I hope you all had a Merry Christmas, and may 2021 be a better year for us all.
I want to thank everyone who replied to my posts, I really appreciate it. I plan to reply and answer your questions a little later. I see your replies and have been thinking about them and am not ignoring you, I promise. For now, I want to mention that I signed up for ten DB phone coaching sessions and have had two so far. The next one will be in the new year - my ability to do such things is very dependent on H's schedule because he is the only babysitter I have for S3.
There's pretty much only one day in the week when I can do such things for myself. In addition to H working full-time, plus seeing private clients, he has numerous hobbies and distractions with his (very high-functioning) ADHD, so being there for me is a challenge for him. I have no family nearby, and S3 and I are home alone quite a bit.
But I have made it a point to tell H I need him to babysit in order for me to do this phone coaching once in a while, and he has been good about it. I've been vague about the nature of the coaching, but somehow he got the idea that I'm talking to a "life coach," and I am okay with that. I will say more about the coaching later.
For now, I want to talk about an exchange I had with H at the beginning of the week, a very short and relatively minor exchange, but it has been bothering me a great deal. It opened the floodgates and put me deep in thought about everything that's happened. So I want to write about it, as well as the family dynamics between H and my in-laws that factored into destroying our marriage. I've been working on this after hours all week while S3 and H sleep. (I know I can be long-winded and rambly - I hope that's not against the rules here. There are some message boards where "venting" is kind of frowned upon. I welcome any feedback.)
Why do I post these gory details of my story? Because these were traumatic experiences for me and my marriage that have bogged me down for years. Sometimes someone writes a letter to whoever and, instead of sending it, burns it as a gesture of letting go and moving on. Posting here is something similar for me. Also, it may or may not explain why H has only had sex with me three times since S3 was born and stopped having sex with me completely almost two years ago.
Every year, sending out Xmas cards is "my thing" - I design them, place the order for them, handwrite the notes and the recipients' names and our names in them, handwrite the addresses on the envelopes. The Xmas cards I sent out this year were a photo card featuring a photo of our toddler.
H is one of four children - he has two brothers (BIL1 and BIL2) and a sister (SIL), all 10-20 years older than him, and I don't have a good relationship with them. But I sent a Xmas card to BIL1 - I wasn't going to, but H told me to, and I was okay with it. BIL1 lives out of town and is the sibling H is closest to, and he hasn't seen S3 (or us) in person in a long while. He received the card and has been gushing to H over the phone about what a beautiful child S3 is, how he's grown and resembles their side of the family, etc. H is very pleased that the card made BIL1 so happy, and so am I. In return, BIL1 sent us a Xmas card with $40 cash for S3, and H was so touched by it, he teared up.
I don't really have a huge issue with BIL1, except he is constantly drunk and high and not all there, which has made it difficult for me to relate to him. He would drunkenly spew anger at our dinner table over politics when he would visit and stuff like that. Once, he fell and seriously injured himself while visiting because he was drunk and high, and he had to stick around and be nursed by H for a while until he recovered enough to go home. I've been told he has been in a drunken high tailspin since his wife died of cancer, before H and I even started dating (I never met her). He has a host of health issues, and I take pity on him.
Okay, so the thing that happened at the beginning of the week was that H told me to also send Xmas cards to BIL2 and SIL. Normally, my response to that would be something like "Are you kidding me?!" And a fight would ensue. Instead, I calmly responded, "But why? I don't think they're hurting to see S3." H replied "Yeah" and left it at that. Inside, I was freaking out because there's a history that makes it rather insensitive of H to suggest I send Xmas cards to BIL2 and SIL, and just when I start to think his lack of empathy for me doesn't surprise me anymore, he manages to surprise me.
I know where he's coming from. He's stoked about the gushing approval he's getting from BIL1 about the Xmas card and was hoping that by also sending Xmas cards to BIL2 and SIL, he would get the same approval from them. It's simple-minded, but that's H's reasoning, no doubt about it.
