I love it when guys say, "I wasn't the greatest husband." What does that MEAN? HOW weren't you supportive of her career? What did you say? What did you do?
Alright, here is my public confessional:
I guess I had some sort of mid-life crisis after our first daughter was born. I tried to cram down a lot of things that I always wanted to do, but hadn't up to that point. I trained for and ran a marathon. I started a small company on the side of my career. Between these 2 things, I had very little time to help out. W was doing laundry, cooking, taking care of the baby, while mantaining a career of her own. Now that I look back on it, I was amazingly selfish. I remember I would ask if she needed help, and she would reply "No. Do what you need to do." This was an obvious cry for help, but I was completely oblivious to it.
Our second child was born. I think I became more helpful, but not nearly as helpful as I should have been. Shortly after the birth of our second child, my W took a new position at a new company as a manager. It was her first real promotion. This is also the time that she started working under the OM (but that is a sidepoint). I was supportive of the move, but I believe there was some envy in me at the time as well. I helped out more, but it was always on my terms. And for some reason, I had some sort of anxiety over the babies myself. So to help out, I would go grocery shopping while W stayed at home and took care of the girls. W rarely got out of the house unless it was as a family or to go to work.
The new career definitely added more stress on her. She had an anxiety attack a few months after beginning it. I remember being in the emergency room at 2 AM praying that the screening for MS came back negative (the way the attack presented itself was the same as some of the MS symptoms). Fortunately, they said it was "just" anxiety.
At this point, we were having major disagreements on how we spend our free time (which given our careers we had very little of). She wanted some of her free time to go out with our own individual friends. I thought that we needed to spend more time alone together by getting a baby-sitter. But she was already feeling guilty about how little the girls were seeing of us and couldn't have a good time even when we did go out alone.
Less than a year after becoming manager, she was promoted to Assistant Director. This time I know I was envious of her promotion and it showed. I was also afraid of how much time the new position would take. It would mean more travel, late meetings, etc. I remember (and she does too) a statement I made when we were talking about a week that she needed to travel and I was going to need to take care of the children: "You always seem to be trying to fill your life with something. First it was me. When I wasn't enough you needed to get cats, so we got cats. Then when the cats weren't enough you wanted children, so we had children. And now that the children aren't enough, you are trying to fill it with your career." This statement made her extremely angry and for good reason. Her reply: "Don't you dare bring the kids into this." I think this was the most visibly angry I have ever seen her. At this point, I think our marriage was in free-fall.
However, that was not the end of it. After a bad week with a single female manager at work; I made a statement paraphrased: "All the male managers at work seem to be easy-going, but the women all seem to be such b****s". What makes it worse is that I do not swear, so the fact that I did in that statement put that much more emphasis on it. I am not proud of this statement, but it was said and can not be taken back. My W took it personally and still has not let it go.
Somewhere in this time, my W invited me to MC to see if we could get things turned around between us. I agreed and we went. From the very beginning I was feeling ganged up on; and of course I was too arrogant to believe that it could be because I was in the wrong. We were fighting mainly about who should being taking care of the children and when. I would say that we needed to get more help via a nanny or babby-sitter. She would say that it needed to be done by the parents; we were away too much as it is. The marriage counselor frustrated me because we would argue, she would look at us, sigh and say "This is hard. This is really hard." And I felt we were getting little advice on how to solve our disagreements. So in one of the sessions, I got upset and said "These sessions are doing us no good. We just go home more upset at each other than when we came." My wife didn't contend the statement and neither really did the MC. That ended a short stint of marriage counselling a couple of years ago.
However, I believe that I did take some of the sessions to heart and started helping out more around the house. I was doing laundry, washing dishes, changing diapers more than I had before. But I had this problem of always needing her to be on a schedule. If she would go out and said she would be back by 6. I expected her to be back by 6. If it didn't happen that way, I would get upset and be trying to call her at 6:01. She still reminds me of a time when she spent a month trying to get time to go out with a girlfriend and when she finally was able to schedule a breakfast date on a Saturday and she returned 2 hours late - it ruined our whole weekend because I was so upset.
Anyway, I believe that I have been gradually changing over the last 2 years to be the man she says I am today. However, she contends that I changed overnight 8 months ago when she first told me that she was having an EA and wanted to seperate.
I know there are many more times of when I have failed her. But I tried to hit the high points. I hope that is enough detail.
