Moving On

by ComputerBob

May 5, 2007

Last Updated June 5, 2007

My wife and I have been happily married for many, many years, but two days ago, we had our very first wedding anniversary. How can that be?

It's a long story.

Despite the happy masks that we all wore in public, my biological family was never close. I always imagined my siblings and myself as sort of prison camp survivors who had nothing in common but our shared dysfunction. As a result, even casual visits as adults always had dark undercurrents of competition, one-upsmanship, and acidic put-downs, even when we all got together after my younger brother's suicide in 1996 — a tragic event that I wasn't able to make any sense of until years later.

When I was growing up, my relationship with my father centered around him constantly demanding my respect while constantly earning only my fear. He never gave me any fatherly advice, asked me how I felt about anything or showed a genuine interest in anything I ever did. I remember never wanting to call him "Dad," because it felt like it would be like telling a lie to give him the honor of that title of endearment. He used to get really mad at me because I'd tap him on the shoulder or clear my throat, or do some other subtle behavior whenever I wanted to get his attention. He'd yell at me, "My name isn't 'Um!' My name isn't (clearing throat sound). My name is 'Dad!'" And we didn't get any closer as the years went by. One day, about 5 years ago, I called my parents to tell them that the college where I taught had received an "anthrax letter," and that because I was in the college post office when that letter had been opened, I might have been exposed to anthrax spores. His annoyed response was, "Oh, I've heard of that kind of thing happening. Listen, we're just sitting down to have a bite to eat. Can you call back in about twenty minutes?" Then, right before he abandoned my mother at my wife's and my house in July of 2004, he spent about 40 minutes storming around my house, telling me every reason he could think of why he hates me, and has always hated me, ever since I was a little kid. None of what he said surprised me. And I haven't heard from him since that day. So it also didn't surprise me at all to hear from relatives that he was telling them lies about me afterward.

On the other hand, I thought that things were going to be really good between my mother and my wife and me. After all,

For at least 20 years, she had confided in me about her marriage problems with my father.
I had called my mother long-distance almost every day for nearly eight years, to help her deal with her guilt feelings about my younger brother's suicide.
My wife and I had rescued her from her abusive marriage with my father.

Unfortunately, I couldn't have been more wrong. Less than one month after my father had abandoned her and we had agreed to let her live with us, my mother completely dropped her appearance of gratitude and began trying to cause trouble in our marriage, like a spoiled teenage child. After about a month, she began to openly criticize me to my wife. After a couple of months, I learned that she had been secretely badmouthing both my wife and me to our other relatives.

In the meantime, as soon as he heard that our mother was living with my wife and me, my older brother called and sent email messages to make it very clear that:

Our mother was "taking the easy way out" by not flying home to her abusive husband.
By helping our mother, I was "doing Satan's work."
Our parents' first priority should be to keep their marriage going, no matter what.
The women's shelter where my wife and I had gotten advice to help my mother "is obviously not a Christian shelter."
His church would never help a woman who is thinking of leaving her husband, even if she claimed that he was abusive.

As she got more secure and comfortable living with us, my mother grew much more outspoken, and her lies became more and more disruptive. One day, a relative called me to say that my mother had said, "Bob is even more abusive than his father." When my wife confronted her about that lie, my mother said, "I didn't mean it, but I was mad, and you say things you don't really mean when you're mad." Unfortunately, my mother didn't bother to call and make that clear to any of the people that she had said it to.

It quickly became obvious to my wife and me that years of living in an abusive relationship had left my mother with a lot of dysfunctional, manipulative, antisocial behavior patterns. A year-and-a-half after she had started living with us, when I wrote my speech on domestic violence, I did my best to express that general idea to the audience without embarrassing or putting my mother down in public. That's why I actually spent eight hours carefully crafting the phrase, "interpersonally obtuse and functionally handicapped" to describe what she was like. Anyway, my wife and I hoped that someone could help my mother with her many problems, but when we asked her if she would attend a women's shelter's weekly group counseling for victims of domestic violence, she refused. After we coaxed and encouraged her for a couple of months, she finally agreed to get private, one-on-one counseling at the shelter. At her second counseling session, the counselor told her that she should consider living on her own, instead of with my wife and me. She immediately stopped going to counseling, insisting that I had somehow turned the counselor against her. When my wife asked my mother if she would please go to family counseling with us, my mother refused. A few weeks later, my wife asked her again. She refused again, so my wife stopped asking her.

