I have been doing a lot of thinking lately and a lot of it was inspired by Underdog's thread on the piecing forum. In past years I have had so much anger at my husband and couldn't let it go.
And then it occurred to me--I am to blame. I even told Cemar this the other day but I was just beginning to see how fully it applied to me, also.
As many of you know, my husband basically dropped out of our marriage when he re-discovered the Catholic Church during year two of our now 8 yr marriage. He wanted a friendship relationship and for me to support him as he spent more and more time at church and left me at home by myself to fume. The sex began to disappear during that time but it wasn't until year 3 that it was so striking that I began to run out of excuses as to why it was happening.
I went the usual gamut and assumed it was me (and just recently was able to shed this once and for all) until I finally confronted him after 4 yrs of a SSM and he told me, "I don't know where a wife fits into things anymore" meaning, that he wasn't sure that he wanted to continue to have sex with me or to treat me in a romantic way--although he definitely wanted to stay married. It was devastating to me. I had always assumed that I was irresistable to him (vain, silly girl I was!) and here I found out that not only was that not true, but that his plans might include resisting me for the rest of my life.
The anger boiled up in me like a pressure cooker. I was pissed and I stayed pissed for, gosh, a year and a half? I was SO angry that a man could make plans to reject me for the rest of my life and not include me in it; I was mad that a man would reject me in the first dang place; I was mad about you name it. Anger was the predominating feeling in our house. We would have periods of contentment but that anger was always there and ready to seethe out, whenever I sensed that he was backsliding. Looking back, I don't know how H stayed so calm and steadfast throughout this, except to say that is the type of person that he is.
I suppose I was most mad about the fact that I had been WRONGED. And I wanted someone to pay for that and pay dearly. I wanted revenge! I wanted him to feel the hurt that I had felt during those years.
When the anger started to fade, I began to see things a little more clearly. Lurking on Betsey's thread helped me to further clarify it..sometimes you can see someone else's situation so clearly, but not your own.
One of the things that struck me so hard was the fact that she was able to say, Boy did I do some dumb things. NOT absolving her husband--what he did was still absolutely wrong--but to sit back and say, This is where I could have done things differently.
And that is where I am today. I realize that, yep, we didn't have much sex for four years and he had emotionally checked out of our marriage but you know what? I allowed him to do that! I could have, at any point, spoke up but I didn't. I had my own reasons for not doing so (fear, mostly) but I could have knocked years off the misery. Prior to these last months, I have been so caught up in my own feelings of being wronged, that I haven't been able to forgive him or move past the idea of what he SHOULD have been doing all along.
Don't get me wrong--what he did was idiotic.
But I could have done something about it and I chose not to and then sat back and griped about how long-suffering I was. YES he should have seen how destructive he was being, but to hold this anger over his head for another four years has got to be the dumbest idea I've ever had.
As I've written before, I think this will always be an area that we need to work on and perfect..it doesn't come easy to us, the way it does to other couples.
But owning up to my part in it and feeling the subsequent feeling of peace and forgiveness has got to be one of the best feelings I've had in a long time. I always knew what part I played but I wasn't ready to really OWN it and have the ability to ditch the anger until recently.
So, Betsey, if you read this, thank you for spilling your life online--while our situations are different and the journeys we are each taking are different, just seeing someone else go down their path has illuminated my own.
