A Video of Me Burning a Lock of Baby Hair During Halloween

Last Halloween I made a video where I burned a lock of my ex-husband’s baby hair right on October 31, 2014. I had come across his baby hair in an envelope while I was doing some decluttering and things were so strained and hurtful between us that I just didn’t feel like delivering that small envelope to his new home that he now shares with the woman he left me for and subsequently married soon after our divorce was final. (On top of it, she was a friend of mine who had also been open and honest about her struggles with mental illness.)

I read online that burning hair in a Pagan/Wiccan ceremony is supposed to negatively affect the original owner of that hair. For added effect I decided to do that ritual on Halloween while I made a video of myself burning his hair.

Well nothing has happened to my ex-husband. I see him every now and then so I guess he’s okay but I can’t say for sure. (We are no longer on speaking terms and I’m still adhering to my therapist’s advice of not contacting him at all.)

I didn’t get around to uploading that video on YouTube until New Year’s Eve while I wrote a post on New Year’s Day about it. But I think it was the wrong time of the year to publicize it because I didn’t get too many YouTube views.

So here is the original video for you to view at the right time of the year. It also includes a cameo appearance from my American Girl doll, Julie Albright. My video explains why that doll is even relevant to my marital breakup and my ex-husband.

My Husband Ran Away From Home and I Had to Pick Up the Pieces

I’ve written about my divorce before but I’m writing about it again not because I’m a drama queen but because I’m hoping that this post would get mentioned by the Delightfully Tacky blog. Especially with that blog’s The Brave Ones section where other writers write about their own experiences with overcoming trauma.

I don’t know if anything will come of it but I want to do things in the hope that my life will be improved enough so I can move on from the drama of the last three-and-a-half years. My therapist, divorce recovery support group, and even a few books have suggested that everyday I do at least one thing that could possibly help me move on from this major trauma that I went through and I’m still struggling with.

I married my college sweetheart. Compared to other boyfriends I’ve had, this man was very mature, level-headed, and very responsible. He never developed any addictions nor was he ever violent towards me in any way. We had a lot in common. When I introduced him to my parents, he managed to charm them. When I announced our engagement, my parents were totally thrilled because they liked him. We got married 10 months after I finished college and I felt like I had died and gone to heaven because I considered him to be my best friend as well as my husband. At times he even served as a model and muse for some of my art projects.

We had weathered a lot together, including the sudden death of his mother in 2010 and my hip surgery in 2011. I thought that we were destined to spend the rest of our lives together. This blog post, which described this baseball card collage I made as a present for my husband in early 2011 based on his own suggestion, is typical of the married life I had with him.

My husband did a lot for me both before and after my hip surgery. He made all the preparations for my surgery, he took time off from his job so he could take care of me while I recuperated, and he even lined up friends to drive me to and from physical therapy sessions when he had to return to his job. On Christmas Day, 2011, we had a lovely time together, which I recounted in this post. I was happy in the marriage and my husband acted happy as well. He didn’t indicate that he felt there were problems in our marriage or anything like that.

It all came to a sudden screeching halt just three days after that lovely Christmas Day and three months after my hip surgery. He came home from work, announced “I’m moving out…I found a room,” threw some pieces of paper my way, then ran out the door before I could even respond. I looked at the papers. One was a check for $2,000 that was designated as my first alimony payment. One was a separation schedule that he drummed up that would lead to our divorce. The other was a note where he blamed the fact that the day before I had the hip surgery, I went on a little shopping trip to a mall where I purchased an American Girl doll who was supposed to represent the 1970’s. she had long blonde hair (like I did before I hit my teens), and she wore an outfit that was nearly identical to one that I wore as a child in the same era.

Basically that doll was the reason why he said he had to leave home.

I was totally shocked by all this. At the time I thought he had simply snapped due to all the stress over my health problems and some stresses at his job and this volunteer job he took on as treasurer for our church. The night he left I wrote a short entry hoping that he would soon return home and the separation would be a short-lived one.

A couple of days later my husband was still missing so I did a few Google searches under “My husband ran away from home” and I was led to this book by Vikki Stark called Runaway Husbands where she went through a similar situation as I did. I ordered it through Amazon.com and for the next several months I read and re-read that book over and over again.

Despite Vikki Stark’s contention that, based on her own experiences and her research of other women who went through the same thing, my marriage was destined for divorce, I still held out hope that my husband would reconsider. I had even contemplated selling that doll that he blamed for the walkout on eBay in the hopes that he would realize that I was serious about saving our marriage and return to me.

