Old School (Feb. 2006)

I’m sure this has happened to everyone who has ever tried to move back, so my experience is by no means unique. It’s more, how shall I put this? Insensitive? Annoying? Let me explain.

I used to work on campus at University of Houston full-time. As such, I know most of the Information Technology department and they know me… or they used to. That part is very good and it makes me smile that I’m remembered fondly. But there are other parts to which I’m adjusting.

When I first got the job as an Intranet/Internet Developer II, they had a summer student hire working for me. I didn’t know until I got to my job on the very first day that the employee working for me was my then-girlfriend, Kathleen. Not surprisingly, it did not go well. She was (and I’m sure, still is) a Type A personality and she was used to getting her way at home. Her problem at work was that our roles were reversed and I was in charge of making the decisions… but she wouldn’t trust me to make them. At the end of the summer, I was thrilled that she chose to work someplace else so that I could have a little bit of breathing room, because working together and living together only added fuel to the effigies we held in secret.

I should have taken this into account when we started fighting over what would happen when Kathleen graduated, because her first choice was to go with ExxonMobil- a company that had a horrible track record with things like domestic partner benefits- because they were offering her more money. If I had been thinking correctly, I would have said to myself that any woman that would sell out her partner for a little extra money is not the kind of woman that I want to be with long term. But, I was young and I’d made this committment that I thought I ought to stick to… and she was the one with the job offer, not me, so off we went.

Because I’d paid the rent with my job at University of Houston for the past year and a half, Kathleen agreed to shoulder that burden for the year it would take me to finish up school at George Mason. But two things stopped that- the first was that tuition at George Mason was INCREDIBLY expensive, and the second is that if I worked for a year and saved up money, then I’d get the in-state tuition rate because I could prove that I was a resident of Virginia. So I started looking around for jobs. I didn’t find anything in computers, but I did find a couple of things of the minimum wage nature. Kathleen was not impressed. She told me that there was a temp agency at ExxonMobil and I should start doing secretarial work because I’d make more money. At that point, making more money was appealing. So that’s when I became the second member of our family to work at ExxonMobil. A few months later, I got a permanent job with them. Kathleen and I were living together and working together all over again. It should have been a red flag, but it wasn’t. We were in different departments, different wings of a building that spanned a half mile. But we still saw each other every day at lunch, and as a result, had all the same friends. We had no life outside of each other, and it was suffocating for both of us. I interviewed at Gannett (news wire service) as a Macintosh support guru, but I didn’t get the job. I wanted to individuate, but it wasn’t happening fast enough for Kathleen. She started pulling away, going out and not coming home until 2 or 3 in the morning. She danced and got close with with lots of men that knew I was at home waiting for her.

Our marriage exploded shortly after that, in a truly memorable fight moments before I went to stand up in my mother’s wedding. She’d told our pastor, Ruth, that in the short time I’d been gone, she’d slept with two different men. I was in Texas, she was in Virginia. I never felt more helpless in my life… I couldn’t get to her, and I wouldn’t have known what to do with her if I could.

And now I’m back at University of Houston, with people who worked with both of us, and they ask about her all the time. I don’t really know what to say. I haven’t talked to her in almost four years. I don’t know what I’d say to her if we did talk. I might thank her, because being shaken out of that life and into the one I have now is probably the best thing that could have happened. But I’m not quite finished being angry yet. I’m not quite finished feeling that she took away all my choices in the matter of whether to end our marriage or not. When people ask me how she is, it touches into that wealth of mixed up emotion, and I’m not sure what to do with it.

There was one particularly interesting incident the other day. My sister had driven me to school because my Jeep was being worked on… but I got out of class an hour and a half earlier than she did, so I asked my friend Tom to take me home. While we were riding, he started talking about how devastated I must have felt when Kathleen walked out, as if it had happened yesterday instead of almost four years ago. He also said that he was so shocked, because we just looked like this perfect couple.

And that is true. We did. But how many couples are there that are completely authentic in public? It is as if my friend had no concept of private life, that of course there were things that went on behind the scenes that no one would know.

I’m still wrestling over what to do with this one, because I love my friends… but I’m also to the point that I’m done traveling down memory lane and I hope they’ll get to know me for who I am, instead of who I used to be.