Une Vie

Exhausted

It's been longer than I've wanted to go between posts. I am exhausted: emotionally, physically, mentally. My husband has no clue about the divorce but it is obvious that there is tension since we don't talk to each other for anything. In fact, the only communication we have is his going around the apartment laughing at me, mocking me, fake crying and telling me I'm a victim. Or, his new favorite is to come up to my face and say "BOO" and jiggle his hands in front of me like spiders. He also follows me around, will not leave me alone. I don't react. My face stays like stone. Today he randomly told me, "You know why I laugh at you? Because you take yourself so seriously and are playacting." Then he went on to tell me that he really doesn't know what's going on with me, why I'm acting so serious and hurt. Well, he'll find out soon enough...

 

One of the biggest challenges is dealing with a divorce and keeping up a front for the family. This past weekend my husband went to our country house and I kept the kids at our city apartment so that we could go to my youngest daughter's birthday party organized by family (my husband is clearly not invited because of his outburst on NYE towards his cousin). It was wonderful to have a break from the tension he creates during the week, but I felt overwhelmed with wanting to spend time with the kids to having all my thoughts towards the divorce and keeping up with the daily tasks of laundry, cooking etc... Already, I don't have time for those, add a divorce in there and wow, it's exhausting. I really hope the kids had a good weekend. We had lots of outings, but I still didn't feel like supermom since my mind was elsewhere.

 

I don't know how our weekends are going to look from now on... It's been 3 weeks since I've been to our country home and honestly, I don't want to go there if he's going to be there. Do I tell him to take the kids next weekend? Do I offer to go with the kids but not him? We had a family vacation planned at the end of the month in another country. I have  decided not to go and also decided to keep our 3 year old at home with me, only letting him take the two oldest. I don't want it this way, but I also don't want to keep my two oldest from going on vacation.

My husband says that I'm creating how things are now and that I just need to snap out of my mood. What mood? Isn't the one who has been mistreating me over all these years? And I'm just expected to accept that behavior?

 

I did go and speak with an attorney on Friday. I liked her, mostly, but there were a few areas where I had some question marks. She will defend my case, no doubt. However, I didn't feel that I had expressed myself as well as I would have liked on the verbal abuse front. So, I don't feel like she felt that was a huge part of my case. I am going to try out another lawyer and see what kind of feeling I get from her as well.

 

After my decision, I'll turn in all the papers, 3 weeks later my husband will get the divorce papers in the mail. About 3 months from now, there will be a temporary hearing to see where the children will temporarily live, who gets to stay in the apartment, etc... Then, the real divorce proceedings will happen within 2 years or more, depending on my husband's agreement. What am I hoping for? I'm hoping he'll see that the divorce will happen no matter what so that it's really stupid to drag it out. I'm hoping the kids will be able to live with me and we'll be able to split vacations/weekends. I'm hoping for child support and a small amount in damages to at least cover the student loan money my husband used to by himself electronics. And most of all, I'm hoping that his family will understand my decision.

 

 

The Most Difficult Decision

Yesterday, I made the decision to file for divorce. This was probably the most difficult decision I've had to make in my life.

 

I had putting off seeing a lawyer, the financial hurdles covering up for the real hurdle: going to a lawyer would be almost admitting to the direction my life is about to take. So, as a first step, I went to see a social worker at our local town hall. One thing about being in a situation like mine is that you don't really realize there is something unnaturally wrong and when you do, like I did last August, and I decided to 'come out' (even though my voice has been trying to surface for years), the person who is hurting you does everything in their power to convince you that YOU are the problem, that YOU don't know yourself and that HE knows you and if you just listen to him, he'll get you out of your hysterical fits and back into reality. It's even harder when I hear him telling his family that I am purposefully making all this up in order to break up our family. Then, he'll tell me that I am just perceiving what our relationship is, and that I'm forgetting the good times.  It has taken me so long to make this decision because I needed validation that my experience isn't normal, that even if there are 'good' times, the 'bad' that I've experienced shouldn't even exist, that the kids need to have another model. I had gotten that validation from my therapist, I got that validation from a domestic violence support group, I got that validation from my friends and finally, yesterday, after 2 minutes of breaking down with the social assistant, she said, "You are being abused, he won't change, you need to protect yourself and your children, my advice would be to get a good lawyer and get the process started." She said it is NEVER normal to call your wife a "bitch" no matter how many good times there are and the face that this is a repeated cycle makes it an abusive one.

 

I decided to walk home, just to have some fresh air. As I was walking home, I had to face up to myself right then and there. I said to myself "Only I have the power to move my life in a different direction, it's up to me to steer me and my kids to happiness." It was right then and there that I forgot about the material complications with our house, with all his STUFF (I mean, he has so much stuff that we could probably furnish a small castle), with his mom moving on purpose to be close to us in the country, I forgot about how difficult it will be to be on my own financially and I decided that the only real stability my kids can ever hope for is being lost by living with a volatile father and a mother who can't even show them who she really is. This needs to end right here and now.

