November 8, 2009 – my thoughts – my husband didn’t want me to put this on my blog, but I am going to in case it helps anyone else with their own problems. That is why we go through what we do, isn’t it, to share. No one knows who I am, this is anonymous, so from one hurting woman to another, I hope this finds you when you need it.
Love is a concept, as much as a feeling. How I define it and what I expect from it mirrors the way my parents treated me and each other. Therefore, it is important for me and others to understand how these relationships affected me while growing up. My model was dysfunctional, so I was attracted to a partner who seemed different than my parents, but I believe has ended up reminding me and treating me in the same stunted, yet familiar way, reopening the wounds of my past. I believe I have resented my husband for quite some time (unconsciously) for failing to give me what I never got as a child. After 13 years of marriage, I went elsewhere to try and get these needs met, trusting someone I hardly knew. I attributed the way I felt with this other person as a marvelous passion, the power of healing, and experienced myself as never before. I believed this person could give me the sense of self, the love I’ve craved all my life. My affair reawakened me to the positive qualities in myself that were being deprived in my existing marriage, giving me new confidence and awakening my desire to confront my doubts, my fears, beginning with my childhood, to overcome them.
I don’t want another edition of my relationship with my mom and dad as an adolescent. I don’t want a man who is dependent on me. I want a lover and a husband. I no longer am afraid. I don’t want to be seen only as a caregiver. Children from dysfunctional families take longer to grow up. My adolescence was protracted and my entry into adulthood delayed. I have needed more time to grow up – more time to let go of my past and create a mental model for where I am headed, carving my own way. My adolescence looked like I might have been on the fast track to adulthood, getting trapped into an adolescent culture at an early age – sex, drugs, alcohol – all to find acceptance. My independence and pride in my ability to advise my parents and take care of others masked my pain. From a young age, I was more anxious and uncomfortable with the opposite sex – it was much harder to build relationships, as my feelings of vulnerability, bewilderment and loneliness allowed me to get involved with others, in a shadow play involving sex without love. When I think back to my childhood, the one emotion that pops into my head first is that of loneliness – not feeling like I had anyone to talk to, no one interested in me, no one who cared. No wonder I hated middle school and high school. So I did the only thing I knew how to protect myself and retreated into my shell, becoming overly shy, thinking something was wrong with me, wondering why no one cared or liked me. I remember wanting to make my parents happy, something I still strive to do, wanting their approval, their love more than anything. I remember being alone and feeling alone. I remember more moments of awkwardness with my parents, due to their strained relationship, than feelings of togetherness. I always felt sorry for my mother – despite her drinking and depression, she seemed to be under the constant wrath of my father, with money issues and control being the top of the heap. They would throw around the possibility of divorce, the unhappiness thrust upon us even if they didn’t realize it. My dad has always been overly critical of me- very strict, overbearing, controlling as a child, until I rebelled and didn’t care what he thought. He didn’t take time getting to know me. Our relationship today is much better, but there is still a great divide in the same area. My mother spent her days doing her things, enjoying her solitude, buying all of us anything we wanted as her way of trying to make us happy with stuff. All I ever wanted was her attention, her interest in me, but I would take anything I could get. To this day, I still go to her for things for myself and my kids – I now realize this is just an attempt for connection with her, as I still don’t have the relationship with her today that I wanted as a child.
I knew my parents had infidelities (well, I knew my dad did). His infidelity has followed him throughout his life. I am not sure why my parents have stayed together. I wish they hadn’t at times. My mothers’ alcoholism created an ever widening hole in me, unable to be filled by her inability to be a mother to me, the type of mother who cared about how I felt on the inside and wanted to connect deeply with her daughter. Even after she become sober and began her work as a pastor, I thought our relationship would take on a different meaning, that she would understand how important it was for me to have her stay involved and connected in my life – not just with a once a week phone call, but with an everyday, how are you honey relationship. Did she not know how much I needed her, need her? I know I had told her. But, her job pulls her away from the ability to give this to me. I do understand my mother, which is why it is easy not to blame her. I appreciate her and empathize with her struggles. But, I find that I am still playing the role of caretaker, craving her to reciprocate in all ways except material. I remember too many nights, sitting at the top of the stairs listening to my mother cry, my parents fighting, just wanting to console my mother, scream at my father and go away – but having nowhere to go.
There was very little talking about feelings when I was growing up. Things were discussed on a surface level only. I grew up with my basic needs taken care of, but not my inner most being. I have followed in my mother’s footsteps and was diagnosed with depression during my teen years. Currently, I struggle with a mood disorder, depression and anxiety. Instead of getting the loving nurturance I needed and still need from my parents, I remember great turmoil in our family and never wanted to really rock the boat. Finally, when I did, it was very destructive.
