hi zero, thank you for posting on my situ, your words have offered needy support and encouragement that i so desperately need as i feel so alone right now.
i'm that i am unable to offer you words of encouragemnt and support back. You seem to be very strong, focused and detemined by working on having a good life with or without your H.
Your Kentucky Derby Party sounds fun although i'm a veggie
Gorgeous day! The sun was shining, but it was still cool for the walk. It's heating up now, which is too perfect for mint juleps. H loves horse races. He used to help me organize horse racing parties for clients. He would have loved this. (Sigh) Oh well. I can enjoy it anyway.
Learned a couple of interesting things about verbal abuse that shed a lot of light on what's been going on with H. Seems like I can safely assume that every time he's told me that he never said something that I know he said, or never acted a way I saw him acting that I shouldn't doubt my own memory. He has "forgotten" or lied just to save face. I can't trust him.
I realize now that it was easy for him to be magnanimous and seek cooperation when he was divorcing me, but now that I'm divorcing him I am certain he'll contest just so I don't "win." I'm thinking about hiring an attorney just so I can have an intermediary. The last think I want is for him to start making more assertions just to tick me off and have to be the one to argue with him. I've got better things to worry about than his crazymaking.
Last week in one of his email rants he started going off about certain unnamed belongings of his that I've thrown away. He's just trying to guilt me, of course. I tried to think what he could be talking about and realized that we never got rid of anything that mattered to him without his consent, and for that matter there are many of my belongings that I gave up because he didn't like them or they didn't fit "our" lives anymore. I thought that was just how it goes in relationships, but that's only how it goes in relationships that are partnerships. Same goes with the idea that I never did anything for him. He's often carrying on about how he's done this or that for me, and rarely mentions the things that I've done for him over the years. If he wants to keep score on who has done more for the other or what one of us has done to the other, that's his problem. I thought we were supposed to be doing things for one another for the sake of the relationship, not for the sake of seeing who was better than the other.
I just wanted a partner, not a competitor. All this time, I haven't even been keeping score, which I guess would put me behind if I had been playing his game at all. I think it's time for me to walk away and leave him to his self-satisfaction. I doubt it will warm his heart for very long, but isn't that the crux of the problem?
BTW, one of my second cousins wished me a Happy Mother's Day today. I didn't even correct the boy. I just said "Thank you." It may be the only time I ever hear it in my life. It was very sweet. Everytime I think about it, I want to cry. Happy Mother's Day to all of you who are mothers or have been like a mother to someone.
Thanks for the vote of confidence, d3l1ghts. I’m feeling queasy today. I don’t really miss not talking to H, because he can be a real downer. I do keep worrying that the next time I hear from him it’s going to be some caustic, awful thing that I’m frankly not equipped to deal with right now. Probably the only worse thing would be if he does his “so-sad” voice. Being the one to WA is putting oneself under very intense pressure. Trust me, DBers, people do not skip away without a care to a land of spring flowers, butterflies and rainbows. It took a lot of pain and frustration to get me to WA, and even now that I’ve added being the bad guy to my list of burdens, I’d still rather deal with this crushing pressure in the short term than go back to the way things were. I don’t know if D will work out well for H. I really worry about him, but I hope he pulls it together and thrives. It occurred to me recently that even though I’m an independent person, I had thought H would be the kind of husband who would really look out for me. What I’ve found is that he doesn’t even see me. He thinks he considers me and he doesn’t listen to me. He says that all of his decisions and actions and “sacrifices” are for me, but he’s not hearing me when I tell him what I want and need and how I don’t approve of the sacrifices he’s making. He just blows me off and does something completely different. I think that’s the frustrating symptom of the larger problem. When H and I reconciled – using the term loosely – I knew he was unhappy with himself back then. He didn’t do anything to resolve that problem when we got back together. The only difference is that his misery had company. He seems resigned to being unhappy. He seems to think that the “right” life is lived in a state of self-deprivation. Perhaps I should have insisted on him getting help for his problems back then, before we got back together. Oh well, twenty-twenty hindsight.