The next thing I know, I am on the phone with my mom asking for their financial help in the legal process. That was it, my decision was made, but I would estimate that it took 3 or 4 years to get there. The only feelings I can describe right now are fear and pain. He has no clue that he will be handed divorce papers, my kids know that we are not doing well but they don't know what their future holds for them, and his family hasn't a clue. His mom called me the other day to ask me a question and as she was talking, my heart was breaking knowing the real truth inside, that in a matter of weeks, her world would be turned over. We just saw some of his family at Xmas and they will be shocked. And his friends? They didn't even know any of this has happened over the years.

 

Once the divorce proceedings are known, his family will try and convince, try to persuade me to go back, for us to get help, for him to change. They will get upset if I refuse and they will say I didn't even try. I have been trying for 10 years. They will say that I am hurting them and their son/cousin/friend, but they won't take into consideration for once the hurt that he has caused me. They won't even take into consideration for once the hurt he is causing the kids. My MIL keeps saying that a 2 parent home should be kept at all costs, that's what brings stability and happiness and that I'm just overreacting to one criticism. At what point does 'one' become too many? Am I just supposed to accept the criticism and rage as an isolated incident and move on, until the next? Talk about instability! Don't they realize the damage our marriage is causing on the kids? My girls are learning that they need to do everything and if they don't, they'll be lazy, my boy is learning that a man is superior to a woman and that he has the right to call her names, degrade her, prevent her from being an individual. And above all, they are learning to walk on eggshells.

 

I will be starting my research for a lawyer today and then we'll go from there. I don't really know how the process works. There will definitely be a hearing to decide on our apartment and where the kids will live. I am SO afraid that I am going to lose them. My husband has told me in the past he will lie in court AND use all of their savings (money he got from his first apartment sale) to hire the best lawyer to get full custody. He told me he feels it's his duty to protect them from my 'dumbness' and lack of intelligence. I am hoping I will get to keep the apartment and have the kids with a 70/30 agreement. From what I've heard, the worst scenario would be a 50/50 arrangement. That would also tear me apart, only spending 50 percent of my time with my kids for the rest of their childhood! As it stands now, we already have a 70/30 thing going on with me taking care of the kids most of the time: a divorce will just give more time to my husband that he has to take care of the kids.

 

I also found out the other day that my husband has hacked into anything I do over the internet and any private correspondance or blogs that I set up, he can crack the codes.  I don't want him to find out about the divorce prematurely, so from now on, any research I do, or any emails I write have to be done from outside the apartment! He keeps going off about how cameras shouldn't be installed anywhere because it's a violation of individual liberty, but what is he doing to me? On the other hand, it's a blessing in disguise because I need to take a break from all this and can't be in it all the time. If I can't use internet at home, that's more time to spend with the kids and focus on them.

 

Well, my time is precious, so I must run do some lawyer research. I still cannot believe that I am about to take this step, but I feel in my heart that it's the right thing to do. It's the only way I can take control of my life again.

 

 

The Last Incident

For people who have been in similar situations as I am, there has to have been one last incident, one last explosion, one last lashing out where you said, "This is the last." For 8 years, we've had several 'incidents', and even though the shock of these incidents was so great that I have mentioned the D word a few times (mostly as an empty threat), never in the back of my mind did I really mean that I wanted to get out. We have built a family, we recently used every single cent we had to buy a fixer upper farm house to take the kids on the weekends while we continue to live in our rent control during the week, my MIL moved closer to us. Not once did I ever consider breaking our 'routine', including an routine of extreme highs and lows, to get out. Until last summer.

Weirdly, there wasn't really one incident, it was just a general feeling that things wouldn't get better unless we worked on our marriage. At the time, I was willing to 'work' to better the marriage, to go to therapy, to really look at where I needed to blame myself and to fix those parts of myself that needed to compromise more. All of the areas where my husband was 'blaming' me, I couldn't really dismiss: I had gotten a bit indifferent over the years about spending time with him. We have completely different interests and I felt like we were always conceeding to his way of doing things or if he did agree to go out to eat (rarely), my husband would always find a way to sabotage the evening. In therapy he revealed that he felt like our way of life was mine. Therapy helped for us to work on that 'couple' problem and lack of communication and I felt like it opened some doors and broke down some barriers. It was also true that I was a bit selfish and egotistical: I do enjoy running and having alone time and it uplifts me to converse with friends with snippets on Facebook. I told myself that I needed to be more open to my husband's needs. From October to December, we went from me almost filing for divorce to feeling like I was on my honeymoon again. 

But, there was a nagging feeling underneath that outside comfort. My husband's biggest complaint was that he felt that I no longer wanted to spend time with him, that I was indifferent to him and that I cared more about myself than my entourage. So, I stopped really doing the things I had done for myself: running became less frequent (I don't blame him for that, I just wanted to work on my relationship, so finding time to run became inevitably more difficult) and instead of wanting to be alone in the evenings, I made it a priority to spend time with my husband. Friday afternoons when we were both home and he had given me so much grief because I used that afternoon to clean up the house and do laundry, I really turned my focus to him. Weirdly, though, I felt like the closer I got to him, the more he would find excuses to pull away. He didn't act as if he appreciated the extra time I was spending with him even though I had heard him a month before that crying with his family on the phone because I supposedly didn't care about him and only cared about myself.

