MARRIAGE AND MOTHERHOOD

A crisis of identity can naturally occur for the women who choose to make marriage and motherhood their main focus. You learn to put your own needs and desires on hold as you lovingly nurture, tend and protect your children and your husband as best you can. It is very easy to lose contact with the outside world, as I explained in my previous post about midlife crisis.

Losing your own voice is fine for a while. If you’re lucky enough, you slowly re-emerge, blinking and terrified into the light at about the time your children begin to show varying degrees of independence. If you are thrown a hand grenade, as in my case, it can be a different matter. Your world can come crashing down. The foundations of your very existence, the structure that you had so carefully nurtured and built up around you can suddenly turn from solid concrete to something more fluid. Something that makes you feel as if you’re drowning. You can struggle to breath. All that was safe and secure melted around me. I felt naked, exposed, raw on the outside and terrified, desperate on the inside. I had become displaced. As if I had blinked suddenly and found myself in a different life. Everything had changed and nothing had changed. My long imprinted image of all that was familiar became blurred around the edges.

It seems as I sadly watch other people’s lives unravel, that the story of the breakdown of my marriage is depressingly familiar and I behaved in a relatively stereotypical way. I went through the textbook range of emotions: denial, panic, fear, hurt, confusion, jealousy, anger, rage, disgust. Time became suspended and yet rushed passed me at an alarming pace. The hours dragged by, but the months and then years disappeared without me even noticing. For a time I hated everybody that was happy, I couldn’t bear the sound of laughter. I especially hated the school playground. Those formless grey images of other people’s happy families. They were unbearable. Only a few isolated warm red glows emanated from my fog. They were my friends, the ones that knew – looking out for me, keeping me going.

I understand now why I couldn’t see what was blatantly obvious to everybody else. We see what we want to see in life and hear what we are ready to hear and that is how we survive. At the time, when I found out about my husbands affair, I was furious with myself for being so consistently blind. I couldn’t understand how my husband – my best friend, could have betrayed me so cruelly. Or how a man and a woman could eat together, sleep together, live together for so long and yet remain so separate, so far apart. I was confident enough to believe that it would never happen to us. I thought that I knew him. His inner thoughts. I naively trusted that the man who cried as he watched each of his children take their first breath of life loved me too much and valued all that we had created together to ever put it at risk. My self esteem and my confidence plummeted as I struggled to trust my own judgement on absolutely everything.

It is so easy to drift apart in a marriage. To lose sight of each other and yourself. You begin to ooze milk and motherhood instead of sex appeal and it saps your energy and changes your outlook on life. When it all fell apart I panicked. Being on my own was not an option. I wouldn’t be able to cope. My children wouldn’t be able to cope. He stayed in the house and in our bed. We tried everything. Counselling. Endless drinks and dinner together to talk on neutral territory, away from the children. Weekends away. I tried desperately to make sense of it all, to understand, to forgive him. But he had become a stranger to me and I began not only to hate him, but to hate myself. I was alarmed by the constant ugly roar of noise in my head – the sound of my pure unadulterated rage. It would be years before I managed to look at the situation from another perspective. From his perspective.

Sorry…this is all depressing stuff I know, I just feel it necessary to write it down again. Maybe it will help. All that I can remember during that time is friends suggesting practical, helpful things. Speak to the school, find a lawyer, write things down, be kind to yourself, have a massage, go away, get pissed, shag somebody else….I wasn’t listening then. It was too raw. I couldn’t see my way through it. I was in a deep black pit.

Writing everything down helped a lot. I tried to be utterly honest about how I really felt and what I really wanted. If nothing else, it can be interesting to go back to it months later to see how you are progressing. I began to look at ways of clawing back some control. Of ways to start taking some responsibility for my own life instead of feeling like the eternal victim. Until you can take responsibility for your own life you will never know who you are and what you are capable of. I remember drawing up a list. A list of friends I wanted to see, of places I wanted to go, courses I would like to do, jobs I might want to consider. The only thing you can do is be kind to yourself and start learning how to be a little bit selfish. The only way I managed to crawl out of the hole was to start looking at how to slowly begin to find both myself and my self respect.

It proved to be a very long journey…