Ancient history?

Hanging around one place for such a long time has had an impact on me. Instead of traveling to new and interesting places every day to allow life to wash over me, I´ve been reading books in spanish, watching tv in spanish, and visiting a girl at least every other day.

As I can read anywhere and the tv thing is really a last resort to ward off boredom it is obvious that it´s the girl keeping me pinned down. The impact is that my mind has switched gears from imput to recycle. And, given my interest in this girl, the subject matter most recycled is that of women and relationships, especially as they concern Nicaraguan women.

George Santayana once said, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." This little perl has been nagging me for several weeks now, as I have been down this road once before. What follows is not recent history, and it is not exclusively Nicaraguan, but it does involve a Nicaraguan so I´m gonna count it.

About ten years ago I met a girl in Nicaragua named Wendy. My relationship with her began as a casual friendship. I would pass by her house ever now and again more to visit her family than to visit her. When I left Nicaragua to return to the States I passed by her house to say goodbye to the family and I got the impression that she might be interested in more than friendship. At the time I thought, "Well that´s typical, the girl waits until I´m leaving the country before she let´s me know how she feels."

Over the next couple of years I yearned to return to beautiful Nicaragua. As I detailed in my posts entitled "Perspective" I did get back down to Nicaragua for a month with a friend of mine named Tim and his cousin Shawn. This was about seven years ago. While I was down there I swung by Wendy´s house to say hi. It turns out that she had just recently returned from Costa Rica a week or so before I came by.

She had a bad experience in Costa Rica and was spending a little while relaxing back home contemplating what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. She had been unlucky in love. She considered the men that had dated her and that allways seemed to be interested in her to be scum. In fact she had decided to swear off men alltogether and just live with her mom and her dogs (that she loved like they were her children).

As fate would have it in her lonely and desperate state she remembered me, how I had been a good and kind man. As she had been raised an envagelist she prayed to God for a good man (like me) to come into her life. The very next day I showed up on her doorstep.

My thinking was that it would be interesting to see what she had done over the last three years. I also wanted to chance to ask her about how she had acted right before I had left the last time to see if I had read her correctly or not. When she answered the door I saw a level of interest and vulnerability in her eyes that I had never seen before. This did nothing to diminish my curiosity.

She invited me in and we sat on a couch in her front room talking for hours and hours. The chemistry was so intense and the pharamones so think that I felt intoxicated, and I completely lost track of the time. I frequestly lost the thread of my own thoughts as we talked leaving many moments of silence. However, the silences were not akward, they simply allowed us to drown in each other´s eyes without any verbal distractions from time to time.

Obviously I considered Wendy to be a rare beauty, else her hold over me would not have been so complete. She had worked as a beautition in Costa Rica at a hotel/resort, but her work in Nicaragua was as a dance instructor. She has a dancers figure and a air of confident sexuality that quite overwhelmed me. Also, she communicated more with her eyes than I have ever been able to do with words, and that smile. . .

An any case, at some point I said, "I want to kiss you." and I watched her melt right there in front of me. I honestly don´t know how long we kissed, but I figure that it could be measured in hours as by the time we stopped for dinner I found out that it was 10:00pm, and that there weren´t any any buses leaving Ciudad Sandino for Managua at that hour. So, she offered to let me sleep over. She slept that night in her mother´s bed and I lay there in her bed feeling like a million bucks for a long time until sleep finally overtook me.

I had heard about classic romatic tragedies as I am a literary man, the flame that burns too bright. . .However, at that moment all I could think about was how damn good it felt to love and be loved by this amazing Nicaraguan beauty. I didn´t bother to stop and consider if perhaps I was letting myself fall too quickly or too far for this woman. I figured that I was strong enough to handle anything that came my way, and that our love could withstand anything.

With these sensations and ´thoughts´ spinning around my head I left Wendy again at the end of my month long trip, and returned to the States. There we wrote letters and spent countless hours talking on the phone late at night. This was facilitated by my working at a global 24/7 webhosting tech support company on a graveyard shift, all by myself. We did this for about six months until I returned to Nicaragua again for another month, this time right before the new year.

I spent the entire month courting Wendy. About half my way through that month it became apparent to me that the only was I was going to be able to make this relationship work was to marry her in Nicaragua and then arrange things with immigration to allow her to follow me to the States. I didn´t consider trying to live in Nicaragua as I still had my student debts, and I figured that I would never find a job that would pay enough for me to climb out of that hole down here.