Just journaling a little. Something that has been on my mind recently is my illness. I have chronic illness that just makes everyday life a general pain in the neck. I’ve never liked how H treats me when I get really sick. I call it nursing me to death, but it’s really pestering. He won’t leave me alone when I’m seriously sick, he just hovers nearby griping at me to do anything other than what I am doing. If I’m sleepy he thinks I should up doing something. If I’m up and about, he thinks I should be in bed. If I’m eating, I shouldn’t. If I’m on medication, he bugs me about weaning myself off. If I don’t want to take my medication he lectures me about how I need it. I can’t get any rest from his constant commentary of what I need to be doing that I’m not. I once begged my boss to let me come into work when I had a heart attack scare, because my H was worrying over me so much that the office was the only place I could go that H wouldn’t bother me. (BTW, it wasn’t a heart attack.)
I hate arguing with my H about my health. He always thinks he knows better what I need, and I’m the one who deals with the symptoms 24-7… and then there’s the part about how it’s my life.
I remember when my first husband was dying of cancer and we would disagree about what treatment he should have, but ultimately I let him decide because it was his life and I felt very strongly that he should live and die on his own terms. I still feel very strongly about this. IMO, everyone of us has the basic right to decide how and whether to pursue treatment for terminal diseases.
So getting back to my sitch, many of the symptoms of my current illness mimic a form of cancer that I am more likely to get because of my illness. I’m 95% sure I don’t have cancer, and I know my doctor is keeping an eye on it, because he asks all the right questions about my symptoms. Nonetheless, being constantly on the lookout for signs of cancer does make one think about what one would do if one had cancer. Of course it would depend upon my prognosis, but I am not one of those people who thinks I would want treatment no matter what. I would want to weigh out my life expectancy against the quality of my life; and I know my current H would be desperate to “save my life” no matter what I had to endure. It really bugs me that if I ever got that sick, I would have to argue with him just so that I could enjoy what was left of my life and die with some dignity. He doesn’t care about my dignity or my pain.
Of course that seems like an assumption, so I threw a hypothetical question at him one day last month. I asked him “If I had cancer, and I didn’t want to treat it, would you argue with me about it.” His response was “That’s crazy. You’d have to have treatment.” So I said, “but if I was really sick and I didn’t want to spend my last days taking drugs or hanging around hospitals, would you really argue with me about it?” His answer was that of course he would argue with me about it. I explained to him that I wouldn’t want to spend my last days arguing about it either. He just dismissed me, per usual. So it’s confirmed that I can’t even trust him to respect my wishes when I'm dying.
Wow Z - H seems to be a real contrarian, doesn't he?
Either that or he has some serious control/codependency issues that he refuses to acknowledge, let alone face in the open.
I didn't realize that you were married prior to your current sitch and that your 1st H died related to cancer. Although I haven't gone through this personally, I know a couple of close friends who succombed to this scourage as well as another currently battling pancreatic cancer. In each case, their spouses have been very supportive of their individual choices regarding treatment options, hospice care, etc.
It comes back to needing to assume ownership for all of your choices in life. It seems you have a good medical support system in your sitch and that you take the effort to educate yourself to know what to watch for and to ask the right questions. I did read up on Sjorgen's syndrome online. It still amazes me the amount and quality of information available now compared to a few years ago. Exciting but scary at the same time...
Me 52, STBEX 52 D 17, S 12 M 20 years Em Sep since 2002, Phys Sep Sept 2009
I'm a big believer in owning one's choices. It's actually been the central issue in the big argument between H and me over the past five years. Actions speak louder than words, and it speaks volumes that H has made one decision after another that delayed his coming to live with me. He still maintains it's out of his control. Weird that he can do that. Of course I've put up with it for that long, which is my weirdness.
I'm impressed that you've read up on Sjogren's Syndrome. There is more information now than there used to be, though I still meet doctors have never heard of it. So, hey, you know more than some doctors.
