Being thankful and praying

[angel61]

Thank you again for posting, Cyrena. It’s so uncanny how similar our H’s behave.

Part 2: Consequences

The next couple of weeks after our big “fight” I felt like our relationship had gone back so much, not exactly to square one but to somewhere almost like our pre-retrouvaille mode. We barely spoke to each other, looked at each other. The walls went up high. The pain was back. I felt at that point like I just wanted to give up, to walk away. I was thinking at that point that I could actually be happier without H. The first Saturday, he and D13 went out to go shopping, and it was such a huge relief to be alone that I ate in the backyard, enjoying the beautiful spring day.

The next day, H brought us along for a nice drive along the coast. I was quietly observing H, and saw that he had withdrawn again into his “miserable” shell. He wouldn’t smile when posing with us in pics, not even with D13. Poor kid, she has this radiant smile and a morose dad beside her. That’s one of my “benchmarks” of my H’s emotional status….the no smiling thing in pics (he had huge smiles right after Retrouvaille in our Hawaii pics, and also during our Christmas party, just to compare!). Just in pictures though, because he does smile and laugh in regular conversation!

My feeling at that point was that he was back in his “I am trapped” mode.

This was all confirmed in the next few days/weeks. One time, he told me that he had an unexpected trip to make and because it fell on a day when we were having a school volunteer meeting in our house, I reacted (very mildly, to tell the truth, something like Uh-oh!). He blew the thing out of proportion, claiming that he felt that I made him feel bad ‘cause I was disappointed, that it made him feel like he couldn’t do anything, what could he do it was work, blah blah… I tried to explain calmly, but in the end had to yell at him to stop and let him know that yes, I was a bit disappointed but please could he stop it cause I am perfectly capable of handling it by myself!

A few more incidents …. He once told D13 to not marry early and have kids, that having kids takes away your freedom, so D13 commented that “Dad is so weird, hello, I am a child so he should think first before telling me that….” I did tell H about it, and he spluttered and said ….I didn’t mean it that way…..just thinking about teenage moms, etc….. Another time when I asked him what flight he was on and he accuses me of being in his business all the time…. All the generalizations…..

Initially, I was blaming myself for blowing it. We were in a good place, where we were starting to connect, talk a little more, then I started expecting again. I should have just kept quiet, not asked questions, let him work it out.

But later, I just realized that it was bound to happen, sooner or later. And that whatever happens, its all part of the journey.

To be continued....