Despite the fact that my mother refused to put any effort into getting help or doing any work to improve our relationships, she repeatedly got sympathy from our friends and relatives by telling them, "I wish I could have a good relationship with my son." When people called and told me that, I finally realized what I had long suspected — she really didn't care about actually having a good relationship with my wife and me. What she really wanted was for everyone to think that she wanted to have a good relationship with us. That way, they would feel sorry for her and blame us for the fact that she didn't have one. That's when a bunch of memories came flooding back to me — memories that had long ago convinced me that my parents had never really cared about being good parents, having a good marriage, or even living Christian lives. I had never seen them put any effort into "walking the walk" because, it seemed to me, the only thing they had ever really cared about — and were really, really good at doing — was "talking the talk" to make their friends and relatives think that they were good parents, had a good marriage and lived Christian lives. In fact, that's exactly how, ever since the early 1970s, they had successfully hidden their dysfunctional real lives from everyone but their children and had served as highly respected leaders in a national religious organization. And, unfortunately, whether we did it out of a sense of fear, loyalty, despair, or a combination of the three, my siblings and I had spent several decades enabling our parents' dysfunctional, abusive behavior, by never telling anyone the truth about our family.

Even though my mother had refused to get counseling, I went to private counseling sessions for several weeks at the women's shelter. I wanted to learn how to cope with my mother's increasingly frustrating and confrontative behavior, as well as the resulting anger and resentment that I felt toward her. Through counseling, I realized that she tries to "bait" the people that she's closest to into fighting with her so that she can make them feel guilty and control them. And then she gets sympathy from other people by telling them her version of what happened in the fight. In hindsight, I realized that I had seen her do that to my father and younger brother for decades, but it was very depressing to realize that she was doing it to me, too. From that point on, I consciously reminded myself to stay calm, no matter what my she said or did. Even with my internal voice telling me, "Stay calm," I fell for her taunts and yelled at her in frustration several times, though I never swore at her or threatened her in any way.

I was deeply honored to spend the first five months of 2005, being a primary caregiver to my Uncle Dom (my mother's brother) until his death from cancer. Many times, that role required me to stay overnight at my uncle and aunt's house for several days in a row. In between those times, I took my mother to visit her brother, who lived fifty miles away, and a few times, I even drove her there, left her to visit overnight, turned around and drove home by myself, and then drove back and picked her up a few days later. But, instead of being grateful that I had spent several months helping her brother prepare for, and face death, my mother was jealous of the time that I spent with him, and told our relatives that I had "replaced" my father and her with my uncle and aunt.

It felt like the harder I tried to remain calm, the harder my my mother worked to ridicule me and try to get me to fight with her. I didn't know why she was doing that until one day, during one of our many arguments, she suddenly put her face about six inches from mine, looked up at me and yelled, "Hit me! Go ahead! You know you want to do it! Hit me!" Just the thought of it still terrifies me, but yes, for a thousandth of a second, I was actually tempted to do it. But in that split-second, my mother's motives — and the enormity of my father's "legacy of abuse" — suddenly became clear. In a flash of insight, I realized that she actually wanted me to hit her so that she would be in control of our relationship. That's how she had survived for fifty years with my abusive father, and that's how she was hoping to live the rest of her life with my wife and me. Suddenly, it was like I was standing at the edge of a very deep, very dark chasm. I knew that my father had been in that chasm my entire life, and that, by example, he had raised me to join him there. All of my years of silently witnessing his out-of-control behavior and telling myself, "I'm never going to be like him" suddenly came rushing back to me, and I knew that, whether or not I gave in to temptation, my life was never going to be the same. Instead of hitting her, I told her, for the very first time, "I want you out of here as soon as possible." And I walked away, knowing that I would never again be able to trust her.

Even after that, my mother's demeanor and behavior continued to get worse until my wife and I finally decided that we just couldn't take it any more. We looked at apartments and condos for several weeks, and then, almost a year after we had allowed her to start living with us, we moved her into a really nice senior condominium community nearby. She didn't go peacefully. By that time, she had developed a huge sense of entitlement and wanted — demanded — to live with us for the rest of her life. One day, on the way home from looking at an apartment for her, she turned to me and said, "Isn't there anything I can do to keep living with you? I'm your mother. I'm 74 years old. I'm handicapped. It's your job to take care of me." From that point on, she spent a lot of time trying to make my wife and me feel guilty that we were planning to "throw her out." She also spent a lot of time telling our friends and relatives that we were "throwing her out."

