My Husband Got Sick and I Cannot Feel Anything (Part 1)

I think it will require a few postings to empty myself of all this sadness.  So in my fuzzy-brained state, I am trying to measure just how depressed I am and all I can come up with is more than usual.  A lot more than usual.  And I know exactly what got me here, but I cannot tell how deep into the sadness I am.  So I’ve called this posting Part 1 because I’m pretty sure they’ll at least be a Part 2.  And maybe more

I wrote in prior posts that my husband has had to put up with a lot being married to me with all my mental health crap.  But it was a give and a take and I’ve carried my share of the burdens of building this family despite all of that.  It was a good partnership overall.  Not perfect, nothing is.  But good.  And the kids are healthy and happy and decent people.  So it seemed good.  But something happened last year.  I know in hindsight now he was probably starting to become ill, but I didn’t know then that his surly disposition and nasty temper were symptoms of anything but him being tired of me.  And so that’s what I convinced myself of and once that happens, well then things really start to disintegrate.  The respect, the caring, the sharing and then even the love are just so easy to toss over the side of the sinking ship.  Almost 17 years of marriage and in 9 months it appears to have gone to shit.  That’s all it took.

In January he started falling down from dizziness.  It took weeks to figure out he needed a triple bypass and now he’s been home recuperating for the last two months.  And the last thing we needed was to be thrown together 24/7 when we were already not getting along.  And I could be wrong.  Maybe he did just tire of being married to me.  And then I got ticked and made myself feel nothing for him.  But he did start it.  Before we learned he was ill, he said the meanest things he’d ever said to me in the 20 years I know him.  It could have all been the disease, or he could just not like me anymore.  But I cannot forget the words he said.  I’m not sure if I’ve forgiven him, but I cannot forget. Never.  Because he knows that as a Mom with Depression and PTSD from a messed up childhood, I have a few achilles heels.  There are things he knows he can’t say, yet he said them…

He told me I was being a bad mother for spending too much time in bed.  He said I was harsh and overly critical to the children.  He said I was cold.  He said I was turning into my mother.  Now I know these are things that would greatly piss off any woman, but with me he would’ve been better off shooting me that saying those words.  Those words are burned into my skin like a brand.  I can’t shake them.  And I cannot stop thinking about them every time he is here with me and the kids.  I have started to resent him watching me or trying to take over the parenting.  I am always certain he’s judging me.  And this is after only years of praise.  He never said anything unkind like this before. He was so supportive.  But then he did become unkind and at first I became despondent….and he got so mad.  At me!  Because I was making him feel bad for hurting me.  Then I got angry and he stormed out.  He told me I was being too dramatic.  Then I grew silent and he said I was being spiteful.  And this cycle of my behaving and his responding has been going on like this for months.  I am no longer allowed to have any of my feelings because they are wrong.  By his judgment they are wrong so I just have to shut up and have no feelings.

And that’s why I broke.  The spell broke.  The notion that we would be together for the rest of our days started to appear unlikely.  From certain to unlikely in just months.  And it’s gotten worse after his surgery.  We sit here for hours on end not speaking to one another because I don’t want to have any feelings.  I don’t want to give him the satisfaction.  And I don’t know what at all to do.  I am so lost.

I have no people.

 

Lonely.  I have never felt this lonely.  And scared because people who feel like this usually do stupid things.  I used to do super self-destructive things when I was anxious or depressed.  It’s amazing I’ve survived this long.  You know, drinking ’til you blackout…going home with a stranger you just met…driving drunk.  I guess I have had my share of “get out of jail free” cards.  I don’t think I deserve them but nonetheless I am still breathing.  But I’ve never felt so isolated while having these other feelings.  I want to do something stupid.  I want to get out of this house, maybe just book a trip somewhere and disappear.  Drink myself into a stupor or worse.  But I can’t.  I can’t do that anymore because I’m a Mom.  I have to keep all of this bottled up inside and pretend I’m normal today.  It’s been going on for awhile but especially today.  And I can let it show.

But it must show, right?  Like cracks in the surface of my being where the reality just seeps out.  Like my spirit itself is shattering my body in order to escape?  It feels like that.  Like I will explode.  And I realized I have no one to talk to about it except my Doctors.  That’s it. The only people who I can tell how I feel are those whom I pay to do so.  And that is sad.