He also told his family that I allow matters to sit for days, weeks, months and years and then explode without communinicating with him prior to that (which I had never noticed about myself...anytime I brought up anything to him in a calm manner, he'd tell me I was attacking him). So, I decided to be more open in my communication and when something bothered me, I would tell him in a constructive manner. One day in late October, he was making a huge effort and took the kids and our visiting nephew out (something he rarely does) so that I could have some time to myself. I had wonderful run and came home and needed to clean up our apartment. I spent 2 or 3 hours picking up and cleaning and had an hour or two to kill. Sure, I could have found a chore to do, but instead, I decided to read and knit. When he came home, tired from the day's outing, the first thing he said to me was, "Geez, I leave you here the whole day and then come home to a huge mess." I didn't think the apartment was a mess, especially after spending the afternoon cleaning it up! I told him that hurt me and his response was that it wasn't a good time to attack him, he was tired. Was that an attack? I was just telling him that his comment hurt me. I was confused but didn't bring it up again.

The second indication of former behavior was mid-November. An American student was looking for a room in Paris for a couple months. I thought this would be a great opportunity for the kids. I got even more excited when I read what she was studying: "The Empowerment of Women Through Running." Wow, what a great topic, I thought. Here I am, a wife, a mom, a teacher, and about ten other labels, I feel like my identity as a woman is, at times, split because of those roles, and running does allow me to feel empowered and whole again because it briefly takes me out of a role and into my own thoughts. At that point, I felt comfortable enough again with my husband to talk about these types of subjects but without a moment's notice, he started off on a verbal tirade: "Women don't need to be empowered, that it a bunch of shit. Hitler was empowered and look where he ended up: killing hundreds of millions. I'm tired of all these minorities thinking they need to be 'empowered.'" Whereas he was so enthusiastic about the possibility of having the student just before, he drastically changed his tune and told me that he just knew that when she came, I was going to drop my family and go out with her like in my student days and become some feminist spokeswoman. And we couldn't 'talk' about this, he was right, there was no discussion. This was when I remember crying out of disappointment for the first time. Here, I thought we had come so far and now this.

I also found it strange that he kept asking me that one day, he needed to know why I went off the deep end at the end of the summer and he wanted to hear my perspective on how I needed to change...so I asked him, what about how HE needed to change, and he said "Well, the real problem is with you and your problems that caused a crisis." Something kept nagging at me, wondering why he couldn't be open about his part of the problems. I felt like I had really taken a look at myself to see my problems but he refused to take any responsibility for his part, yet he kept telling me that he 'knew' himself so well, that he understood himself that that I really needed to do some more work on myself. I felt no closure and like the problems weren't really resolved. 

By December, I was fully trusting, fully comfortable and fully smitten with my husband again. We never really do Xmas gifts but I told him that if he wanted to, something I had really wanted for awhile is a running headband with integrated headphones. Mid-December, he told me that for my gift, he got me a set of wine glasses off of ebay so that when I have my glass of wine while cooking, I don't have to use our wedding glasses. Although I knew I was supposed to appreciate his thought and gesture, something told me that he was only doing this for himself and that he doesn't really 'understand' me. We have a thousand and one wine glasses at our farm house that I was planning on bringing back to our city apartment...wine glasses were not a 'need' or something that I can really say was at the top of my Xmas wishes. It almost felt like he was trying to 'control' that one moment of pleasure I have in the evening as I cook. But, I didn't want to read too much into it.

The first of three rather heated moments came mid-December as well. His mom was renovating and offered to pay me to prime her walls one Saturday. I let my husband make the decision, as he would have to watch the kids and I didn't want it coming back to me that I left him to watch the kids while I went off to do something he didn't approve of. He happily agreed for me to go because we can use all the extra money we can get. His mom also needed some help moving a piece of furniture and had halfway expected my husband to bring the kids over later that morning. While I was painting, I told her to call him to see if he was coming, because I didn't want to slow down my painting. He was livid from the start of the conversation. Livid because the kids were being rambunctious, livid because I was over at his mom's house painting even though we had agreed on that, and livid because he said that his mom was trying to 'control' the situation. I was there, all she said was "Are you coming over?" She kindly offered to pick up some deli meat and bread to make a quick lunch and my husband told her that she was trying to control our lunch. When she handed the phone to me, he yelled at me, saying that it was just like us women to gang up on a helpless man. I was stunned...where did this come from? No matter how much I tried to tell him that we really had no ulterior motives, we just simply wanted to know what his plans were, he said "There you go, using the word 'we', you and my mom have become a team against me." And, we couldn't have a discussion about it until I told him he was right. Tears streamed down my eyes as I continued to paint.