As we got closer and closer to her moving-out date, she tried every guilt-inducing method she could think of from her lifetime of manipulation experience. I ended up having to almost constantly remind myself that my wife and I had done everything we could possibly do to help my mother, but that it's not my job to take care of her for the rest of her life. We had protected her, defended her and taken care of her for almost a year. We had fed her, sheltered her and paid for all of her expenses. We had made all of the calls and filled out all of the paperwork to freeze my parents' joint assets after my father had threatened to take all of the money and close all of the accounts. We had driven her to countless appointments, helped her obtain a legal no-contact order against her husband, filled out paperwork, made phone calls, and done scores of other tasks that needed to be done to help her start a brand new, abuse-free life. We had given her money, furniture, linens and many other things that she had needed. After all of that, and after all of the effort that she had put into trying to convince us to let her keep living with us, my wife and I were shocked to hear that, as soon as we moved her into her condominium, she called relatives and told them, "I'm glad to finally be out from under Bob's thumb."

Unfortunately, her lies didn't stop once she was living on her own and didn't have any new experiences with living with us to lie about. Instead of lying about our day-to-day lives, she started to "rewrite history" by lying about things that happened in the past. Here's one example: Our closest friends know that, from February, 1989, until June, 1995, my wife and I helped a divorced abuse victim from our church raise her two young daughters. And the more we helped her, the more her abusive ex-husband hated us. One night, he stalked me and tried to beat me to death. He was convicted and served jail time for his crime, and I ended up with permanent injuries. Once my mother was out of our house and living in her condo, she told one of my cousins, "You know when Bob got beat up years ago? He started that fight." When my wife heard about that, she went to my mother and asked her why she had said that. Without hesitation, my mother sheepishly claimed that my cousin must have "misunderstood" her. My wife knew that my mother was lying, and I'm sure that my mother knew that my wife knew that she was lying — by that time, my wife and I had already caught my mother in many, many other lies, and each time we had, she had claimed that someone must have misunderstood her.

In the meantime, my mother continued to do what, to me, was extremely predictable behavior with regards to religion. Despite the fact that this area has a few hundred churches of all denominations to choose from, she chose to officially become a member of the church where my wife is the church secretary, even though it is a denomination in which she had never in her life expressed an interest. Once my mother joined that church, she immediately began attending weekly ministry and leadership classes, to try to get into a position of respect and authority within the church, just as she and my father had done at several different churches since the early 1970s. I feel sick to my stomach every time I think about my mother trying to worm her way into church leadership, into a position of authority over my wife. And I know that feeling of dread isn't going to go away until my wife finds a different job and leaves that church secretary job that she used to love. My wife wants to keep our personal lives out of her work as much as possible, so she hasn't told anyone in the church what my mother is really like, but we're both hoping that they'll figure it out on their own, as they spend more time with my mother.

Even though my mother no longer lived with us, my wife and I continued to help my her with paperwork, rides, her taxes, dealing with her divorce lawyer, odd jobs around her condo, and many, many other things. Despite all of that, she made it clear to our relatives and friends that she thought we should be doing a lot more for her. In October of 2005, I gave my speech on domestic violence to several hundred people at a yearly fundraising luncheon for a local women's shelter. Against my better judgment, the women's shelter invited my mother to attend that luncheon. To avoid embarrassing her, I didn't tell the audience that she was there. So when I finished my speech, which was very supportive of the fact that she had finally stood up to her abusive husband, I was pleasantly surprised to see her join the audience's standing ovation and proudly announce to everyone around her "That's my son! I'm his mother! He's done so much to help me!" That made me think that things were finally going to be better between us. Once again, I couldn't have been more wrong. Less than a week later, she told several of our relatives that my speech had really embarrassed her. Looking back at that whole experience, I'm still glad that I gave that speech, but I wish I had insisted that they not invite my mother to be there for it. Instead of helping our relationship, my speech empowered her with undeserved credibility, extremely powerful "victim status," and complete immunity from anyone being able — or willing — to point out her many lies. And once she had those powers, she gladly used them with impunity against my wife and me.

