Today is my Dead Ex’s birthday. If he were still alive, he’d be 65. This is a piece I wrote about him years ago.

IT WAS FREEZING COLD, and of course I was still driving around with my dead husband’s ashes in the trunk of my old Tercel. My sons weren’t sure what to do with them, and since the fake marble cask was so heavy, I left them in the trunk until they made up their minds.

“Well, there were times you sure sounded like you wanted to put him in the trunk,” said R., my best friend.

“I feel funny,” I said. “It’s so cold. I feel like I should take him a blanket and a Thermos of hot chocolate or something.” He was gone, and years of hard feelings left with him.

I was fifteen when I met him, eighteen when I moved in with him and nineteen when we married. Roy and I stayed married for thirteen years and had two sons, M. and J.

It was one of those cerebral, friendly marriages where we had no real emotional understanding of each other; worse, we lacked compassion. We once thought we’d manage to stay friends despite our divorce but mostly, we could only manage friend-ly. Often, there were hard feelings between us. Most of those hard feelings appeared to be related to money but ultimately, they had to do with the way each of us looked at the world. Roy was afraid of so many things and he tended to hoard things to keep himself safe. He thought money was his armor.

People were so quick to write off my complaints as the embittered exaggeration of an ex-wife. They weren’t standing there in the support hearing when, asked by the judge if he had anything to say, Roy laid out an elaborate explanation of how much it cost him to feed the boys each week. “So you see, your honor, not only should I not be paying more support, I believe I should be paying less.” (At the time, he paid $35 a week for two boys. I was making $16,000 a year. He made more than twice that.)

The judge looked genuinely shocked. “You know, sir,” he said, peering over his glasses, “I have fathers in here all the time, begging for the opportunity to spend more time with their children. I must say, I believe this is the first time I’ve ever had a father ask for a rebate for time spent with their own children. Increase granted!” He banged the gavel.

Oh yes, I could tell stories. But I won’t. I only want to illustrate how out of proportion to life was his emotional attachment to money.
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I was trying to get an additional closet built on the other side of an alcove in my bedroom (I don’t actually have one, but my parents did), and someone promised to build one for me, but abandoned it when they barely started. Then I walk back in the room to discover that my father arranged to have my brother complete it, and it’s almost finished.

It’s been a rough couple of days. I had a migraine yesterday, my neck and shoulder are locked in a painful spasm (which hardly EVER happens, I might add), and I’m having a flareup of my DV. That’s why there were so few posts up yesterday. Fortunately, my physiatrist had a cancellation, so relief is at hand later today.

My aunt just died this morning, after pneumonia complications from the flu. She was the last of my mother’s four sisters, the five Miller girls.

Like all the women in my family, she was feisty and funny. She was what we used to call “a real pip.” I’m glad she’s with all her sisters now.

Ever since I announced my new job, my daily hits have dropped by 40%. (Those visits and page views are what drives ad revenue.) So that concerns me, because I sat down and did a budget last night, and after my monthly bills are paid, I have $30 left. That’s it. It seemed like a lot, but it isn’t.

That’s without putting anything at all away for taxes (because it’s a contract job), and of course just one doctor co-pay eats that up last $30.

So I’m a little nervous, and I’d really appreciate your continuing support. Please keep clicking back on the page, and please continue to make donations if you can afford it. Because I really hate hyperventilating.

It’s the kind of day where you’re making oatmeal, you notice that the bag of brown sugar has hardened, you whack the bag on the counter to loosen it up, and the bag explodes, sending brown sugar all over your kitchen. Yeah, that kind of day.