The Van

I had been unwilling to write about his topic, because I was refusing to let it affect me. It was an incident involving an inanimate object, a material thing...nothing to get emotional about. The truth is that there have been some deep emotions attached to this singular incident.

The day that I told my husband that I wanted a divorce, I worked an evening shift at a location near my home. I came back from a short break just in time to see him drive up to the drive-through window with the kids...in my van. He lied and told the kids that they were taking my van to get washed. When I asked him why he needed to take the van, he simply replied, "We'll talk about it later." He left me the sedan that he had been driving, the one that I had bought and paid for and had been mine before I drove the van. 

To give you a little history, this van had been his birthday gift to me about two years ago. It was exactly the make and model that I wanted. All the features and extra amenities were precisely the way I wanted them. Nothing more, nothing less. Even the color was the one I had chosen. He knew these things because we had shopped for this vehicle together months earlier, but I decided to be sensible and hold off on a new car payment. About two days before my birthday, he showed up in the driveway with this extravagant gift...taking on the payments himself.

Fast forward to last month: when I got home that night after work...at close to 11:00 PM, I found that my key no longer opened the van and all the things that I had kept in it were stripped out of it and placed in the dining room...they are still there. I manually opened the van, and found that nothing electronic worked...lights, doors, engine, nothing. He had inactivated my key (his key still works). When I asked, he said that the van was stripped and inactivated and that he was going to return it...he is still driving it.

Whatever, I thought. It's just a car. I've had less in my life. I demanded his key to the sedan and went about my life driving the sedan. In addition to my two girls, I bring another child home from school. I think he thought I would not be able to do so without the van. I stuffed three kids, book bags, lunch boxes and coats in the back seat and went on my merry way...nothing could break my stride.

As you can see, it is not the physical loss of the van that has been bothering me. During the past couple of weeks, I have begun to realize that there is something emotional to it.

There was something humiliating and infuriating about finding all my belongings out of my van and bagged up in the dining room. There was something painful about being essentially locked out of my vehicle.

When I allow myself to pause and feel this pain, a childhood memory rises to the surface. When I was about my daughter's age, my stepfather bought my mother a brand new car. It was the first new car we had had in the family, and it was sleek and beautiful...the kind that you felt proud to be dropped off at school in. When they had severe fights, the first thing that he did was take the car keys away from her. She was left helpless and completely dependent on him. One particular time, I remember walking through our town with her (I think he may have kicked us out of the house), looking for a friend of hers who could help us get to the women's shelter. I felt homeless, stripped, and afraid.

It is this particular memory that keeps creeping up on me when I tell myself that this van is just an object. I feel like I am reliving my childhood but in a different role, that of my mother. I am going through her hell and her pain, and I wonder if I married my stepfather.

When I drove the van, I used to park it in the garage, close the door and leave the van unlocked. It gave the girls and myself easy access in an out of the van when we needed to retrieve items or load up the vehicle for a trip. After taking possession of both of the keys to the sedan, I keep the car locked at all times and the keys with me wherever I go. I feel like I have to protect that space furiously. It has become another "safe place" for me.

Although twice my husband has offered me use of the van, I have refused, telling him that the van is his now and I can no longer drive it. On another occasion, he offered to have it detailed and return it to me. I explained to him that I can never drive that vehicle again. There would be too many painful memories associated with it. As far as I was concerned, I added, when he deactivated my key to the van and removed all my belongings, he stripped the van of me and everything that represented me. It is no longer mine, and I can never take it back.

Because the sedan is high in mileage and, frankly, a bit tight for my kids and their friends, I will soon be trading it in for another van. When I made my husband aware of this, he offered to sell me the van and take back the sedan so that I could have a higher trade in value towards the new vehicle. I still refused. I do not want any part of him involved in my purchase of another vehicle. I would like to be able to drive my new van in peace, without feeling like I owe him anything for it. No one will EVER take my car keys again.

He understood my reasons for not wanting the van back. Then he explained to me that he could never feel good about using the van for anything that would benefit him, in other words, trade it in for something that he wants to drive. Anything that he purchases using the van as a trade-in will feel wrong to him...bad karma. I did not reply to this. I did not need to. Enough said, I thought. So you want to return the van to me, because you feel bad about what you have done and you don't want to keep feeling bad about it for the rest of your life? I believe those are your feelings to contend with. These are just natural consequences to your actions, and I don't have to compromise my own healing just so that you can wash yourself clean of your ugliness. This is not my cross to bear.

When I get another vehicle, I will start fresh and clean, knowing that he had no hands in this part of my life.