Sometimes you have to get to the very bottom of things before it gets so desperate that there are no further choices: it’s decide to end it all (your current state of life) or start going up.
We descended to the bottom through layers of increasingly bitter shocks. There was the Venice honeymoon blighted by his ability to walk for any time or any distance before needing to sleep all afternoon while I got disconcertingly good at, and addicted to, playing solo electronic backgammon. There was the first time he said “Fuck You” and didn’t start laughing after a few seconds. Really meant it. Locking myself in the car once, because he scared me. Shocks of all shapes and sizes, constantly surprising, all slaps in the face. That was all him (or ME) shocking me. Waking me up to what this illness is and does. Once I was fully awake, we were miles apart, and he was furious with me. He was a stranger: angry, and resentful, and insecure, and full of rage. I dreamt his ME as a poisonous substance-abusing lodger called Brian, who we'd inadvertently invited in as a friend of a friend, who refused to move out, and now we were stuck with heavy drinking and emotional warfare. After that dream, I woke up to the realisation that my husband had become, was enveloped by, Brian.
But I never stopped wanting my first husband to return. Desperation pushed me to my own edges, until I started to do things that shocked him back. Six months ago I responded to the launch of another verbal assault by throwing a glass of water in his face.
Ever since then, by slow levels, we have been ascending to the light. Shocks from me to him help us surface.
Last week, realising the extent to which I was drowning without his emotional suport, I finally began to feel that if I couldn’t have it, when it came down to it, that I should start making progress, in a very real way, out of the marriage. I didn’t want him to move out; it isn’t that I don’t love him any more, because I do. Painfully so. But I had begun to feel that he treated me so much better when we weren’t married, and since treating me better was what I wanted him to do, I reasoned that maybe the best thing to do was to stop being married to him.
When the woman you love is lying there awake next to you at four o’ clock in the morning, and says, quietly, that she wants to get a divorce, it’s a one of the bigger shocks. What is telling is how a husband reacts, and mine reacted like my real husband. Became, in less than an hour of talking, my original husband, the man who genuinely loves me and is horrified to wake up in the middle of making his wife so very unhappy.
He came in a few hours later while I was reading people's comments on here and I didn't hide it. "It really makes me sad," I said, "that there's a bunch of people you've never even met who knows more about what's going on in my head than you do." We talked. I cried. He held me, and said sorry; he was truly, truly sorry.
This was last Thursday morning. It’ll be a week tomorrow, and things are feeling firmer and safer day by day. We’re getting better at being happy with each other, and enjoying having our connection back. We’re losing sleep for the right reasons instead of the wrong ones. For a long time now, my husband’s insomnia was lodged upstairs on a sofa, watching movies, passing the hours in draining isolation. For the last week we’ve had more positive forms of sleep-loss: long talks in each other’s arms, and kissing. We are lovers again, as we were right back at the beginning.
I’ve been wrong before. But let's hope I'm not.
Wednesday 27 June 2007
Tuesday 19 June 2007
Back On The Slide
It has become a necessity of our situation that I stay as buoyant as I can for as long as I can. Frequently, when I "crumble" in some way, he gets angry with me. He sees it these days as me placing unreasonable demands on him; as me, either blindly or selfishly asking him for emotional support when he is the one that needs support. He has said several times in the past he is tired of being the one to prop up my confidence when it flags. Yet he doesn’t do that now, hasn't done it for a couple of years. I relied upon him for this kind of support before he got ill, but I don’t think he sees it as his job anymore. As he points out, I do have other people around that are currently wonderfully supportive in the way I need them to be. But none of their support means as much as his would. If he felt he had the energy to give it.
These days, he just doesn’t. He can’t muster up the enthusiasm. His life has been taken apart piece by piece until there’s nothing left. Compared to what he is suffering, my losses are pathetic, not worth the energy. What on earth do I have to complain about? So some biggish piece of work has to be torn up and started again; so what? He can barely get through the day. Every day. You can see why he is unable to support me. But I miss having that part of him, the friend who won my trust with his support, because that man seemed to really care for me.
