Life is really complex. I’m not sure I can answer the question weighing most heavily on me and pinpoint any one thing that most influenced the losses I experienced in myself (related to my identity, my energy, my joy, my peace) over the life of my marriage. So I'm going to start with some reflections about the early years of my marriage and even our dating years leading up to the wedding.
I think it all started with the pressures and expectations of adulthood and my first professional job which also happened to coincide with the beginning of my marriage. I graduated from college in May of 2005 and was married just a couple weeks later in early June.
We had been living together for almost two years by then and with student teaching, teaching observations, a first grade program I ran, and my summer job, I had already been dipping my toes into that professional world and all the expectations that come with it. Teachers are often held to a fairly high standard. Middle and high school students can be brutal and I quickly learned their parents can be worse. I was already allowing myself to be conditioned to conform even before I had my teaching license.
It was also a time of high stress - commuting across state lines that final semester, finding a job close enough to where he was already working, getting licensed in another state, and then planning a wedding on top of it.
My first professional job involved teaching classes at both the middle and high schools with class sizes that touched 40 and covered three distinct curriculums. And although I’m sure this is an exaggeration but it felt like every moment I was awake, I had a pile of papers in my lap for correcting, was planning a lesson, or was at or on my way to school. It didn’t help that the Principal made clear he didn’t like me and as a probationary employee, I was dependent on whether or not he renewed my contract each year, something he chose not to do at the end of my third and final probationary year. I was then replaced by a young, stereotypically beautiful, single teacher who was often so late I had to let her students into her classroom at the start of the day, who had lines a mile long of parents with complaints at parent-teacher conferences, and whose students were not prepared for the next level the next year. That really left an impression on me.
So where was my fiancé/husband in all this? He started his first public accounting job in December of 2004 before we got married and so we moved across the state line right before my final semester of college It was clear from the very beginning of his career that he was not cut out for public accounting and that fist firm he was hired with was toxic and unsupportive. It was especially bad during their spring busy season when he had overwhelming billable hour requirements. I remember how my heart went out to him as he came home with the stories and as I witnessed some of it at work events where spouses were invited.
In addition to the stress of his job and his lack of coping skills for that stress, the intrusiveness of his parents on our lives grew after we got married. They were visiting several times a year for longer than a weekend and almost always during the school year (but not during his busy season of course). We even hosted Thanksgiving one year with his parents and his brother and sister-in-law.
I have journal entries that talk about how my ex-husband was so concerned with the house being spotless and elaborate meals planned and prepped for each of their visits. His mom especially was pretty critical and quick to judge. She was always looking for the faults in people. We argued about their visits a lot. I didn't have the energy or the time for that during the school year. I asked for shorter visits. I asked for visits in the summer. I asked for less elaborate meals. I tried to pull back on the amount of cleaning I was willing to help with. But he wasn't willing to set up any boundaries.
So I didn't feel like I was getting support for the stressful start to my career. I was using some of my limited energy to support him in his stressful start to his career which at times was actively working against my own need to take care of myself. And I felt like I was battling his intrusive parents and his unwillingness to set boundaries with them.
It really was a rough start to our marriage. And his avoidance of conflict made it so much harder and we never could seem to finish an argument or resolve anything contentious.
We didn't stay here but it's not because we got better at communication or because his parents became less intrusive. It's because life circumstances changed so we didn't have the added career stress on top of it all. But it set up some dynamics that followed us to the end. And between society's expectations of women and his mom's criticism (and some of the more subtle ways he mimicked her), it made me pull a bit more inward and conform more.
And I think that at least on a subconscious level, the lack of much support from him as I struggled as a new teacher (and the active way he went against what I needed to avoid making waves with his parents) made me realize this was not a man I could turn to for emotional support.
So why was I okay with that? Why did I accept that?
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