Topic: What Is My Part?
I spent the first five months of 2010 writing a blog entitled "Saying Goodbye to You". In it I was preparing myself for the horrors of losing my husband to pancreatic cancer and just plain old losing my husband of 22 years. Prior to getting married, we had dated off and on for four years, so really our relationship had lasted 26 years. Most of the time we had been together as a couple but we had had a few break-ups during which I would try my hand at dating, not exactly a favorite pasttime. I have never enjoyed dating, especially first dates, and am clumsy at it at best.
I would be duplicitious if I omitted the part about my biological clock. It was ticking loudly back then. I wanted to have a child. I couldn't imagine ending my life without offspring. Like most women, I felt I had strong maternal instincts. I also wanted a family. I wanted togetherness, I wanted to feel loved, I wanted the unity, commitment and dedication that come with having a family. At the end of my first marriage we had started trying to conceive. That attempt had opened my eyes to the fact that I didn't see a future as a family with my first husband, that he had a horrible chip on his shoulder and felt comfortable with it---he loved his chip. After all, he had inherited it from his father with pride. There was no way I wanted any child of mine to grow up thinking all people were out to get him or put him down. That was just crazy. By the time 1988 rolled around, changing husbands had become a time-consuming effort. And I felt my time was running out. What this amounted to was me being in a hurry to find a new mate and have a family. I didn't feel like I was in a position to be too picky, and I thought I loved Bill. In fact, I thought he was the love of my life. At the time, I didn't think I was 'settling'. Where the truth is-----I don't know. But this I know has to happen now: I have to discover what it is I have done wrong, what it is I want for myself, what I will tolerate, and what are 'deal-breakers'. I have been told to make a list.
Before I can make that list, I must understand myself. What is it about me that has contributed to the demise of two marriages? If I blame it all on my exes, if I absolve myself of all responsibility, I will not improve. I will make the same mistakes over again. I vow to dig and to dig deep.
What are the commonalities between the two marriages? In both cases there was some emotional imbalance. What attracted me to two men with mental/emotional problems? Did I mistake depression for introspection? Did I think these were guys with the ability to be in touch with their feelings when in fact they were suffering from depression? Check! I think it would be in my best interest to say 'yes' to that.
Next, and extemely importantly, assertiveness. Mom taught me never to ask/demand anything from a man. When I was a little girl she said that when I grew up, men would be beating down the door for me. I thought it was a sweet comment but I didn't believe her. She, my aunt and my grandmother, the backbones of their families, all said we women just needed to be loved and taken care of. My aunt and my grandmother were taken care of by their spouses. My grandfather met my grandmother's every whim. My aunt's husband adored her, made a lot of money, and took extremely good care of her until the day she died. But while saying I would be taken care of out of one side of her mouth, out of the other side Mom was saying to take whatever a man dished out. My mom was the antitheses of the American woman everyone says marries a man and then sets out to change him. She was more of the variety that married a man, took his friends as hers, his interests as hers, then realized what she got was not working out for her, and instead of trying to change her man, she became resentful of his shortcomings. She felt unempowered to change her circumstances to be more acceptable to her. She would make unflattering comments about her husband but never when he was around. It was as if she was hopeless to change whatever dissatisfied her in her marriages, so she saw resentment as her only recourse. I went through a terribly awkwardly unattractive period from eighth to tenth grades. During that time there was no one knocking on the door let alone beating it down. After the metamorphosis of getting my braces off, getting contact lenses, and discovering hair-straightening products, I came into my own, and I became attractive to boys. When I would get angry or demanding of a boyfriend, Mom would tell me I was wrong, that the boy was too nice for me, and that I didn't deserve him. Put this all together and what message did I get? When you marry, take what is dished out. If you don't like it, you are in no position to change him, so you can be resentful and backbite. That kind of betrayal was permissable. I entered both marriages believing that my husband would take care of me, support a family, 'provide' for me. I thought we shared those common values. In both instances, I was willing to work and help support us on a temporary basis while they finished school or did whatever was needed to establish themselves so that I could later quit my job and raise a family while he 'took care' of us. When my husband made a request, a rule, a comment, I took it in. I acquiesced. I wanted to be that wife my mother had led me to believe I should be. It worked for a while, but then things started to deteriorate. I would realize I couldn't handle what was being dished out and I withdrew. Things weren't going according to plan and I both times I was looking at being the major financial family support. I got resentful and felt powerless. I started seeing my husband as strange, unacceptable, and a social embarrassment. As I withdrew, both times my husbands made power plays. They sensed the distance I had created and tried to get me under their control again: We couldn't do one thing, we couldn't socialize with so-and-so, this or that thing had to be changed. Or,as in this most recent case,there was passive/aggressive behavior that resulted in damage that couldn't be undone. Bill would go out and gamble on the sly. Money that was lost could not be retrieved. You can't go knocking on a casino door and explain to them that the money that your husband lost was a 'mistake' and they should give it back to you. Then, in the final days, I would detach. I saw myself as a completely separate entity, and at times I lived an unrelated and parallel lif: go to work, take care of your business, have your own friends, take your own vacations, eat meals separately. That's how I coped with the unravelling relationship. From my mother's messages, I saw this as the only way I could resolve marital problems and my unhappiness. It was survival mode for me. So here's my part: put up with things that become incrementally more unacceptable, can't feel I can express my own wishes, withdraw from my spouse who begins to look more and more odd and demanding all the time, detach and live a parallel life, and finally throw in the towel.
I have spent much of my life looking for others who had successful marriages. And, sadly, I have found few. I recently asked a friend if he knew anyone who had a successful marriage, and he came up with a whole list. I have never been able to, and I wonder if I ever really had criteria for determining what constitutes a happy marriage. This topic leaves me in a complete fog.
When Bill was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, I was already out of love with him. However,I was committed to him. I honored my vows to be a devoted wife to him. But in my heart I felt he had betrayed me too many times to love him the way I had loved him on our wedding day. He wasn't a team player, he had bipolar disorder, he had not only NOT passed the Bar exam and become a lawyer but had spent months out of work 'studying' for the Bar only to go to the first day of the exam and skip the next two because he felt he just wasn't going to pass. This and many other times when we had made big family sacrifices for an endeavor of his, were examples of him not really trying in the marriage. When Laura was a baby we had decided to get life insurance policies on ourselves. It was at that time we discovered that Bill had dangerously high cholesterol. Life insurance for him was prohibitive. We paid for one for a while, but later only I carried a policy. He later developed clogged arteries followed by an angioplasty and, in time, a triple bypass. He had plantar fascitis, type 2 diabetes and, of course, cancer. His health didn't help him be a teamplayer in supporting our household. Then there was the chronic 'sacroiliac' complaints. He couldn't help out with one thing or another because of his sacroiliac. But he could somehow sit at a poker table for hours on end or go out in the mountains and the desert in all kinds of weather with the dogs. But when someone else needed help, his 'sacroiliac' would make him unable to pitch in. And so it went. The theme in the family became one of Bill doing whatever he wanted and me feeling like I had to fill in all the gaps and pick up all the slack. If I hadn't been my mother's daughter maybe I would have seen the points at which I should have said, "Do your share! You will need to get and a job and give X dollars a month to me to run this household. No, you may not buy this or that." Maybe Bill needed a ball-breaking, no-nonsense type of woman to set him straight. Whatever it was he needed, I wasn't it. I was a pushover. I was no match for his cunning and his will.
So far, I have hurried choice and lack of assertiveness. Then poor communication and withdrawing. That's four things. That's a lot to work on. I'm sure there are more.
No comments:
Post a Comment