I mentioned earlier that H has had a tendency to invoke third parties in our relationship, gossip and complain about me and our relationship to others; glom onto certain people, who are often not very nice, yearning for their approval, putting them before me and our relationship. Well, my in-laws are included among such people. That's why I don't have a good relationship with my in-laws.
Let me explain why it would be inappropriate to send Xmas cards to BIL2 and SIL, especially considering that not even everyone I love gets one from me. (I come from a huge extended family, who all live far away from me, and I used to send out like 100 Xmas cards, but I don't have that kind of time anymore.)
BIL2 is kind of a creepy guy. H and I live on a ranch that belongs to H's family estate (his parents bought the property in the 1950s), and BIL2 also lived on the property until shortly before their very elderly mother (MIL) passed away, a couple years ago. (The property belonging to H's family estate might explain why H and my in-laws look upon me as having no status on the property, not even in our home. Though the four children equally own the property, H is the trustee of the property, the only one of their family who lives on the property, and the only one who puts work into it. It has been home to him since he was born. Our child and I live with him, but it's their world, where I'm nothing, the weird isolated world of H and my in-laws.)
Five years ago, the police came and seized BIL2's computer because they heard there was child porn on it. That alone should be enough to tell you why I'm not keen on sending BIL2 a Xmas card, especially not one with a photo of my child. Sometimes the way H thinks just freaks me out.
When BIL2 lived on the property, practically next door to us, he had kind of an addiction to the Internet. He had a habit of befriending strangers on the Internet and inviting them onto the property, sometimes to live with him in MIL's house, the house H grew up in. (He was unemployed but served as caregiver for MIL.) It tended to be females down on their luck, transients and drug addicts who were in and out of prison. They in turn would attract an element to the property. BIL2 had a hero complex where he fancied himself a savior of these people. (He has a similar thing as H where he desperately craves approval from others, but his manifestation of it is very different.)
They would loiter, and thefts would happen. Our home was never robbed, but I was constantly afraid it would be, and things would go missing from MIL's house. Outdoor storage structures would get broken into. Someone forged a check out of an old checkbook of H's that was probably swiped out of storage. Even the side mirrors on a non-operational vehicle were stolen.
Dealing with that kind of presence on the property was a source of great stress on me and my relationship with H, starting when I moved in with him a year prior to our wedding. H was very passive and generally did nothing about it despite my distress and pleading with him about safety concerns. He didn't want to offend BIL2.
Looking back, though, I don't know what H could have done. BIL2 is not someone who can be reasoned with. I think I wanted at least some gesture on H's part to show me he thought it was important to take my feelings and concerns seriously and protect me. But I don't know what gesture would have done any good even if he had the will for it. They say where there's a will, there's a way, and H simply wasn't willing. H was afraid to confront BIL2, so he ignored me.
Just prior to the incident of the police seizing BIL2's computer, a transient woman was living in MIL's house, brought there by BIL2. H somehow found the strength within himself to tell her to leave. I don't know that it had anything to do particularly with a desire to protect me. But it infuriated BIL2, who was wholly unaccustomed to H going against him like that.
So in retaliation, while H was out taking MIL for a walk in the neighborhood, BIL2 called the police and told them H was threatening his life with a gun. It was a complete fabrication, an absolute lie. Police officers arrived in several cruisers. H managed to peacefully meet and talk with them, and they left. I'm not sure what BIL2's goal had been there.
The next day, H and BIL2 carried on like none of that stuff ever happened - that's part of the dynamic in that family. The woman eventually left of her own volition. She would come and go and come and go and actually ended up being murdered (I suppose that was the fate that BIL2 was trying to save her from). Transients would continue to come and go for years.
Later on, when the police seized BIL2's computer, he got it in his head that it was me who had called them on him, to get back at him for calling them on H. But it wasn't me. It later came to light that BIL2 had taken his computer to a repair shop, and the repair people saw something that prompted them to report child porn to the police. The police ended up not finding anything incriminating and returned the computer to BIL2. Based on his history, it was probably just very young women in pornographic photos.
