The Early Years
In college, Treva Hodges (Dean, at the time) competed on a nationally recognized speech team. After she graduated, she went to work as the debate coach for that same team. When Treva opened her speech with “I know you’ve seen me speak before and you wonder why I have notes,” she was calling attention to her background in public speaking. The University of Alabama trained her well. She rehearsed every word. Every pause was perfectly timed for maximum effect.
Near the start of the speech, she spends less than 40 seconds describing the good parts of our fourteen-year marriage. Then, “early on”, she claims to have started to detect signs of our incompatibility. She touches on the divorce of her parents, the death of grandparents, and the loss of her “one and only pregnancy” as a reason to keep pushing these “niggling fears” down. She claims we frequently argued, and sometimes those arguments would lead to me physically restraining her until she was willing to apologize.
Stewart (The Brain)
In a post dated August 20, 2010 on her blog, “Life on the Dean’s List”, she described me like this:
“Stewart is the real thinker of the bunch. He’s always calm and processes the details of every situation before reacting.” In the early stages of our courtship, I visited her at Judson College — a small women-only school in the middle of nowhere. (Actually it’s a little past nowhere on the left, as I recall…) For some reason or other, she was angry and threw a fruit cup against the wall of her dorm room, leading her friends to joke that she would one day be throwing things in anger while I sat calmly in a chair, reading the paper and catching anything that happened to fly in my direction. Even today, my calmness is one of my defining characteristics. Am I always calm? Nobody is. Have angry outbursts ever caused me to act contrary to my character? Never.
“He lives his life with no regrets and is one of the most genuine people I’ve ever met.” Aww, thanks, Treva! She’s mostly right, though. I don’t have many regrets. Certainly this statement was accurate in 2010. Even now, I don’t regret marrying Treva and I don’t regret the fourteen years we spent together, because otherwise I wouldn’t have my kids!
“He brings joy to my life every day.” I tried, anyway. For most of our marriage, I believed her when she said things like this. We laughed, we joked, we even had a phrase, “Who has more fun than we?” “No one!”
Treva (The Ring Master)
In the video, she continues by contrasting my alleged violence and anger with claims that she “worked even harder to be the best wife possible”. And rather than suggest otherwise, I agree that I thought she was a good wife for most of our marriage. We took a marriage class at church soon after her parents’ divorce to avoid the pitfalls that destroyed their marriage. She went back to college, but not to “get a new job to increase our financial stability”. She already had a good job. In fact, she earned more at the job she had when she went back to school than she made at almost any point between the divorce and when she was elected mayor! She went back to school to further her own educational goals, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We moved an hour away from my job so she could finish school and start her doctoral program, and she did have a happy career at a major university.
So how did she describe herself at this time? “I love my life (most days) and have no regrets.” “I’m very stubborn. I tend to be reactionary instead of thoughtful. I love to argue.” (One might think that someone who was physically restrained and forced to apologize would have a bit more of a traumatic response to arguments…) “I have a horrible temper and ‘patience’ is not a word in my vocabulary.”
“I feel as though I’m continually reinventing myself.” Early in our marriage, this was my mom’s primary complaint. We lived so far away and came home so rarely that they felt Treva was a different person each time we visited, and they never knew which Treva they were going to get! As time moved on and Treva’s personality and personal goals coalesced, this concern disappeared and they began to accept her like a daughter.
