Saga

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Last week someone tried to take over the USA and foment violent revolution.

Madam X

But now lets talk about MY life!

This is the saga of the letters!  I will not be giving names but I am going to run a photo of the to-you-anonymous woman with whom my spouse was in love the year before he met me.  Let's call her Madame X.  This photo is a few years before he met her.  She has now gone on to the next world, though I'm not sure exactly when as the ancestry.com info on her death just noted it was between 2015-2017.

So.  As I noted in my last post, I spent last Monday using Ancestry.com, Google, Newspapers.com, and Zabasearch to track down the surviving son and daughter of Madame X.   I'd seen the names of three children on a Christmas card.  Tuesday I posted letters to the only addresses I could find for the two children, now in their sixties.  The letter I sent to the son came back as no longer at that address.  The letter to the daughter I paste below:

Are you the daughter of Mr. and Madame  X? 

 

If not, read no further.  Thanks for your time.

 

If so, I hope you will have the patience to read on.

 

I am a retired teacher and current dementia-carer/writer.  As my spouse and I have been traveling the last stage of our journey together, I’ve been digging through his boxes of papers (this man I’ve been married to for 47 years never threw out a piece of paper related to him) and ran across a big old stack of letters from a Madam X (mother to Son, Son, Daughter) in the years 1969-1970.  I met my later-to-be-husband in 1971.  If you are indeed the daughter of Madame X, I wonder if you would be interested in either writing to me or talking to me about anything you might remember about Will Huck, a friend of your mother’s.  

 

If you got this far, thank you for your time.  

 

 I don't know what I expected.  Certainly not to be called at a few minutes before 4:00 pm last Thursday for a twenty minute chat with Daughter X.  From her I learned that Madame X and her spouse each had affairs, that Madame X left her children alone much of the time and was neglectful. It was Daughter X who asked what kind of relationship the letters revealed and I paused and then said that it was an affair she said that she had guessed as much.  That both Madame and Mr. X had affairs and that it was a hard way for kids to grow up.  I couldn't talk for very long because I had an appointment for which I was late.  

Suffice to say we exchanged some photos (which Yahoo wouldn't let her send but which came through at my Google account) and she recognized my spouse.  She recognized her mother in this photo which I'd tracked down in a yearbook online.

Then on Friday, I read all 50 letters (which included two from Daughter X).

These are my take-aways from the 50 yr old letters of Madame X.

1.  This woman had some of the same seductive behaviors that I exhibited in my younger days.

1. She flirts by using the word "love" and telling him how smart he is and how he delights her and about how she longs for their hugs.  (She also winds up having a sexy nickname for him.)
2. She flatters by talking about his intelligence (I actually did a lot less of this than she does.)
   
3. She talks about her attractions to other men.
4. She presents her wounds (she mentions being sick fairly often).

2.  She also exhibits some similar boundary-making behaviors I used with those folks with whom I had "flings:"  

1. In response to what may have been a protest of love, she wrote the "I love you but" line: -- she was married and didn't intend to become unmarried.
2.  When Will clearly became too serious for her, she found ways to slow then terminate the relationship.  The last letters clearly show a decline of personal connection.
3. Unlike me, she also used her children to protect herself.

3.  She is similar to me in enjoying her alcohol and weed.

 

4.  The letters are filled with book and theatre chat and stories of parties, so she loved what he did and what I do.

 

5.  After his mother died, she began a single letter with an "I'm sorry . ." sentence and then went off talking about her own life.  I did not find a sympathy card.  When I got to that letter on Friday I wanted to reach my Dr. Who hand back 50 years and slap the shit out of the bitch.  "This man loves you, desires you, is giving you the passionate letter writing and hugs for which you hunger and you don't understand what the loss of his mother, the woman he's been traveling back to Nebraska to see every summer since he left home, over half of his 40 year old life ago?  Come here, ghost, and let me backhand you!"

After doing my online research, reading the letters, and exchanging information with Daughter X, I've had some freeing thoughts about my relationship with Will.

 

1. Before me he was attracted to another crazy, promiscuous woman who sought a variety of men for balance in her life and who misused intoxicants.  I wasn't his first one!  This frees me up from taking all the responsibility for his woundedness when he finally realized I wasn't kidding about my devotion to the "free-love" ideals of Bertrand Russell.
2. Will lucked out, however, in that I am a kind and loving narcissistic neurotic whereas it sounds like Madame X. was mean and manipulative.  
3. Will was very sparing in using the word "love" to me and actually admitted at one time that he wasn't "in love" with me and that companionship and friendship were as good a basis for marriage.  Now that I have an understanding that his betrayal by Madame X (who threw the word "love" around with indiscretion) may have led to his own damping of that particular emotion and the words used to express it.
   

AND about my choice to not bear young'ns -- clearly Madame X was not a good mother and left some damage behind as I believe I would have as well.

What's up next?  I'll copy the letters for future reference (people keep telling me this would make a good novel) and then send them to Daughter X.

 

And, as always, I wish that I could tell my beloved friend Will about what I've learned about my husband Will now that the latter has dementia. 

 

tears emoji

ADDENDUM:

I have photocopied the letter collection for future use as a reminder of Will's hidden-from-me self, and sent the letters on to Daughter X.  I would be overjoyed to get a bunch of information like this about my forebears as a heuristic tool of self-inquiry, so I hope she enjoys them as well.  I know they've been very helpful to me in rounding out my understanding of my sweet friend.  And they remind me so much of who he was in ways that his own letters don't.  (Of course I have saved all his letters and now I have all of mine to him.  I may do something with all of these some day.) (Then again, I may not.😁)

 

   

 

 

 

.