While I was in the hospital to give birth to S3, MIL was admitted to the hospital for pneumonia. She went downhill from there, passing away 7 months later. In the first few months of her going downhill, BIL2 was really acting up, getting her to sign legal documents (she was pretty much blind and deaf) in his favor, inviting yet another unstable transient woman to live in MIL's house, and inviting a man with several horses to park his trailer and live on the property. As trustee of the property, H told the woman and the man with the horses to leave. They refused to leave. They were squatters at this point.
The combination of BIL2 making MIL sign contracts she didn't have the capacity to understand, and the squatters, pushed H to get a lawyer and file for an emergency restraining order against BIL2, on the basis of financial elder abuse. It was granted right away, and BIL2 was removed from the property by police escort. This was about 3 months before MIL passed. A court trial shortly followed to determine whether the restraining order should be upheld. It was upheld and deemed applicable for the duration of MIL's life.
But the squatters were still there. It was not legally considered an emergency to make them leave right away - there had to be a slow legal process. The unstable transient woman in MIL's house was a nightmare to deal with. Caregivers were hired to look after MIL full-time, and the woman - angry about BIL2 being kicked out - would harass them. She eventually left of her own volition, but it was weeks after BIL2 was removed. Shortly after she left, there was a court trial to determine whether the man in the trailer with several horses should be evicted. The court ruled to evict, and he took his horses and left.
S3 was about 5 months old at that point. Having a new baby is stressful enough, and litigation is an extremely exhausting thing. I helped H with administrative things pertaining to the litigation, and it was a lot of work. That time was supposed to be a special time to enjoy my new baby, and it was fraught with all these things. I will always resent that.
A couple months passed, and MIL passed away, which voided the restraining order against BIL2. So the first thing he did was come to the property and break into MIL's now-uninhabited house, intending to move back in. But it didn't work like that. H called the police, who came and told BIL2 he couldn't break into the house. He could come to the property with H's consent, but he wasn't allowed to be breaking into any houses. H did not press charges.
So, for at least a year after MIL passed, BIL2 would regularly come to the property uninvited and just hang out on the premises. He wasn't invited to do so, but H was permissive. BIL2 insisted on using the property as his mailing address, and he would come and get his mail and just loiter on the property whenever he wanted. This really, really creeped me out and drove me crazy. I would beg H to do something about it, and he would do nothing. He would shrug and tell me, "It doesn't bother me."
If there's just one thing that exemplifies H's response to me when I raise a concern to him, calling upon him to stand up for and protect me, it's him telling me "It doesn't bother me." Our wedding vows included "Let no man tear asunder..." In our case, it's more like: Let no one tear us apart, unless it doesn't bother H.
I was throwing fits over BIL2 just coming and going as he pleased and H doing nothing about it, and my pain simply didn't matter to H. Or rather, it didn't matter enough. We would be outside, and BIL2 would come along, and H would be like "Oh hi, BIL2, how's it going?" and just make pleasantries with BIL2 right in front of my face, as if we were graced with the presence of a wonderful visitor. It made me so sick. I'd be out with my baby on a walk in the neighborhood, and BIL2 would come strolling along, knowing I didn't want him around. He broke into MIL's house a few more times that we know of just for kicks - we found out after the fact.
Sometime last year, I overheard a phone conference that H was on with all his siblings to discuss estate matters. Somehow, on that call, he found the strength to assertively tell BIL2 not to use the property as his mailing address anymore, and not to show up uninvited anymore. I was so proud of him for that. It resembled the husband I've always wanted. Maybe there was something about the other siblings being on the call to chime in and back him up that inspired him.
Because I certainly wasn't enough to inspire him. At that point, it had been at least a year of me throwing fits and our marriage going further down the toilet over BIL2 trespassing. But lo and behold, BIL2 did change his mailing address after that. Coincidence, maybe. He didn't stop coming to the property uninvited, but he curtailed it after that, and now he only comes once in a while. He still freaks me out, but once in a while is better than all the time.