So, that is what we did. We had a small civil ceremony in her home. She was radient in a festive bright flowery dress that we had purchased for the occasion. Oddly enough I didn´t get to spend my wedding night with my bride because of complications with her family having come to see the wedding and needing to spend the night at her house. Still, the next day I took her to Ponoloya for our honeymoon. The sun, the sand, the ocean, and my lovely bride.

At the end of the month I had to return home, and leave her behind me once again. I spent the next two months fighting with immigration to allow her to follow. Eventually, after a great deal of effort, I succeeded. She arrived at the end of March.

The first couple of months were pure heaven. I have never felt as happy or as complete. I can remember standing outside of our small student apartment in the evening sun thinking that I felt like I had been half alseep my entire life until I met and married Wendy. I was amazed and the new level of life I had achieved, and I marveled that I had previously considered myself to be happy. What I felt then was but a pale shadow compared to what I now felt.

This is not to say that there weren´t some bumps in the road. Wendy started displaying signs of home sickness and depression almost from the very first. As a sterotypical male I thought that I could fix whatever was broken in her so I applied all of my empathy, and patience, and intellect to the task. I made some headway, forstalling her breakdown, but I was unable to fix her, even after my best efforts over the course of about nine months.

We loved each so much that our relationship was precarious at best, and downright dangerous at worst. Our love caused us to be completely open and trusting with each other. This meant of course, that we had the ability to hurt each other more than anyone had ever hurt us before. I didn´t see this possibility until her depression began prompting her to lash out at me.

At the time I didn´t understand why she felt the need to hurt me as only she could. Now, I get it. She was in a strange country where she didn´t know anyone outside of my family. She missed her family and friends back in Nicaragua. To a Nicaragua nothing is as important as the family, I knew this but didn´t understand at the time just how hard the seperation would be for my wife.

Also, she couldn´t speak the language. This meant that she could only vent to me. I´m pretty sure that most woman use their girlfriends to vent most of their martital frustrations. In my case I had to be her girlfriend as well as her husband. Not being able to speak the languange made it difficult for her to work as she was accustomed to work in her country, and she is a very independent person with expensive tastes.

She was used to being able to buy whatever she wanted because she earned her own money. Our financial difficulties were hard for her for two reason: One, because she couldn´t buy the shoes and handbags, and makeup that she wanted, and Two, because she wanted to help. It really bothered her that I had to carry the entire burden, because she really wanted to help.

Lastly, Wendy and I wanted to start a family immidiately; we both really wanted children. We were both new to this experience and didn´t have any idea what we were doing. I know that I just figured that all I had to worry about was getting her pregnant and then things would just sort themselves out. She may have know a bit more than I did, but not much. Our first pregnancy ended in miscarraige not long after we played a game of vollyball.

This hit both of us hard, but I realize now that it was much harder for her. It aggravated her depression to an abusive level. I figured that she would have to take it a bit easier the next time around to avoid another miscarraige, and an OBGYN agreed. The next pregnancy also ended in a miscarraige. This time we were told that in order to carry a child to term she would need to spend almost the entire nine months in bed.

This second miscarraige completely unhinged her. She felt rage, and more importantly an uncontrollable need to vent that rage, and I was the only persn around that she could talk to, so she ended up venting on me. I figured that she was depressed and I tried to be patient and loving and understanding and just weather the storm. The storm lasted for half a year before it finally broke me.

Before the end I would awake to find her sitting alone in the middle of the night holding a knife muttering to herself. Sometimes she would be sitting right next to me in bed doing this. I was so horrified by the thought that she might hurt herself that I would forcibly take the knife away from her and then wrap myself around her talking to her until I felt that she had calmed down. Sometimes this took all night.

As I felt completely out of my depth I once suggested that she talk to a psychiatrist. Her response was so negative to this suggestion that I disgarded that as an option. This left me trapped in a situation that I could not fix, that we decidedly verbally and emotionally abusive.

This situation began to impact my job. I was tired all o the time so my performace at work was sliding. Also, she would call me up in the middle of the night demanding that I come home from work quite often. I couldn´t leave work with permission so I snuck away several times for her "emergencies". At the time I needed that job, and I felt even more like a cornered animal.

I changed my hours at work so that I could spend the night with my wife thinking that this might help, but I found that after a hard day at work I would come home to a wife that had been waiting all day to unload her anger on me. Burning me at both ends was more than I could take, so I would leave her alone with her anger and walk the streets of the town for hours trying to calm myself down and figure out how to deal with a situation that I not only couldn´t fix but that was rapidly driving me insane.

