Over the holidays, I tried to contact my son Cameron. I called him a couple of times, but was unable to speak with him. My ex-wife, Tara, told me that he was rarely at home, that he is at that age where a boy is very active. Cameron is 17 years old and has been “at that age” for quite awhile. On numerous occasions throughout the past several years, I have called him at various times of the day. They have it set up there where someone has to input their telephone number to get through. I always have done this and almost always have had their answering machine pick up. Sometimes I left a message. Sometimes I didn’t. On the rare occasion that there was an answer, it was my ex-wife on the other end, telling me the same story, that Cameron wasn’t home.

Each time Tara answered the phone there was an accompanying request for money, over and above that which I already pay for monthly child support. When I have tried to direct the conversations back to my problem of contacting Cameron, she quickly ends them. I have asked Tara to help out with this problem, to get Cameron to commit to a time when I can call him, but she gives excuses why this cannot be done.

I’m not too sure that she isn’t the instigator in this bad situation in the first place. Certainly, Tara hasn’t lifted a finger to ensure that there is contact between Cameron and I, let alone complying with the liberal visitation schedule set up in the courts years ago. On the contrary, my ex-wife has set up obstacle after obstacle between Cameron and me. When he was young, she enrolled him in various extracurricular activities over the summer months when the court had ordered her to give him over to me for visitation. Then, she would use that situation she herself created to accuse me of not caring about Cameron, because I wanted to pull him out of the various summer programs so I could spend time with him (and, perhaps, be involved with similar programs in my area through the visitation months).

Throughout the years, this went on and on. Tara did everything she could to keep Cameron from me, even though it was frequently in direct violation of court orders. So, why didn’t I sue her for custody? Well, I was in the process of doing that by having my lawyer file two stipulations against her. The details of those stipulations is best left to a separate entry, but they fall along the same lines as what I have been writing here, with the addition of evidence showing Tara was unfit to be Cameron’s mother.

I feel 100 percent confident that I could have taken Cameron away from his mother to live with me at that time. There was more than enough proof to show that Tara was unfit to be his mother. So, I let the proceedings begin. Tara felt the pressure from that first hearing. Not having a valid answer to the judge’s inquiry as to why she wasn’t allowing me to see my son, Tara was ordered to comply with the visitation schedule immediately or lose custody.

The very next day, I was finally spending time with my son again. I remember how happy I was to be with him after such a long battle with his mother. In that long dry spell, I had conjured up all sorts of nightmares about what Tara was putting him through. One has merely to read the horrid accounts to see why I was feeling this way. I intend to backtrack and give a detailed accounting of each and every piece of information I learned about Tara and her situation, mostly through my lawyer’s private investigator. There was too much to go into in this entry. However, I will say that the straw that broke the camel’s back was when I learned that Tara was a suspect in a robbery at a Costco store.

Many of the problems with the law side of the story had been coming from her husband, as he was a convicted criminal and had spent time in prison. (On one occasion he was thrown in jail for having beaten Tara up in a bar.) During that referenced visitation period, Cameron told me how he and his stepfather, Scott, had outran the police in Scott’s truck. Cameron was emotionally shaken up from the event and I knew it wouldn’t be the last time this sort of thing happened. One thing that did encourage me, however, was the fact that Scott told Cameron to keep the occurrences secret from Tara. That showed me that Tara was still mentally stable enough to decipher right from wrong, as she would be upset at Scott for having placed Cameron in such a bad situation. This was the beginning to the end of the custody suit.

Twice more during the pursuit of custody of Cameron, I was allowed to see him. Also, I was able to speak to him on the telephone. These connections with him caused my anxiety over his situation to lessen. There were issues regarding how he was being raised; but, because of the restored line of communication with him, they seemed to be not as bad as I had previously imagined. Consequently, I dropped the custody suit and settled on a court-ordered liberal visitation schedule. Little did I know that Tara would treat that order with indifference and go back to her old tricks of doing anything and everything to keep me from contacting my son.

I often wonder what life would have been like had I continued the suit and won custody of Cameron. There is no doubt in my mind that I wouldn’t have won the suit. There was simply too much proof against Tara as an unfit mother to justify her keeping him. The best she could have received from the deal was a visitation schedule with Cameron, and a conservative one at that. It would have been similar to the one that her husband Scott received when he divorced Tara a few years after this. He could only see their two children under constant supervision by a case worker and had to do it in an area of a government building designated for such things.