If you've read this far, then I hope you understand why I find it outrageous that H would tell me to send BIL2 a Xmas card. Now I want to talk about why it's also outrageous that H would tell me to send SIL one.
We live in a two-bedroom double-wide trailer home that was placed on the property when H was a kid in the 70s. It's not that big, and the walls are thin and bendy. It's not my dream home, but as long as I want to be married to H, home is wherever he is. In the first couple years of our marriage, BIL1, SIL, and her two daughters (H's nieces, not much younger than me) would routinely visit from out of town, and our home was the place for them to stay. It was that way before we were married in 2014, and it continued like that for a couple years afterwards as if we weren't married.
H wouldn't check with me first as to whether it was okay with me to have them stay in our home. They'd stay for a weekend or a week or two or six, and H wouldn't check with me beforehand - it was like "Oh, hey 1hedlite, by the way, so-and-so is coming to stay for a while," sometimes on very short notice. One niece liked to bring along a friend or two and request to be pampered with a vegan dinner by H, who was happy to oblige. Though he had a wife now, it was like H was still the single, hip young uncle.
It really bothered me that H wouldn't ask my permission first, but it kind of took me a while to realize it was wrong of him not to. I wanted a good relationship with SIL and her daughters, so I tried to be accommodating and welcoming, friendly and affectionate. Sometimes I did great, other times not so much. If you have social anxiety like I do, you know having houseguests can be really nerve-wracking even if they are people you know and love, even with ample advance notice. Even visitors who aren't sleeping over make me nervous.
SIL is a shrewd woman with an alpha personality, and H has a kind of fearful respect for her that extends to her daughters, though they are not quite formidable like she is. She is known to be off-putting and litigious, and her own mother (MIL) would go off on tangents saying she disliked her and calling her greedy, but I thought at first that it was just the dementia talking.
Once, H was on the phone with SIL, and she told him she was thinking of coming out and visiting, so he happily replied, "Of course! I'll pay for your plane ticket!" I was miffed. I don't even think she was asking him to pay for her plane ticket, which is typically not a cheap thing, and SIL has a lot more money than we do. But H was always expected to foot the bill for my in-laws. He would just do it without discussing it with me first, and sometimes the expense was a lot.
In 2016, this is what happened that destroyed any relationship I thought I had with SIL and her daughters. One day, while H and I were at work, they brought lawyers and businesspeople into our home for a meeting to discuss making the property the site of a certain controversial industry. I had NO IDEA that this meeting between strangers and my in-laws was going to take place at all, let alone in our home, and H claimed he had no idea either. I found out about it the day it occurred, after it already occurred, when I got home from work and found myself alone with one of the nieces. We were making small talk, and she happened to casually mention that they held this meeting in our home and that it was about to drastically change all our lives.
Let me back up a bit. When I got home from work and was pulling into our driveway, H and the niece were there outside talking, and the niece kind of scurried off to MIL's house as I approached them in my car. When I got out of the car, H told me she had taken it upon herself to spray flea killer all over our home because she had found a flea on her puppy (which she had brought with her without asking our permission, and it wasn't housebroken). H told her this would upset me, hence her scurrying off. It was unclear whether she was concerned that her dog got fleas from our house, or our house got fleas from her dog.
I did get upset when I heard about what she did because we had four pet birds, and if you know much about pet birds, you know that pesticide fumes could kill them. So I am touchy about fumes in the house. When I entered our home, sure enough, the fumes hit me. I found that our master bedroom was the only room in the house she managed not to spray, so I moved our birds there. This turned out to be the least of my worries, but it just goes to show you the kind of mentality I was dealing with. When you're a guest in someone's house, and you want to treat their whole house with pesticide, it would usually occur to you to check with them first, right?
