What has changed is that my husband has sunk into a pit of grief so deep I'm afraid he's never going to come out of it.
I feel as though he and I are just existing, waiting to die.
Although I am middle-aged, I'm finding that I miss the intimacy.
No, no, no. This is all wrong. When I first read your post, I thought you were someone in her seventies. Having never been 50 before, you probably do think you are old. And you are older than you were at 30, or even 49. But trust me, fifty is spring chicken territory. What you are experiencing has to do with learning the survival skills you need to come through this horribly traumatic thing that has happened to you, and to your family.
:O)
One of the most valuable things I ever did was to tell my husband that I needed him. I told him that I was so sorry these terrible things, these terrible, devastating, impossible-to-figure-out losses, had happened, to him, and to us. I told him I needed him to be a man, to be MY man; that I needed him to be the man who made me giddy when I was young, who cherished and protected and made me laugh all through those early days when we were young and foolish and oh, so in love.
For oh, I don't know. A week? A month? Maybe longer? My husband was, like, "Of course I still love you." Or, "I don't know what you're talking about. I'm happy." Stuff like that. And then? One day, when I said again that I was sorry that this had happened to him, when I told him that I needed to hear him say that to me, when I told him that I loved him, that I was so proud of the man he is and was so sorry for his pain...my husband got tears in his eyes. The floodgates opened, and he started to talk about what all this felt like, what it meant, to him.
Shortly after that, and to this very day, my husband tells me, when something very bad has happened again, that he is sorry, so sorry, for my pain.
We can acknowledge that we suffer.
We aren't isolated from one another by our suffering.
We share the shame, the sense of loss, the simple hurt of it all.
You will have to be the judge of how to go about this with your husband. Back when all the badness started for us, I responded by creating a whole different life. There are no two people in all the world more surprised that we did not go ahead and get a divorce than husband and myself. I had been a mom at home. My whole life revolved around my kids and my family. When this happened to us...I don't know how to describe it, really. I felt the failure was mine. PTA, Cub Scout den mother, Brownie and Girl Scout leader, Great Books leader ~ you name it, I was there. Parenting classes? I took them, read the parenting books, fed everyone healthy, home made foods. But somehow, this happened to us, anyway. My failure, right? But here's the thing. In my heart, I secretly blamed husband, too. I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out what I did wrong. So, it had to be something so secret, so awful, some horrible dysfunction that, between the two of us, we were too sick, or too toxic, to see.
SOMETHING was wrong here, right?
The shine was definitely off, in my relationship to husband. Though I went through the motions? He was no longer my hero, my MAN, my protector.
I went back to school. He let me go (and paid for it). Know why? Because, in his secret heart...I wasn't so shiny anymore, either.
That is what happens in our marriages, when we see everything we've created blasted away and we don't understand why.
I've told you what it felt like to be me, as we lost the lives we'd created. But this is what I have learned from husband: Much as I did not feel he was my hero anymore? HE did not feel like a hero. He had not protected, he had not been wise enough to prevent the bad things, had not been smart enough to beat it and to come out on top.
His life, and his self-image, were even more battered than mine.
Secretly, he wondered what had really gone on at home, all those hours he was away, working.
Like me, he felt cheated. He had done all the right things. How did this happen to him, to his life?
I think that maybe, your husband wondered those things, too. If there was no way for him to understand and acknowledge the feelings, he internalized them and started taking them out on himself.
And those are some really powerful feelings.
And men carry them on some sub-verbal level. It's like they don't think about their perceived failures like we do, picking away at them until things make some kind of sense.
Plus, women talk about their feelings. To do that, we have to make some kind of sense of them; men don't do that. If they do, it's more a release of rage or frustration or blame than it is a sincere effort to try to figure it out.
I don't know how anyone else is going to feel about this. But, during the years when we really had so little to do with one another, when the last person either of us wanted anything to do with was the other one, my husband began a new tradition, at our house. Every day, at 5:30, I was to meet him in our own dining room. No television. No phone calls allowed. I could play music. I chose something different than what we listened to any other time.
Know what I picked? Dean Martin.
:O)
And my husband and I, pretty much strangers who disgusted one another because of the suffering and the questions each of us were addressing alone, year after chaotic, horrible year...would have a Manhattan, together.
Every day.
It was the only thing my husband would not let me get out of, during those years.
Every day. 5:30. Happy Hour. Manhattans. Dean Martin. All by ourselves. Those were the rules. Then, we had dinner, and could have the rest of the evening to ourselves.
And it worked. We stayed married, somehow. We got to know one another, trust one another, maybe even laugh, once in awhile. It got to be like, a happy spot, in all the darkness. Sometimes? Those darn Manhattans were so good, and Dean Martin was so romantic? That it got to be pretty hot times, at our lonely little house.
:O)
That was all years ago. I'm making it sound so simple, when it wasn't. We didn't know we would stay together. Suspected we probably wouldn't. Somehow, neither of us wandered away from the marriage. Somehow, there was some little ember somewhere that got us both to try the Happy Hour thing. Before husband came up with that? He would do things like make romantic dinners beside the fireplace. Sweet, huh? It would disgust me. I know. How awful, right?
True, though.
There was just something about the no-expectations of that one or two drinks. Something sort of happy about Dean Martin, and we always put him on, first.
Barbara
I just wanted to clarify that the part about my husband opening up to me (and even, the part about me caring enough about the marriage to keep at it) happened years after the Happy Hour thing. From those private, happy times we created, we took the strength to declare our relationship good even though, somehow, our belief in ourselves, in the family we had created, had turned to dust in our hands. We just picked up from where we were, then. We didn't talk so much about the bad things. It was years later, when our son got into drugs and we lost our dreams for him too, that we were forced to go deeper, to be stronger. Man, when we think about what we've been through, when we think about everything that seemed so right going so wrong, I just can't believe we're still standing. But you know what? We are. And maybe, you can, too. Another thing I thought of after I'd posted this is that men in therapy...I don't know. You said your husband had been in therapy. Mine would never go. I did, though. I was in so much therapy, it isn't even funny. But it never really worked. I think husbands and wives are the only two people who can share and trust one another enough to risk sharing this kind of vulnerability, this kind of pain. You know, that heart-rending kind there isn't anything you can do about. But there is something about the sincerity of the connection between mated couples that enables compassion and healing and acceptance of the other person's value that a therapist could never give you.
I wish you and your husband all good things.
I sincerely believe there is a kind of white magic that can happen, that can somehow come to be, in a marriage.
That would be love, right?
It's still in there, for both of you, or you wouldn't have posted, here.
