2004 – 2006 | The Illusion of Peace Before the Real Conflict Took Up Residence

Years after our divorce, Daniel and I are still firing at each other, this time with Nintendo game tanks instead of words. Beneath the laughter lay a history of rage, survival and uneasy peace, where love, conflict and resilience coexisted under one unpredictable roof.

“You are shooting me! STOP SHOOTING ME!! If you kill me, you are also dead, you dufus!” The door to the passage slams open. “Mom! Dad! Stop this! PLEASE! For goodness’ sake, the neighbours are hanging on the palisades trying to see what is going on!”

“Your mother is parking her green tank under the green bush. How am I supposed to see her? Then she calls me stupid!”

“Your father expects me to remain at the home base like a good housewife while he has all the fun outside on the battlefield. If he doesn’t let me out of here, I will shoot him on purpose!”  

Daniel and I are playing Nintendo Battle Tanks after work. This is one thing we have always had in common—our inner children love playing. I remember the time we bought the two boys a BMX bicycle each, and we happily rode up and down the street while the two small boys watched from the sidewalk. We taught Corné to play Sergeant Major when he was ten years old, and we kept him playing well past his bedtime on many school nights. We watched all the children’s programmes on TV and knew the lyrics to all the songs.

Unfortunately, we fought just as passionately. For a man who suffered from severe dyslexia and never read a single book in his life, Daniel possessed an extensive vocabulary of the most vile and vulgar insults and threats that he delivered in a thundering voice which could be heard down the street. He would use this ability to roar me into submission during the first few years of our marriage. I didn’t know half the swear words, and my softer tone could not compete with his stentorian bellowing. I remember many times that I cowered at the dining room table with two crying boys in my lap, and crying myself, too afraid to open my mouth. Until one night when I just had enough. I had a severe migraine; there was, once again, no milk for the children in the fridge, no money in my purse and no more patience for this way of life. I turned around and shrieked like a banshee at him to shut his fecking mouth before I shut it for him. He just stood there and stared at me, slack-mouthed and quiet. Blessedly quiet. I don’t know what he saw in my face or my demeanour in that moment, but when I later opened the safe to take out my chequebook to write yet another post-dated cheque (not permissible for lowly bank officials, and I would be penalised for that action in my progress report), I noted that my little snub-nose revolver was gone. I went to bed in relative peace that night.

Strangely enough, Daniel never lifted a hand to me. His abuse consisted solely of verbal insults and humiliation in public. I learned early on in my marriage to eat humble pie to keep the peace. But that slowly changed. I’m a quick learner, and I started paying him back in kind at unexpected times. He hated his own medicine. Daniel used every opportunity to make others, including our children, aware of his wife’s bad language and behaviour. He was using my children as a whip to beat me up, because he knew this was my soft spot. I no longer talked; I screeched. My cussing vocabulary expanded. Our friends started avoiding our company, and our two boys, born thirteen months apart, became increasingly quiet, seeming to shrink into their own skin.

My anger grew into a savage rage I could no longer control. I became physically violent towards Daniel (never the children, thank God, never the children). I remember the day Daniel held eighteen-month-old Karen by the shoulders and shook her because she refused to eat the pea soup he had cooked for dinner. I yelled at him to let her go, and when he turned away to put me in my place, I picked up the boiling pot of soup from the stove and threw it at him. Soup was dripping from his hair and the kitchen drapes. I took the children to a friend's house, where we slept over. When we returned in the morning, he was sober and the kitchen spotless. On another occasion, I threw a marble ashtray at his temple—had it hit the mark, he could have been dead or seriously injured.

Only then did I understand what Daniel saw in my eyes that day when he made my little revolver disappear. I had to get myself under control. So, I put a lid on my white-hot temper by intentionally growing a ball of ice in my deepest emotional innards. I froze Daniel out of my thoughts and my body. I no longer reacted to his taunts or his fumbling attempts to make me love him again. He tried to make my life miserable by playing loud music in the middle of the school night, keeping everyone awake. I threw his CDs on the floor and danced on them. The next morning, he took my LPs from the shelf and invited the children to play frisbee. After another night out with his drinking buddies, he brought home a bucket of very expensive ice cream (my favourite). I pulled the bucket over his head like a multicoloured melting hat. After another drunken night and a visit to a strip club, he wrote off another one of the cars that I had paid for. The police called to ask if I would come and get him. I asked that they leave him in a jail cell until he sobered up. They did.

Who the hell was I? What was I becoming? I didn’t recognise myself anymore. I finally went to see a divorce attorney. I had all the necessary legal documents, including a pre-prepared settlement agreement (private law was one of my majors, and I knew exactly what the court would require from me). My attorney obtained the services of the best advocate (barrister) I could afford, and because of the possibility that the minor children may be in bodily danger as a result of alcohol abuse, I was standing in the witness box in the Cape Town divorce court only six weeks later. Two weeks before Christmas, on 18 December 1992, the divorce decree was declared final, with immediate effect. The uncontested divorce proceedings took exactly 90 seconds. One and a half minutes to dissolve a tumultuous marriage of sixteen years.

Now, to calm the children’s nerves about the shooting and noisy games between their parents, which attracted the nosy neighbours' attention, Corné built a personal computer for each of us. We taught Daniel to play online bingo, and we played side by side in the spacious old garage next to the house, which Daniel turned into a family room when we added the double garage I asked for.

The divorced state proved much friendlier and more relaxed than the married years. We did have an occasional flare-up of tempers in the house, but overall, the household operated on an even keel. But not for long, because nothing in my life remains serene. It was not long before the illusion of peace was shattered and the real conflict finally took up residence.

Featured image: Stylised photo of Daniel and me playing Nintendo Battle Tanks on TV.