The niece soon showed up again, slipping in through the patio door with the flea killer spray in hand. The first thing she said to me, pointing to the spray label, was that there was nothing on the label to indicate it was harmful to birds. Yeah, the label never says it could kill birds, but bird people know better. We moved on to small talk. (At this point, it was only H, her, and myself in the house, and H was in a different room. BIL1, SIL, and the other niece and her fiance were also visiting from out of town, but they were elsewhere doing their own respective things. We would leave our doors unlocked for the visitors to come and go as they pleased for as long as they were around.)
Then she mentioned the meeting, which made me extremely upset.
For one, houseguests bringing strangers into my home while I'm at work without letting me know beforehand - that does not sit right with me. It just seems impolite. And then there's the idea of SIL and the nieces making major decisions that would drastically affect our life on the property. They weren't the ones living on the property, and what they were proposing should happen to it would completely change the vibe of the place and require us, the residents, to go through a lot of upheaval.
Those decisions regarding the property may have been theirs to make, but they could not go forward without H's consent, and my issue was that nobody thought to give me the courtesy of a warning. About inviting strangers to enter my home or ANYTHING.
I brought my concerns to H and asked him to run interference for me, tell them to back off and just give us some time to think about things. In response, H did nothing. If you've read this far, that shouldn't surprise you. I begged and pleaded with H to assert himself to SIL and nieces on my behalf, and he smiled and nodded at me and did nothing.
He told me he wasn't necessarily on board with their plans. But they were used to H never telling them no, and this case was no different. He didn't want to hurt their feelings by appearing to disagree with them. So he was giving off every impression that he was on board with them, standing with them against me. They were in town for a week or so, and they were all carrying on around me like I wasn't even there in my own home, like I was Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. At some point, I slipped out to take a break from them and get some air (I went to a gym in the next town over).
I was in IC at the time, and sometime after this visit from my in-laws, when they had returned home, I brought H along to a counseling session to talk about what happened with them. In this session, it came out that while I was away getting some air, they asked H what was wrong with me because I was very obviously extremely upset. According to H, he proceeded to explain to my in-laws that I had a history of mental illness (depression and anxiety), and that I was having an irrational reaction to their business proposal, an episode of mental illness. It was like a come-to-Jesus meeting where he confessed to my in-laws that I was mentally ill, and that he had been suffering on account of my mental illness for a long time. In response, they showered him with sympathy and affection and told him, "Our only concern is you. Do whatever you have to do."
I don't know exactly who said that to him, or what extent it was verbatim or paraphrased, or what it was even supposed to mean. But these words he recounted, in our counseling session four years ago, that my in-laws said to him - "Our only concern is you. Do whatever you have to do" - still ring in my mind, in the way he said they said those words.
Therefore, not only did SIL and the nieces overstepping the bounds become all about me being mentally ill and victimizing H. It also gave my in-laws permission to be further dismissive of me. Before, it wasn't so much that they were trying to exclude me but that they were oblivious to me - it simply didn't occur to them that I mattered. But now, with H's blessing, they were going to make it a point to exclude me.
One niece (the other one, not the flea killer spray one) sent H an email where she specifically told him not to tell me about the email, with some kind of business plan attached. In turn, H forwarded the email to a mutual lawyer friend of ours to ask her professional opinion, and he told her not to tell me about it. This came to light and to my attention accidentally, as things done in the dark sometimes do. I didn't think the triangulation against me could get any worse until I found out H reached out to this friend who was supposed to be my friend too and told her not to tell me. I'm sure a lot happened that I never found out about, but I happened to find out about that. Then I reached out to our friend and told her, "I consider you to be my friend too - please don't keep these things secret from me."
Ultimately, SIL and her daughters' business proposition did not pan out, for whatever reason. They badgered H about it for a year or so, but it never panned out. I have no idea what made it fail to be realized, but whatever it was had nothing to do with me. But the crying and screaming on my part that ensued for a couple years from that business meeting they held in my home was incredible. I'm not proud of that (atoning for it will be part of my DB process), and it gave H further reason to dismiss me as a lunatic. Our marriage was broken before, but that business meeting and pertinent events that followed really broke us. It made something snap in me. Yet I managed to get pregnant the following year.