After one such incident I came home to find Wendy waiting for me with even more rage pouring out of her eyes than she had when I left to calm down a few hours before. I walked in, sat down on the couch, and rested my head in my hands as she started in on me again. Her abuse had before more and more exotic with time, but it allways centered around a few themes that she knew would hurt me the most:

She claimed that I never really loved her.

She blamed me for the miscarraiges.

She accused me to being unfaithful.

I loved Wendy more than I have ever loved anyone. I wanted children with her more than I can adequetly express. And, I was completely faithful to her, to us, and to our trust/love. I don´t know that I will be able to communite through these words exactly why these things hurt me, or just how much they hurt me. It´s enough for me to say that she knew how to push my buttons and she was pushing for all she was worth.

As I sat there hearing her telling me that I didn´t really love her for the hundreth time something inside of me broke. I stood up, stared her in the eyes, and said, "Ok, you are right." When I said this I saw shock followd by horror in her eyes. She knew instantly that in that moment she had lost me forever.

I found that after I no longer loved Wendy it was much easier to deal with her. I arranged for us to more into a different apartment with two rooms so that we could sleep apart and have our space. I explained to Wendy that it was over. I told her that I would continue to support her with a room and food until she was able to get her life to a point where she could move out and support herself.

I noticed while we were living in this new apartment that Wendy had completely stopped being abusive. In fact she had started trying to do things for me. At the time I figured that she was only acting that way to get me to change my mind about leaving her, not because she had changed. I now know that when she saw my eyes devoid of love for her that night, it had been enough to shock her into realizing the error of her ways. She had changed and was honestly trying to save the marraige.

The depressing truth however, was that I would have done anything to save the marraige up until that moment on the couch, but after whatever it was that broke inside of me snapped I couldn´t trust her anymore. For me if I cannot trust someone I cannot love them; for me love is trust. So, I ignored her attempts to reconcile that lasted for about a month.

One evening at my work I got a call from the police asking if they could talk to me. I told them that I was at work just then, but that I would be happy to talk to them during my hour long dinner break. I drove home on my break to find police in my apartment and Wendy and all of her stuff gone. I was informed by the police that my wife had been taken to a safe place and that I would have to come down to the police station to talk to them about my domestic violence.

While I realize that this probably didn´t help things, hearing someone accuse me of domestic violence really pissed me off. I hate domestic violence. I am the man least likely to ever hit a woman, so being accused of doing so was almost more than I could handle. Still, anger is not the best response to an accusation of domestic violence; heads up tp anyone else who should find themselves in this situation. . .

Instead of arresting me they allowed me to go back to work after grilling me at the station. However, I had to go to a hearing the next day, Saturday. When I showed up the judge was surpised to see me walking around free. It seems that I was supposed to have been arrested and kept overnight. If that had been the case I would have been sitting there in orange with the other seven people that were seeing the judge that day.

As a law abiding individual the thought that I could be thrown in jail for something that I didn´t do also pissed me off. So, when the judge asked me if I wanted to declare not guilt, guilty, or no contest, I answered "Not guilty." with just a bit of color to my voice. The judge than asked me a couple of questions about what had happened.

I don´t remember all of the questions, but I do remember that he asked me, "Why, if you didn´t abuse her, she was so upset." I answered, "She was depressed over a couple miscarraiges, amoung other things." He told me that she claimed that I had caused a miscarraige, so I responded with, "I didn´t cause them, she is incapable of carrying a baby to term without nine months of bed rest." When I said this the judge looked at me with very partial and very angry eyes.

I figure now that he must have thought that my response was somehow damning. In truth, I was simply mimicking what the OBGYN had told us most recently. In any case at that point I was worried. The judge for my trial wasn´t going to be impartial and I was being accused of a repugnant crime that would generate sympathy for my wife and anger against me, regardless of the fact that I was innocent of the crime.

Wendy had insulted me, besmirched my name, and threatened my freedom by accusing me of a crime that I had not commited. She had taken things to an entirely new level. I admit that this caught me off guard and left me feeling angry and confused. I felt that I had not only bent over backwords to try to be a good husband, but that I had only gone the extra mile by not divorcing her immediately and kicking her out on her ass. As this was how she had chosed to repay me.

As I had never been in trouble with the law before I spent about a week talking to everyone I could find who knew anything about lawyers. Then I hired a trial lawyer to help defend me. The guy had a good reputation, but he seemed a bit slow. He didn´t do a very good job of making me feel understood, or of calming my fears, but as I had never been in a situation like this, I just put up with him.

