’t talk much. When we got back to the apartment he sat down on the couch and turned the tv on. He stayed there until it was time for him to get ready for work the next afternoon.
That was when he discovered I hadn’t done the dishes. He started screaming at me for being a parasite, for using him and taking advantage of him. I was bothered by this, because I had spent months searching diligently for a non-legal job, crying over every rejection, while he lounged about in bed refusing to even fill out a single job application. But I didn’t say any of that.
I just curled into a ball on the floor of the hallway and cried.
That made him scream louder. He accused me of manipulating him, and insisted he wasn’t going to fall for it. He berated me for several minutes until I managed to pull myself together and apologize.
That afternoon, Charles went to work at the bar. I don’t remember what I did. I probably drank a lot. The only time in my life I ever drank much was when I was with Charles.
I set an alarm so I could be up to pick up Charles and Kolin from the French Quarter around four o’clock the next morning. Parking in the Quarter is hard at the best of times, and straight up impossible during Mardi Gras, so having me drive them back and forth made the most sense.
In the car on the way home, I tried to explain why I was having a hard weekend. I wanted Charles to know that I was aware I wasn’t at my best, and that I was trying to cope.
He got angry. VERY angry.
By the time we got back to the apartment, he was raging. He started shouting that he was going to kill Norman, that he would tell everyone he knew to beat the shit out of him if they saw him. Then he grabbed a cleaver off of a shelf and started chopping up a table in the kitchen, while still ranting that he was going to murder Norman or have him murdered.
I don’t remember exactly what happened after he calmed down. I just remember that I started drinking. And drinking. And drinking.
Twenty-four hours after Charles chopped up a table, I was sitting on the front porch with no coat on, drunk out of my mind, talking about how I wanted to kill myself but I knew I couldn’t leave this planet without hugging my children one last time.
Charles accused me of manipulating him. Charles accused me of choosing to be crazy. Charles called the cops, who I told repeatedly to arrest me for being a shitty human.
By the time the sun rose, I was handcuffed in the back of a police car, being driven to the hospital for a twenty-four hour suicide watch. I wasn’t in the hospital long. I sobered up, calmed down, and was released the following morning.
Charles later convinced me that this incident was a prime example of how I abused him. The screaming and the chopping up of the table was just him being himself. The losing my shit and wanting to die was me choosing to be crazy and trying to manipulate him.
I believed this. For over a year, I believed this.
I don’t believe it now.
It has been a hard week. Too many bad memories, mixed with the good memories of watching Mardi Gras parades with my children, left my head spinning. It doesn’t help that people here see me as the girl from New Orleans, so everyone kept saying “Happy Mardi Gras” and expecting me to smile and be happy.
I tried. I’m always trying. Sometimes I succeed. But it’s still been a difficult week. I’ve had trouble concentrating, and things have fallen through the cracks. I decided to write this to see if it would clear the cobwebs out and allow me to function again.
Telling the story has made me feel better. I might actually get my homework done over the weekend. I definitely need to grade a bunch of shit. My students try hard. They deserve my time and attention.
Perhaps the most significant thing about this week is that I only cried a little, and they were normal tears, not “crying so hard I can’t breathe or even sit up” tears.
Progress is being made, one tiny little bit at a time.
