Now you are here.
How did you get here?
You look around and you see people who are more successful than you, healthier, in loving relationships. People who go out on a Friday night. Perhaps you go out as well, if only the people who you meet would know you – the real you.
Or perhaps they do. But the conversation is always the same – running in the same circle like a headless chicken, complaining about the same old problems, over and over again, with no resolution.
You just start thinking that…that’s you.
That’s life.
However, with the wrong map, even the best of us get lost. Here’s where the wrong got Adele, and why deeply-ingrained beliefs, emotional dysregulation and childhood neglect still run the show – despite Adele no longer being a child.
Adele is 35, married and feeling pressured to get pregnant by her husband, yet she doesn’t feel their relationship is where it should be to make room for a child as well. She is a school teacher while her husband is a driver for a local delivery company.
She writes to me, unsure what to do next, and unsure whether her feelings of uncertainty are warranted, since her husband has always been loyal to her, never insulted her or harmed her in any way, yet she doesn’t feel happy and is almost afraid to admit it.
Adele’s letter
Hi Miriam,
I received your template. First I’ll speak about my current situation, and then I’ll give you some details about my childhood.
First of all, I feel tremendous amount of guilt even writing to you. My husband has no idea I would even come close to writing to anyone about this. He hates anything that has to do with mental health and thinks everyone is a quack anyway.
It’s hard for me to admit, but I feel…unhappy. And really, I don’t know whether there’s something that I need to fix with my perception of what happiness is (this ain’t a Disney movie, right) or perhaps I am missing something about my life and my current situation.
I can’t say I envy many people. I have people who have it better, some who have it worse; I suppose I fall in the middle.
My husband wants me to get pregnant yesterday. We’ve been married for 2 years and he keeps on pushing me because my biological clock is ticking. And he is objectively right, but I don’t really feel the calling to be a mother. And deep down, I feel that for me it would change but for him nothing would change at all.
My body will change, my schedule will change, and suddenly I will be stuck at home for a long time. And I know, I know many women would love to do that, but I just don’t feel like…I am cut for it.
I also feel that my husband is using my job against me. I work as a school teacher and work less hours than he does, so obviously, I do the work around the house, but he doesn’t help at all. And up until recently he didn’t work for a whole year.
Almost every night I hear from him how much he hates his job, how depressed he is, and sometimes, I don’t know, my head explodes and I just want to hide. I can’t listen to him anymore. And when I go to the other room, he just says I don’t love him and I am not supportive of him and how he is providing for me. But I am providing as well!
It’s the constant bickering that tires me. And then I go out with my friends; they all have children. And honestly, they complain about the same.
I get an almost hit of “reality” by hearing these women complain about the sleepless nights, the baby vomit and the fact that their husbands is a jerk. Although, a loveable one.
I suggested therapy many times, he simply told me he has real problems, and that therapy only works for people who have issues with their head. Part of me believes him, but part of me is just mad.
Yet, I look around and I see myself, in the future, in my friends. And honestly, they look dreadful. One of them has an alcoholic husband, and two kids. At least my husband is not an alcoholic, but at least her husband just falls asleep on the couch while mine berates me on a daily basis.
I don’t want a Disney movie romance. I’m a middle class woman. I have my feet on the ground, but there’s also a part of me that thinks that something ain’t right, and maybe it shouldn’t be like this.
As for my childhood, I was raised by my grandparents. They weren’t bad people by any means, it is just that they had their own relationship issues, and it was hard raising me as well, especially at their age.
My grandmother was constantly crying, real tears. I almost never cry, and I would always confort her. She was crying because my grandfather was either disrespecting her in the present or she would remember how she was beaten or cheated on when she was younger.
I never seen any violence in the house, only stories of it. My grandfather was almost always intoxicated with alcohol. He would drink very little – I could never tell he was drunk – but it happened on a daily basis.
