I know it's been a while since I last posted. Sometimes I do that. Between just not feeling like writing or really thinking deeply, to just being busy and tired. This whole blog has really become more of a journal than anything else. But I'm just rolling with the thoughts, so that's okay. Maybe one day I'll start posting something more useful to other people.
My husband and I started seeing a new therapist this week, yesterday actually. Our previous one was super expensive, quite the drive, and didn't really sit well with us. Neither one of us felt like he was actually offering any sort of guidance, and he'd often take too much time to give analogies, and though we were seeing him separately, we discovered he was saying many of the same things to us about things he'd done that day which didn't add up. It was just strange. Plus, I made him cry, and for some reason I just feel uncomfortable now. To be clear, I wasn't mean, he just cried hearing my story.
Our new guy is much closer to us, and works for our church. In one single sitting, we learned more than in the whole month+ of seeing the other guy. He basically said the same things I've been saying. That my husband is the one who really needs therapy to figure out why he continuously hurts the people he claims to love. He said we can come in together every three or four sessions to sort of touch base and talk about the marriage and how things are going. He's a very smart and lovely man. We could both tell that he genuinely cared about us and wanted to help. Not that he was looking for a paycheck.
Multiple different times, he seemed happily surprised that I was still here and trying to make things work. Even though I'd wanted to divorce, that I was trying for the kids, and because I felt like I'd been given 'signs' to forgive and heal this marriage, that it was amazing and not something he often saw. He said that I lacked the nasty bitterness that spouses usually had, especially after ten years of living this way. I said the bitterness was definitely there, but he said that it was normal, but the way I talked to, about and understood my husband, was amazing, and purely by grace of God.
Recently, after what my husband has done, I've asked him how he would feel if I'd been the one to do what he did. Would he still be here? Would he have forgiven me so quickly? He's tried to put himself in my shoes, and has answered that he honestly doesn't know. It's a tough and shitty situation, and he understands that. But, the therapist proposed that he "flip the script" entirely. That he put himself in my shoes for our entire relationship. My husband's attitude and demeanor changed almost instantly, and he couldn't even look at me. The entire car ride home, he didn't say a word.
I was scared, thinking that he was upset. Maybe he didn't like the new therapist. Maybe he realized that this wasn't something he was willing to fight so hard for. Later when he got home after work, he admitted it was because he felt like such an asshole. He was so ashamed at all he'd done and taken for granted. He said he'd never once in the ten years we've been together, put himself in my shoes. Never wondered how he'd have felt if I brought my ex to his home while he was at work and lied. Never wondered how he'd have felt if I constantly turned my phone off and disappeared, showing up at three in the morning gouging holes in the door with my key because I was so belligerently drunk I couldn't get in the house. Never wondered how he'd have felt having to clean my vomit off the couch or floor while our daughter slept because I got drunk with the girl who worked next to my work, again.
And the list goes on. He'd never once considered those things. What it might feel like to be home with children and doing his best to please and take care of his family day in and day out without my appreciating it in the least, and always needing and searching for 'more' for 'better'. The therapist said the things he's always looking for to make himself happy are like vapor. The moment he gets his hands on them, they're gone, and he's already searching for the next thing. Because things don't make you happy. My husband measures success and happiness by what he's accomplished and has. But the therapist, like myself, believes that's wrong. Success is measured by a happy family, home and where you stand with God. 100 years from now, nothing will matter but where you stand with the Lord. You can not take worldly things with you when you die. And I think my husband finally realized that the things he's always striving for to make him happy, never have, and how true it was that they were so like vapor.
For the first time in ten years, I really feel like I have hope, that things are going to change for us for the better. Not that they'll be 'good' for a while, while I'm sitting around waiting for the next time he hurts me. But that his heart is actually going to change. I don't want him to change the things he loves. His hunting, fishing and car hobbies, his love for the outdoors and Jeeps and travel. His favorite foods and clothes. I don't want any of that to change. What I want to change is his priorities of those things, and God and his family. He admitted last night that his job was the top priority. Then side work, then his hobbies, then somewhere down the line was his family, and God was off to the side there somewhere.
He's finally recognized that he really needs to reevaluate what's most important and why. Thank God.
Me on the other hand. I'm doing better with my anxiety, thanks to the Prozac. I've only had two or three attacks in the last couple of weeks, as opposed to the multiple daily. Last night I had a weird feeling, but I couldn't relate it to anxiety as much. It felt very, claustrophobic. I felt claustrophobic inside my own body. It was strange. But I think it was because my mom's husband stopped by while he was out riding his bike, and we talked for a while.
He and my mom aren't doing well in their marriage either. They have far less problems than we have, and nothing so serious as adultery, but they're both so very unhappy. They have both quit their jobs to pursue self employment; they've both started their own businesses. It wasn't a leap for them, because their house and cars are paid off and they had plenty of savings (on top of us paying them $20k+ that we owed them for our home in a lump sum). But even being in their positions, they're just so miserable. It kills me. I want to see them happy.
But he was venting a little bit and we got on the subject of how my mom seems to think I had a childhood safe from seeing the fighting and problems my parents had. He said that she's actually said that they made sure I didn't hear and know of the problems. But, it isn't true. Not only could I feel it, I heard them shouting at each other plenty. Did she think I went deaf in those times? It makes no sense. Has her mind blocked them out? There were times I sat in my room alone crying, and scared, because my dad would put hands on my mom.
I had said something about moving in with my mom and her husband had me clarify. In the eight years they've been together, he never knew that I didn't live with my mom until I was eight. He said she made it seem like I'd always lived with her. When I opened up to him about it, and about my great grandmother who was very much more of a mother to me, and he passing and how she passed in the end, he was mind blown. And angry.
In merely a month, a handful of people who have heard my story, have cried, been shocked, and not known how to respond to me. The realization for me, that while I'm a 'normal' person who has taken bad situations and become a good person because of it, but that I really and truly do have a rough and painful story, made me feel claustrophobic in my own head. It was like, for the first time I didn't say, 'Oh yeah, well such is life - what doesn't kill you...', and really recognized that I have some demons in the closet, was very overwhelming for me.
My stepdad says these are things I need to address with my mother some day. Obviously I plan to, someday. I just don't know when, or how to start. I also don't want to hurt her. She's been through enough, too. But I also know she needs help, and healing, and I want to be there to help her in those things. I want to have a real relationship with my mother before it's too late and I'm just someone regretting that I never got to have that with a parent.