We went to my brother in-law's for a few days at Christmas. Overall, the trip went well, but the nagging feeling kept persisting. My husband seemed to me like this untouchable statue figure...in a moment when I wanted to feel close to him, I grabbed his hand at the grocery store and he pushed it away. I didn't feel like we were connecting. A couple times during the meals, he would get upset if I was eating at the same time he tried to talk to me, little incidents like that. I discovered that my children's head lice had come back and I urgently needed to treat them one evening. I was gone from the dinner table for at least an hour and my husband started telling me I was too obsessed with the lice and being rude by leaving the table. I felt like while my husband was sitting, enjoying his time with the family, I was running all around taking care of the kids. I didn't mind, but what I did mind was if I were in the same situation with my family, my husband would get upset if he had to take care of the kids like I did. Most of all, I didn't feel like there was any understanding from him as to what I was experiencing at his brother's, there was no 'togetherness', no 'we're in this together, parenting is tough.' My sister-in-law had asked me to make a couple of pies one night for the dessert buffet. While we were out, I told my husband that I desperately needed to get the ingredients at the store. He took me to the store, but I didn't feel that he was 'with' me on the pies, he was just chauffeuring me to the store...there was no connection. It was really difficult to understand. I think the really hurtful moment was on my birthday, a couple days before Christmas. Everyone signed a card with a sweet note like "Happy Birthday" "Have fun enjoying this winter sun".... my husband only signed his name. He said it was meant to be funny, it was a joke. But, I didn't think it was very funny. To me, a husband (and a wife) should cherish each other and on cards like that write something like "Love you and happy to be celebrating with you" or something like that.  

After we returned from our trip, we spent a half a day at our farm house stacking firewood and it was a really nice family time. The next day, we decided to clean up the house. I was going through toys in the family room and we decided to put paintings and art supplies on a certain shelf. I spent two hours vacumming, picking up...I had come across two board games and didn't think it would be a huge deal to neatly set them in the same area as the art supplies. HUGE mistake! A couple hours later, not suspecting anything was wrong, I heard yelling from the family room "WHAT? How could you do that? We decided that this was for art, not games....you are such a controlling bitch." He then took everything I had picked up and threw it all over the family room, in a rage. I really could not understand this outburst, so I ignored it, not wanting to say something to set him off even more. Well, THAT set him off! The only way to get him to stop yelling was to tell him how sorry I was for putting the board games there and telling him how wrong I was.

The final straw was New Year's Eve. His cousin, her husband and baby were going to spend the night. The house was still messy and I really felt it was a priority to get it cleaned up AND cook the NYE dinner buffet. He didn't understand that my priority wasn't his. He was a little upset and basically told me that I didn't need to cook. But I had planned all this fun stuff for dinner! His cousin called and said she couldn't get there until 8 that evening. My husband was irate that she was arriving so late and kept saying how rude she was and how she was forcing herself to come. I told him that it was a bit odd but that it wasn't a huge deal, I needed to cook anyway (since he kept saying it wasn't a priority and here we were 6 pm and I hadn't made one thing!) and at least she was coming. She got there, dinner was a bit full of tension. Conversation was a bit forceful because you could tell she was tired. After the 'buffet' dinner, I suggested we take a break before the cheese and dessert courses. We hadn't exchanged gifts, so we went to the family room and opened gifts. I briefly went into the kitchen to get the kids something to drink and I was dying of thirst so grabbed a glass of water. My husband came in and started whispering to me, "I just think my cousin is really rude..." Then, because I was drinking a glass of water, he got mad at me "Oh, just like usual, doing something else is more important than listening to me" then he walked off huffing and puffing. Around 15 min. later, I thought we could talk about that incident. I told him it hurt me that he didn't see that I was listening to him and that I sincerely didn't want to upset him. He said, "Are you crazy? I forgot about that the minute it happened and now you are attacking me?" I said I wasn't attacking him, I just thought that he wanted us to communicate more and that I was telling him that I really didn't want to upset him while he was talking to me but that it was normal to drink and listen at the same time. He got frustrated and left the room while I went to clear the dining room table.

His cousin and her husband went upstairs to put their baby to bed: my husband got upset that they both had to be upstairs doing that and felt that it was really rude for them both to leave the family room. When his cousin came back downstairs, she helped me clear the table. I might add here that she and her husband were a HUGE shoulder for my husband to cry on during our September 'crisis' and being the godparents of our children, they really felt that we needed to make our marriage work. She knew all about our situation. So, I didn't find it 'odd' for her to ask me about our progress. I told her things were definitely better but I was worried since a few incidents had crept back into his behavior. She told me she really felt that the couple's therapy was stopped too soon and that we didn't get to the heart of the problem...I still believe that the heart of the problem was both of us and agreed with her that we really needed to work more, but my husband kept saying that we were only going to couple's therapy for me and that he felt we could really work on our problems on our own. Just from that statement, I had an increasing feeling that there was no 'closure' and no way to move ahead. 