When I read Stark’s book, especially the section about how there’s usually another woman involved, I initially thought that there was either no one else or, if there was another woman, she would’ve been a co-worker at my husband’s job at NASA. My assumptions were totally shattered a month later when a few of my friends finally came forward with the truth. They had seen him in the company of a friend of ours whom we both met through this cafe that we frequented. (She worked as a barmaid two nights a week while being open about struggling with severe depression that has impacted much of her adult life. She even mentioned that she had an experimental pacemaker implanted into her brain because her depression had grown that bad. About 10 months before my husband ran away from home she had to check into a hospital for a few days in order to adjust her meds because her body had adjusted to her current course of treatment.) He took her on dates to the same cafe where she worked as a barmaid (and the same one where my husband and I were regulars) within a week after he left me so my friends figured it out before I did.

I thought that the barmaid was my friend and I even felt sorry for her because of her struggles with mental illness. She was among my friends whom I approached when I was trying to look for my husband and she denied knowing where he was. When I told her how he ran away from home, she seemed shocked at the time. But now I realize that she was just a fake friend who had no qualms about stabbing me in the back while I was still recovering from hip surgery and was still willing to stay with him even after I told her he ran away from home.

For the next year I didn’t hear from my husband other than receiving e-mails and texts demanding that we separate our finances and we sign this separation agreement as soon as possible. In his messages he basically barked orders at me like I was his employee instead of his wife. Whenever I protested he would threaten to sue me in court. Basically my husband went from being my best friend to my own worst enemy.

To make manners worse, on Christmas Eve, 2012, he sent a divorce petition in a .pdf format that was attached to an e-mail. Then he demanded that I sign it and mail it to his lawyer as soon as possible. I consulted a lawyer who told me that it wasn’t real because there was no case number assigned to it. My husband had his lawyer file for divorce for real and I ended up in divorce court in April, 2013.  Our divorce was declared final by June. In August, just two months after the divorce being final, I got word via Facebook that my ex-husband and my ex-friend suddenly got married.

In the aftermath of my husband’s dramatic about face, I began to see a therapist and I also started attending weekly meetings of a divorce recovery support group. Through them I began to gain a new perspective on my marriage. I realize now that there were some issues in the marriage that I had swept under the carpet and was willing to overlook because I thought my husband was such a swell guy. For example, my husband grew up in a family that was basically dysfunctional and full of drama and it had an effect on him that I should not have ignored. These days I tell people that before they get married, see how that person interacts with his/her own family. If there’s something troubling about your fiancee’s family dynamic, get out now. Ditto for any other red flag that your fiancee may display. It’s easier and cheaper to break an engagement than it is to get a divorce.

I kept on reading other books after I went through Vikki Stark’s book several times and they were all a tremendous help to me. I also have to credit my family and friends for sticking by me and helping me through this sudden out-of-the-blue divorce. If it weren’t for them, I would be in a worse place now both mentally and financially.

I’ve always considered myself to be an artist but I’m having a hard time trying to make ends meet with only selling through art shows and craft fairs. I’m currently looking into temping and freelance work so I can support myself once my husband’s court-mandated five-year alimony runs out. I’m trying to move on. My therapist tells me that I’m making great progress but there are times when I doubt it myself.

I’ve also tried finding creative ways of dealing with what happened. When a member of my divorce recovery group threw a party at her home, she invited people to bring things in order to thrown into a bonfire that she was having in her backyard. I donated my old wedding cake topper for the occasion.

And then there is the time on Halloween when I did this wiccan/pagan ritual where I burned a lock of my ex-husband’s baby hair (which was saved by his late mother when he was nearly a year old and it came with a bunch of items from his mother’s estate—ultimately he left it behind with me).

I have no other choice but to keep on trying new avenues and make major life decisions by myself and hope everything works out for me because right now I’m currently in limbo. I don’t know where I’ll end up. I’m hoping for the best while trying everything possible to avoid the worst.

http://www.nablopomo.com

UPDATE (November 10, 2019): In the four years since I wrote this post in this blog, it has remained among my most-read posts of all time. I think I really hit a nerve when I wrote about how my husband abruptly went from being a very loving spouse to a total stranger whom I rarely hear from anymore.

