Maybell XXXIV: Expecto Patronum!

[Maybell]

Yes, it's been 1000 times better since that awful night. And things with the boys are generally better too.

I am not even close to the same woman I was in my marriage. I think I have many of you here to thank for that.

I've been thinking a lot about when I stopped working, which is a bit of a complicated story. It was before we had kids, but for several reasons. Some of them were that I was kind of lost at that point in my life, and "can't" came too easily. Some of them were to accommodate him.

I'm a little bit ashamed of who I was then. I bear very little relation to that woman now, I'm pleased to say.

I've been thinking also of our financial situation over the years. It surprised me to realize that for 10-12 years I had no idea what he made and very little idea of what we spent, although I did try to be frugal. I could not say, for example, what our mortgage payment was for three of our houses. Six months in to our marriage he didn't want to go over the monthly budget with me anymore, and since he kept the finances, that was that. I did the best I could in the dark. I'd say "Can we afford X?" And he'd say "Yes," and that was that.

We did ok till he overreached on our house on the west coast. And it was when I finally demanded (several times) the means to monitor our finances that he decided sleeping around was a good idea. (This is what I learned in January.)

I am ashamed I didn't work longer in the marriage. I guess I thought we were making team decisions that would pay off in the long run. And yet, if I had made different choices, would it have mattered? At one point he wanted to move to Australia (and later, Amsterdam), and when I asked him to wait till I'd finished the master's degree I was working on at the time, he had a huge tantrum and said he felt trapped. So I think I would have had to give up my work at some point anyway.

And I did oversee a huge home renovation that ultimately netted us an enormous profit. So it's not as though I didn't contribute.

I'd like to ask forgiveness for squandering those two years. And yet some of the reason I didn't go on and fill them the way I'd intended was to accommodate him.

Sigh. I can't change the past. I think I'm going to have to just forgive myself.