The things that were always important to me, like my work, don't get any less important to me now that he's ill; in fact, in some ways they become more important. I run to my work when I feel I don't matter to him like I used to. And so the gap gets wider again.
These days, he just doesn’t. He can’t muster up the enthusiasm. His life has been taken apart piece by piece until there’s nothing left. Compared to what he is suffering, my losses are pathetic, not worth the energy. What on earth do I have to complain about? So some biggish piece of work has to be torn up and started again; so what? He can barely get through the day. Every day. You can see why he is unable to support me. But I miss having that part of him, the friend who won my trust with his support, because that man seemed to really care for me.
The things that were always important to me, like my work, don't get any less important to me now that he's ill; in fact, in some ways they become more important. I run to my work when I feel I don't matter to him like I used to. And so the gap gets wider again.
Monday 11 June 2007
Downs and Ups
Things seem to improve much more quickly, now, than they have been doing for the last year and a half. There are still some problems, some areas of conversation that are possibly still not ready to be discussed. But we are coming together more quickly after things go wrong. It frightens me when it collapses - I'm send right back into despair; everything feels insoluble. But he is less unreasonable than before. He is more willing to take steps towards me. When he sees I am upset, his resentment evaporates more quickly (instead of being provoked).
We had the nicest weekend I can remember for a long time. We just relaxed together, doing very little. He's still really ill from my overloading him (which finished ten days ago or so) and I'm doing what I can to help him feel better. On Saturday evening we went for a long, gentle stroll along the seafront, further than we have walked since we were courting. [Both of us, in the last seven years, have had health conditions that have prevented us walking very far at times.] We had our daughter with us; she was happy and playing, and clambering and "doing excercise" (she's not yet four) and saying the sorts of things that make adults laugh. It was so lovely to be together, and just talk about stuff. He was the man I remember, the man I fell in love with, explaining the world to me in a way that makes sense (his philosophies about the nature of people, and of happiness, always seem absolutely right - and are reassuring). I didn't want it to end; it was like being transported back to the time before ME, before we had a daughter.
This is hard to say, and I don't want to be misunderstood. I don't blame our daughter for Paul's ME in any way. She is a joy, and we are both devoted to her. But the ME coincided very closely with her arrival; the big viral event that he never seemed to recover from began less than three months after she was born. He was overdoing it. I had a pregnancy-induced instability of the pelvis (SPD) that meant I couldn't walk without great pain, and we pretty much sofa-bound for three months before and three months after the birth. Because he felt so responsible, in that way that impending and new fathers do, he was working two jobs - the job he loved, which didn't pay but involved being out until late every night, and a cash-in-hand physically demanding job - removals - which meant he had to get up early. He was also taking on more than his fair share of running the home because of my physical impairment. Once our daughter was born, he was also helping to look after her, doing nappies, taking her with him when he could, pacing or dancing her to sleep when she was restless. He was brilliant. He was totally over-doing though. Then he got a bad cold and he didn't stop for it. He said he "couldn't". I can't remember if he dropped removals - quite possibly not. It was Christmas, I wasn't working, had only state maternity benefit, and we were struggling financially. Nor did he drop the job he did for love, which kept him out till midnight, or later. Perhaps he cut down a little on looking after me and his daughter (my pelvis was stabilising, I could do more) but was still doting on us both, and therefore wanted to continue doing whatever he could. He said he would stop working and have a proper Christmas holiday from the 21st December; three weeks off. But at the end of that three weeks he was still ill. Six months later, he was still ill.
This whole three years since has been one long struggle to come to terms with this illness; to, on some level, accept it and accommodate it. We still fight it, both of us. I am still so angry, sometimes, when I think of what it has done to us. But there is no way out of here without accommodation. And there may still be no way out of here.
I don't wish we'd never had our daughter. Enjoying her, together, was a large part of what made Saturday night so special. She is the bridge that enables us way to fight our way back to each other. She is so precious to us, and we are both so proud of her, and thank goodness, when times get really tough, we have something we can agree on.
