Things you never forget

In 2004, New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey held a press conference to announce that he is a gay american. That wasn't really the BIG bombshell.The issues here were that he was married to Dina McGreevey and McGreevey had given his Israeli lover, Golan Cipel a key position as New Jersey's Homeland Security Advisor. Ruh roh.

What I remember about McGreevey's coming out is that his wife Dina was on stage WITH HIM during the press conference. From the look on Mrs. McGreevey's face you KNEW that even she hadn't had enough time to process the information. Maybe she was thinking, "Is this really happening? Am I in the middle of an awful dream?" There were allegations that Dina willingly engagned in threesomes with her husband.

Here is Dina's statement regarding how she felt when he told her privately: Dina says she was in shock after what Jim had told her. "It was all so new, and it just hit me like a ton of bricks, and I wasn't absorbing it," she says. "I just started to cry, and I said to him, 'What does that mean for us?' And he said, 'I need you more than ever.' … He had tears in his eyes, and I was just sobbing."

This is how I remember finding out about my ex-husband. He's there saying these words and you just sort of here this buzzing sound that you hope is not a warning sign that you are about to pass out. You hear it and you think, "I can't handle this right now." You can't handle what you are hearing, how you have to process it, or how you have to react to it. It's impossible.

In an interview given on Good Morning America Dina McGreevey says, "You know he had the entire day [that he resigned] scripted. His entire life had been choreographed, and even as his world was falling apart, he was still trying to script everything and making sure that day went as he wanted it."

This infuriates me. You are, after all, still an actor in his play so he is going to tell you how this is going to go. And you go along with it. Maybe because he is a master-manipulator, but mostly because you are so shell-shocked you don't know what to think. You ask yourself, "How can I handle this with dignity." What you really want to be doing is beating the mother fucker on the back of the head with an iron skillet.

I've been in Dina's shoes. I wonder what she was thinking while she stood next to him on that stage. Was she thinking, "Awwwww, helllllls NO! Somebody better come take my earrings cuz this here is about to get nasty!" I really thought she looked frightened. But now, she's been asked to stand by him and that she has to be "Jackie Kennedy" during this. I love the occasional pictures of Dina off to the right and just behind McGreevey. She is totally giving him the side-eye!

Oprah asks Dina: Did Jim apologize? "If that's what you call it," Dina says. "It was a pathetic attempt at an apology."

A few days after the news conference, Dina says she and Jim went away for the weekend to escape the press. "I had complained to some of his friends that he had never apologized," she says. "And he came back into the room and said, 'For the record, I apologize.' And that was like a slap in the face. I mean, I rather would have had him not say anything."

I did this. I asked, "Are you sorry?" He said, "Yes." I said, "But you're really sorry you got caught, not that you did it." He said,"Yes." A slap in the face indeed.

At some point my ex made some sort of remark about how he had never allowed me to get to really know him. That he had hidden such an essential part of himself that he had never really been himself with me.

I can look back at this time in my life and see that the "essential part of himself" is pretty clear to me now. If I had known he was so incapable of remorse I would never have entered into that relathionship much less that marriage. But a good manipulator never lets you see his tricks. You just fall for the illusion.

Why write this now? Because this is a difficult time of the year for me. Without realizing what is going on, I start to feel this nebulous anxiety. As if at an moment I'm going to crash into another brick wall. I'm just trying to acknowledge the feelings, process them and move on.