Truthful Tuesday: When I knew it was time to get help
I like to spend time in the state of denial. I like to find other things to blame how I am feeling, saying I'm homesick, that I miss my friends, my family, I need a break from life, that work is stressing me out. I do, I spend a lot of time in denial, not wanting or not able to address the elephant in the room.
By now we are in the Christmas Season, by now we are getting to the most wonderful time of the year, and yet my Christmas spirit this year was at an all time low. We do Elf on the Self with our kids, and I just didn't care. All I wanted was to plan to go to Saskatchewan for part of the Christmas break and have my husband fly out to meet us for New Years.
Then our puppy Sasha had to go to the vet, she fell down one morning and wouldn't get up, it was extremely scary. My husband likes to live in denial about our pets and will often say that we have a lifetime warranty with them, I know it's a joke, but Sasha is nine this year and she's getting to her top age. All around me my friends are having to say good bye to their dear pets and I know how they feel it's terribly sad. So we took Sasha to the vet and $300 later we find out that she has torn her, what is equivalent to her, ACL and would need surgery to fix it, that surgery is $5000, and she also has a tumour on her belly. Growing old is the worst!!
So then my husband told me he didn't think he could fly to Saskatchewan to meet us for New Years. I was pissed, I felt like whenever I made plans to see my family who lives further away, my husband would always try to find away out of it. In reality, and hindsight, this isn't exactly true, but I was so angry. I then figured out that we could just go do Christmas in Saskatchewan, where we would all drive there and then drive home on Boxing Day. See I was still in denial about what I was missing, I really felt it was seeing my family and friends in Saskatchewan that was creating a gaping hole in my soul. So when my husband waits until 2 weeks before to tell me going to Saskatchewan isn't going to work I was pissed. But I was willing to compromise.
We had a fight, I told him how it makes me so mad that we always go to his family functions as a unit, but often when we go to my family things it's me and the boys and he will only sometimes join us. Sometimes this makes sense, I have similar holidays with the boys, I enjoy just going to Saskatchewan for quick trips and it's easy with the school holidays, my husband doesn't have these same holidays. But it irked me that he wouldn't even come with us to my brothers house, that he would drive himself later, stay for supper then leave right away. For me that was sending a non verbal message to our boys that his family was the "Family" and my family was the other family, the not as important because it wasn't important to both of us, only to me.
Whether this was true or not, and whether my husband realized it or not are secondary points because this was how I was feeling. My husband does not engage with me when we have arguments, he more often than not gets quiet and turns in to himself and we don't have dialogues, but at this time I was not playing this game, so I kept at him and kept hammering at him to talk to me. This was the first time I had the thought my marriage is over. Not in trouble but over and that's when I made my first call for help.
I decided I needed someone impartial to talk to, someone who could give me strategies, books ideas on how to control my out of control thoughts and feelings while I made an attempt to work with my husband to save our marriage. My problem was my husband did not want to go to Counselling so I would have to go on my own, whenever I asked him about it, he shut it down, he had to "think" about it but he'd never give me an answer and I got tired of nagging him.
Then Christmas came and this was before my first counselling appointment, and it was my clear, undeniable sign that I was fighting a mild depression. Everyone in my family got sick at Christmas, myself included, so it meant that we weren't going to Saskatchewan. I cried so much that day and I couldn't even reason with myself. I tried, I really tried to put on a happy face for the kids, but I was so disconnected and sad that I was thankful I had counselling because I couldn't live like this.
Work was sucking and so much harder than it had ever been, I had zero patience with my kids, I had no tolerance for setbacks and I felt like my husband would not listen to me about the importance of my family and him taking a more active role in that family. So Christmas I stayed home, I didn't go to my in laws, honestly I wasn't feeling well and I didn't want to spread my germs, but I was also just too sad to spend time with anyone that wasn't my mom or sister.
It was also that fear that my marriage was over, or at least really far into non -existence that big changes could be on the horizon depending on choices that would be made in the near future. And it was like our marriage was dying from a silent killer, because we didn't fight with screaming matches and there was never any physical abuse. But Silence became our killer, because we didn't talk and we became disengaged with each other.
So that's where I was at Christmas and New Years. All I knew is that I didn't want to spend New Years without my husband again, because I wanted us to at least try to make things work, we had to try to get back to where we were but at this point I had no idea how we would do this.