A few weeks after she walked out on me Wendy dropped by to visit. Before opening the door I looked out the peephole and saw her standing there. I was so enraged by what she had done that I ignored her persistant doorbell rings for about ten minutes and turned up the volume on the TV that was right inside the door to try to block out the noise. Still, she persisted. Finally I located the ringer for the doorbell and disconnected the wires. I never did open the door to her; at that moment I considered her to be my enemy.

I found out later that she had hitched a ride with a friend down to my town (as she had been moved to another city about an hour away) earlier in the day and she had waited outside until she saw me come home from work with her friend. Than she let her friend drive off and she went to talk to me. She didn´t have any other place to go, so when I didn´t answer the door she just kept trying. Untimately she spent the night sleeping outside me door. I didn´t find out about this until much later; I figured she had just given up and left.

It took several months for the court date to arrive, and when it did it was the first time that I had seen my wife clearly since she had walked out on me. When I looked into her eyes I saw a confused jumble of emotions that I couldn´t unravel. My father and a good friend of mine had come to court with me for moral support and possibly to serve as character witnesses if that was needed.

I got to see firsthand how the United States judicial process works. I assisted my lawyer in picking the jurors that we thought would be least favorable to my plight and the prosecuting attorney did the same. When we were done the jury was almost entirely made up of young women about Wendy´s age. I thought, "Yeah, I´m screwed."

The bias from the judge was probably the most frustrating element in my trial. He would consistantly make comments that alluded to my guilt. I knew that judges were supposed to be impartial, and my freedom was on the line so this was getting under my skin.

The prosecuting attorney was an emotional dumbass. He tried on several occasions to play games with me when I was on the stand to try to get me to contradict myself in order to slander my character and impune my honesty. What he failed to realize is that in order for this to work he´s got to be smarter than the person on the stand; and let me just say that I´m guessing he hasn´t won that many cases.

Wendy stole one of my journals when she left and he had copis of several of my journal entires with him. Now, I´m pretty sure there is something illegal about that, but I didn´t sweat it because I didn´t lie in my journal any more than I do when I speak. He asked me if i liked my job. I said that it was a good job, in that it paid relatively well and wasn´t that challenging. He then pulled out a jounal entry where I had been talking about wanting to quit my job because it "sucked" and look for a better one.

It was amusing to see to triumf on the halfwits face when he pulled that out of his butt. It took me all of 10 seconds to explain that just because someone in a tech support job doesn´t have to work very hard and gets paid well doesn´t mean the job doesn´t sap their will to live. Obviously the people on the jury either had some experience in tech support, or their husbands did, because they did not look impressed.

Another thing that frustrated me about this trial is that it is impossible to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in a case such as this. There is no evidence. There are no witnesses. It boils down to a he said, she said situation. The only reason the city had decided to try to case was to make it apparent that they opposed domestic violence. Oh yeah? Well, I opposed domestic violence too, but that doesn´t mean that I´m gonna volunteer to be a martyr.

Wendy looked truely pathetic on the stand. She was so emotional that it was hard for even me to understand everything that she said in spanish. Still, the court translator botch the vast majority of what Wendy said in spanish. I could barely restartin myslef for correcting her each time as some of the translation mistakes were quite important. Still, I ended up just complaining to my lawyer every time. I don´t know if he believed me, or even if me did, I don´t know if he had any idea what to do about it.

She was such a symapthetic figure: A beautiful young woman crying uncontrollably and babling on in a language that nobodies in the jury could understand. This was what I had most feared, that she would been seen as a victim regardless of the facts.

When I jury was sent out to deliberate the case my lawyer started to talk to me about potential sentencing involving prison time and fines. I could tell that my lawyer was convinced that the verdict would be guilty. I was obvious that the judge and the prosecuting attorney thought the same thing. I understood by all of this that my chances were slim, but I couldn´t abandon all hope until I heard the jury say the words.

The jury took its time coming back out and taking their seats before one of them stood and gave the verdict: not guilty. I felt my heart lurch when they said the words and I looked into the eyes of the jurors with naked gratitude.

The judge took one last shot at me by insinuating that the jurors had made a mistake in their decision before thanking them and letting me go. I just gotta say, I love the "trial by jury" system. If my fate had been in the hands of that biased SOB judge I would probably been in prison right now for a crime that I didn´t commit, after a trial without evidence or witnesses.

After the trial I spent the next 18 months trying to track down my wife to get her to sign the divorce papers. I stuck with the same lawyer because (through no fault of his own) he had won the case, and that was probably another mistake because he made little to no effect to find her and get the divorce processed.