I keep thinking about Grey’s Anatomy.  Meredith.  If you are a fan, you’ll understand this. I’m like the “dark and twisty”  Meredith who is sinking into the icy water and not caring. No instinct to fight back.  Just allowing the water to slowly do its job.  I always loved the dark Meredith because she felt like me.   But as they always say on Grey’s, despite all their crazy, they have “people.”  They have their people.  And some people or even one, is better than no people.  I have no people.  My mother is a crazy narcissist and my sister’s life is a disaster.  I actually have to avoid them or I get worse.  My best friend lives so far away and works like 100 hours a week so I never even see her anymore.  The one close friend I had in this town turned out to be a Bible thumping hypocrite and tale teller.  She told my secrets to other people.  Not my people.

That leaves my husband.  I mean I can’t tell my kids I’m falling apart because I have no one to talk to.  They’d freak.  They cannot be my people.  But my husband.  I can’t talk to him anymore.  Our relationship is an emotional black hole.  The last time I confessed my anxiety to him he threatened to quit his job and stay home and take care of the family since I was incapable.  And he didn’t care if we lost the house because of it.  Which frankly is emotional blackmail because now…no matter what happens, I can never tell him about my sadness or my anxiety  or my panic attacks.  That jackass shut me up but good.  I’m sitting here today  because my PTSD made it so I couldn’t work anymore. Not at what I was doing.  Too much stress.  But now because I can’t work, I can’t leave.  I’m stuck here.  I’m trapped.  I have nowhere to go and no one to tell.  Except this page.  I write these words to get some of the sad and lonely bits out before my kids get home from school.

Maybe somebody reading this will be one of my people.  I can hope anyway.

 

P.S.  All credit to anything I cribbed from Shonda Rhimes.  I wish I could live in Shondaland.  I feel like she could’ve been one of my people.

The Mansplainers Need to Stop Telling Me to Calm Down

I’m not going to lie.  I’ve been down.  Seriously rocked over what happened these past weeks.  I took cover the day the FBI reopened the email bulls*&t and I stayed down for a while.  I hid from all news sources for two days post-election because I couldn’t stand the sound of “his” voice, gloating and threatening and making my skin crawl.  Then I read a few headlines…but still remained off social media.  I knew the haters were hating and the trollers, trolling and the spewers of filth loving it up. And I knew I couldn’t handle it. As a victim of sexual assault I cannot properly adjust my working view of this country. It does not compute. We just elected the most unqualified person ever to the Whitehouse.   But that is not the real problem for me. For me, he is a vile misogynist, who from his own lips admitted to assaulting women and who simply does not deserve to be anything but arrested. And when the women came forward to tell their stories, he tortured them. He accused them. He called them ugly liars.

For probably a week after Election Day, PTSD was still controlling my life. But because my freaking husband can’t deal with me not dealing with the world, I have to get up and get moving. He actually threatened to quit his job to stay home with me if I didn’t “get over it.” He didn’t vote for the new Grabber in Chief. But he just doesn’t think my stress over the election is warranted. Great. My own husband, my “protector” has decided how I should deal with my fear and grief over this horror show. So I’m shaking, but I’m standing. Because now I know I can’t count on anyone to protect me.   I have to get my act together and get past the debilitating fear. Drugs, biofeedback, therapy, yoga…I’m using all the tools I can find because one thing that’s happened concurrent to all of this is now I’m PISSED OFF. And that is motivating.

The anger at having my feelings dismissed in such a way is pushing me up and out of my house. I don’t know if my husband realized how much his words hurt me or how truly angry with him I am, but he sure has gotten me up. First I got into my regular routine for a few days and now into writing for the first time in weeks or maybe it’s been months, I’m not even sure. I even went on my social media accounts. And I saw all the friends out there still fighting the inevitable. Still hammering away at people for choosing a truly hateful and detestable man to lead us. But that was not all I saw. I saw the mansplaining. I saw the disgruntled white men who voted for that man, all over social media telling us (in my case victims of sexual assault, but also all the other minorities our president-elect* has abused over the last months) we need to “calm down now.” The election’s over and we need to settle down and accept the results. Kind of like what my husband said, but this time mansplaining Trump to me. And they’re telling us why, no matter what, he’s better than HER. No, NO he isn’t. HE IS WORSE IN EVERY POSSIBLE WAY, so stop telling me how I should freaking feel about it.

