I’m finally starting to catch up with this blog as I’ve been falling behind recently. I tried to stay so busy the past couple of weeks because I felt like I was catching up on all the times that I never got to leave the house. I’ve had a lot of fun but I haven’t had time to really sit down and think about anything which was kind of the point of the separation. I didn’t realize that I need to start calming down until this past week/weekend.
Work had started picking up and I was going in at 6 in the morning instead of the usual 7:30 and I was staying up until 11 or 12 at night. It’s not like I was partying but I was hanging out with my family every night and playing the guitar with my brother as well as going to church band practice. Friday night, I spent the night with my Mom, much to my husbands annoyance and we didn’t go to bed until pretty late again. I had to be at therapy an hour away at 8 in the morning the next day and at this point, I was starting to feel worn down. After an incredibly busy Saturday, camping Saturday night, and going to church early to practice for the guitar, I was down right exhausted. That’s when I decided to start cutting out alone time and working on myself.
Back to Saturday though- Therapy went ok and he explained to my husband that the constant joking, although once healthy, has now becoming toxic as we have lost a lot of trust in our relationship. Our goal now is to start rebuilding that trust by basically starting from the beginning and dating again. I don’t think my husband was happy about that because that’s what I told him a few weeks ago and he thought it was stupid. We also wen’t through our history together and explained everything that we’ve been through. I think the therapist was a little shocked- I mean we have been through some really tough stuff together, it’s honestly quite amazing that we somehow managed to get to the upper middle class together.
Talking about these things makes me so sad. I feel like we have crawled through hell to get to where we are today and thinking back on those times, I never felt support from my husband after the first couple years. I felt like I was trying to deal with the crap from our life, trying to keep my husband calm so he wouldn’t lose his temper, and trying to handle my own emotions without any support. We have a great story of starting in extreme poverty to owning a great home and two cars with minimal debt but our relationship has suffered so much. We’ve both worked so hard to get here and for him to now have everything in his name and to start acting controlling with the first money that we get is so hurtful. I’ve always worked full time and quite often, worked two jobs and to be treated this way is degrading in every way.
Anyways, enough of that tangent- What our therapist apparently learned from this is that we deal with life issues in vastly different ways. My husband buckles down, turns off all emotions and pushes through the hard times. I tend to take things one day at a time and find the good things in each day so that I don’t get overwhelmed. To me, shutting down for long periods of times (like years) is unhealthy and you don’t learn how to manage problems that way. Not to mention, it makes it hard to be a caring wife when your husband turns himself off and I would say he’s done this for more then half of our relationship. Apparently when he shuts down like that, the only way he gets through is with anger because it keeps him focused and awake when he’s tired. I get that for some things but the problem is that life is always hard. It never goes the way you want it to and we’re going to be faced with issues every single day. How am I supposed to trust my husband to support me in the future during hard times when I know he’ll just shut down again?
The therapist told us that we both need to work on supporting the other, I need to learn how to push past his anger and get him to talk or to walk away and he needs to learn that I have emotional needs and he shouldn’t shut me out. I’m learning in these sessions that we have a lot to work on together and I just hope that we can both be open minded and willing.
He actually seemed to be that way for the first couple days. The night before therapy, he had smoked a huge pork shoulder and brought it to my brothers after therapy. We all hung out together, ate and played games. It was really nice! We had a birthday party for my Mom that afternoon though so we didn’t have that much time together. I did invite him to the party but he was a little too excited and said he wouldn’t be able to control his sarcastic comments around her- FYI, he hates my Mom so that wouldn’t go well. Well as he was getting ready to leave, my brother asked if he could pray with him. To my surprise he said yes, although he thought he was going to pray after he left, not lay his hands on him and pray right there. Needless to say, my husband was thrown off guard but he let him do it. He just prayed for things like our marriage and his insomnia and things like that. Luckily my brother prayed, if it would have been me it would have gone more like this: “God, please show this man how to stop being a jerk”. Although, I have been working on different prayers at this point, I now pray for healing, grace and understanding for him instead of asking God to just change who he is.