His cousin invited me outside to smoke (family who are reading this, I smoke one cigarrette once every 6 months when we have company, no more no less). My husband and I have done this tons of times over the years, so I really didn't give it a second thought. The kids were playing in the family room with the guys. His cousin and I mostly talked about Xmas, the gifts the kids got, my nieces and nephews, etc... When I came in, we went back into the family room but only her husband was sitting there: my kids and husband weren't there. My husband had taken the kids upstairs to put them to bed. This was before the dessert, before midnight, and my husband NEVER puts the kids to bed. I don't even think he knows where their Pjs are! At that moment, I think I wanted to ignore the sinking feeling I had at the pit of my stomach. I went upstairs, in a cheerful manner, tickled the kids, told them we could go onto dessert. Then, I asked my husband why he had decided to put them to bed? His answer? "You bitch, you think you can just go outside and talk about me after attacking me in the kitchen, you can to fuck yourself.... now you'll have the whole night to talk about me with my cousin." I told him we WEREN'T talking about him and that the only thing she asked was how we were doing (he had spent entire evenings at her place in September talking about 'us', so I didn't think my one-liner answer to his cousin was a violation of any trust agreement)  but that we mostly talked about Xmas...I was flabbergasted with this whole incident. He was yelling, screaming at me in front of the kids, screaming so loud his cousin came up and told him to calm down, her baby was sleeping. That's when he said "You can take your fucking baby and leave, bitch." So, she did. That's when I thought: it's easy for his family to take these isolated incidents and leave, I can't leave. I am stuck here, with him, with his unpredicatble rage. His cousin will eventually forgive him for 'just being angry'. They don't see that it's not acceptable to live a life with so much anger. 

That night, I slept in our guest room at the farm house. The next day, he refused to drive back to the city with me since I was 'such a bitch'. He stayed in bed the whole day. We had planned to go back to the city anyway the day before school started to have a day to unwind, so I took the kids back anyway. He came home by train a day later. I had spent hours this past summer trying to diagnose him with every single mental problem that exists and fits his behavior: Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Borderline, Bi-Polar, Depression... I thought those were the causes for his aggressive behavior. But, I never read up on Verbal Abuse. I quickly ordered a couple of books for my Kindle. As I read the first book, I felt like I was reading about my life with my husband: good cycles where you think everying is fine and normal mixed with horrible cycles when you question everything, my husband telling me I was the problem and that I need to get help, my husband telling me I'm hysterical and making a mountain out of a molehill, the projection of HIS weaknesses onto me, the degrading and belittling...and so much more. All up to this point, I just thought he was difficult, that I needed to learn to live with it, that I was supposed to accept his behavior. AFter all, he had always told me it up was to me to be strong and go against his criticisms. This time was different, though, I finally admitted the words to myself: verbal abuse. 

Once I came to the realization that no matter what we were going through, good or bad, no matter how many compliements he could give me, no matter how 'normal' things seemed, he had utter disrespect for me, once I said to myself that I am no where to blame in this situation, once I admitted that these cycles were not my fault, not caused by my own occasional bad moods and that they were very real, once I said to myself that a real loving couple does not behave this way....once I admitted all that, it was very liberating. But, it was also very limiting: I couldn't continue life as it had been. I couldn't put a smile back on my face and play along with his 'good' cycle again...because I knew the rage, the belittling, the unfairness was just below the surface ready to rear its ugly head at any time. I wasn't going to give into that cycle again. More on where we are now and what I feel like the future holds as I try to find a solution to stop the abuse.

   

It's all about control

One of the characteristics of any type of abusive behavior is the need to control. And, this is probably the main reason why it took me so long to admit to myself that my husband was using verbal and emotional abuse. After all, I, myself, am a bit of a control freak...he made me believe that I was the one who insisted on "controlling" every aspect of our material life. He convinced me that I "wouldn't let him in" to my care of the kids, to my housework, to my management of tasks... But, then I remember all those times I tried to come up with a chore chart, tried to ask him for help... I even asked if maybe he could have a night per week designated for him to cook (even if that meant frozen pizzas or pasta) or a couple hours on the weekend where he would take care of the kids or maybe get up with them one day per week: everything I thought a couple based on mutual love and respect would want to work out together. He would never have any of that and said that if I needed help or wanted him to cook, just to ask. But, when the time came for him to help, he was rarely there, or he would bitch about it. He would always say to me, "So, a marriage for you is partnership? That's all it is? Like a business deal? Well, I don't want any part of YOUR view." It made me feel bad for even thinking that we should have roles and he made me think that I was shallow for even thinking that a chore chart or dinner night or one night a week giving the kids a bath were a sign of love and respect for your spouse.

A couple years ago when a friend pointed out that she thought I was going through verbal abuse, I skirted the internet for information. I mostly used the stories of men tracing their wives' calls or men completely dominating everything in the home or men never allowing their wives to go out as signs that my husband was not controlling and therefore not abusive. On the surface, I still felt like I had the power to do mostly what I wanted and I certainly did what I wanted in the kitchen, dressing and caring for the kids (he has only taken them to the doctor twice in 7 years and doesn't even know what vaccinations they have had or have needed...he will tell you that it's because I prevented him and controlled him, but their immunization records are in the same place they always have been and never once did he ask what types of care they needed). It's taken me a few years to realize that by giving me control of the house, of the meals, of the kids, he is actually controlling me.

