Looking for the silver lining...

[AntoniaB]

Hey Brookie! Nice to see ya!

IB let me piggyback on Brookie's and Beatrice's comments about being ok and even thriving as a woman who doesn't have a man in her life, by telling you about my close friend and her mom.

My friend's mom was divorced about 10 years ago. This was her second marriage--to the brother of the first husband, actually, who had abused her...then when he took pity on her for his abuse and cheating, eventually they got together and married. Flash forward to many years later, and second hubbie divorces her, and takes up with an OW, who is half his age. MLC all over the place.

Well in the 10 years since the second divorce, my friend's mom has never come to terms with not having a man in her life. She is depressed all the time. She has MS, but it's not a progressive form, and she should have only minor issues, but she has sort of turned them into major ones...all courtesy of her depression. Some days she doesn't get out of bed. She's a lovely, intelligent woman in her 60s. And she seems to project that she wants/needs a man to care for her. Hence, she doesn't have a long-term relationship.

What she does do is to lean on her daughter a lot. She lives across the street from her daughter, and my friend is now in a job she despises with a ridiculous workload, all to be able to afford to take care of the mom and keep her in her house which is in foreclosure. My friend feels she has to visit her mom and/or call her multiple times a day, because she is "lonely" and "sad." She takes her on vacations a lot, and then has to deal with taking her home, knowing that, in her words, "Mom has nothing to go back home to."

My friend is burning herself out so badly being a caretaker of a depressed woman who will NOT change her way of thinking, that my friend is now having an EA with a colleague. Why? She feels justified. She feels like she works so hard and sacrifices so much to help her mom, and she also believes that her mom SHOULD be depressed that she doesn't have a man in her life...and while my friend is married, she's not happy in her marriage, but she's hiding it and telling this coworker that she loves him on the side. She spent years convincing her husband that this coworker was just a friend, so that she can even go out to dinner with him and her husband won't suspect anything.

In short, mom is creating her own hell by thinking she can't be happy if she doesn't have a man and by never GALing, after all these years, and she's pushed her pain on her daughter, who in helping her, is neglecting her own marriage and working herself to the bone, then feeling she can rationalize a secret EA because she, too, assumes that if she doesnt' have a man to thrill her, that she can't be happy.

When I tell her that I'm doing great and totally got rid of the "spinster" mindset, she just says "that's so great that happened for you." As if it fell in my lap!

But she still pressures me to date and says that I have to have a man in my life because friends and family aren't "enough." I beg to differ.

So this is a long story, but I've told you because you want to do as B and B said and break out of that mindset. I think that mindset is slowly destroying my friend and her mom, and when that EA gets discovered, their whole family is going to be devastated.