Anyways, I went and saw my husband on Sunday also and brought him food that wasn’t hot dogs and canned ravioli. Both days were really great except it still didn’t really feel like he was putting in any effort except to not be angry. He was in a good mood but the joking about my personality and things that I do were still constant. I told him that we were just talking to the therapist about this, did it not make sense? You know what he said? That things weren’t that bad between us, I didn’t know what a bad relationship was because I have never been in one and that we are going to be fine. He thought cutting back on the jokes was overkill and unnecessary.
I’m glad that he is now starting to think more positively but two good days isn’t a cure all and I told him that but he kind of just brushed it off. Well he stayed in a good mood for a while and we had good talks every night. He even said that if I need more time after this week that I can take it, he wants me to make sure that I’m ready to come home when I do so we don’t do this again. I was so shocked and I told him how much I appreciated and respect him for saying that. This was all fine until Wednesday…. I went for a hike after work when I hadn’t eaten anything for two days which was not super smart. I had been hiking every night because I’ve always felt closer to God when I’m in nature and not around the sounds of the city. I’m also directionally impaired and this place was a little bigger then I had anticipated.
I spent almost two and a half hours trying to find my stupid car that afternoon. I ended up going off trail so I could B-line it in the direction of my car. Well off trail meant avoiding all spiders (there was a lot) and crossing a large pond on a slippery log. I really hate spiders, I will hold a snake, a cockroach, and pretty much anything else but I draw the line at spiders- and there were so many freaking spiders strung up in these woods for some reason. So I’m hardcore hiking through these woods singing a song from church at the top of my lungs trying to ignore the wave of spiders that seemed to be coming out of the woodwork and I finally see my beautiful car in the distance. Thank God because I was starting to panic a little bit because it looked like it was going to start storming.
Anyways…. I call my husband afterwards and he seems fine but he keeps telling me that I’m acting weird and I’m like yeah, I haven’t eaten, I’m tired and I just accidentally hiked 5 miles, I’m not going to be all happy sounding. Part of this problem is that I tried to use my compass on my phone but it had to update, first world problems I know. So when I was driving and talking to him I looked at the app and I just told him that it said I was in another town but I wasn’t actually in that town, I was on my way to my brothers. Well he starts getting all suspicious, asking where I actually am, wanting to know street names, asking me to tell him the truth. I am just not in the mood for this because I’m not doing anything wrong and I’ve never warranted this kind of behavior. Also I’m way out in the boonies and I’m not crossing any streets and I don’t even know the name of the road that I take so that doesn’t help.
I finally just tell him that I don’t know if he’s joking or not but I hate it when he does stuff like this (because he does it all the time). I just asked him to stop doing it and he freaked out again. I’m so emotional, so sensitive, he can’t even joke around with me anymore. Then he said that he’ll stop joking, he won’t make any jokes anymore because I can’t handle them. So it’s been two days since that day and he’s barely talked to me, when I call or text him it’s all one word answers. It’s my birthday today and he said he doesn’t want to do anything, and he’s basically back to shutting off everything. He’s still ok enough to ask me to pick up his blood pressure medication though… ridiculous. This is just another example of why I don’t tell him when I have a problem though, because it never ends well and I know that he’ll stop for a while and go right back to doing it.
It drives me crazy because I have been trying to fast every week, trying to grow closer to God and every single time I do it, something happens. The first time, my dog attacked my other dog. The second time, my husband explained all his feelings about my Christianity in a horrible way and now this. Apparently this is upsetting someone in that spirit realm. Well guess what, I’m going to enjoy this day regardless because all of this is getting really old and I’m tired of the demons in life keeping me down. They can annoy the crap out of me but they can no longer scare me. So suck it, happy birthday to me.
The Tired Wife 