I’m in kind of a good stretch here where we’ve ML twice in the last two weeks and I hate to jinx it by complaining. But complain I will.
Your comments about being on both the LD and the HD side of the equation and about what caused you to be there just scream at me about my W. I absolutely believe that she has some kind of mental/emotional problem that is causing her LD, but I/we have had no luck in finding it and addressing it.
You said that you were in abusive and dysfunctional Rs before you got to where you are now. We were married quite young (she was 18, I was 19) and neither of us had much in the way of past Rs to deal with. But W DOES come from a really dysfunctional family that left her with very low self-esteem. Her family treats women as servants for the male members of the family. By the 4th grade she was doing the cooking and cleaning for a family of five and nothing she ever did was good enough. Her father farmed by day and had a second shift factory job besides, so he was mostly absent. But when he was there he had a violent temper that frequently got directed at her – both the youngest and a female to boot.
I don’t understand parents who want their children to be failures, but her parents actively discouraged ambition and success. I can see it in her older sister. I can see how they convinced her older brother that he would never amount to anything. He a very smart and engaging person, but he’s also convinced that he’s worthless. She also has a younger brother, 12 years younger, who is exactly the same way. When he was in his early teens, I had him convinced to go to college. He wanted to be a petroleum engineer. But even then, his parents were telling him that he wasn’t smart enough to go to college. Now he’s in his mid 30s, lives in a broken-down trailer in the corner of a soybean field, can’t hold a job, did time for possession of crystal meth with intent to distribute, and is a real pillar of society.
So W has self-esteem issues. There are body-image issues as well. She is right at five feet tall (a quarter of an inch shy really, but she doesn’t like me to mention that). When we were M she weighed somewhere around 120 lbs and wore a size 12-14. Within a couple of years she was up over 200 and wearing a 24W. When she got pregnant and first went to the doctor she weighed in at 234. Now she’s down to a svelte 180 or so. She’s in 18W-20W now. I would like her to be thinner both because she looks better and more importantly, because of the health issues, but desire-wise, her weight doesn’t put me off a bit. I’m attracted to her – not just a body. I frequently tell her that she’s attractive, sexy, hot, or what have you, but she ALWAYS replies with something like, “If you like fat.”
I honestly don’t know where I’m going with this, but your comments about abuse and low self-esteem just brought this out of me. While I don’t believe that there was any real physical abuse beyond the occasional over-zealous spanking, she did come from an intensely mentally abusive childhood. I know that she harbors feelings of being not up to snuff in most areas. I know that she doesn’t see herself as attractive. And I don’t know what to do about any of that.
