The Pedestal and Push

For twenty-five years, my ex-husband presented two versions of me (and of himself).

He performed them in public, often within the same conversation.

The first version was the one he put on display, telling people what a wonderful woman I was. At my commencement, when I finished my doctorate, a friend asked him if he was proud of me. “She does whatever the hell she wants,” he said. People laughed. I did not know that some were also concerned.

When I had the farm, a friend and his wife visited to meet the animals and spend time with my husband and me. My friend was a male colleague a couple decades older than us. Years later, he told me that after I did something seemingly insignificant, my husband turned to him and said, "Yeah, she's not very smart." My friend told him, "Your wife is one of the most intelligent people I know." That night, he went home and said to his own wife: "I don't think he treats her very well."

He was right, though I was not aware. That was a normal every day comment. I got accustomed to him kicking me off the pedestal.

The pedestalling was constant, and so was this tendency to pick and kick at it and ensure it could not actually hold me up. In public, around friends and family, he would say things that seemed almost funny. My voice grated on his soul, he told people, more than once, in front of me. He’d hush me when I laughed too loud in a restaurant. He became exceptionally angry when I was reportedly disrespectful, forgetful, or too much. And it only recently dawned on me how throughout the marriage he delivered the following as a joke, at a gathering, to whoever was standing there: He had me brainwashed, he’d say, and laugh.

It is not funny to me now. I don’t think it ever was.

A joke told about someone, in front of them, is never really for them. It’s for the room. “Brainwashed” was never a comment on my personality the way “loud” or “forgetful” pretended to be. It was a claim about the origin of my mind — that my opinions, my choices, my whole way of seeing things, were his design and not mine. Said as a joke, it arrived pre-defended. I couldn’t push back on it without confirming the very thing it accused me of. We know this tactic. Object too seriously to a joke and you’re humorless, sensitive, exactly the kind of person who needs to be managed.

The pedestal was purposeful. Elevating me in front of people bought him credibility as someone who clearly adored his wife. That credibility was spent the moment he turned around and knocked me down, because the room had already decided what kind of man says those glowing things about someone. A man like that couldn’t be doing harm. He must be teasing. The elevation laundered the diminishment.

And I used to think the pedestal and push were contradictions in him, like two conflicting impulses at war. No. They were one move, timed, though I cannot say that he was aware of this at every level. Self- and other- awareness is not something he had much of.

I’ve written before about epistemic injustice in therapy, the way a person stops being treated as a credible narrator of their own experience, and how a system built around someone else’s authority to interpret you can hollow out your relationship to your own perception over time. I built that argument thinking about diagnosis and the therapist’s chair. I didn’t expect to find the clearest version of it in my kitchen or bedroom.

“Brainwashed” is epistemic injustice compressed into a single word. It is also delivered as entertainment. It tells everyone listening that my interpretations of my own life are not to be trusted at the source. And because it’s funny, because it’s just my funny husband being my funny husband, nobody in that room was going to ask me what I actually thought about anything I’d just said or done. Why would they? They’d already been told the answer wasn’t really mine.

I started to notice, over years, that I'd narrate my own choices to people with a kind of preemptive defense built in. I'd explain why I wanted to go back to school, why I was talking to a particular friend, why I felt a particular way, with more evidence and explanation than the moment required. And I would get in trouble for that, too: "Yeah," he would say, "I heard you the first ten times." And as icing on the cake, if I did not agree or follow through with his demands, he would say, "Did you understand me THAT time," as if my not following through before was because I or my children were idiots. I thought for a long time that the over-explaining was just childhood trauma or how my mind worked. After all, I am thorough, precise, and clever with language. And while some of this is innate, some of it was also rehearsal for an audience that had already been instructed not to believe me.

A marriage is a small system, and small systems can organize themselves the same way large ones do. I’ve written about how corporations become self-referential, how feedback that threatens the leadership’s narrative gets reframed as negativity or disloyalty rather than addressed directly. Ours worked the same way at a smaller scale. When I raised something that had hurt me, it became me being too sensitive, too intense, and always too much. Or it would swing the direction of him saying, “Well I guess I’m just a horrible person.” It could never just be the thing itself. The story stayed intact, while I became the variable that needed adjusting.

My daughters were in the room for a lot of this. They learned to hush me when I laughed too loud. They learned to question my driving, the way he did, in the same tone even. I don’t say this to explain the estrangement I now carry with them. I don’t think it can. But I notice it. The pattern got transmitted and believed before anyone involved could question it. So now I exist as the one to be questioned or not believed. I am the weak one. I am the emotional or manipulative one. They tell me as much. I reflect on what part can be true, and gaslight myself in the process.

I can hold that I loved my ex for a long time, genuinely, and that this was still happening the whole time I loved him. I can hold that he may not have experienced it as a strategy, that it may have felt to him like simple truth-telling wrapped up in humor. The effect on me was real regardless of his intent, and I’m so done looking for the version of this story where everyone was just doing their best. What he did hurt me. I tried to let him know. There was no curiosity about my experience.

I’m writing this now because this story matters, particularly to those who may live in it still. The transparency matters too, since so often we hide in the shame of these stories too long. I am not looking for vindication from the room that laughed. I sometimes laughed too — uncomfortably, though few knew it. I need to be more gentle and grounded than inculpable. I need to stand up straight in this and say my truth plainly, once, without a joke built in to soften it for anyone else’s comfort. He told people he had me brainwashed. He meant it as a bit. It cost me years of narrating myself defensively to people who had already been told my account didn’t count.

I’m the one narrating now, f*cker.

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