Funny how, the minute things really come to the sort of head that has me looking up the phone number for Relate, everything suddenly (if temporarily) resolves.
Putting my feelings down in type has long been my solution to almost every problem and clarifying them in the process of starting this blog, I wrote my husband (the nice one) a letter. Things have got to be pretty bad, I figure, when you are reduced to writing letters to the person you live with - someone, indeed, who you know is sitting upstairs as you compose it. Only realising the extent to which verbal communication between us had become impossible drove me to do it. But maybe I should try to do it sooner next time.
The first letter created a ceasefire. Though a ceasefire is vastly preferable to constant bombardment, airstrikes and sniper's bullets as you make the foray across open ground to fetch water, after 24 hours I couldn't even bear that (you have to understand it's been so bad for so many weeks that civility is just another depressing form of non-communication). So I wrote a second letter, which finally broke through to its intended recipient (my husband, rather than the bastard Brian).
As a result, and to my huge relief, Brian's been absent for a full four days and counting. Every now and then I have to check - when my husband's looking a little drained as the result of some exertion (collecting our daughter from nursery, for example), the cast of Brian can fall over his face. You're still there, right? I ask. So far, every time, he has been.
I know Brian's only waiting for a chance to move back in, and that I can't take any of this for granted, but am glad, at least, to have the man I love back with me for a while.
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2 comments:
Hey wife of Brian, I could cry reading this, I found you through Signs. Much as I empathise with Brian's feelings of loss, I do feel vexed for you that he is blaming you, as your posts suggest, for his lack of recovery. You strike me as being immensely supportive to him, he is very lucky to have you. One can have very angry moments with this illness (as with any illness), and I have certainly behaved selfishly at times, but Brian's sustained anger sounds excessive to me. Please don't think I am judging him harshly, we are all individuals, and handle our loss of health differently, but if he does not want you to go out without him, when on earth do you get a chance to have a break? But please don't despair, he could still make some kind of recovery (3 and a half yrs in ME terms is not long at all). I really hope he can get used to his new life with ME, his new self. Maybe he just has to get though the anger first.
Thank you, nmj. I've cried so many times on my own and it feels good to find some people I can share it with. You're quite right about me needing to go out a bit to have a break from it all, but the ME makes him feel so insecure - as well as, a lot of the time, completely unreasonable and irrational in his responses - that even me suggesting I go out with a girlfriend, he considers "unsupportive" and we end up arguing. In recent months I'd just begun to feel he was using the ME as an excuse to bully me.
But then I had to remember that naturally, he's not the bullying kind. It's really hard, sometimes, to remember the kind, reasonable person that must still be there somewhere behind the illness. ME really seems to have awakened his demons - and they're ugly critters, I can tell you. Thanks for being here. I hope you'll hang around.
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