Finally I tracked her down and opened a dialog with her. I started out slowly and gently so as to not spook her away as I really wanted her to sign the divorce papers. This took all of my reserves of patience as I was still pissed off by what she had tried to do to me, and I figured that she´d try to bleed me for every cent she could even though we were only living together for less than a year.

As we talked, and talked, and talked, I discovered over time that my animosity towards her was based on a misunderstanding. She told me what had really happened from her point of view:

Wendy was horried that she was loosing the man that she loved and the life that she wanted with him. She was trying to save the marriage and mend fences with me, but she found me completely unresponsive. She felt like I had been abusive my manhandling her when she was the most emotionally vulnerable (when she was holding a knife and talking about killing herself). She wanted to find some way to get through to me so that I would fall back in love with her and we could get past this.

Because she couldn´t find a way to do this directly with me, she went to a religious figure for help. She explained how horrible she felt in order to help this man of God understand just how much she needed his help and wanted to get back together with me. Two things were working against her. The first is that the religions leader didn´t understand everything she said. All he understood was that she was in an abusive relationship. The second is that he was required by his church to report cases of domestic violence to the police.

So, he drew up some papers that he would give to the police so that they could make a case against me based on what he thought she had said. She also thought that this man had offered to let her stay in his home with his family while all of this happened so that she could still be close to me, because after all her untimate goal was to shock me enough so that she could get though to me and get me to love her again. The reality was that he sent her to a halfway home for abused women in a faraway city.

Once the city had the papers they no longer needed her participation to make a case against me. For that reason it wasn´t Wendy vrs Jeff, it was the City vrs Jeff. When I explained what had allmost happened to me, she expressed honest remorse. She repeated over and over that all she wanted was to get me back not drive me away. Obviously she screwed that up.

The more we talked the more I realized how difficult the whole experience had been for her. Plus, once she realized that the only reason I restrained her those few times was in order to keep her from commiting suicide, she stopped claiming that I ad been abusing, and this went a long way to mending fences, at least the fences of friendship.

At the present time I enjoy a good relationship of friendship with my ex-wife. She agreed to sign the divorce papers after only bleeding me for a slightly larger than reasonable amount. I feel like I completely understand how she saw things and that she understands how I saw things. We get each other now, and what´s more, I feel like if we were to give it another shot everything would probbly work out.

However, I am unable to overcome my shattered trust. I can care for her, and even love her in a way, but I don´t feel like I could ever trust her again. Doing that seems to me like forgiving a muderer for killing your brother and than inviting that person back into your home. I can see forgiving someone for almost anything, however allowing that person to repeat the origional offense just seems stupid.

Any any case, that was my first experience with love with a Nicaraguan woman. I learned a great deal about what I could have done better. For example, I should have stayed here. I am much more capable of adapting to a new place that she was. If she had retained her family she would have had other people to talk to when she felt depressed, or when she just needed to vent about something in our relationship.

I belive that if we had stayed in Nicaragua we would still be together. Also, the differences in culture and language really do matter. She had a really had time making those adjustments. Once again it is allways better to stay in Nicaragua so that the only initial adjustment is being married. Marraige is hard enough without looking for other more things to complicate it.

Another thing that I´ve learned about Nicaragua women in general is that they are jealous. This is not going to change (ever) so if you date or marry a Nicaraguan woman just be prepared to live with it. She will not only be jealous of any woman friends you might have but also of your male friends, of anything that isn´t spending time with her.

Also, many Nicaraguan woman feel the need to fight. It´s almost an Irish thing. That night on the couch when Wendy destroyed my trust in her she was just trying to get a reaction from me. She felt like my loving patient long suffering was a lack of love and interest in her. I still think that´s a really screwed up way to look at things, but there you are.

Because of this I get the feeling that the typical machismo Nicaragua man is well suited to a life with the typical Nicaragua woman. They are willing to fight right back, and the woman respond to that. I realize that this comment won´t make me many friends amoung woman on this sight, however that is what I have observed from first hand experience; I´m not just talking out off my ass, so please just take it for what it is.

Ok, so these are the things that are buzzing around my skull as I spend my time dating another Nicaragua woman here in Managua. It´s amazing to me as I get to know this girl better just how much she and me ex are alike.

What does this mean? Have I failed to learn from history, so now I am doomed to repeat it? I have learned from my experiences else I wouldn´t be writing this post, and yet I find myself attracted to the exact same kind of woman as I was before. I guess when it comes to affairs of the heart it´s not enough to intellectually learn, I will need to find a way to get my heart to learn and adjust as well.

I aplogize to those who have grown accustomed to my travel logs for this drought. I intend to start traveling again soon so there are clouds on the horizon.

Saludos!