Maybe I should have pursued custody of Cameron. I feel that I was always a good father to him, aside from the fact that I was a terrible husband to his mother. Therein lays the real reason I didn’t force the issue.

After Tara and I separated, I immediately had a rush of guilt that enveloped me. The reality that I had been a horrible husband to Tara hit me like a ton of bricks. Throughout the following years the guilt grew stronger. The fact that Tara blew everything out of proportion didn’t help matters. She was running around telling everyone that I was an abusive husband, that I beat her up on several occasions and threatened to kill her. This was entirely false. I was abusive to her, no doubt about it, but it was emotional abuse, not physical.

Oh, there were times when we both got a bit abusive with each other, where throwing hateful comments at each other turned to plates, dishes, and even pictures hanging on the wall. There were even times where we both came close to blows, pushing, kicking, and even slapping one another. However, I never hit Tara with a closed fist nor did I threaten to kill her. I’m not trying to justify my actions here, for there is no excuse for the bad way I treated Tara, none whatsoever, and I am deeply ashamed for my misbehavior during that period, but the truth is that she was as much to blame for our demise as a married couple as was I.

Again, I am in no way trying to justify my actions at that time. Yes, Tara knew what buttons to push, and often pushed them, but I had a choice whether to get set off by that or not. Unfortunately, I seldom made the right choice. Turning the other cheek was just not in my nature at that time. Since then, I have changed completely. My over-bloated ego of that time left me almost immediately after our separation. I tried to tell Tara that, but it was too late Her mind was well on its way to painting a mixed-up convoluted picture of me, portraying me as a horrific monster and the cause of all her problems from that period on. In some strange way, I guess it helps her cope with life now.

Because I was feeling such great remorse at that time, I questioned my own ability to be a good parent. Once I discovered that Cameron wasn’t being abused and was relatively safe, I dropped the custody suit. I rationalized that I, too, was an unfit parent and probably wouldn’t have been able to raise Cameron any better than Tara. The years of her condemnation of me had taken their toll. I was no longer thinking clearly. I went from a know-it-all to a know-nothing. I couldn’t see that Tara’s accusations of me were unfounded.

The seed of guilt quickly grew, until it encompassed my whole soul. I found it difficult to continue on, believing myself to be a complete failure, as Tara had often told me I was. With this downtrodden attitude and the knowledge that Cameron was not in jeopardy as I had thought he was, I decided to drop the custody battle.

Throughout the years, Tara’s opinion of me has only gotten worse. I imagine she sees movies or reads books from time to time about physically abusive husbands and tags on a little more dirt to that horrid picture she has painted of me. I’m pretty certain that she wants to believe that I represent all the abusive husbands in the world. Most assuredly, her mind has altered the reality of the past into some frightful nightmare. I have no idea why she has done this. Perhaps it is to help her avoid taking responsibility for her own actions. Or, perhaps it is easier just to view the past as black or white, with no grey.

The end result of all this turmoil has been the loss of my firstborn son. Throughout the years, my contact with him has been less and less. This is through no fault of my own, as I have attempted to get a hold of him on countless occasions. My actions have been in vain, as I was even unable to talk to him on the phone during this last holiday season. His mother, Tara, answered the phone and said those all-too-familiar words, “Cameron is busy.”

Yes, he is a typical 17 year-old boy, out and about the town, involved with several activities. That I understand. But what I don’t understand, and I’ve related this to Tara on more than one occasion, is why his mother cannot arrange a time with him to be at home for my phone call. I mean, it’s just a phone call! I have long ago given up hope of actual visitation with him, the court-ordered visitation Tara has circumvented all these years. I’d be happy to just talk to him at this point. Obviously, to Tara it isn’t worth the effort.

She has clearly demonstrated that he doesn’t want me to contact him. Frankly, to her I am just a possible additional source of income. That is all. Well, that possibility really doesn’t exist, for she will receive nothing from me except the court-ordered support. I also give Cameron birthday and Christmas gifts. But, that is all. I hate to say this, but sometimes I feel like I’m paying for a car that I am not allowed to drive. I know he is a human being and I do love him very much, but I can’t help but think about all the money I have given to Tara for Cameron’s welfare and the handful of times that she has allowed me to see him.