Nowhere on this web site have I ever mentioned my real name. Nor have I ever mentioned my parents' names, or the names of either of my living siblings, in anything that I've ever said or written about my abusive family. Unless you're one of the handful of visitors to this site who knows all of us personally, you have no idea who any of us are. Yet, in what was clearly revenge for me "airing the family's dirty laundry," (or at least a tiny bit of it) in my speech on domestic violence and on this web site, my sister and older brother joined my mother in spreading lies about my wife and me to our other relatives and friends. Their lies got my mother a lot of sympathy and support, while making my wife and me look bad to everyone. Sadly, over time, we discovered that their lies had changed, strained or ended many of our relationships, and that many of our relatives had been willing to believe — and to spread — their lies about us without ever even bothering to talk to us.

Once my siblings joined my mother in telling lies about us, the lies took on additional crediblity and developed lives of their own, as the relatives told them to each other. A cousin who I used to feel close to, started telling lies about us, based on things that my mother had told her, without ever asking me if any of them were true. She even spread the lie that I had started the fight in which I had been assaulted. She said she did it because she felt sorry for my mother and wanted people to know that "Bob's not perfect either." Even though that cousin continues to tell lies about my wife and me, she also says that she wants to be close to me, like she used to be. Yet she's never tried to apologize for all of the lies that she's told others about us, let alone make any effort to correct those lies in the minds of the people that she has told them to. I don't understand how people can live with themselves after they knowingly tell lies to manipulate others, but the ability to do that apparently runs in my family.

For many years, I've known that writing is a very cathartic experience for me — after I write about a bad experience that I've had, it's easier for me to "move on" with my life, taking whatever lessons I've learned from the experience, but leaving the bad feelings behind. Plus, I write with the hope that others who have had similar experiences might find some new insight or comfort from the things that I write. As such, this web site serves a tremendous purpose in my life. Unfortunately, for the past few years, I've been aware that some of my relatives scour this web site regularly, looking for things to criticize about anything that I say about my abusive family. In the past, that forced me to constantly look for a delicate balance between being totally honest and open with my readers and being very guarded and paranoid, so as not to offend any of my relatives. Several times in the past, I posted things about my family in my Journal in the middle of the night, and within 30 minutes, I got an email message from a relative, condemning me for what I had written. The first few times that it happened, I changed or deleted the things that I had written; however, when it kept happening, I realized that I need to write the things that I write, whether or not my relatives like them.

I do feel good that I deleted part of one of my writings from this site, though. In my online Journal this past February, I said that, years ago, my paternal grandfather had diabetes, and that his legs had to be amputated before he died, due to diabetes-related circulation problems. Several weeks after I wrote that, a relative told me that my mother had said that I had lied about that — that my grandfather's legs had never been amputated. What my mother didn't tell anyone was that, years ago, she and my father were the ones who had told me that it had happened. They had said that when he was in the hospital, his diabetes had caused such bad circulation problems that he had gotten gangrene in his legs, and so his legs had to be amputated shortly before he died. Was my mother lying years ago, when she told me that it had happened, or was she lying recently when she told other people that it had never happened? I don't know, but I went back and deleted that whole part of my Journal entry as soon as I heard that it might not be true. Now I have to wonder if any of the stories that she told me about my other grandparents were lies, too. It turns out that my site-scouring relatives aren't just looking for factual errors to criticize me about, though. One of my cousins recently told another relative, "The way he writes on his web site, he must think he's some kind of genius." I'm not sure what that means, but I think it says a lot more about the person who said it than it says about me. My duplicitous relatives may not realize it, but other relatives tell me who they are and what they're saying about my wife and me behind our backs. I guess they'll realize it now, since they'll probably read (and start trying to criticize) this article pretty soon.

Anyway, it became obvious to my wife and me that lying was such a natural part of my mother's life that she did it every day, in nearly every situation, apparently effortlessly, and without feeling any guilt or remorse. When I tried to help her get a mortgage to buy her condo, I wondered why it was taking so long for it to be approved. The reason became clear when the mortgage agent called and told me that my mother had lied to the mortgage company's underwriters in three separate telephone conversations, repeatedly telling them that she was single, when they already knew that, although she was living alone, she was still legally married. When I told her what the mortgage agent had said, my mother said, "Oh, I would never lie — I'm a Christian. If they got the impression that I'm single, then they must have misunderstood me. Besides, it's none of their business whether I'm married or not." I instantly corrected her, saying, "Mom, that's exactly what their business is! You're asking them to loan you xx thousand dollars! It's their business to know exactly who they're lending it to! You have to assume that anything they ask you, they either already know the answer to, or they're going to find out the answer to. If I were the mortgage company, I would refuse to give you a mortgage if I found out that you lied to me!" A few days later, a relative called me to say that my mother had admitted that she had lied to the mortgage company, but she had explained, "I only did it because Bob told me that it's none of their business whether I'm married or not." When I heard that, I thought to myself, "What kind of mother knowingly commits financial fraud and then tries to blame her crime on her son?"

