I met Bob Svoboda in September of 1968. He asked me to go out in November of 1968 to Roosevelt Raceway. He was a compulsive gambler and died penniless without health or life insurance.
He then took me to Killington Ski Area. I was an avid skier and he followed my example and learned quickly.
Our entire short courtship consisted of ski trips in NY, NJ, CT and VT. We became very compatible skiers and had lots of fun.
In February 1969, we became engaged. In March he was drafted. That month he chipped his ankle in a ski accident. He convinced his draft board to cancel his draft notice because of his injury and desire to join military intelligence. He immediately got a draft deferred job teaching high school math and then my father got him into the. Air National Guard and he avoided the draft.
Bob was on active duty from April to September 1969. My mother arranged a large wedding that took place on November 22, 1969
In June 1969, I let Bob meet a former boyfriend of mine who was in the Army National Guard. The meeting did not go well. The former boyfriend, Eduardo Gonzalez,who was 6’4”, weighed 190 lbs, was quite handsome and spoke in a deep baritone, was a Cuban refugee who lived in foster care for ten years until he parents finally got out of Cuba and moved in Puerto Rico.
Eduardo and I had dated briefly in our Freshman year of college. For the rest of college he transferred to the University of Puerto Rico. When he visited me in June of 1969 he asked me to marry him instead of Bob. I wrote to Bob, who was stationed in Chicago, that I was uncertain about our engagement and I hurt him. In the end I told Eduardo “no”.
In August, Bob asked me to go with him to a wedding which I did. Eduardo was out of the picture by then. Bob was very mean to me at the wedding. He didn’t introduce me as his fiancé to any of his friends and never danced with me. He really hurt my feelings. I thought I had made the wrong choice, but plans for the wedding in November were already made.
Bob was 6’ tall and I am 5’ tall. He didn’t like to dance, particularly with me. I love to dance so going to places where everyone was dancing but me made me very sad.
Bob was clearly upset with me. However, the marriage took place and we went skiing in Canada for our honeymoon. We didn’t have much to talk about on Thanksgiving while we were away. Bob took some ski lessons and skiing was as always fun. Sex was not good. When we got home, I bought a book, The Joy of Sex. We never read it.
Bob had told me a few things about his childhood, but he wasn’t interested in hearing anything about my childhood. There was never any “pillow talk” in our relationship.
During the first week after the honeymoon when we were at our new apartment Bob established his control over cooking, laundry, grocery shopping, our finances and the bedroom and he started a game of throwing cold water on me in the shower that lasted ten years. I was busy studying for the CPA exam and going for my PhD and let him have his way to keep the peace.
We enjoyed playing together but our opinions were always different so we had very little to talk about.
He was a Conservative politically. I was a Liberal.
Nevertheless, the first two years of our marriage were idyllic. We lived in NYC and went away every weekend, skiing all winter and to my Grandmother’s country home where we played golf the rest of the year. After the first year we had a second honeymoon in the Bahamas. In 1972, we went on a trip to Europe with my parents.
That year Bob joined a men’s only golf club and our “marriage” ended. With his approval we had Stacey on May 28, 1973. I had sole responsibility for our baby. In September 1973, I accepted a teaching position at St. John’s University.
Bob lost his first jobs and In 1975 he accepted a teaching position at St. John’s University as well. Our son, Stephen was born on September 15, 1976. I taught on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings. Bob taught on Tuesday and Thursday. He watched Stacey and Stephen on his days off and drove Stacey’s carpool to Nursery School. I had to hire a babysitter to help him with the children.
I had plans for four children three years apart. On October 2, 1979, Andrew was born and we moved to a much larger home. I was able to hire live-in help to take care of Andrew from when he was a baby until he was five. Michaelle also did the laundry, cooking and cleaning freeing me to teach and work on my PhD at Columbia University.
Bob taught three years at St. John’s and three years at Iona College, his Alma mater. Then he went to work for our partnership, Svoboda & Svoboda CPAs as the tax partner and as such he was able to play golf five days a week. He did his accounting work in the evenings.