I originally wrote this post because there was a blog called Delightfully Tacky that had a section called The Brave Ones that consisted of first-person stories from other writers on any trauma that they have faced and what they did to overcome it. I followed the instructions for getting this post noticed by the writer of the Delightfully Tacky blog (including even posting a photo of her at the top of this post) but I never heard back from her.

Recently I clicked on the original Delightfully Tacky link only to get taken to a T-Mobile search page that is powered by Yahoo!. The first link on this page is this Reddit thread from last year that discusses whatever happened to the person behind the now-defunct Delightfully Tacky blog and it seems pretty sad. I did a Google search and found this thread on the GOMIBLOG forum that mentions some disturbing Instagram posts like this one, this one, and that one. I hope she’s doing okay these days because it sounded like she went through a dark phase of her life in recent years, especially since she had a baby.

My Last Video of 2014 or How I Burned a Lock of My Ex-Husband’s Baby Hair on Halloween

Happy New Year, everyone! I finally got around to finishing editing and uploading this video I originally shot on Halloween and I made an allusion about a few months ago in this blog. Well, here’s the video in question.

On Halloween, about an hour or so before sunset, I made a video where I burned a lock of my ex-husband’s baby hair, which was one of the many things he left behind when he walked out on me back in October, 2011. I guess I could’ve dropped it in his mailbox at his current home but I’m still dealing with sour feelings from all those months when he totally treated me like I was little more than a robot who had to obey him or else he would sue me and refused to even treat me like I was his wife. Right now I’m just not inclined to do anything nice for him unless he issues a sincere heartfelt apology for the hell that he put me through and, to be honest, I won’t be getting one from him anytime soon.

The lock of baby hair in question was one that was originally saved by my late mother-in-law after my ex-husband had his first haircut. It was one of the numerous items that we received after her death. Then he left it behind and I really didn’t want it around. I originally thought about just throwing it in the trash but then I came across this entry by Kate Evangelista about the various superstitions concerning hair. I found that if one burned the hair in a ritual, it was supposed to bring pain to the hair’s original owner. (In case you’re wondering, this ritual hair burning didn’t work for me. My ex-husband is still healthy and I haven’t heard any talk about him being sick in any way.)

So I decided to burn the hair in a ritual and film it for posterity. Drawing on my previous experience with rituals (mainly through my Unitarian Universalist congregation and through a sub-group of the Unitarian Universalist Association known as CUUPS), I did one and I burned the hair. I also filmed an intro where I mentioned how my husband abruptly ran away from home, how he cited my purchase of an American Girl doll (Julie Albright, who’s supposed to represent the 1970’s) along with some corresponding books the day before my hip surgery as the reason why he had to leave home, along with brief mentions about how he hooked up with a friend of ours with serious mental health issues and Vikki Stark’s Runaway Husbands book.

I ended not editing it until December because I got diverted by other things. It’s fitting that I waited until New Year’s Eve to upload this video since my husband left me three days after Christmas in 2011 and he e-mailed a divorce petition in a .pdf format on December 24, 2012 (Christmas Eve). Well, anyway, here it is.

By the way, I originally had music accompanying the opening and closing credits. It’s the same tune that I used for the opening and closing credits of My Visit to the Psychic. I originally composed it in GarageBand by mixing various loops. I used it in the previous video with no problem. But when I tried to upload this new video on to YouTube, first it required me to verify that I was a real person uploading this video and not a bot by typing in my cell phone number then responding to a text. Then, after I verified that I am a real person, YouTube was claiming that the music matched “third party content” (without specifying what the content in question is) and I wouldn’t be allowed to monetize this video. I also couldn’t find any links or buttons where I could appeal and say that the music came from my own work on GarageBand. So I deleted the video on YouTube, brought the original video back into iMovie, and stripped out the music. When I uploaded the new music-free video, I had no problem at all. I didn’t have to verify that I was a human being and I could monetize my creation. So I now have gaping silence in the credits where there should’ve been music.

And one more thing, since I mentioned in this post and in the video about how my husband cited my purchase of the 1970’s historical American Girl doll the day before my hip surgery as the reason why we had to get a divorce, I came across this blog entry written by the husband of a doll collector. He seems to be more tolerant of his wife’s hobbies and interests than mine ever was. (My ex was a bit on the tightwad side even though we weren’t poor or financially struggling but that’s another story.) This woman is so incredibly lucky to have a husband like hers. Believe me, I know. If only my husband had been more like that man, we would still be happily married and we probably would’ve ended up celebrating our golden 50th anniversary sometime in the distant future.