Like many of us, Andrea wasn’t ready to see the red flags that her marriage wasn’t working. She thought her husband was the perfect match and with three young children, one of whom was autistic, she had her plate full being the perfect stay-at-home-mom. She sensed there were problems with her marriage but it wasn’t until her daughter was placed into care, that the reality started to dawn on her. Here’s Andrea:
I think the Autism sort of covered what was going on for a long time.
At some point my mom started to not like my husband, so I had to choose a side, and of course I chose my husband. I said to her,
“You can’t come to my house and stir things up. This is my family, this is my choice and you don’t get to come up here and make comments about my husband.”
She was saying things but I couldn’t take them because I felt it was an insult to my family. I couldn’t even see what he was doing because I was so—what the counselor called at the time “in survival mode.” I was just getting from day to day.
I didn’t miss a beat with my kids. They did swim team, they did dive team, they took voice lessons, they took piano, they went to German school on Saturdays, we missed nothing. I was not going to let Autism keep my other two kids from having a life, so it’s not like anybody in the house was suffering.My husband was still doing all of his athletics, he still did his business trip stuff. It was me, really, that ended up bearing the burden of it all and what I kept telling myself was,
“I want my children to have an intact family with a mom and a dad and I can fix that later.”
Well after my daughter went into care and my mom was gone and I start thinking,
“Life is short, what’s going on here?” and I said to him,
“This marriage isn’t working for me. I’m not happy, you need to make some changes. This isn’t working for me.”
He would listen to everything I said and then he would just nod and go “okay.” Sometimes he would make an effort and sometimes he wouldn’t. My biggest complaint was that I never, ever got to sleep in. Not only did he never get up with the kids at night, he never got up with them in the morning and I was exhausted. He would say “you can sleep in on Saturday, you can sleep in on Sunday” and then it was always “the worst possible time” just like it was when I wanted him to go to marriage counseling.
We’d make appointments, the counselor would make appointments, and he would always say “it’s the worst possible time,” something would always come up and things were getting worse. We hadn’t slept together. There was no intimacy in the marriage whatsoever, not sexual, not sharing of hopes or dreams or unhappiness, no support, no nothing. We didn’t go out to dinner, we didn’t have any shared activities, we were just roommates that slept in the same bed.
This went on for a while and then I realized probably a year and a half before I left that it was bad enough that my marriage wasn’t going to make it, it just was not. He was doing things socially that were embarrassing me. He would meet someone and he would know them for five minutes and he would say “what do you do for a living?” and they’d say “oh, I’m a stockbroker” or something and he’d say “oh, how much do you make a year? How much did you pay for your car? How much did you pay for your house?” He just didn’t know any social boundaries, he would say anything. He would get in arguments with people, he was just constantly embarrassing people.
I just got to where I didn’t want to be around him anymore. I got to where I didn’t want to go anywhere with him, I didn’t want to hear anything he had to say. Then he started being worried about money and he had never had a problem with me spending money. We weren’t rich, but we didn’t have any money issues. We had our bills, we lived within our means and we were fine. We had a gardener, we had a housekeeper that came every two weeks, I stayed at home, we belonged to a country club, we had a nice life.
All of a sudden he stopped putting money into the joint account. My name wasn’t on little things like when we got a new car, my name wasn’t on it. When I went to the video store one day, my name wasn’t on the account anymore, it was his name. My name wasn’t on anything, and I knew what was going on, but I didn’t really know how to bring it up because I felt like I had bigger issues.
I knew that things were changing.
The Divorce Coach Says
Andrea’s counselor was right – you put up with a lot when you’re in survival mode and it isn’t always a deliberate, intentional choice. Deep down you know things aren’t right but you can’t or don’t want to make talking about that a priority. Sometimes that’s a conflict avoidance tactic – if you avoid the discussion and work around the issue, it keeps the marriage in tact and you’re keeping your wedding vows, yes? You’re hanging on to that vision of the perfect family.
Then something happens that changes the balance and brings a new perspective. For Andrea, it was no longer having the demands of taking care of her daughter. For me, it was approaching fifty, realizing my life was more than half over and knowing I couldn’t live the rest of life going through the motions. Then, some of us choose change.
Discovering your name is no longer on accounts is a definite red flag and a sure sign that you need to start protecting yourself … changing your passwords, getting your own back account, getting your own credit card, pulling your credit account …
Photo credit: jmgasalla