Frozen Nowhere

I am an avid blog reader, even when I don’t seem to be able to put words together for my own blog… and a few days ago I came across this post on one of my favourite blogs The Freak Revolution regarding how sometimes it hits the author that she has changed.

 

I have been struggling with the idea of change. 

 

 I have been struggling with a lot of things lately:

 

And amidst the struggling I have realized that part of my deep issue is that I seem to be having an existential crisis of face.

 

I say “crisis of face” because its not a crisis of faith (although we’ll get to that part), its not a financial or material crisis, and its not a medical crisis.

 

Its a crisis to the core of the being that I thought I was, a deep questioning of not only what I am, the labels that I used to describe myself and delineate and connect myself with social groups and family groups and interest groups.

 

Its a profound realization of the very INTENSE and SOUL SHAKING CHANGES that have come with my personal and painful decision to leave a marriage and a husband and a home… and an IDENTITY and walk out into that wide world again as a new person.

 

I WAS:

 

And I was miserable, absolutely freaking miserable.

 

With my husband living away from myself and our children for 50% of the time, and emotionally withdrawn from us when he was there, I felt like I was a single mother who happened to be married. I felt like my husband was a guest in my home, when he was home, and that it was my job to ensure that everything to do with the children was done in such a way as to not disturb him. When he was gone I was the sole parent. When he was home I was still expected to do all the housework and childcare while he went out to movies or sports events with his friends.

 

While theEx would come home, take business calls for hours, hidden in the office or bedroom or basement (wherever his computer happened to be located), and it was my responsibility to keep the kids away from him. He would sit at his computer and download torrents for movies or music he wanted… for hours while I took the kids out to the park or with me to get groceries or to the babysitter (because he couldn’t take care of them alone). He made plans with his friends to go to movies or coffee or road trips, and none of those plans involved his wife or his kids (and the sad thing is that his friends were ALSO married with kids). The evenings when he stayed home we watched movies that he wanted to watch or tv shows that he liked, while he complained about my housekeeping skills, my hours at work, my hobbies, or how much he disliked my friends.

 

I retreated. Not having friends I could go out with, I sought friendships online. I sought adventure through a brief addiction to World of Warcraft. I sought internal peace with the tug-of-war between my stifled social life and my need to talk to and share who I was with other people by writing in an online diary. I walked the balance between the formerly spiritual side of myself (Moon’sLark) and my mundane hausfrau reality (Pam) by maintaining that I was, in fact, still an intelligent, sophisticated, thoughtful, quirky, spiritual, creative, decisive, loving, lovable, INTERESTING, and strong person — when in reality I felt scared, alone, lonely, unloved, unlovable, spiritually dead, boring, and weak weak weak.

 

It changed when I started to work, at theEx’s insistence that his income (which was higher than the AVERAGE dual income family in our province) was insufficient to meet his goals and that I needed to get back into the work world again. And so I took a job at a call centre.

 

And I both loved and hated the job. The work itself was right up my alley, right in line with my area of expertise in both operational management and psychology, I was working with a large group of people, and I had moved up in the company to a place where I was being recognized for my hard work and dedication. I was starting to make friends, and I THOUGHT I was well liked in my department. I liked that.

 

But I also HATED the hours I worked that took me away from my “primary” responsibilities as a married woman (in my mind)– home and children.

 

Often I had to get up and be at work at 6am or not be able to leave work until 9pm at night, which meant leaving my children with my xMIL and xFIL. Being tied like that to my in-laws had wide ranging implications for my spirituality because they were (and still are as far as I know) “Holy Rolling, Bible Thumping, EVANGELICAL” (which seems to be some sort of code for “using their ‘god’ to justify being xenophobic, close minded, intolerant and MEAN”) . And for family harmony theEx had required me to never let his family know that I was NOT christian. Having them care for my children also meant that allowing my CHILDREN to know that there was more to spiritual fulfillment than what my xFIL preached was out of the question.

 

So, I had horrible hours, I felt guilty for leaving my children with people who loved them but were VERY intolerant of anything  outside of their personal worldview, I was working 40-50 hours at a job and an additional 30 hours at home trying to keep up, there was a lot of nasty politicking going on at my work (most of which I was unaware of), and the fact that I was working outside of the home gave theEx fuel to accuse me of sleeping around on him…

 

But through my job I started to see that I wasn’t as pathetic, useless, boring or WEAK as theEx had made me believe with his words. Here I was getting to work, getting things done on time for my department and I earned the respect of various departments.

 

 

And I realized how unhappy I was with my marriage, with theEx, and with my self.

Now, I did try things to repair my marriage, and I had been trying them for years unsuccessfully… unsuccessfully because all the blame for the distance between theEx and myself had been laid on me and the responsibility for fixing it was MINE and mine alone. I went to counselling for MY problems with the marriage. I went to MY doctor for MY issues with depression. I was sent out to get “appropriate” friends and hobbies so that I would fit into theEx’s life. TheEx didn’t listen to me when I told him that I needed him home more, to support me and the kids, to let me have a night off once in a while, to separate our lives from his parents and their church and their rules, I was told to make it work because the issues lay with me.

 

Maybe he was right. But the issues could not be “fixed” by only me, and his distancing himself from the taint of who and what I was, his embarassment of me with his coworkers, friends and family chewed away at the person that he married until I became someone that even I didn’t recognize when I looked in the mirror.