I loved our new home which was built in 1711, and shortly after we moved there I bought a pony, named Chestnut for the children. We had a large barn where Chestnut lived as a backyard pony.
Bob had a good client, the Dick Clark Westchester Theater, who paid us a large fee that made our new home affordable. Unfortunately, based on Bob’s advice, his golfing partner and joint owner of the Theater booked an aging comedian and lost his shirt. The Theater went bankrupt, his friend lost his house and we lost our lucrative client. Our mortgage was reasonable, but heating this sixteen room house was extremely expensive. So, Bob shut down half the house in the winter and kept the thermostat at 65 degrees.
Bob was not good to us when he was under financial stress. However, he continued to invest heavily in the stock market and had considerable losses which added to his stress. Sex was infrequent.
Our house had a buildup of 200 years of paint. Bob decided to melt and scrape the old paint off down to the raw wood. He painted by hand the house federal blue with white trim. The house turned out beautifully.
When Stephen was three and Andrew was a baby, Bob took responsibility for waking Stephen and taking him to the bathroom each night at midnight.
Occasionally Bob would fall asleep watching TV. By the time he came upstairs at 3 AM Stephen would have wet his bed. Bob would go beserk and he’d start to yell and attempt to beat Stephen in his sleep. I would listen for Bob each night. When I heard him yell I’d jump out of bed and stop him from hitting the little boy. This went on until I took the children away from Bob when Stephen was seven. Prior to that time Stacey insisted she would stay and live with her Dad. This was not an option for me. I didn’t trust him not to molest Stacey.
In 1986, I asked for a divorce. Bob agreed to leave the marital residence, but he moved back in in August 1987 so the children and I went to live in the Adirondacks. Stephen had only one bed wetting accident there. Without his father to wake him, he got up by himself at night when he needed to to take himself to the bathroom. His bed wetting stopped.
I had hired an attorney in Dream Lake where we lived to write a Separation Agreement but Bob wouldn’t sign it. My divorce attorney in Mamaroneck said that without a Separation Agreement I could only get a divorce based on mental cruelty, but I would need to state the dates, the witnesses and what Bob said that was abusive. When I tried to do this on Thanksgiving 1988, I ended up having my second nervous breakdown, and I lost a teaching job the salary from which I was supporting my children in the Adirondacks.
In 1989, Bob agreed to return the marital residence to me and I left the Adirondacks and returned to the marital residence in defeat. I became clinically depressed and had to claw my way back to mental health.
My first experience with depression was when Eduardo broke up with me in 1967. I would burst out in uncontrollable tears at random moments. I was very sad all of the time for six months. Finally, my mother threatened to take me to a psychiatrist.. Everyone was insisting Eduardo didn’t love me and that I should just move on. I was certain that he did love me and that he had made a unilateral decision that we should date other people while we were separated by our choice of colleges. I didn’t like this about him and I got out of my funk by deciding he wasn’t worthy of my love and that I didn’t ultimately want to be with someone who would make unilateral decisions for me and my recovery began without a psychiatrists intervention or any medication. I joined a Service Club and made new friends teaching adults to read. I became good friends with the head of the Organization, Michael O’Shea.
I felt I killed the infatuation Bob had with me when I introduced him to Eduardo and gave him an excuse to be very mean to me. Still he wanted to go through with the marriage. It wasn’t until I read Dr. Susan Forward’s book, Men who Hate Women and Women who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and you Don’t Know Why that I realized that Bob was a mysogenous and that it was only a matter of time before I would fall off the pedestal he had me on and attempt to control every aspect of our lives together and I stopped blaming myself for the failure of our marriage.
In 1972, when Bob joined an all men’s golf club the “marriage” disintegrated. I was very sad and lonely on the weekends when I was used to spending them with Bob. When Stacey was born in May of 1973 she became my new best friend. I read somewhere that you are responsible for your own happiness. So, I did things that I enjoyed whenever I could with my daughter.
