Marriage

To write from a place of pain is an interesting challenge. The pain, whether physical or emotional, can act as an anaesthetic that inhibits a clear picture, a clear head. My parents and my husband's parents both had terrible marriages. My mother was an alcoholic with a masterful skill to manipulate and lie, my father was too weak to stand up to her. My in- laws had an equally miserable relationship, with my husband's father being an abusive alcoholic and his mother an enabler with a penchant for emotional cruelty. My brother's marriage lasted 12 years, my sister's was cut short by her premature death at 44. My youngest sister never married and committed suicide at age 35. At the time, she was living with my parents, whose marriage was by then brutally toxic. Michael and I have been married 26 years. We have had very happy years , and years that were difficult. With our family history, I am amazed we are doing as well as we are, most of the time. Both my husband's younger brothers have been married 23 and 11 years respectively, and both have children. From all accounts, their marriages too are doing well. The hardest part of my marriage are the times when my husband's solitary and very private nature clash with my extroverted, gregarious nature. The trauma of all the family loss, and the mark of having grown up with a mother more interested in her lovers than her children's emotional growth and development, make me at times  struggle with basic confidence issues, like going where I want to and need to go, and doing what is important to my happiness. Writing has become a way to break through that glass but very thick glass at at that, barrier, that at times saps my strongest resolve, as I feel unworthy, unloved, invisible and defeated. My husband is a very good man, but as a clinical therapist he has a tendency to analyze and categorize me, rather than see me as just a person in need of a helping hand, and a good conversation. I have come to understand over the course of the years that his detachment is his way to have overcome the trauma he suffered growing up with a violent father and a mother who failed to protect her children. He feels he should try to fix me, and cannot, just like he could not protect himself and his younger brother . So, I now know, many years later, that he has little to do with how I feel. Our mother was forever blaming our father for everything, effectively destroying any decent relationship we could have had with our father, and tragically isolating us from him, and him from us. I am responsible for my own feelings, and sorrows, not my husband, and as obvious as that may sound to most of you, it is a revelation to someone like me who grew up with a very manipulative mother who craftily blamed everything on her husband. Marriage is hard, and it takes a lot of work, even after 26 years. But if you have two people who truly care about each other, in spite of profound challenges, it can work, if both people want it to. There are days when I think I'd rather be anything but married. There are days where I feel a deep satisfaction at having persevered, and where the happiness and warmth make all the sacrifice and effort worthwhile. There are many days where it all feels like part of the larger mystery of life, and marriage just happens to be the map I chose to travel the path of my life on. There are days it feels like the best decision I ever made, and there are times when I look at my husband and feel he is going to fry the last nerve I have left. Most of the time, all goes smoothly, but there are certainly always bumps, hurts, challenges, exasperations, ahead that are inevitably mixed in with the love, devotion, humor and tenderness. Twenty six years into it, I would certainly agree, with a benevolent chuckle, that marriage is not for the weak of stomach.