He was also somewhat of a loser, my grandmother was taking care of everything, she was better educated and even worked more than he did, but somehow, at the end of the day, despite her apparent strength, she was always finding reasons to cry about him.
I often asked her why didn’t she leave when she was younger, and she always told me that it was because of my father.
But now, looking back I think she was really just very dependent on him, at least emotionally. I also remember her telling me that with my attitude, I would certainly get a divorce. And I would have divorced a man if he was acting just like my grandfather, but my husband is not an alcoholic, and he doesn’t beat me or cheat on me. He just…makes me feel sad.
Thanks for reading. Looking forward to your answer.
My response
Hi Adele, thank you for writing this, I think I can be of help with a little bit of perspective.
First, I noticed 2-3 repeating themes:
- Fear that you are asking for too much from a relationship, with the added societal pressure and the fact that most of your friends are in a poor situation
- Fear and guilt for even having negative feelings towards your husband
- Confusion on what are the metrics of what makes a relationship healthy or what is even healthy and achievable in a relationship
First of all, I would like to add, that from my perspective and from what I’ve seen in my own life, I can assure you not every mother is feeling miserable or complains about her husband after having a child. This is not to say one shouldn’t complain! This is to say that there are women out there who really want to be mothers and have the support from their partner to make this life transition as soon as possible. And yes, there will be loss of sleep, and yes it can be challenging, but in a healthy relationship, all of these challenges are not aggravated by a father who is either completely absent or only focuses on his needs, while expecting the wife to deliver a child, care for his child, and for his life to remain largely unchanged. This is not, I repeat, this is not what happens in every relationship and is not a reality you or your friends should settle for.
On the second point, with regards to the societal pressure and the fear and the guilt of having negative feelings towards your husband, I can’t stop but seeing you as a person who is almost hiding from sight, in the sense that I don’t see anyone worrying what you desire, but I see you worrying about what everyone is saying about you.
It’s almost as if there is a shame around saying “no”, going against the grain, which is really not going against the grain at all. Many women and men these days decide to be childfree. I suppose that what I am observing is that, somehow you live a life that is meant to please and appease others but have no idea or perhaps even feel some shame around the idea of doing something for yourself. Perhaps you feel that only selfish people do so. But I can assure you, perfectly kind and wonderful people make choices that make them happy even if that doesn’t make everyone else around them happy.
And for the last part, it seems that your guilt also stems from what you’ve seen in childhood. You’ve seen your grandmother having it “much worse”, and you think of yourself as lucky and think of yourself as someone who should be pleased with what she has, but at the same time, you are not.
And I can’t shake the feeling that your upbringing did play a huge role in the way you relate to others today. For example, you’ve learned early on that your role is to caregive for others, while you comforted your grandmother. Today, I notice is very hard for you to even feel things that go against the comfort of others.
Lastly, I noticed that even though your husband is indeed not a cheater or a violent man, your standards of what a healthy relationship is are indeed severely lowered, because at the end of the day, you come back home to a man who demands a lot, and gives very little, and you have every right to be sad—or hell, even mad—at a man expecting me to carry a child I don’t want, after berating me every day, after work. I would be mad too!
You are not daydreaming in Disney when you ask yourself whether “this is it”, this could be different.
Unfortunately, when we are in the thick of it, we also relate to people who are in the same dynamics (speaking of your friends), which further reinforces the idea that it is what relationships are and I should just suck it up.
You don’t have to suck it up nor do anything you don’t want to do.
Recommendations for Adele:
Learn more about similar relational dynamics by reading books such as “Codependent No More” by Melody Beattie.
Start journaling to get accustomed to speaking her own mind in a safe space and start exploring her own likes and dislikes.
Join a support group dedicated to women who are going through similar challenges, so she can learn, in real time, more about her relation patterns, get support from others and learn real skills on how to improve her life.
Names are changed privacy reasons.
Do you need support on your journey? Learn more about individual sessions or group sessions that can help you uncover what’s holding you back and get you the support you need to thrive?
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