And then, to make me feel even worse, I heard from a relative that my mother had told several relatives, "When I die, I'm going to leave everything to XXXX, YYYY and ZZZZ (my wife, my older brother's wife, and my sister's husband), because I trust them and they've been nice to me." Even knowing how manipulative my mother is, I still could hardly believe the cold, calculating cruelty of that statement. I suddenly realized that despite everything that I had given her and everything that she had taken from me over the years, and despite how close she had always told everyone she had felt to me, she was planning to go out of her way to "stab me in the back from beyond the grave." And she was going to do it in an extremely blatant way that would guarantee that every relative and friend who ever heard about what she had done would instantly conclude that I must have been an absolutely horrible son to her. I was so upset about it that I actually called my older brother, to tell him what our mother had said — thinking that he would be just as shocked to hear about it as I was. Instead, he matter-of-factly told me that he had already known about it for several years, and so had my sister! Then he laughingly told me, "It's no big deal to me — I figure, either way, I'm still gonna get the money." I tried to explain to him that I didn't care about the money, but I couldn't get him to understand. To bring the short, disturbing conversation to an end, he laughed at me and told me that I was taking our mother's public statement way too seriously.

Over time, the lies and unrelenting attacks by my mother, siblings and other family members continued, making it excruciatingly clear to my wife and me that we didn't belong in that family. Some time in early 2006, my older brother and younger sister — who each live hundreds of miles away and hadn't lifted a finger or paid a penny to help our mother — each posted hateful lies about me in this site's Guestbook. A few hours after I silently deleted those messages, they each sent long email messages to all of our relatives and a few of our friends, spreading even more lies and accusing me of being a hypocrite. My older brother, who hadn't seen my wife in at least 10 years, sent her a condemning email message at the church where she works, telling her that she's "as Bad as Bob is" (i.e. worse than my abusive father), and threatening to tell her employer — and the entire town where we live — what she's "really like." Since my brother had never talked to my wife about the situation, and in fact hadn't talked to her at all for the past several years, we knew that he must have gotten that idea from something that my mother had said to him.

It was very, very difficult for me to not respond to any of those messages — especially the threat against my wife — but I knew that any response would "fan the flames" and result in even more lies and attacks. And I remembered the wisdom of the old saying: "Silence can be misinterpreted, but it can't be misquoted." So I kept telling myself that the people who really know us will know that the lies are lies, and the people who don't really know us are going to believe whatever they want to believe about us, no matter what I tell them. Instead of responding to the liars or defending ourselves to everyone else, my wife and I read several good books that she had found on the subjects of "abusive families" and "narcissistic personality disorder," and we spent many long hours trying to figure out why my family members would do such horrible things to us. I wish I could tell you that we finally found an answer, but we didn't. The best reason we could think of was that they are a very damaged and disturbed group of people. They've always been the way they are, and they apparently think that it serves them well to be that way. They proudly claim that God wants them to do the things that they do, so they don't feel any guilt or remorse for doing them — in fact, they've convinced themselves that they're "doing God's will." Since they see no need to change, they probably never will. And the examples of their behavior that I've described here are just the tip of a huge family iceberg of abuse and dysfunction that originally formed at least two generations before I was born.

