Tuesday, January 10, 2012

The Quest for Love and Self - Part II

[Excerpt from Volume One - Summer 2011]

 
While growing up as a child I learned, by watching my independent, yet oftentimes weak, single mother and single grandmother, not challenge authority and avoid conflict. They never once said “stand up for yourself daughter,” or “never let anyone change who you are.” Instead, the advice my twice-divorced mother gave me was that marriage was not 50/50. It was compromise. And so I did. I compromised on everything, in every way, including me, most of the time just to avoid conflict. I developed some real bite marks on my tongue while compromising.
My relationship with my ex-husband reminds me of the young women who so aspired to be married in the movie Mona Lisa Smile. Julia Roberts, while portraying an Art History teacher in the movie, challenges her female students to re-examine the traditional roles of women. She says during a self-reflecting moment that she “didn’t realize that by demanding excellence of these girls that she was also challenging the roles they were ‘born to fill.” Who said we women were born to be wives, and couldn’t also be everything else that we want to be? I don’t know, but I bought into this concept – hook, line, sinker, fisherman, and boots! And it cost me tremendously. In the process of trying to be a wife, I lost the authentic me. I have spent the rest of my life since then trying to regain it – uncompromisingly so.
For 10 years I wore my ‘Mona Lisa’ smile. Why I felt that I couldn’t tell anyone how terrible marriage turned out to be for me, I have no idea. Maybe I was embarrassed by my naïveté going into it, and my failure to make it work while I was in it. Nah, I don’t embarrass easily. I think my husband was embarrassed, because ultimately he was, over time, failing at creating the perfect wife. In the beginning it was easy because I really wanted to be married. But as time went on it became more difficult to keep me within his confines because the real me always aspired for more, for greatness, for the next accomplishment, for freedom and flexibility. You can’t keep a real winner down, ya know?
But my husband sure did try. And he succeeded for about the first 4 years. I spent those years helping him grow in his career; cooking the food that he liked to eat; watching the movies that he liked; ironing his clothes; going to work and handing over my pay check. I was so good at being a wife – even stupid and foolish at times. I knew he was an asshole. Somehow I rationalized that if I could make him look good by shinning brighter and being the perfect wife, no one would know about my mistake and how weak I really was in this situation.
There was some real dumb shit that went down between 1995 and 2005—shit that I and many other women put up with for the sake of being a wife.
During the first four years of the marriage we focused on our careers and becoming more financially stable. I had helped him get a very good job, progressed in my own career and we started several businesses. Some worked out, others did not. But the company that I helped set up for him and for which I did all the marketing prospered. We banked the income, bought a new house and on the outside we represented the standard upwardly mobile couple.
I really wanted to have kids and since his business was doing well we agreed that I would quit my job and start my own consulting company to give me the flexibility to be at home. I easily got pregnant and after being in business for myself for about 1 year, I set that aside to concentrate on being a stay-at-home mom. My first son was born in 2000, five years after we got married. About a year and half later came kid number two. But while I was pregnant with kid number two, and while taking care of kid number one I was no longer marketing my husband’s business. He lost his major contract and remained unemployed for about 6-8 months. Can you imagine what it was like in our house with the both of us there all day and me being pregnant?  Fortunately we had set aside enough money to sustain us for a while but the pressure was building.
Since I didn’t deal with the finances I really didn’t know how much money we had – just that there was enough. It turned out that after about 7 months, there was only a few more months of money left in the bank. So one peaceful afternoon I was in my office. My two year-old was rocking in the baby swing while I nursed my two month-old. “Asshole” (that’s his name now) walks into my office and without hesitation and as cavalier as anyone could be, says to me “you need to get a job.” I was dumbfounded, speechless. I wanted to be a wife and a stay-at-home mom, and live up to my role. We had worked so hard for this, I thought to myself. Now, what the fuck? 
What kind of real man sends his nursing wife out to work while he sits at home on his ass? A manipulating, controlling one who wants to be a lazy fuck, and has no respect for women let alone himself – that’s the kind. So for about two months we debated about me going back to work. I was still nursing! But in the end somehow I was reminded that I needed to submit to his will. I found a job, a damn good job and in January of year eight of the marriage I went back to work full-time.
Thank God that I did because that’s when the shit hit the fan so to speak. Even thought I was free from him in proximity he continued to figure out ways to control me and isolate me from the world. When I worked he remained unemployed. Yet insisted we put the kids in day care, so that whenever he got a job they would already be settled in and used to it. I fell for that lame reasoning. Where had my brain cells gone? I was still avoiding conflict.

To be continued....

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