He is controlling his capacity to not have to do anything in the house. He has controlled me so much that he knows that even if he doesn't do anything, I'll always be his right hand doing certain tasks (an abuser doesn't see you as a separate individual, but as an extension of themselves). When those tasks aren't done or are incomplete or aren't done the way he would like, he feels entitled to try and exert his control again through criticism or berating. How many times will I not be able to get the apartment cleaned up in time after work and he'll walk in and say "This is so white trash and with the mother you have, no wonder you don't learn to pick up after yourselves?" Or, how many times do I unload/load the dishwasher each month (an average of 12!) and when he decides, just once, to do it, it's not to be nice to help me, as a separate individual with feelings, he does it to prove a point that I'm not doing my job good enough. Thus, attempting to control me back into submission through belittling.

When did we mutually talk about who does what in our home? Did I sign up for everything I do? Did we discuss and talk about it? Never. What if I want a night off or don't want to cook? What if I don't want to get up with the kids one morning? I will get comments that I'm doing my job badly. Then, if I set aside a time to clean the toilets or scrub the bathroom, he gets annoyed that I'm taking the time to do that. One of my priorities before we have guests is to really try and clean as much as I can, but he never 'understands' that need and will always try to find something else to sabotage my time. If I try and make my needs known, he'll either tell me I'm being superficial and materialistic or a bitch!

Several times during our marriage, during the good times, I've heard things like "I don't care about how clean the house is, that's not what's important." It took me a long time to wonder why, then, does he get so upset when I don't clean up as well as he would like if he doesn't really care? I've come to the conclusion that he, himself may not care, but since I'm supposedly an extension of him and everything he dislikes in himself, he expects that part of him to keep things orderly through me. When I don't, well, the irate attacks begin.

One area where I have tried to find a bit of personal freedom is cooking. When I got married, I was still in my early 20s and had absolutely no notion of the role I would play as a wife. I knew that I wanted an equal partnership, but didn't really know what that meant, not having experienced marriage and real life, really, before I came to France. Growing up, I inevitably saw women cooking through my single mother (during my formative years) and through my grandmother, who was happily married 40 + years until my grandfather passed. Somewhere in my mind, the model I had must have been that the woman does the majority of the cooking. But, on visits with my dad, I did see that men can and do cook. My brother also got the cooking bug from an early age and still cooks to this day. So, somewhere, I also knew that it wasn't just up to me to do the family cooking. My husband, on the other hand, grew up in traditional France where the women were the masters of the kitchen. His mom would find time to work and come home and cook a 3 course meal.

Although early in our marriage, through my naivety of cooking (I grew up on a lot of TV dinners), my husband would make simple dinners of frozen pizzas, pasta, and simple salads, somewhere our cultural and personal childhood backgrounds forged me into the role of 'cook.' At one point, I tried to say that I would be responsible for dinner and my husband for lunch, but he would get continually angry when there wasn't a lunch prepared on the weekends. And, I gave in...I did try and stand up, I really did...I tried to establish some fairness. Like I said, he refused to have a night where he would cook, so I really had no choice and had to bite the bullet and learn.

When our firstborn was at the age when we started having family meals together, I can just hear my husband's voice: "My mom cooked 3 course meals every night, raised 3 kids AND worked, you have nothing to complain about." I also tried to establish if I cook then he cleans up the mess: he would have no such thing. All I had to do was 'ask' for his help, according to him. Well, that happened once or twice but in my mind, since cooking was a given for me, cleaning up should be a given for him and not something I have to ask. Did he ask me if I wanted to cook?

A year ago, when I started running more seriously and caring more about the family's health (preservatives, fats etc...), I decided that it might be good to start eating healthier. This was also sparked by a rather surprising 12 pound gain after I had been running and thinking I had lost weight! I vaguely told my husband about my plan, telling him that we could both go on a diet together and lose a few pounds together. He declined and said that it was dumb to restrict yourself too much. I, however, continued for myself and started packing low caloric meals for lunch and found a few websites that helped with healthy meals for the family. When my husband would see me packing my lunches every day, I would offer to make one for him, but he never eats lunch. It wouldn't prevent him from saying to me, "There you go, your selfish packing healthy lunches, goes right along with your selfish running." I ignored it and continued, and what I found through everything was that I was a real foodie at heart. I found all of these cooking blogs and it became a priority for me to severely limit (not eliminate since convenience foods happen) preservatives from our diet. I started making homemade everything from tortillas, to ice cream, to peanut butter. Cooking became a real pleasure and a passion and a priority. After all, hadn't my husband wanted me to 'be like his mom?' and cook delicious and healthy meals for the family? Only, it had gradually transformed from his attempt to control to my individual liberty to create.

Although I did hear him say a couple times to his mom and other family members that I have turned into a really good cook and that we eat well every night, the negative outweighed the positive. Knowing that getting a nutritious dinner on a table turned into my priority and not his, he would choose to sabotage my endeavors. Sometimes it would be, "You are so obsessed with cooking that you neglect your family", other times it would be "you control everything we eat, I can't even buy a frozen pizza" and more often than not, I have been accused of being a bad mother because according to my husband, I put cooking over my children. I don't know how many times I've been in the kitchen, that sacred hour before dinner time, cooking away, enjoying my glass of wine and jazz music while the kids play around me, watch a cartoon, or draw and he'll cuttingly say, "It's just like you to neglect your kids." And yet, if I were to pay 100 percent attention to my kids and give up on cooking dinner, there would be just as much negativity.

