Waiting More Than a Dozen Years

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

My router is acting screwy again, so I really can't depnd upon messages being sent. That being said....

The possibility that I've made a huge mistake is something I am considering after all this time. It does not feel like "investing time," it feels like marking time, like waiting for the clock to run out...which one of us dies first.

Don't get me wrong. This is not a relationship where there is no affection. There is; there is just nothing sexual about it. It looks more like a professional business relationship...to the point where I keep my personal feelings to myself because I have found expressing those are somehow very dangerous.

What I can say is that at some time in the past there was an acknowledgement on my part, that nothing I did mattered any longer, just so long as my behavior was not so outrageous that it could not be ignored. I can't remember what triggered that thought process, whether it was the fallout from her final decision on our sex life or something else.

As for why time has passed? Well, there have family medical circumstances that have had as much to do with staying in the marriage as anything else. But the are other factors that have played in as well. My losing my job in 1997 and it taking nearly a year to find a new position in a market that was in transition and "oversupplied." I took a substantial pay cut of more than one-third of my previous pay just to secure a position. My cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatment.

Her mother suffered a stroke in 98 that left her mother incapacitated until she died in 2003. Just before her mother died, my mother became critically ill and spent the next 5-1/2 years in a nursing home until she died earlier this year. Then there have been a string of health issues for my wife and a job change for her that, while stressful, has reversed our finacial positions in the marriage.

Maybe it was my optimism and the fact that even through what seemed a constant struggle, we kept working stuff out. Whenever I was ready to walk away, there would be some special effort put forward to resolve the crisis until the next one arose. And there is always my willingness to suffer in silence, though I was not so willing to be silent in the beginning. I feel I eventually was just beat down into survival mode.

I was told (by her) that I was "passive-agressive" (what the hell did that mean? I had never heard of that before) and a whole string of other problems about my outlook on life, childraising, and whole host of other things that I, essentially, had to change. Well you see them, all those things that had me be "larger than life" are now gone, just a distant memory.

The one thing I managed to keep intact was my parenting and I did that by limiting my son's contact with her. That was pretty tough and we all made it through.