The picture above is of a mother from a performance of the Greek tragedy THE BACCHAE. It is the picture of Agaue, the mother of King Pentheus, proudly showing off the head of her son, which she had ripped off in ecstasy, believing that she has killed a lion. Even twenty-five hundred years ago, those Greeks knew a lot about life and love.

 (Below is the text of the podcast)

As I describe in my book BEDEVILED, Tom was subject to frequent bouts of depression.

The depression episode would begin by his arriving home from some audition or job and becoming almost silent. When I would ask him what was wrong, he’d say he was depressed. So, in my therapeutic way, I would ask him to talk about it. What was bothering him? He would say he didn’t know. When did it begin? Didn’t know. And on and on.

I always hit a stone wall. And this would go on for days. He would just sit there in glum silence, uncommunicative and unresponsive to anything. Nothing could cheer him up. He would describe his feelings as being at the bottom of a well. Eventually, it would pass and he’d claim some incident had triggered it, which was now better.

I really didn’t know what to make of these depression episodes. Of course, I urged him to go into therapy. But he refused to even consider that. In a way, I could understand that. Being in therapy can be used to label a person as crazy and destroy their job prospects.

What I realize now that I know the truth about who Tom really was, is that his depressions were the result of his secret life bleeding over into our life. This secret life was in fact the only life that he was emotionally responsive to.

The depressions must have been caused by fluctuations in the relationships with the other women. These women, like the Merry-Go-Round owner in CAROUSEL, who used Bigelow as a come on for her business, were bad mother figures. And these mother figures were destructive mother figures who had used their sons in a sexually compromising way that rendered them completely dependent on that mother figure for their sense of self.

I know Tom was an abused child. My guess is that his mother found emotional comfort and support in her oldest son and used him as a pawn against her violent husband, and as a stand-in for the man in her life.

She used him and he became emotionally crippled by her. But it was worse than that. This had started when he was a helpless child, rendering him irrationally fearful of losing this unstable and ultimately rejecting woman’s approval and help. He was addicted to rejecting mother figures. When he couldn’t get his fix, he sank back into his depression.

It’s been very painful to know that for all the years we were married, I was never the emotional center of Tom’s life.

Every time he was depressed, it was because another woman disappointed him. Coming home to me was a sign of failure; he was still stuck with me.

Tom’s depression had nothing to do with me or our life. That’s why he never could confess what was bothering him.

What was bothering him was that he was still unable to be free and be himself. Instead, he was stuck with a woman he really didn’t love or very much respect, me, in a relationship that he only accepted conditionally, until some mother type woman would complete his dream of love and success. And those women always failed him, so as he once angrily told me, I had ruined his life. Yeah, just by loving him and staying married to him.

Even our son has said to me that once he reached high school, it was like his father lost interest, like he was feeling "okay, my job is done, time to move on. Being a dad is over.”

Having been surrounded by depressed people all my life, I often think I should have known better than to marry such a depressed man.

But being raised by a depressed mother and a father who thought men’s fate was to be manipulated by depressed females. I think I was on constant guard against the slightest signs of negativity. I was always the Pollyanna. In my family, I had to be to survive.

If you shed a tear or showed any sign of weakness around my mother, she made it her business to magnify your difficulty infinitely, by blowing it up into Greek tragedy and ending all chance of your ever being happy.

In other words, that you would end up like her, unable to experience any happiness but by making others miserable. It took me years of therapy to be able to shed tears. Then, I went through a phase where I cried all the time. I finally got over that, too.

It’s hard to believe that Tom was so depressed, because he always seemed like such a happy, laughing person; and he was, most of the time, until he ran out of hope that the magical mother person would appear and save him, or that some other woman would make him feel complete.

Tom tried everything for his depression. Pills, exercise and even therapy when he got older. I remember him coming home from his therapist and telling me the therapist just didn’t understand. I guess by then it was too late for him to recognize that it was he himself who didn’t understand. He’d have had to absorb the horrible shock of having wasted decades of his life in useless misery.

My biggest struggle in coming to terms with what my marriage really was is trying to forgive Tom. Marrying me without real love, but more because you were expected to; and then gaslighting and lying to me for decades about what was actually going on in his life really hurts. I remind myself I got so much out of knowing Tom, so I am not bitter, but I do feel hurt and angry and sorry for myself.

Knowing so surely as I do, that there is an afterlife, I wonder if I do want to see him again. I really don’t know how that would work. Maybe all the bad feelings would fade away in the afterlife and we could see each other more truly. Or maybe he doesn’t want to see me.

It worries me a bit, but you really can’t change how you feel.

Does this mean it’s over forever for Tom and I? Yes, I think so, at least for a while. I think that may be the final message of the dream movie CALL OF THE WILD. Love was a brief interlude between Clark Gable and Loretta Young, that ended when summer came, the ice broke, and she found out her real husband was still alive.

We also had a brief interlude of love that lasted about two years. After that, Tom found it convenient and not unpleasant to be married while he waited for his real life to begin…without me.

I think Tom still needs to hear the call of the wild in his soul, the call to be a whole person, independent and free to be himself, before he can really love anybody. So, I’m doing my best to let it go. Blue on blue, heartache on heartache cause I can’t get over losing you.