One time I remember we were renovating a bedroom and I was assigned the painting job and after spending a whole day painting, I only had one, tiny bit of wall left and really wanted to get it done before dinner. Even my husband agreed that it needed to be done that night. Around 8 p.m, which was way past dinner time but I had thought my husband had put my priority on finishing the painting, he came into the room and said "What kind of mother continues to paint when her kids are starving?" So, I dropped the painting to go cook dinner. While I was boiling the water for a quick pasta dish and cutting up greens for a salad, the kids were understandably a little on edge out of hunger and tiredness. I was hurrying as fast as I could in the kitchen when my husband came in and made another comment about my mothering, telling me that he doesn't know how I can't take care of my kids AND make dinner at the same time. By this point, around 8 years into our marriage, I learned to just shut up. If I had said, "Why can't you do something to help?" or "You could take care of them so that I can make dinner or vice versa", his reply would have continued along the abusive path with something "light" like "In a bitchy mood again" to something more cutting like, "Stupid bitch." No matter what I do, nothing is right.

My husband loves to tell me that he has never prevented me from doing anything. Of course, physically, he can never prevent me: thankfully we haven't gotten to that point yet. But, psychologically he has tried to do his control number. For every one positive, okay, make it two positive comments about my friends, I've heard around 10 to 15 negative. From "How's fatso doing?" to "Stupid feminist bitch" to "Dumb American housewife." I can't say that his comments consciously affected my distancing from them, as motherhood also played its part on less frequent girls' nights out and playdates, but I can say that somewhere, I just didn't want to hear it anymore. It would be easier for me to not see my friends, or see them alone, than to hear his comments. For a couple of years, one friend would organize a Thanksgiving dinner. I would always go in high spirits only to see the dead pan look on my husband's face throughout the evening. I knew that our rides home would be a slew of negative, "This was so stupid, so superficial etc..." I have reminded him several times that I never say a negative word about his friends and always happily go with him to dinner invitations. His reply? "Feel free to criticize my friends. In fact, you should, it would show me that you aren't indifferent and that you actually care." But, I don't see the point in trying to find something wrong with someone. Respect and indifference are not interchangeable words.

I think the biggest area where I felt a 'control' tactic was in my attempt for self-expression. When we went on any trips together, there was no mutual consent or planning. He accused me several times for just not caring, but it got to the point where if I did suggest something, he wouldn't like it or would tell me I'm a superficial American or complain the whole time. I remember on one trip, it was raining so hard and freezing outside, I just suggested we go back to the hotel and relax. He got irate that I would suggest such a thing. A couple years later, same scenario and HE decided that we should forgo our tourism and just relax at the hotel for the evening because of the rain. Since he decided, it was okay. So, I just let him do all the trip planning. And trips with him were not fun. I never got to have breakfast at the hotel because he doesn't eat breakfast, so I had to remind him several times to stop for coffee on the way to wherever we were going or the bad mood in me would come out. He would always casually forget and by the nth reminder, he'd yell at me saying "You are such a dumb, superficial American who only cares about material things...you should forget about the coffee and enjoy being in a city that's thousands of years old."

When I took up 'running' as a serious activity and started planning for my first huge race, I had to stick to a fairly frequent running schedule. I did my best to do this when the kids were sleeping early in the morning so I wouldn't disrupt the family. On the weekends, however, I needed my husband to watch the kids anywhere from an hour to a couple so that I could get in the long runs. About a fourth of that time, he was fine with it, when he had decided to be in a good mood. About a fourth of that time, he was neutral. And about half the time, I would hear sarcasm like "Great" when I told him I was going on my run, or huffing and puffing, or flat out telling me that I just didn't care about the family but about my selfish ego trip from running more. He loved to criticize runners and athletes and anyone who found pleasure in bettering themselves so that they can have a better relationship to those around them. Looking back on it, I don't know how I found the motivation and the strength to train for 13 miles and to cross that finish line on my own. The only people who congratulated me were my friends on Facebook. When I got back from the race, beaming from an achievment I thought I could never accomplish, my husband greeted me with, "That took forever, the kids are starting to drive me crazy."

My husband kept telling me that it was up to me to go against his negativity and criticism and to do something for myself and be a stronger more assertive person. It got to the point where I would have to muster up the courage to ask if we could get takeout or flat out hide that I took the kids to McDonald's once every 6 months or so. If a friend invited me out for drinks, I had to really think about the most diplomatic way to ask him. When my mom sent me women's mags and I would skim through them, I'd be sure to get them out of sight before he got home. I felt like he was a rug and that he swept any part of me under it. He said I have created this image of a dictator in my head and that I'm crazy. So, I started to question the validity of that statement: I'm not fearful of him just 'because', there has to be a learned reason. Look at children: they aren't scared of Strawberry Shortcake but they are scared of ghosts and goblins. They 'learn' to be fearful or cheerful when confronted with certain people because of the cultural contexts in which they are learned. If my husband had been loving, respectful, positive, optimistic, supportive and if he had cherished me rather than belittle, degrade, disrespect, criticize and judge, maybe I wouldn't have 'learned' to be fearful of his reactions. Over time, the control caused me to build an armor around my heart. He called it indifference towards him and me completely not caring about him. I called it protection of any personal integrity I had left.

