Curious Memory

Dirty Dancing (1987) - Trailer

On billboards here and there on buses and other parts of the city, you see them.  Advertisements for the show Dirty Dancing.  Two black silhouettes suggestive of a male and female against a burgundy background, the female silhouette has "big hair" the male silhouette has a "mullet" suggesting that the story takes place in the 1980's. I saw such an advertisement the other day this week on the Blue Line train heading home from work, and all of the sudden my mind flooded with memories of my life back during my first marriage.

I recalled an incident where after my ex and I had been living together for about a year, and he openly told me of a date he had with some other girl from class.  He had taken her to see a movie and then they had dinner at some Greek restaurant on Lincoln Avenue.  It was one of the first restaurants in the city to sport an "old fashioned" brick oven, and I had always wanted to go.  I love Greek food.  He told me what he ordered and how interesting the girl was.  She was from Israel, he said, she was an exchange student. It was her birthday, he had drawn her a card. He showed me.  I decided not to be jealous, but I was hurt and I said so. I said, "You are living with me, why haven't you taken me to the Greek restaurant?  Why couldn't I have gone with you?"  And he answered, "Because she is interesting and you are not."  As we had this conversation (because we never really argued until the very end), I could hear the soundtrack from the moving Dirty Dancing coming through the floorboards from the apartment.

That was over twenty years ago, and I had long pushed such unpleasant and painful memories of my horrible first marriage out of my mind, but a visual cue like that billboard on the L train and I was back in 1988, back in that apartment on Whipple Street in Albany park, with the hard wood floors and the lovely sunshine, as if it were yesterday, not two decades ago. 

It took me a day to recover from that memory. 

Years later when I finally had enough money to afford a therapist, she often told me that I could get insurance to pay for therapy if I allowed her to put down on my record recovering from "post traumatic stress disorder" and "depression."  I laughed at her.  "No way," I said, "It's not like I went to Viet Nam. For you to diagnose my with PTSD would be an insult to men and women who suffered true combat." After this latest incident of recollection, however, I wonder if perhaps I do have some attenuated form of PTSD, and I wonder if she had a correct diagnosis for my condition.  And I wonder if I will ever completely recover from those years of suffering and abuse, not only from my former marriage, but also from the numerous painful experiences I had before and after my marriage.

Still, I had to give myself some credit for getting out of the marriage as soon as I found my own voice and started to think for myself. Again. I had to give myself credit for finding women to care and support me while I did it.  I cannot thank Nancy and Marsha enough for the help they gave me, they and Suzette Elgin Hagin, who wrote the book The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense. All of them gave me the support and the strength to leave.  They validated my perceptions.  They gave me enough strength to leave that horrible situation. A lot of women are too shamed into leaving their ex husbands, some have no place to go.  I was lucky. I had more than enough people encouraging me to leave him, and I had a lot of open doors.

So anyway, I moved on to new adventures, not any less painful, but at least a lot more fun and there isn't a day that I don't thank God in heaven that I am no longer married to that man.

And, I have healed enough to say that while I have forgiven him for being who he was at the time, and I have forgiven myself for making such an ill fated choice, when my gut instinct told me to run.

But I have not forgotten and I suppose I never will.