Bob was jealous of my love for Stacey, and he hated his son Stephen who was just like him. Our house became a battle zone when Andrew was born and Bob took responsibility for keeping Stephen from wetting his bed.
In 1983, Bob took the children and his mother and me to Disney World. In the middle of our first vacation in seven years Bob went golfing with his former secretary and her husband a wealthy scion. He ruined our trip and I decided to divorce him if he didn’t stop putting golf above his family.
I had to choose between completing my doctorate degree and having a fourth child and trying to save our marriage. I decided to have Audrey, give up on my PhD and become an active participant in Svoboda and Svoboda CPAs as audit partner. Bob was happier when I was working for our firm for a year.
Audrey was born July 14, 1984. I was very successful as the audit partner of the firm bringing in revenue equal to what Bob was earning as the tax partner after fifteen years. My success was a double edged sword. Bob celebrated 1984 as our most successful year, but he used my success as an auditor against me when he refused to sign a Separation Agreement without specifying a reduction in his child support for every dollar I earned. It took him five years to make his revisions.
In 1985, I stopped driving in the same car with Bob and the children. He would complain and criticize me and the children constantly. I started to take the children in my car to family events. When Bob had me in his car he exercised total control over me. It was very unpleasant.
In 1988, while in the Adirondacks I found myself following the car of my doctor after we watched our daughters play soccer. I looked at his car and mentally said “Bob’s car” which it resembled. I involuntarily jerked my car across two lanes of oncoming traffic and into a restaurant parking lot. Bob’s constant abuse had given me a case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I couldn’t follow the car of a man I was beginning to have feelings for.
In 1986, when Stacey turned thirteen Bob’s relationship with her changed drastically. He started to hit her and curse at her. She couldn’t have friends over without fear that he would yell at her, slap her and embarrass her. She started to spend all her time at her friend’s house in Larchmont.
Each day when he came home from the golf course he assumed control of the house yelling at the children to do chores that were previously his responsibility like feeding the cats, doing dishes or taking out the garbage. The children would hide when they heard his car. He liked making them afraid of him.
In 1995, I finally got a divorce with the help of a pro bono lawyer. The house was sold by the judge and I purchased a log cabin the the Adirondacks.
It took me from 1986 to 1995 to begin to recover my mental health.
In 1986, I experienced my first psychotic break. I had the children with me at my sister Joanne’s house over Christmas vacation. She let me sleep during the day while she watched the children. After I rested I was fine.
In the beginning of 1987, I took the three older children on a ski vacation to my friend Penny Noletti’s ski house near Stratton Mountain and experienced a major psychotic break which lasted after we returned home when I went to my neighbor, the Iraqi Ambassador’s, house and told his wife that her husband was a very evil man. This resulted in my first hospitalization at a mental health facility. At the time I was on a counterindicated drug originally prescribed by a new doctor in the Adirondacks and continued by my Scarsdale psychiatrist.
When the police came to take me away because of a call from the Iraqi ambassador’s wife I was playing Whitney Houston’s The Greatest Love of All on my baby grand piano. Bob and I had irreconcilable differences. Bob thought children were innately bad and needed to be disciplined. I thought they were good and needed a chance to “lead the way.” I did everything to give them a “sense of pride”. Bob tried to belittle and destroy them. He attacked my “dignity” at every opportunity. So much so that I was too embarrassed by his behavior to have friends over.
I returned home after a three week hospitalization and resumed care of my children and was placed on lithium. Life went on and in the summer of 1987 I returned to the Country Club pool to watch the children swim and Stacey dive and produced a “South Pacific” Water Ballet.
During this time Bob insisted on living with us at the marital residence so we left staying with my parents, then at a club member’s house while she was away, then at a shelter for abused women. Summer ended and we packed the car and drove to the Adirondack Mountains where I put the children in school.
At first we stayed at my sister’s motel. After a few weeks we rented a cabin in the woods.