There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about him. It was a big black mark on my past, one that should have never taken place had mature people thought with clear heads. I let him down and I will forever feel the guilt of doing that. I still love him very much. I wish things had gone differently and it pains me to think about it, but I often do. Hopefully, he will try to contact me someday and possibly begin some sort of relationship anew.

I have already addressed one of the big reasons I am in a loveless marriage – a lack of physical intimacy. I feel that is the biggest reason, but there are several others. Akin to the living-like-a-monk situation I am in is the almost-complete-lack-of-communication predicament.

I have tried diligently to communicate with Shu Mei, with very little reciprocation on her part. On the surface, one might deduce that it is the difference in native tongues that makes it difficult for Shu Mei to talk to me. (Some days go by with no more than a couple of words and/or cavewoman-like grunts thrown my way.) However, I have seen Shu Mei talking to other English speakers for hours on end. Certainly, there are words she doesn’t know and cultural issues she is not familiar with, but that should give her even more reason to communicate. It doesn’t. For some reason, Shu Mei has decided to give up talking to me. When I ask her why she doesn’t want to talk to me, she just grunts and pretends like I am not talking to her.

For her, there is always an option of not answering my questions. Often, when I ask her a question, she chooses to just ignore that I ever said anything. I’m not talking about some pointed question that is flung her way as a way to criticize her, although I have done a few of those to my shame, but non-confrontational questions, like, “How was your day?” or “Did you hear about the news?” or “What should we do for dinner?”

Another problem in our relationship is the ambiguity of roles. A couple of years ago, I managed to get Shu Mei to read a church book about marriage with me, hoping it would help us get closer. The book was set up as a manual, discussing many aspects of a successful relationship.

It was quite a fiasco, trying to get her to sit down and read it with me each night. She always seemed to have something else to do. Again, you’d think the language barrier would have been the problem, but it must be noted that her book was in Chinese, while mine was in English. When we did finally get together, we took turns reading a page at a time, in our native tongue. Eventually, Shu Mei resisted reading it altogether. As I recall, we only made it through 7 lessons.

In the 7th lesson in the marriage manual it talked about the importance of playing one’s role in a marriage. It said that a husband has certain responsibilities that are exclusively his and a wife has certain responsibilities that are exclusively hers. I found it interesting that the manual avoided the notion that the man is the head of the household. That is something which had been pounded in my head from birth by the Mormon community I was raised in. Now I can understand why some Mormon men seek divorce. They cannot adapt when their wife chooses to not allow them to be the head of their household. I’m still trying to adapt to this reality.

The current marriage manual put out by the LDS church, the one we were reading, made no mention of a head of household, but did address the idea of different roles. It talked about the importance of a mother as the nurturer in the family, the one to turn to for emotional support, whereas the father is the sustainer, the breadwinner if you will.

Shu Mei has great difficulty with playing the role of the nurturer. It isn’t in her character. I thought it was, before we got married, but it isn’t. The way she treats our sons, Billy and Tyley, is more like a drill instructor at boot camp than a loving mother at home. One would think that the cause of this abrasive demeanor is a result of how Shu Mei was raised by her parents. However, her parents raised her in a typically Chinese way, having little to no interaction with her whatsoever.

From what Shu Mei has told me (mostly before we got married, back when she actually communicated with me), her mother speaks to her now more than she ever did through Shu Mei’s childhood. Her father, on the other hand, still doesn’t speak to her directly. He goes through Shu Mei’s mother. It isn’t that Shu Mei’s father hates her. On the contrary, I think he loves her very much. That is simply his way. He has always been emotionally distant from everyone around him. Consequently, he probably doesn’t know any different because he has locked his heart against seeing things that are different. One might call this stubbornness and I feel that one would be right. I honestly feel that is where Shu Mei’s stubbornness comes from. That and her miserly attitude to money-spending are traits shared by both Shu Mei and her father.

