Help Please: Chapter 2

[Maybell]

Which How to Improve Your Marriage book? I saw the one that was followed with "without talking about it" and had a testimonial by MWD. Did you have another one in mind? Can that one be done while separated?

Yes, he certainly felt my loss of respect when that happened. Definitely. I have long pointed to that period as the start of our worst problems. But he always denied it was important to him. As with most things, good and bad.

What you said about expectations being resentments waiting to happen and accepting him where he is both resonated with me. The acceptance part has been something that has been in front of me for a long while, thanks to a lovely friend who has been an amazing support this past eight months. She has what looks like a delightful marriage and I've been privileged that she has let me see a lot of the work of it close up. It is helpful to see that close marriages require a lot of work and patience and forbearance with one another.

Having just spent the week with my parents I saw some of the dynamics that I grew up with and it has really made me think about how I brought them into my own marriage.

In a nutshell: My brothers & I and my parents were playing cards together. My mother starts complaining about how she never wins, about how the cards are always against her, yadda yadda. She says this AS SHE'S RAKING IN THE KITTY and we're all paying her for the cards in our hand and she has an enormous stack of chips in front of her. Everyone is quiet and she just keeps going and then one of us makes a joke about her not having enough space for all her chips while the rest of us have been to the bank twice each. She just huffs and says "Well." And she always complains about my dad. ALWAYS. She hardly ever says anything nice about him. But he is really complimentary to her. I'm NOT saying he's perfect at all because he is very frustrating in his own way, and she does many nice things for him. But her manner is very self-centered, and it's very important to her that she be right a LOT.

I know for certain I've brought a fair amount of this into my own relationship. My dissatisfactions have been genuine but because I brought this disrespectful manner into our relationship it's been... well, for sure not as good as it could have been. As an understatement.

The time we've been apart this spring has been really amazingly helpful for my perspective. I need still more of it to be able to strengthen my awareness of my behavior. Yesterday helping with the couch was really good for that, because at first I didn't do any more than what I knew he needed me for out of... well, not for kind reasons, I guess. Stubbornness that I didn't want to make his life easier. Then as we worked on it I realized I was doing what he had always wanted, let him take the lead on this task. The longer I did that, the clearer I seemed to see him as his own person rather than "my husband." Does that make sense? And then I felt like seeing him that way changed EVERYTHING. I found myself more curious about him, much less desperate. I felt kinder toward him. And we had a lovely evening last night. (IC noted that H had been saying all along that he didn't know what he wanted).

There are excellent reasons (not all of them his) why it is too soon to say if we'll end up divorced or if we'll reconcile. But I no longer feel like I would be doomed to endless loneliness if we did manage to reconcile. What I told my IC this morning was that I no longer felt like a passenger in the car but a driver, and that the steering wheel is in my hands even though I don't know if I will go left or right. I did formerly feel like I was only a passenger in his car. Many of the things I see as barriers to reconciliation might not be, depending on how events unfold -- they may right themselves.

My values and my goals... I'm not sure where to start on those. I used to feel like I understood them very well, but I feel like I've gotten a crash course in life in the last few months and now I realize that the values I thought I had were only the big-picture items, and there is detail work to be done. As for goals... I'm not sure what you're thinking there. I'm not totally sure where my head should be. My goals at the moment are mostly smaller ones, like getting a job to make sure I'm protected financially and then sorting the logistics of finding childcare, etc. Continuing to watch myself and how things unfold with H. I'm reluctant to state goals with him while I'm watching to see how we react to each other. And I want to be cautious.

I've been having second thoughts about pushing the legal separation through. The attorney hasn't contacted me since I paid the retainer. I'm afraid of rocking the boat now that the terrain seems to have shifted for me. I feel less sure of where we are and quite a lot less belligerent.

And thank you for saying straight out that an A can be about connecting with a person who doesn't have any resentments built up against him. That makes it a lot more understandable than the other things I've been thinking.

I'm having tons of ups and downs here, but I also feel grateful to have shifted course from where I was a year ago. No matter what happens I feel bigger and better than I was, and the world doesn't look quite so cold. Isn't that funny?