Thanks for reading!! Love to you all!
By now we are in the Christmas Season, by now we are getting to the most wonderful time of the year, and yet my Christmas spirit this year was at an all time low. We do Elf on the Self with our kids, and I just didn't care. All I wanted was to plan to go to Saskatchewan for part of the Christmas break and have my husband fly out to meet us for New Years.
Then our puppy Sasha had to go to the vet, she fell down one morning and wouldn't get up, it was extremely scary. My husband likes to live in denial about our pets and will often say that we have a lifetime warranty with them, I know it's a joke, but Sasha is nine this year and she's getting to her top age. All around me my friends are having to say good bye to their dear pets and I know how they feel it's terribly sad. So we took Sasha to the vet and $300 later we find out that she has torn her, what is equivalent to her, ACL and would need surgery to fix it, that surgery is $5000, and she also has a tumour on her belly. Growing old is the worst!!
So then my husband told me he didn't think he could fly to Saskatchewan to meet us for New Years. I was pissed, I felt like whenever I made plans to see my family who lives further away, my husband would always try to find away out of it. In reality, and hindsight, this isn't exactly true, but I was so angry. I then figured out that we could just go do Christmas in Saskatchewan, where we would all drive there and then drive home on Boxing Day. See I was still in denial about what I was missing, I really felt it was seeing my family and friends in Saskatchewan that was creating a gaping hole in my soul. So when my husband waits until 2 weeks before to tell me going to Saskatchewan isn't going to work I was pissed. But I was willing to compromise.
We had a fight, I told him how it makes me so mad that we always go to his family functions as a unit, but often when we go to my family things it's me and the boys and he will only sometimes join us. Sometimes this makes sense, I have similar holidays with the boys, I enjoy just going to Saskatchewan for quick trips and it's easy with the school holidays, my husband doesn't have these same holidays. But it irked me that he wouldn't even come with us to my brothers house, that he would drive himself later, stay for supper then leave right away. For me that was sending a non verbal message to our boys that his family was the "Family" and my family was the other family, the not as important because it wasn't important to both of us, only to me.
Whether this was true or not, and whether my husband realized it or not are secondary points because this was how I was feeling. My husband does not engage with me when we have arguments, he more often than not gets quiet and turns in to himself and we don't have dialogues, but at this time I was not playing this game, so I kept at him and kept hammering at him to talk to me. This was the first time I had the thought my marriage is over. Not in trouble but over and that's when I made my first call for help.
I decided I needed someone impartial to talk to, someone who could give me strategies, books ideas on how to control my out of control thoughts and feelings while I made an attempt to work with my husband to save our marriage. My problem was my husband did not want to go to Counselling so I would have to go on my own, whenever I asked him about it, he shut it down, he had to "think" about it but he'd never give me an answer and I got tired of nagging him.
Then Christmas came and this was before my first counselling appointment, and it was my clear, undeniable sign that I was fighting a mild depression. Everyone in my family got sick at Christmas, myself included, so it meant that we weren't going to Saskatchewan. I cried so much that day and I couldn't even reason with myself. I tried, I really tried to put on a happy face for the kids, but I was so disconnected and sad that I was thankful I had counselling because I couldn't live like this.
Work was sucking and so much harder than it had ever been, I had zero patience with my kids, I had no tolerance for setbacks and I felt like my husband would not listen to me about the importance of my family and him taking a more active role in that family. So Christmas I stayed home, I didn't go to my in laws, honestly I wasn't feeling well and I didn't want to spread my germs, but I was also just too sad to spend time with anyone that wasn't my mom or sister.
It was also that fear that my marriage was over, or at least really far into non -existence that big changes could be on the horizon depending on choices that would be made in the near future. And it was like our marriage was dying from a silent killer, because we didn't fight with screaming matches and there was never any physical abuse. But Silence became our killer, because we didn't talk and we became disengaged with each other.
So that's where I was at Christmas and New Years. All I knew is that I didn't want to spend New Years without my husband again, because I wanted us to at least try to make things work, we had to try to get back to where we were but at this point I had no idea how we would do this.
Thanks for reading!! Love to you all!
Comments
Post a Comment