This last week’s session with Dr. Mandolin was the worst on record. It has taken me nearly a week to get it on paper. And that says a lot. I’ve had sessions where I’ve vomited, disassociated, got angry, cried until I couldn’t breathe. But this last one hit a nerve and exposed part of my past that I didn’t fully understand, its significance, and how it impacts me today. It cataclysmically changed my view of Mick, and not for the better. His space in my head has been tenuous for a while and this just made it worse.
Many parents stuck in the mindset of yesteryear will tell you that they didn’t know any better, that children cannot hold them accountable today for decisions made so long ago. They did what they could. I call bullshit. At the end of the day, at the moment of my birth, my parents were obligated to protect me until I could protect myself. Even if that meant protecting me from the other parent. Mick was obligated to protect me from Pearl. Hard stop. And he didn’t. He willfully shirked his responsibilities and blamed his upbringing. “He didn’t know how to handle it all…” Nope, I’m not buying it. He had choices and made the wrong ones at every turn.
Anyway, at the end of our session, Dr. Mandolin told me that I needed to move my body. Emotions would be all pinned up inside me, and that they needed a way out. Movement is relatively new to my mental wellness journey because it has previously caused an elevated heart rate (a completely normal cardiovascular response to exercise), but my mind has misperceived it as panic. So, for years, I’d go on a walk in an attempt to relax and end up with a debilitating panic attack. Then, my brain would connect the panic attack to nice walks outside, too. Go outside with the doggos, throw the ball, and have a panic attack. Anything that sets the heart rate moving causes panic attacks. Seems my brain misreads every single signal. Asshole.
We are past that place now. I think. Or maybe I’m being forced to move through it. Regardless, I’m working to take back that part of my brain that has made my life hell for so long. So, when Dr. Mandolin asked me how I am following rough sessions, I told her that I’m on edge. My nerves are shot. I’m irritable and my whole body shakes. Physically drained. When she asked about the target of my ire, it’s Husband. Always Husband. I don’t get mad at him, per se. I’m irritated and easily annoyed by him. He can’t breathe right.
I think he might be a proxy for Mick.
She told me it is very important for me to have someone to talk to as I move through this process; it’s going to get uglier. Someone I can share my feelings with and just be…me. The thing is, I don’t have a person to fill this role. I guess it’s my keyboard. When I asked her, rhetorically, I think, why it’s not Husband, should it be Husband, and what does it all mean, she replied, “now is not the time to talk about why it’s not your husband.” That was a gut punch. More than 96-hours later, I still feel the gut punch. I know why it’s not him. Ugh.
She pressed again. Who do you have, Stuart?? You cannot go this alone. I told her I had a few friends, but they had big jobs, like hers. An attorney that cannot call out of a deposition or a doctor that can’t put patients on hold. She said, send them a note, and find someone. Anyone. Likely not Husband, though. I could try, lay down a morsel and see how it goes. If I wanted to. But don’t expect much.
I laid on the sofa for three nights numb. Numb over the events of my session, numb over not having a buddy to cry with, and numb that that person never was, and likely never will be, Husband. Numb that I am still alone. After all of these years, I’m still Stuart who hides in my bed at night alone.
To be fair, Husband has his own issues. He’s got his own family drama, sagas, and baggage. I try really hard to give him grace for that. He is, after all, a product of his upbringing, just as I am. While my upbringing was bad in physically torturous ways, his was in emotional and less overt ways. His father worked a ton, not really engaged in any meaningful sense and was, as best as I can tell, absent. When asked, Husband has no significant memories of him. Stories in his family abound about how Husband “drove his father nuts.” Conversely, his mother is a controlling, manipulative, old-school narcissist, who happens to espouse the ideas of the Old South. Husband apparently spent his youth annoying his dad and living in the vice grip of his mother.
She is a self-anointed matriarch who holds the family will over her childrens’ heads because one married a Catholic (Husband married me and converted, on his own accord, I never asked) and the other doesn’t conform to her ideals of appropriate sexuality (Husband’s sibling).
So, it seems Husband’s parents showed him exactly how not to be. For him, the awakening was slow, riddled with questions, and abstruse. He’s coming to terms with it everyday as he actively parents our children and he sees all of the deficiencies of his own upbringing.
My parents showed me exactly how not to be. It was harsh, obvious, and actionable. See the difference?