My sister asked me to run a Children’s Exchange in a store which was owned by our brother, Billy. After awhile I volunteered to run “Magic Carpet”, a free pre-school housed in the town library. All the nursery schools for Audrey were full.
We spent the summer in the mountains which was not nearly as much fun as our usual summers at the Country Club in Westchester for the children and for me without my Summer Friends.
In the Fall of 1988, the children returned to school in the mountains having made some new friends and I got a job teaching accounting to travel agent students, management, hotel accounting and business in a Private College.
It was difficult teaching four new classes without time to prepare and taking care of four young children ages 4, 9, 12 and 15 without any help.
I fell in love with my doctor but was acting like I was unavailable since I had made no progress on my divorce.
For Thanksgiving 1988, I sent my three younger children to our Catskills’ house and took some time for myself to do the work I needed to do to provide to my lawyer the details he needed about Bob’s mental cruelty so we could move forward with a divorce since Bob wouldn’t sign the Separation Agreement I had given him.
It was like tearing a scab off a wound too soon when I mentally said “Bob” and I ended up very sick, laughing at the puns I had saved to share with Bob for three days and nights. I was hospitalized and lost my job. The president of the school violated the Rehabilitation Act of 1954 and I eventually sued and received a good settlement, but I was not reinstated in my job. Because of some vicious lies repeated on the police scanner I could no longer work as a professor in the Adirondack community I chose to live in. Fortunately, when I did return after my divorce, I was able to work in Westchester as a CPA with a weekly six hour commute.
We stayed in the mountains until school was out but returned to the marital residence for the summer on condition that Bob would move out which he finally did in October of 1989.
I had my Summer Friends back for the summer. The children and I had a very good time doing our typical summer activities with our life long friends. My mental health was fine.
Then came the fall. The children were happy in their old schools, but I didn’t have a job or any household help or anyone to talk to except a telephone call each morning from my mother and Bob. I became clinically depressed. It was time for me to find ways to recover my mental health.
After I got the children off to school I did what clinically depressed people often do. I lay on the couch in a fetal position and suffered. I started to watch TV which I rarely did and found solace in “Love Boat” and “Fantasy Island”. Finally, at three o’clock, I picked up the children from school. I was so sick that I couldn’t even go to the grocery store instead sending the children in to buy what we needed. Andrew would get so angry with me because I was living in a dream world and making up story lines that I would laugh at instead of listening to what he was saying to me.
Very slowly I came around with the help of Audrey always giving me a hug, Andrew insisting I play soccer or basketball with him, Stephen cooking and teaching me about Fantasy Therapy as we watched “General Hospital” and I would make up a story line for my favorite characters Anna DeVane and Robert Scorpio using my own experiences each night, and Stacey demanding I act normal and me not wanting to disappoint her.
Summer came again. We all had our friends back and I had children home to watch and someone to talk to and my mental health improved.
I knew I couldn’t spend another winter alone so I convinced my mother to lend me the money I needed to take a course in “Lotus 1,2,3”. This got me out of the house and gave me something academic to do. I applied for jobs and got two adjunct teaching jobs: one in Uptown NYC and one in Downtown NYC and I began to recover.
A technique I learned in the first mental hospital is very important. When something sad happens people become depressed. Their bodies react by producing serotonin and dopamine. The more depressed a person is the more manic they become in recovery like a pendulum swinging.
When you are manic and the synapses in your brain are firing rapidly place your thumbs on your temples and let your fingers roam at will around your brain. Your fingers will vibrate rapidly and you will feel angry words traveling rapidly from your brain to your temples, so rapidly that the “words” are unintelligible.
I call this a “memory dump”. By doing this you erase any psychological abuse you have endured without reliving it.
You have to work constantly to regain your mental health once you have gotten rid of the cause of your “cognitive dissonance”, the one who is saying he loves you but is treating you and your children like he hates you or the parent who is treating you, an adult, as if you are a child. You can recover and lead a normal life if you take every opportunity to do the work necessary to regain and maintain your mental health.