I’ve unfriended almost every single one of them. I actually told one of them first that he was a freaking lunatic (after he called HER the devil incarnate) and then I unfriended him. And now I WON’T CALM DOWN. I think I like being pissed off instead of scared all the time. The fear is exhausting. The anger is exhilarating and motivating. I’ve decided to start school again in the fall. I’m going to finish my degree in counseling and work with trauma survivors. Something tells me they’re going to need a lot of help the next few years. I will not allow myself to be a victim anymore. My husband is not happy with me right now. I hope we survive this. But he just doesn’t get it anymore. That’s the really awful part. He will never get it.

*Quick note:  I disrespectfully refuse to use the capitalized version of the word president, or any of its derivations when it references this person.  It’s still frigging America.

 

My 4th of July Fireworks Began Days Ago

My Mother is coming…

This is so typical.  Because of my depression and PTSD, I often experience unexplained physical pain.  This runs the gamut from your average nagging headache to the most incredible migraines as well as Fibromyalgia.  That’s always fun because I never know where it’s going to hit me or what part of my body might become incapacitated for hours or even days.  And most times it comes out of left field, or at least I thought it did.  It is likely my fight or flight response, which has a mind of its own and reacts to perceived threats of which my higher order brain isn’t even aware.  And that definitely happened this week.

We’ve been planning for months now our families annual 4th of July party for this Saturday the 2nd.  The party moves around and this year I’m hosting.  It’s a lot for me to take on..20 or so adults and about 18 kids.  I must feed and entertain them all Saturday and in the meantime I can barely make dinner during the week.  But I’m pushing through because that is what we do!  On Tuesday though, I started feeling it.  I couldn’t turn my head from neck pain and I started having a headache that right up until this moment feels like it is blinding me in my left eye.  I couldn’t keep dinner down two of the last few nights and just wanted sleep more than anything else.  I couldn’t understand why though.  My husband is doing a ton to help and this year we are making everyone bring a dish of food or desert.  So I have some work to do but it’s certainly not overwhelming.

Given all this, I went to my Doctor to discuss it and of course she worked it out.  She just looked at me knowingly and said, “But…your Mother is coming, isn’t she?”  Oh Dear God, Yes, my Mother is coming.  She’s coming today in fact.  She’s coming a day early to “HELP” me.  She’s helping me so much I can’t get out of bed.

My Mother is a/the trigger for my PTSD.  She is only “a” trigger because there are others.  She is “the” trigger because she and my Dad were the original triggers (he is gone now).  And because she will not accept this fact or change her behavior at all, she continues to be that trigger.  I cannot be in her presence for very long before she says something that, maybe to the outsider might sound innocuous, but to the child in my head is defeating, dismissive…even soul-crushing.  My mantra is “Your mother cannot love you, but it isn’t your fault.”  That helps.  I tried visualizing with my therapist what my Mother might say today or tomorrow that could make me fall apart.  We visualized the words just bouncing off me or running right through me with no effect.  It was great for a bit…and then I saw this look on Mother’s face in my mind’s eye.  It was a look she uses often to express her utter contempt.  A look of disgust and total disappointment.  It blew through all my imagined protections and immediately withered my spirit.  My therapist said it was the shame I carry because my Mother couldn’t love me.  I’m still blaming myself.  That is truth.  That is the ugly truth.

But it’s worse that that.  I broke into tears because I know I have used that same look with my children.  I didn’t even realize it until that moment in my Doctor’s.  All these years of therapy and all these years of swearing I’d never be like my Mother.  All these years of doing everything I possibly could to NOT be my Mother and I knew it in an instant.  I use that same look to shame my kids.  And the self-loathing was so overwhelming for a few moments that I couldn’t breathe.  I was literally swallowed by such guilt and shame I could not breathe.

My Doctor said that in the course of 3 minutes we went from what my Mother does that makes me feel depressed to beating myself up again and that I cannot keep doing that.  Easy for her to say.  I said I had to immediately start watching my every word and now my every gesture with the children…they deserve better.  The Doc said, first you have to get past this weekend with your mother.  One step at a time.  Maybe her train will break down and she won’t make it??? I couldn’t be so lucky.  Nope, I’m going to have to deal with her.  I can’t cut her off…the rest of my family would be horrified.  They don’t know, nor could I ever explain how awful she can be.  She manipulates everyone who didn’t live in our house when I was growing up.  So to keep relationships with them, I have to keep her too.  But God knows I could live a much longer, much more peaceful life if I didn’t have to deal with this.  Sick for three days before and probably a week after.  I have to get away and meditate or pray or something while she’s here.  That or they’ll be way too many cocktails in my immediate future.  If you’re read this and you pray…say one for me.   Or just send me some good thoughts.  I need all I can get.