As a teenager, I voluntarily moved into the role of caregiver to fill the vacuum created by my parent’s emotional collapse. I would be whatever I needed to be. My sense of pride came from the feelings that I was patching things up, trying to maintain the peace in my family – outside of my family, I would try to please others by going along with destructive things like sex, drugs and alcohol. I was well-suited for thins caretaking role, but I quickly learned to keep my own feelings under tight control. When they did erupt, it was not pretty. When my mother would cry or my dad would withdraw, I would feel a sense of responsibility. My capacity to enjoy life as a young person, develop close friendships and cultivate shared interests was sacrificed for responsibility. Because of this, my own needs and wishes made me feel guilty and undeserving – how could I think about me in a time like this? With no one to confide in, I was overburdened, inhibited to leave home emotionally or to follow my heart in love. I am coming to understand that this has led to serious, long-term consequences for my life.
Even though my parents didn’t divorce, their marriage didn’t work – they weren’t content and therefore our relationship was not nourished – because my parents didn’t have or show the love and appreciation for each other, they took on living and building separate lives within their marriage, furthering the distance, the gap between us.
Fast forward to college – a time of continued uncertainty, feelings of continual low self-esteem, low self worth, no friends, continued depression and deep sadness and loneliness. It was here that I met my husband. We slept together the first night we met – we knew each other in high school, but hadn’t kept in contact. Sleeping with him was my way of trying to capture my prey, making sure they wouldn’t leave me. We were not friends before we slept together, so why did I put this pressure on him? First, I knew he wouldn’t refuse such an offer – he had had a crush on me since high school. Second, I thought he would like me more – pretty pathetic, huh, but acceptance and security were driving me and I didn’t even know it.
I knew my husband came from a divorced family with lots of troubles. I felt sorry for him and went out of my way during our four years of college dating to shower him with gifts, etc. – trying to give him the things he missed out on when he was younger, trying to make him feel happy. I wouldn’t say that my husband and I ever really spent time doing things together besides hanging out at his fraternity, my apartment or coming home for the weekends. We didn’t go on trips, try to figure out what made the other tick, what excited each other, what we had in common. At the time, I didn’t care about any of this. All I cared abut was not being alone and I felt that He would never leave me. This was during the time I was only 18-21 years old, getting married at 22 years of age.
Looking back I see the start of my relationship riddled with fear, trying to build a relationship on such fragile foundations. My role of rescuer and caregiver became my top priority with Him, unaware at the time of my own needs and desires. I don’t ever remember thinking “What would make Maggie happy?” I was always too worried about making other’s happy, esp. a man who needed rescuing, or so I wanted to believe. I’m sure my feelings of needing to be loved were also full of fear of being hurt and rejected – memories of lonely years in my childhood. I now see that I was trapped between the wish for love and the fear of loss. This fear and loneliness has led, I believe, to a hasty marriage and a subsequent affair after 13 years of marriage. The psychological scaffolding I needed to construct a happy marriage was badly damaged during my childhood by two people who I depended on while growing up.
Taking care of a husband and four kids, while at the same time trying to please my parents, make them proud of me, has been all I’ve known how to do in my life.
I don’t feel like I can keep going like this or want to. What awakened this feeling inside me? I do believe it was my affair. And I believe if My husband and I don’t come to terms with and understand myself and my needs more fully, I will go down that path again.
The big question is what am I so unhappy, disconnected, detattached from? I hope from reading this it is easy to figure out. But, in case it is still not plain as day, I will explain it further. The first has been that I haven’t even understood myself, my true feelings, and my true self that emerged after my affair. And with that, a frightening realization that I have been trapped for so long inside of myself. This doesn’t mean that I didn’t experience happiness and joy and attachment during the last 13 years of marriage. It, by no means, discounts all of those wonderful times. But, it does bring to the forefront what I have been craving my entire life and something I no longer or can ignore.
So, I find myself asking: If, after 13 years of marriage, my partner doesn’t know this about me, why not? Was he not interested in trying to figure me out? Why didn’t he want to get to know me more deeply earlier on? Am I the person he married? He doesn’t even know the real me. Just as my parents, we have taken on living lives that are parallel to one another, masking realities with staying busy, kids, activities and pushing aside what was missing – true, meaningful connection.
For the first time in my life, I am not scared to scream out:
“I want to be understood, I want to be first, I want to be adored and given as much attention to my heart and soul as I’ve given to others over the years, I want to experience the deep and intense connection men and women are meant to share together. I am not afraid anymore.”