How I got here

Most of my close family and friends didn't realize that I have been in a cycle of extreme good and bad in my marriage for approximately 8 of the 10 years I've been married and there were even signs before we were married that caused me to question the health of our growing relationship. My mind usually came up with the excuse that ALL marriages had their good times and bad and that life wasn't perfect. But, were ALL marriages so damn difficult? I also told myself numerous times that I could somehow prevent the bad cycles by being a better wife, a better mother, by being more intimate and more open, by ditching the women's magazines and silly TV shows and by trying to be smarter for my husband, in a better mood. For awhile, it would work, we'd be in a good cycle, I felt like we connected and that we had a 'normal' marriage. I would kick myself for ever thinking that there was something deeply wrong with our relationship. Inevitably, just when I started thinking that things were better, we'd have an explosion again that would cause me to question the validity of our marriage: How could my husband love the person he disrespected so much? But, it never went further than the nagging feeling that something wasn't right. As my husband reiterated a thousand times, I was just blowing things out of proportion and my bad moods were the cause of most of the 'drama'. I believed it. Over the course of our marriage, I became conditioned to question the 'good' times and 'dread' the impending explosion. It never failed, as soon as I would say to myself "Things are going really well", a huge fight would happen within the week, but sometimes within the day. I could never understand how it was my fault when I was trying so hard to prevent these ugly explosions from happening? After our last child was born, it got to the point that I didn't even know what our marriage was: was it the picture perfect good times or the nasty, ugly, namecalling, degrading, belittling, bad? I had a few friends over the course of my marriage tell me they didn't think the way my husband treated me was how anyone, man or woman, should be treated. One friend even sent me some literature on 'verbal and emotional abuse.' I laughed it off: Abuse? Abuse was more serious, more black and white. I must have been giving the wrong message in my descriptions of events, surely they understood that my husband had a side that they weren't seeing. I told myself I really needed to work on how I blogged about the negative events in my marriage. But, when I would reread my posts, it didn't sound as if I were exagerrating or trying to show my side of events: they read as if I were trying to understand what was going on. But, abuse? No, not me. I didn't feel like a victim AND there were the good times. Isn't abuse a constant cycle of bad? Abuse was definitely way too dramatic for my situation. After many explosions in 2010 and 2011, more than we had had up to that point, the heaviness and dread that I had unknowingly carried on my heart started manifesting themselves in my spirit. I felt like I was living day to day and that my joy in life could instantly be brought down at a given second...I learned to keep my joy to myself. There will be another post on how I have slowly lost my capacity to experience joy over the years as well as examples of what I now realize was abusive behavior. At the end of summer 2011, something hit me: I deserve to be 'me' and be happy being 'me' within my marriage. I deserve to be respected and loved for who I am, even if that means I don't have the same interests as my husband and our points of view differ. Rather than fear his answer when I would tell him something that I knew he wouldn't approve of (like a friend coming in town and wanting to go out to eat, which he despises), rather than walking on eggshells in fear that he would yell at me and call me names at any given moment, I should be in a mutual relationship based on love and understanding and most of all respect. At the time, I was convinced my husband needed psychological help, that he must have bipolar or something that caused his constant mood swings. In this line of thought, I gave him an ultimatum: he gets help, or it's over. After a couple weeks of brutal verbal attacks and his confiscating my children's US passports, he agreed to couple's therapy. By this time, his family as well as mine knew that we were on the brink of divorce. I heard him on the phone at night, playing victim to his family (more on his point of view in another post), convincing them of my "craziness." He weeped with his friends, telling them how much he wanted this to work between us. He even convinced me AND our therapist that we had solved our problems. My own therapist, whom I had begun seeing at the end of the summer went from "You need to get out" to "Wow, he has really changed and I can see that you are happy and content." Our therapists gave us the green light to 'do it on our own' and I felt closer to my husband than I ever had in our marriage. I said to myself, "Wow, we must have needed to work on our communication and understanding issues all along and now that we have worked on how to understand each other, there will be bad times, but the belittling and degrading won't happen again." When I was my most vulnerable, my guards completely down, that's when I started noticing my husband's old behavior creeping back into the cycle that we had defined as our marriage. It was only on New Year's Eve, after several small explosions throughout December, a huge explosion led me to come to the conclusion that no amount of couple's therapy could help us. It may have helped to solve some of our problems, but those were a completely separate problem from the real issue at hand: my husband has an abusive behavior. And, finally, after years of wondering what I could do to prevent his outburts, I came to the conclusion that no matter what we were experiencing, good or bad, no matter how much I tried, he would never respect me, never love me, and would always have an abusive behavior. When I gave him the ultimatum months before, I had it in my mind that if we worked on our marriage, it would inevitably be better than it was before. I didn't realize that the only way it would be better was by admitting that I have lived through emotional and verbal abuse. By admitting that, I stopped trying to please him and I started living my life.