Husband wanted to get married, not join a partnership. He wanted a wife, not to be a husband. He wanted kids, not to be a father. I do not blame or begrudge him; he had bad examples at home. In a way, Pearl and Mick made my world much more easily actionable; I knew, quite clearly, what not to do. Husband did not. His world was hidden behind the farce of things, and that’s hard to tease out. Especially when you don’t know there is any teasing to do until your kids are in their teens and you are forced to take inventory of the world your children live within.
The real problem is that Husband never showed up for me in any meaningful or substantive way until he knew I was hurt, abused, beaten, and taken advantage of. Husband didn’t see all of the clues and blazing warning signs that anything needed action or TLC. And there were tons of them, for more than two decades. Calls to him from my psychiatrists, my acceptance into a highly selective maternal mental health program (reserved for those with significant illness who are also pregnant). Obvious postpartum depression, twice. Admission to mental health facilities three times. 12 electroconvulsive therapy sessions. The constant onslaught of medications. I was, to him, noise.
His family’s mantra was to sweep everything under the rug and move forward. It seems I was like all the other dust in his world and got under rugged. Again, I do not begrudge him these things. His worldview was shaped by a family that faked it to all while putting on the guise that it was right, correct. The thing to do. In somewhat of a warped sense, my family actually prepared me for this world more than his. We hid nothing. Brushed nothing under a rug. Faced everything head on. True, it was violent, abrasive, bloody, and without regard for the health and well-being of others, but we did it.
He was transactional with me. Neutral. Sufficiently detached. Get one thing done, move on. My issues to him were tasks to be addressed, things to be fixed, distractions to be minimized. At least that’s how it feels to me.
It was only after knowing what had happened to me, at the hands of my parents and their friends, did my suffering and cries for help become attention-worthy. Really attention worthy. Oh shit, Stuart wasn’t kidding. There was absolutely no way he could brush me off, checkbox me.
That is when he showed up. 23 years into our relationship. All of this is to say that 95% of my life has been spent with people that didn’t show up. When I needed them the most. Alone and lonely. Regardless of everyone else’s reasons or motives, it can leave a person feeling pretty crappy. It feels like I had to justify why I needed him to show up. Once he knew the why behind it all, I became worthy. And I’m having a very hard time shaking that.
I cannot remember a time when, in the prior 22 years of marriage, where I could put my issue before him, all fucked up and messy, and feel like I had someone to help me lighten the load. Untangle the mess, help me take out the trash. Maybe I was asking too much, I am not sure.
Granted, I show up for those I love in ways most cannot comprehend or even imagine; I am, after all, a product of my childhood. Husband could literally call me at 3am, tell me to grab a shovel and a garbage bag, and give me an obscure address to be, and I’d come through. Not one question asked. And he knows this. Again, my expectations are skewed by what I lived, but I hail from a world of extremes.
Though, I never expected him to carry me, to placate me, to baby me, to be my savior, to go off and fight my battles for me. What I needed were the things that happen in tender moments between life partners. Seeing tears and not dismissing them. Seeing me crying and just sitting there, silently, present. Realizing that days in pajamas aren’t laziness and a week without showering isn’t healthy. Acknowledging that seeing psychiatrists for decades and the constant roulette of medications wasn’t a farce. Consistent and unrelenting panic attacks aren’t normal and are the sign of something else. An inability to keep food down for weeks on end or leave the house, when combined with all the above, means something is really, really wrong.
I needed Husband to look at my signs of unraveling square in the face and not dismiss them. They were there. I know it. I was sending up smoke signals in the only way I knew how. They may not have been in his language, but fire is fire, I don’t care what language you speak. I needed to be embraced for who I am, the mess that made me who I am. I needed a soft landing spot. He’s never been my soft landing spot. He’s never been my safe.
And I am to blame for that as much as he is. Or maybe my family life is to blame. I couldn’t tell him because I didn’t even understand the complexity, enormity, and ugliness of it all until just recently. So much lost time. And that sucks.
As I jump further into the recesses of my mind, I’m left wondering what having a safe person looks and feels like. Right now, though, today, Husband takes baby steps in his journey as a survivor’s spouse. And that’s hard as hell. But he’s moving in the right direction. It’s just that I’m still alone while he figures himself out.
Despite the ambiguity of it all, the wondering, this process has taught me that love isn’t perfect. In fact, it’s really quite ugly. It is a willfulness to show up for those we choose, everyday, and be their brave and their safe when they need it. Even if we don’t know why or how.
