The first three years of our marriage are a blur to me. I was a teacher spending 60 hours a week at school plus countless hours at home. I was so stressed as my class sizes were too big, the subjects I taught covered too many levels, and there is a steep learning curve in teaching. I also had a principal who didn't like me from the very start and so as I got closer to tenure, the stress escalated.
About 1.5-2 years in I also faced medical problems that affected our sex life and caused me a lot of pain.
I remember my ex-husband being so stressed himself as he worked way too many hours in jobs that he didn't like and had no self-confidence that he could do.
So when my ex-husband referred to things going back to those first years, I honestly just had to take his word for it as I didn't remember well. His biggest accusation was how often I gave him the silent treatment.
Well today I was reminded of an online journal site that I used to be very active on so I went to see if my account still exists (it does!) and recovered my password so I could get into it. And then I disappeared into a rabbit hole of reading posts. The last posts I made on that website were in 2010 and it looks like I started in 2001. I started with the most recent and went backwards to the months leading up to our wedding.
There are two different dynamics with my ex-husband that I described in posts. The first was actually of my ex giving me the silent treatment when he didn't want to talk about the conflict we had about his parents over-involvement. I knew this was a recurring argument for us but I didn't realize it went back so far in our marriage. And I had forgotten the way he would give me the silent treatment instead of trying to talk through the issue. We never even came close to resolving that issue because he wouldn't listen to how it affected me or work towards something that could work for both of us.
The second dynamic that I described in that online journal is how on days when I asked him to give me a little space to myself to decompress, he would follow me around our home demanding to talk. In one post, I even went so far as to go into the computer room and close the door, something I write that I don't typically do and he still opened the door to come in and talk to me.
I didn't write so much about my own behavior so I can't say for sure how I reacted or how I contributed to the problems. I doubt I handled it all well. I was new to marriage and new to this kind of dynamic - this is nothing I witnessed growing up. And I was under a lot of stress. But it makes me question the amount of guilt I have felt and concern that I treated him so poorly in those early years.
My posts during these three years also had a lot of references to depression and being worried I was falling back into a depression. The stress of teaching, medical issues, and marital conflict really took its toll on me.
It's interesting what he takes from that time period and how much he held onto how he perceives that time period and how I just put it out of my mind. I think he hung on to his negative perceptions from those three years and let them color how he saw me for the rest of the marriage. And I forgot those years and so they couldn't color how I saw him the rest of our marriage.
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