I suppose I should start at the beginning, or at least the beginning of this part of my life.
I once was a stay at home mom. I managed my household, no I was never amazing at it, but I thought I was doing a pretty good job. I thought I had a partner who wanted similar things to me. It turned out that I was wrong. During the course of our marriage, we grew apart, it is probably both of our faults, but I'm writing this from my side, so I am a bit biased.
As I was saying once I was a stay at home mom to 4 daughters. The oldest one needed to leave us after she graduated from high school. It was important to her to be in her own. We still supported her in any way we could.
After a time, and 2 Maggie familial losses (my brother and my dad), there was a job offer, that involved our family moving from Arizona to Florida. I looked at it like an amazing opportunity for our family. I thought it would bring us closer together, and it was an adventure. I used to love adventure.
At some point during this all, he stopped saying "I love you" when I said it. At first he would mumble something, "luhyoutoo" and that became this slurred, incoherent word. I chose to ignore it. I continued living.
We were in Florida for a year and 1 month, then we moved to Maryland. But of these moves involved him moving to the place before us, whole I stayed behind with the kids and packed. I hate packing. It's stressful.
We finally got ourselves to Maryland, drenched every ounce of our beings in old bay and the Maryland flag. Our kids started yet another school, and we met really awesome neighbors.
During all of this, I kept thinking "he's distant because moving is stressful" or just making up excuses for why he treated me like an employee and not a life partner.
Around a year ago, we started a hard conversation. Mostly via email. We started marriage counseling, which felt hard, but opened my eyes to how much I had been neglecting myself. I was constantly balancing his emotions as well as the kids' emotions, while completely ignoring every feeling I had. I was starting to imagine a way out. But had no idea what I would need to do.
Marriage counseling had really just broken open all of the cracks that I had hot glued together, knowing it was easily removed, but feeling like I needed to keep it all together. He made the choice, finally, for us to separate, I made the choice to put myself first, and accept that it was the best course of action, because neither of us were happy. But mostly because he said, at the beginning of the sessions, he wasn't really interested in reconciliation. He refused to even really talk about us, he spent our sessions discussing how to co-parent. After 25 years of parenthood, he finally wanted to help, and was willing to be a better dad.
He just isn't willing or able tov open himself up to me. And now I'm sitting in the bedroom we once shared- I've painted it, rearranged furniture and got myself a cat. Because I'm stuck here for the foreseeable future I am trying to make this house feel like MY home.
There is so much more, but that is the short story.
No comments:
Post a Comment