Villain, Victim, Victor: The Big V Roles
Nearly two years of entanglement with the manipulative minister that I’ve chosen to call the Villain could have broken me.
I was desperate to prove I was a good person, a smart person, and most of all, someone who could learn how to manage a long-term “good marriage,” like the Villain claimed to have done. And I wanted G-d on my side, another promise this (hindsight!) greedy man offered. Much later, when I’d join a church congregation in St. Johnsbury (the largest “shopping town” in my part of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom), a very different sort of minister would ask me in sincere bafflement, “How is it that you know so much about the Bible?”
“I studied hard, took classes, and kept reading and praying,” I’d answer. Didn’t everyone do it that way? Well, no. My motivations had powerfully pushed me into an improvised college curriculum of text, practice, and spiritual determination.
Still, I don’t think that’s what saved me from total collapse as I broke free of the Villain’s grasp and faced, once again, an image of myself as failing a relationship and retreating, with my kids, to the familiar struggles of harsh economics and single-parent challenges.
I think it was the fight I had on the phone with my father, while I packed to leave.