We had the nicest weekend I can remember for a long time. We just relaxed together, doing very little. He's still really ill from my overloading him (which finished ten days ago or so) and I'm doing what I can to help him feel better. On Saturday evening we went for a long, gentle stroll along the seafront, further than we have walked since we were courting. [Both of us, in the last seven years, have had health conditions that have prevented us walking very far at times.] We had our daughter with us; she was happy and playing, and clambering and "doing excercise" (she's not yet four) and saying the sorts of things that make adults laugh. It was so lovely to be together, and just talk about stuff. He was the man I remember, the man I fell in love with, explaining the world to me in a way that makes sense (his philosophies about the nature of people, and of happiness, always seem absolutely right - and are reassuring). I didn't want it to end; it was like being transported back to the time before ME, before we had a daughter.
This is hard to say, and I don't want to be misunderstood. I don't blame our daughter for Paul's ME in any way. She is a joy, and we are both devoted to her. But the ME coincided very closely with her arrival; the big viral event that he never seemed to recover from began less than three months after she was born. He was overdoing it. I had a pregnancy-induced instability of the pelvis (SPD) that meant I couldn't walk without great pain, and we pretty much sofa-bound for three months before and three months after the birth. Because he felt so responsible, in that way that impending and new fathers do, he was working two jobs - the job he loved, which didn't pay but involved being out until late every night, and a cash-in-hand physically demanding job - removals - which meant he had to get up early. He was also taking on more than his fair share of running the home because of my physical impairment. Once our daughter was born, he was also helping to look after her, doing nappies, taking her with him when he could, pacing or dancing her to sleep when she was restless. He was brilliant. He was totally over-doing though. Then he got a bad cold and he didn't stop for it. He said he "couldn't". I can't remember if he dropped removals - quite possibly not. It was Christmas, I wasn't working, had only state maternity benefit, and we were struggling financially. Nor did he drop the job he did for love, which kept him out till midnight, or later. Perhaps he cut down a little on looking after me and his daughter (my pelvis was stabilising, I could do more) but was still doting on us both, and therefore wanted to continue doing whatever he could. He said he would stop working and have a proper Christmas holiday from the 21st December; three weeks off. But at the end of that three weeks he was still ill. Six months later, he was still ill.
This whole three years since has been one long struggle to come to terms with this illness; to, on some level, accept it and accommodate it. We still fight it, both of us. I am still so angry, sometimes, when I think of what it has done to us. But there is no way out of here without accommodation. And there may still be no way out of here.
I don't wish we'd never had our daughter. Enjoying her, together, was a large part of what made Saturday night so special. She is the bridge that enables us way to fight our way back to each other. She is so precious to us, and we are both so proud of her, and thank goodness, when times get really tough, we have something we can agree on.
Sunday 3 June 2007
Payback
Well, I guessed there would be some come-uppance, but for a while there I thought I’d got away with it. No such luck. Over the last two days, my husband has switched out of "coping" mode, and we’re back to a very familiar and painful place.
Again, it’s my working that’s the issue, my lack of flexibility, now captured in the phrase “5-day-week-family”. “I never wanted to be a 5-day-week family,” he says. That's true. At the time he became really ill, he was running a little venture that was a 7-day-a-week job. He says "that was flexible" but it wasn't. It was demanding (on all of us). For the last year he was doing it, it prevented me working (at all), and for the entire two and a half years interrupted most weekends and the significant majority of our evenings. I was alone (with a small baby) for five nights out of seven. In the meantime my husband was getting so tired that I'd need to have our daughter for long stretches of the day as well, because even if he wasn't doing paperwork, he'd need to rest. He was working (but earning no money). I couldn't work because he was either working or resting and there was a baby to look after. Without the illness, we could have done it (we could have shared both work and childcare). But the only way to enable him to keep working at his labour of love while he was ill was to give over my life to that cause.