One of the most difficult things to deal with when you're in an abusive family is the terrible sense of isolation that it causes. When you're a child in an abusive family, it often feels like you're completely on your own — no one understands or even knows what you're going through, and no one really cares. And to make sure that you're never going to tell the truth about your family to anyone who might suspect that there's something wrong, your abusive parents tell you over and over, "It's nobody else's business what happens in our family." Unfortunately, it often still feels like that, even after you grow up. It's easy for people who haven't lived their lives in an abusive family to read stories like mine and think to themselves — or even say to the victim/survivor — "So you had a bad childhood — get over it!" What they don't understand is that the abusive family that damaged the very core of your psyche as a child, continues to be abusive even after you grow up. Your abusive family isn't just something that affected you in the past. Even if you lie to yourself and pretend that you're "over it," or consciously tell yourself that you're not going to let it affect you any more, your abusive family remains a continuing force in your life. It shaped your feelings and attitudes about yourself and your relationships with others ever since before you could walk — and it will continue to sap your energy and self-esteem, try your faith, and affect your feelings and attitudes toward yourself and your relationships with others for the rest of your life, unless and until you find out a way to take control of the situation and make it stop. I can't tell you how many times my wife and I tried to tell someone we trusted a few of the things that I've shared with you in this article, only to have them judge or condemn us for not "forgiving" my family "for the past." We finally had to accept the fact that, unless they've experienced it firsthand, most people can't possibly understand how utterly devastating it is to be betrayed, reviled and shunned without any remorse by the very people who should love you the most in this life.

On the other hand, every once in awhile, my wife and I hear from someone who really does understand what we've been through, and we gratefully accept their understanding, love and support. An old friend wrote, "I was tempted to go to your site and add to the visitor comments how I have known you for over 30 years, and know the members of your family, and vouch for you and the pain you've lived through." Another old friend wrote, "I appreciate very much that you have trusted us enough to share your story. You are not alone. We love you." And a dear friend who runs a domestic violence support organization wrote, "I would never have realized what pain and suffering other people have gone through, if I hadn't gone through it myself. And so, for you, my friend, you've also gone through a lot of pain and suffering, much more than you deserve! But look at the steps you've already taken. Also, I feel it has made you a more compassionate person because of it. You also understand the pain and suffering of others. So your personal articles on your website can be a very good thing, because you never know who will read it and gain from it."

One of the books that my wife and I read about narcissistic personality disorder contained an analogy that really fit our situation: What if you discovered that the well in your back yard, your main source of water, was poisoned? Would you keep drinking its water? Some people think, "Maybe if I just drank less of it, I'd be OK." Other people think, "Maybe if I used my favorite coffee cup to drink it, I'd be OK." Even people who stop drinking it sometimes think, "It's been a few months since I drank the poisoned water. Maybe it wouldn't hurt me to drink a little of it now." The truth is that poisoned water is never going to be safe to drink. You need to stop drinking it and find other sources of good, clean water. In the same way, there is no "win-win" situation when you're dealing with deeply disturbed people whose main goal is to hurt you. No matter what you do, no matter what you say, and no matter how good your intentions are, they will always find a way to lie or to twist your words or actions to make you look bad. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, from the 1983 movie, "WarGames." At the end of the movie, after calculating all of the possible outcomes of a global thermonuclear war, the U.S. Department of Defense supercomputer says, "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

It may seem cryptic to people who haven't experienced it, but the process of leaving a bad relationship can be a very long grieving process. It may start with living in denial, telling yourself that the relationship is not as bad as it seems. At some point, you may feel like you've lost something that, at least at one time, you thought was a good relationship. You may feel angry at yourself or at the other person for not working harder to make it a better relationship, or you may try to figure out a way that you can do something to unilaterally "fix" it. With time, you may grieve the loss of what you have come to realize you never really even had. You grieve the loss of whatever small positive feelings or scraps of companionship you got from the relationship. Maybe most of all, you grieve the loss of your sense of hope in the possibility that the relationship will ever get any better. Ironically, your sad acceptance of the death of hope may be what finally sets you free to move on with your life.

After working through the stages of our grief process together, my wife and I decided that we could forgive my family for being the way they are, without having to subject ourselves to their continuing abuse. So, in May of 2006, based on the counsel and advice of mental health experts, we quietly and permanently cut off all contact with my mother, my older brother, my sister and all of their supporters, and we stopped discussing any of them with any of our remaining relatives and friends.

Then, on August 17, 2006, to publicly declare that we are no longer part of that family, I legally dropped my inherited middle name, and my wife and I legally changed our last name.

Since then, it has taken me another eight-and-a-half months of soul-searching to get to the point where I could finally sit down and write this article, explaining why we did it.

Though we've been happily married for many, many years, two days ago, my wife and I had our very first anniversary with our new last name.

It was a very happy anniversary.

UPDATE, June 5, 2007: My wife finally left her church secretary job for a new job with significantly better pay and benefits.