With regards to things picked up from Shu Mei’s mother, I see little. Yes, her mother is not affectionate physically, with hugs and kisses and such, but she does demonstrate a stable caring attitude. This is in direct contrast to Shu Mei’s frequent emotional flare-ups at Billy and Tyley. Currently, most of her wrath is directed at Billy. She has admitted to losing patience with him on numerous occasions, which is disappointing to me because Billy isn’t a problematic boy. He does demonstrate some apprehension toward sharing his toys with Tyley from time to time, but that is normal for a 3 year-old. Usually in those instances all that is needed is a reminder for Billy to consider others’ feelings and he changes his behavior.

It is a rare occasion that Billy needs any sort of punishment, but one wouldn’t get that impression from talking to Shu Mei about him. She says that he is so bad at times that she doesn’t know how to handle him. “Just love him,” I say to her, “As a caring and considerate mother should.” I am thinking of my own mother when I give Shu Mei that advice. My mother never passed up an opportunity to take the positive road and encourage me to succeed. Shu Mei must have not had that kind of experience with her own mother, as she often comes across rather harsh and overbearing when she is dealing with Billy. When I try to bring it to her attention, no matter how subtle I am, she becomes extremely defensive and then verbally assaults me with every harebrained accusation in the book.

Oh yes, my marital problems are huge. I frequently pray for help. It must not be in God’s plan for me to have it easy with this part of my life. Luckily, it is only a “part” of my life and I receive much-needed joy from other parts. I am presently of the belief that almost nobody changes. I can honestly say that I have never met someone that made a great change in his or her life. I’ve read about people making huge alterations in their life’s course, but I’ve never actually met one. To me, people are basically like boats without a rudder. Someone gave them a shove from the shoreline and now they’re just plodding along without any means of steering their own course. I do believe they have the potential to steer themselves, but they just don’t.

Consequently, the best advice I can think of for a couple wishing to make their relationship a success is this: Accept your partner for who he or she is. Don’t expect big changes to take place in the future. There will be small changes, depending upon the currents of the time, but there is no way of telling if those will be favorable or not. You just have to accept whatever may come. Otherwise you will end up loathing one another and grow apart. Now, that isn’t always a bad thing, as is the case with my first marriage, but it can be, as would be the case of my second marriage if we were to go that route.

You see, I have stayed committed to this marriage, even from before day one. I did everything in my power to prepare myself for this marriage beforehand. I was ready mentally, physically, and, most importantly, spiritually. With all of this preparation, I still have had numerous problems. There is no doubt in my mind that without this preparation, and the experiences attached to it, I would have annulled my marriage on the third day into it, when Shu Mei first said she wanted a divorce. I would never have made it to the other five times that first year when she either left me for a period of time or threatened to leave me. Nor would I have lasted through the second year with her, when she twice tried to leave me. And I definitely wouldn’t have made the necessary concessions it took to endure the third and fourth years of living in a horridly loveless marriage.

I don’t know if my marriage to Shu Mei can ever be a success. It seems that we’ve nearly fallen into a state of acceptance that things aren’t good and may stay that way forever. We don’t speak, except when it is absolutely necessary. When we do speak, it is never about our relationship. It is always about things of a plutonic nature.

Simply put, I have been closer to all my roommates of the past than I am to my own wife. It is a very sad situation, but I feel I must endure it for the sake of the boys. I would do everything I can to help them be all that they can be. I think my divorce from my first wife harmed my son Cameron, and I wish it could have been different. I’ll do my best to ensure that this time things go better. Still, that isn’t only up to me. If Shu Mei continues to want out, she will eventually get her way.

I once read a statement by an LDS Church official (perhaps by one of the prophets, I cannot remember) that said one shouldn’t talk negatively about one’s spouse in public. That is sound advice, for it often leads one to only think of the negative. Furthermore, it tends to diminish the reputation of the one doing the talking and not the one being talked about. Of course, there are a myriad of other obvious woes that can beset one engaged in such activities.

Having said that, and believing it in most cases, I must risk sounding hypocritical and relate my current challenges regarding my spouse. Before doing that, I would like to reiterate the caveat that these words are only my opinions. Of course, the people I write about have their own opinions, and they frequently contradict mine.

Shu Mei and I are nearing another wedding anniversary. It is our fourth, but to me it feels like our fortieth. Most marriages begin with long romantic bliss, followed by an extended adjustment period and then relax into a prolonged groove. That is how ours has been, too, except for the “long”, “extended”, and “prolonged” aspects. And the “groove” has been more like a rut.