To give you an idea of what little priority H gave our marriage, as if you don't already get it: We have been married almost seven years, and we literally didn't celebrate our wedding anniversary, didn't go out to dinner for our anniversary or anything, until our fifth anniversary. Why not? Because during our first four wedding anniversaries, BIL1, SIL, and/or the nieces were visiting, so the priority was to entertain them. Thus, each of our first four wedding anniversaries was just another day that came and went. I didn't complain about it because I didn't know any better - we couldn't celebrate our anniversary because H had to entertain my in-laws, and that was that.
Why did their visits coincide with our anniversaries? Because when we were planning our wedding, H wanted our wedding day to be right next to MIL's birthday, months before my preferred date. Why? To honor MIL, and also because there was a niece of H's (BIL1's daughter) whom he really wanted to attend our wedding, and he was concerned that there wasn't enough of an incentive for her to fly out and attend. He thought by placing our wedding day right next to MIL's birthday, MIL's birthday festivities would give the niece an extra incentive to attend our wedding. At first, she RSVP'ed no to our wedding, and I was disappointed that we accelerated our wedding date by months for nothing. But then she changed her mind and attended. That was the last time we saw her.
So, every year, my in-laws would converge upon our home to celebrate MIL's birthday, starting a few days to a week before our anniversary, and sticking around for at least a week or two. It was at the time of our second wedding anniversary that they held that fateful business meeting in our home. Our fifth wedding anniversary was the first one where they were not visiting because MIL passed away a few months after our fourth one. So our fifth anniversary was the first one we went out to dinner for. Our sixth anniversary was this year, during the lockdown.
Understand, the property is the absolute love of H's life. Before he is married to me, he is married to my in-laws, and before he is married to my in-laws, he is married to the property. He is willing to fight me in favor of my in-laws; and, though he feels really bad about it, really he does, he is willing to fight my in-laws when they threaten his relationship with the property.
As often happens, MIL's death brought about a fight between H and his siblings over the property. H wants to keep it, and they want to sell it. There is a stipulation giving H the option to keep it if he can meet certain requirements, namely buy them out. Whether it's possible for him to meet all the requirements is another story. The consensus has been that it isn't possible. But now we are in COVID-19 times, and H is counting on COVID-19 to be his lucky charm, play out in his favor such that he will be able to buy out his siblings and keep the property.
He is obsessed with keeping the property.
When his siblings first found out that H planned to exercise his option to keep it, they were infuriated - even BIL1, his favorite sibling. I never really understood why. Maybe it was because it made settling the estate and getting their inheritance a far slower process, I don't know. But they bonded together in their mutual anger against H. Dealing with their anger (namely that of SIL and BIL2) and the threat of losing the property was very stressful every day for a couple years. H was extremely sorry they felt the way they did and still is.
H has made sacrifices for the property all his life. There is work to be done at every turn, and to his ADHD, it is a wonderland of endless delights and distractions. It stresses him out to no end, but he wouldn't have it any other way. It is normal for him to be outside until 2:00 in the morning. Some men spend countless hours gaming, but he gardens into the wee hours. Our marriage was sacrificed for the property. In that regard, it sure would s*ck to lose it because all the sacrifice would be rendered to be in vain.
But I want us to lose the property. I didn't at first because it was instinctive for me to stand with H against his siblings in his desire to keep it, and there's nothing he wants more than to keep it. But now I'm so over it. I have come to have only hatred for the property and also this town. There are so many old ghosts and so much pain, and I want us to get out.
SIL was sending H threatening lawyer letters (she's good at that), and then COVID-19 hit. My in-laws agreed to put their fight with H on hiatus for a year or so, wait until the COVID-19 chaos subsides in order to maximize profits from selling the property. They are all on civil speaking terms, but they were on civil speaking terms before, on the whole, even as my in-laws (i.e., SIL) were sending H threatening lawyer letters.
H told me to send SIL a Xmas card at the beginning of this week, and I calmly said no. That brings us to where we are today.