I couldn't do it. I have a life too, and what the illness seems to constantly ask of me (via my husband as a conduit) is to give my life to it too. Sacrifice all my desires and ambitions to the monster that has consumed the husband I love. Like it didn't have enough of me, already, having swallowed my husband.
So, here we are, back at the nub of it: that he feels angry that my work is prioritised (because it earns money) while his work isn't (because it doesn't). And maybe he's right, maybe it's nothing to do with his illness. But him being ill means I can't discuss it with him (he gets angry), and he was the only person I used to be able to sort things out with. Without him, I'm lost.
*
This argument came about because I was trying, for the second time, to get him to enter into some conversation with me whereby I could explore my feelings about some stuff going on in my birth family at the moment. So I could share it with him on some deeper level, so I wouldn't feel so alone with it, so that he would know what I’ve been going through.
But he’s having none of that. He is not the slightest bit interested in what I’ve been going through. He’s been going through far too much as a result of my recent spell of work, and this is where it starts coming out. (When it is over; when I am taking extra time off to help him recover).
And I feel gutted, because I didn’t realise he was in that place. He’d done such a good cover-up job that I believed him. I thought he was tired, yes, but I still thought he was right next to me. Instead, it turns out that he, my husband, is miles away. And the one who doesn’t know me (but thinks he does) is here. He’s pissed off with me. And he’s no protection from the one I call Brian, who has probably been woken up by the arguing. The stranger husband won’t stand in Brian’s way when he comes. He just can’t care about me right now. He’s ill. That’s the only thing he can think about.
Again, it’s my working that’s the issue, my lack of flexibility, now captured in the phrase “5-day-week-family”. “I never wanted to be a 5-day-week family,” he says. That's true. At the time he became really ill, he was running a little venture that was a 7-day-a-week job. He says "that was flexible" but it wasn't. It was demanding (on all of us). For the last year he was doing it, it prevented me working (at all), and for the entire two and a half years interrupted most weekends and the significant majority of our evenings. I was alone (with a small baby) for five nights out of seven. In the meantime my husband was getting so tired that I'd need to have our daughter for long stretches of the day as well, because even if he wasn't doing paperwork, he'd need to rest. He was working (but earning no money). I couldn't work because he was either working or resting and there was a baby to look after. Without the illness, we could have done it (we could have shared both work and childcare). But the only way to enable him to keep working at his labour of love while he was ill was to give over my life to that cause.
I couldn't do it. I have a life too, and what the illness seems to constantly ask of me (via my husband as a conduit) is to give my life to it too. Sacrifice all my desires and ambitions to the monster that has consumed the husband I love. Like it didn't have enough of me, already, having swallowed my husband.
So, here we are, back at the nub of it: that he feels angry that my work is prioritised (because it earns money) while his work isn't (because it doesn't). And maybe he's right, maybe it's nothing to do with his illness. But him being ill means I can't discuss it with him (he gets angry), and he was the only person I used to be able to sort things out with. Without him, I'm lost.
*
This argument came about because I was trying, for the second time, to get him to enter into some conversation with me whereby I could explore my feelings about some stuff going on in my birth family at the moment. So I could share it with him on some deeper level, so I wouldn't feel so alone with it, so that he would know what I’ve been going through.
But he’s having none of that. He is not the slightest bit interested in what I’ve been going through. He’s been going through far too much as a result of my recent spell of work, and this is where it starts coming out. (When it is over; when I am taking extra time off to help him recover).
And I feel gutted, because I didn’t realise he was in that place. He’d done such a good cover-up job that I believed him. I thought he was tired, yes, but I still thought he was right next to me. Instead, it turns out that he, my husband, is miles away. And the one who doesn’t know me (but thinks he does) is here. He’s pissed off with me. And he’s no protection from the one I call Brian, who has probably been woken up by the arguing. The stranger husband won’t stand in Brian’s way when he comes. He just can’t care about me right now. He’s ill. That’s the only thing he can think about.
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