Jackie, Pt. 2

Part 1 — Part 2 — Part 3

CONTENT WARNING: This story addresses issues of a traumatic and sexual nature, which may be inappropriate for younger audiences to process without parental guidance.

Man and Wife

Jackie began working at a supermarket as a teenager. There she met the man who, eventually, she would marry, Victor. He was a devoted man—loyal to the end, caring, and compassionate. He was attentive to Jackie at her best and at her worst. They went through life together, progressing through different careers and raising children. Life should have been good.

Jackie, however, was decidedly not good. She was volatile and always boiling with negative emotions. She would pick fights on the daily, fights which Victor would bend over backwards to smooth over. She didn’t just have short fuse, she had no fuse. She didn’t think of herself as being bullish or mean, she thought of herself as being in control.

That’s not to say there weren’t good times. There were honeymoon periods too.

Men and Wife

But when the glamour faded, Jackie was left with a family she didn’t exactly ask for. She had a husband she blamed for all her problems and children who made her feel that her life was less and less about her. Control was slipping. Her life wasn’t going where she wanted it to. Jackie was more proud of her job as department manager than the role she had in her own family.

When she was discontent, frustrated, and utterly unhappy with the relationship she had, she began looking for more. As she speaks of it, there were a number of small affairs over the course of a few years which crescendo into one all-consuming one—an affair with a man named James Marshall Butler.

I’ll skip the details of how it started, but suffice it to say that Jackie had fallen more in love with James, who she worked with, than with her husband.

Secrets

Late at night, during the time Jackie was seeing James, she was doing an inventory in her department store. Without expectation, she started bleeding so badly that she had to change her pants. She insisted on working through the night, but even when she went home the bleeding continued.

She was having a miscarriage. She was miscarrying what could have become her and James’s child. She had to have a D&C and 4 pints of blood replaced.

I remember James calling me in my room and asking if I was alright. Of course, he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) come see me. I was wishing he was there. I was off for a few days in the hospital and at home, but wishing I was back at work with James.

When secrets would come out (like they always do), huge fights would spark. After one especially terrible fight, one in which Victor was shocked, infuriated, and heartbroken, they decided to go to counseling. But nothing would ever come from counseling. Not while Jackie insisted on blaming Victor for every issue, despite the fact that he was the only one working to fix the problems.

Tragically, Victor couldn’t understand Jackie. He was doing everything right—he wasn’t abusive, he wasn’t an alcoholic, he listened to her, he loved her deeply. Why would Jackie cheat?

A Dagger Between Them

Regardless, they kept going through the motions of being married. At least, until Victor injured his back on the job and had to go on disability. Even though there were some small checks coming in the mail, the burden of providing for the family fell on Jackie.

She struggled to maintain some semblance of control in her life. When she couldn’t cover all the bills anymore, so she did everything possible to cover up the mounting debt. As her family life fell out of control, she fell head-first back into James’s arms.

Victor, meanwhile, was simmering on all of this. He found out Jackie was hiding an entire life from him… again. More than that, he had been spending a lot of time with a (more aggressive) friend also on disability.

In time, Victor and this friend made a decision. They would remove James from the picture. Knowing Jackie had a key to James’s home, they snuck into his apartment on a Friday night, waiting for him to return. When he did, they jumped him and tied him to a chair. Things escalated, and at some point, Victor fatally stabbed James. He then came home and told Jackie.

In the aftermath, Victor pleaded guilty to manslaughter. This was accompanied by a sentence putting him in prison for 20 years. Jackie believes he did this to avoid involving his family in the process of a trial. But regardless, their family was now irreparably broken. Their children ultimately wound up in the care of Jackie’s mother-in-law (who Jackie hated).

Not an Easy Person

If we made choices that just affected us, good or bad. That would be okay. But we make choices every day and those don’t just affect us. They affect the ones we love. That’s the hardest part of our past that we can’t change.

Falling Apart

Jackie didn’t have a penny to her name after the economic fiasco of the previous several months. Yet she still had to work to pay rent as she slept on a friends’ couch. She still had pay for transportation after she lost one car and the other broke down. She was helpless and hopeless.

Within a couple months she moved in with her mom at Staten Island—while she was 2 months pregnant. Obviously, the baby wasn’t Victor’s this time. What she remembers the most from that pregnancy is the fear and anxiety. She hardly gained much weight throughout it because her anxiety drove away any appetite. At the end of it she adopted away a set of twins. That drove a huge wedge between she and her mother.

Because of guilt, Jackie would try to visit Victor regularly. But since she had no car, the trip upstate took an entire day, if not more. As she sat on buses, surrounded by estranged families bringing their children to see their absent fathers, crying and frustrated, she would think, “I can’t do this another day.”

After a year or so, they finalized a divorce.

A New Partner

While living in Manhattan, a new man weaseled his way into Jackie’s life. After running from problem to problem with men for as long as she could remember, she had finally decided to stay out of relationships. She was focusing on a new career. Though, she still felt like her life was a wreck and out of her control.

Those feelings of insecurity are where Matthew made his home. He was insightful and manipulative. Matthew wanted to be Jackie’s super hero. She had no self-esteem at this point, so he fed off that and used it.

It was a long relationship (1991-2013), one that was almost entirely unhealthy from the start. Jackie was an emotional wreck. And Matthew was manipulative. There was no stability in his life—money would come from God-knows-where and would be spent on God-knows-what. And that’s leaving aside his issues with alcohol abuse.

By the end of their time in New York, only Matthew was working. He had terrible relationships with her children. (Though Jackie’s weren’t too great either.) Jackie never felt she regained control of her life while she was with Matthew. Once fiercely independent, she was now financially and emotionally reliant on this man. Plus, her children were suffering for it. She had become her mother…

Hindsight

In the 20-some year time span that this part of her story covers, there was tremendous amounts of pain. But through the vast majority of it, Jackie was unconsciously choosing to be as numb to it as possible. She held on to the one thing she knew—not a self-improvement philosophy, not any kind of spirituality that should instill hope—she held on to her sense of self. Jackie refused to let go of her unhealthy, broken, fractured, and poorly formed sense of self. She was full of pride. That pride came before many, many falls. Those falls left her injured, shattered, defeated, angry, indifferent, weak, hardened, lost, and scarred. But she has this to say about her checkered past (and about yours as well):

If we didn’t remember our past, we couldn’t learn for the future. Sometimes I wish [God] would wipe [the memories] away… But my past is a blessing too. He gives us the ability to remember and move from our past. All the evil things I did—lying, cheating, stealing, murdering—God turned them into blessings. He doesn’t see me as those things. I still see myself that way sometimes. But He doesn’t see me like that at all.

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P.S.

It honestly feels like that I’m white-washing parts of this story trying to keep it a somewhat reasonable length—I’ve chosen to leave out the trauma and issues Jackie caused for her children, I left out the multiple abortions, I left out details of marital arguments and of her affairs, I left out the countless examples of how she treated those around her, and I left out detailed descriptions of the emotions that are associated with all the brokenness. There was pain, the scope of which I hope is conveyed by the litany of tragic circumstances. As I mentioned with Bumpy’s story, I will eventually publish a longer version of these stories, in one form or another.

Part 1 — Part 2 — Part 3