Almost from the start (day 3 to be exact), Shu Mei considered divorce as a viable option to resolving our problems. To this day, she harbors desires to end our marriage completely. It has been an extremely difficult journey for me, thus far, trying my best to hold our marriage together. When I say “my “best” I am talking about my actions, not my thoughts. I have often toyed with the notion of what it would be like to grant Shu Mei what she has asked for on numerous occasions, a divorce. I feel on many fronts, I would personally be better off.

Before Shu Mei, I was a relatively happy single man for many years. Sure, I had some character flaws (i.e., I wasn’t good with money, I had a bit of an ego problem, and I was spiritually weak). I thought that marrying Shu Mei would help me overcome some of my flaws, as she seemingly possessed what I lacked. However, I feel that my strengths far-outweighed my weaknesses. After my parents first met Shu Mei, they told me that I was a lucky man to have encountered such a gem so late in life. I agreed with them, but also felt that Shu Mei was a lucky woman to have encountered me so late in her life.

I believe that a successful marriage is never easy. If it were, it wouldn’t be worth it. We can learn how to overcome many obstacles by reading about it in a book. Learning how to overcome other obstacles can come from things taught to us by our family members and friends. However, learning how to overcome some obstacles only comes through experiencing them firsthand. Thus, we need difficulties in marriages to learn how to grow. One of the great ways that marriage helps us grow is through the completion factor.

When one person lacks certain important traits, as I did, it is a great help to be married to someone who possesses those missing traits, as I thought I did. The key to the whole process lies in an equal amount of giving and taking by both parties. The way to reach this equality is to just focus on the giving part. The taking part happens naturally. In fact, if one focuses on the taking part at all, he or she has already created an imbalance in the relationship, tending on the side of taking, and progression stops.

Having experienced a variety of long-term relationships in the past, I knew all of this before marrying Shu Mei. She, on the other hand, was inexperienced and is still struggling to learn these things. I didn’t know this about her before getting married (love is blind, deaf, and dumb), but quickly realized shortly after, during our honeymoon.

I knew Shu Mei was sexually inexperienced. A virgin when we got married, Shu Mei had barely even kissed her last boyfriend after a seven-year courtship. (I couldn’t imagine sticking around a girl for seven years and only getting some kisses. Some of these devout Mormons are pretty strange characters, if you ask me.) Shu Mei and I hadn’t gone past kissing during our dating, but that was for less than a year and we were working toward a worthy LDS temple marriage. Knowing her naivety concerning sex didn’t change my feelings about her. Some men would have found it repulsive. Others would have found it alluring. I have to admit hat it didn’t make a whit of difference to me. I just figured there would be years of teaching in store for me. And it isn’t the worst teaching one could imagine.

Because of Shu Mei’s inexperience with sex, I bought her a sex manual. Sadly, she hasn’t read any of it to this day. Obviously, that has been a major area of difficulty in our relationship and one that I never anticipated. You see, even though we never engaged in any physical intimacy beyond playful kissing, I made certain that we talked about it. One of my biggest fears was for Shu Mei to become frigid after we got married. I voiced that fear to her on several occasions during the courtship period. She assured me that this would never happen. Time has proved otherwise.

That fear has become a reality and we’re going on two years without sex (and half that prior to the last time). Even kissing has been nearly nonexistent, with a small peck about every two or three months to keep up appearances for our sons. Admittedly, she has not been the only one rejecting physical advances. Initially, she was the one that rejected the advances, usually due in part to some small disagreement we had had prior to each advance. Almost immediately, Shu Mei withheld affection when we disagreed on matters. It must be made clear that I’m talking about disagreements here, not arguments. Even minor disagreements have always been cause for Shu Mei to recoil into her shell.

Somewhere along the line, after she rejected me countless times, I gave up trying. Then, she made a few meager attempts, which I shrugged off. I feel she did this just to satisfy her inner guilt for all the rejection she put me through. Because of this, she can now rest her conscience and point all the blame in my direction. I feel that is how her mind works, as I’ve seen this sort of thing in the past (although, not on quite this level). Now, that part of our relationship seems to be like that sex manual I gave her, sitting on a shelf collecting dust.

Aside from sex, Shu Mei and I have many other problems. I’ll leave talking about those for Part 2 of this missive.