Tag: happy marriage

Home Safe Home

A common consequence of being raised in an abusive household is an adult survivor’s ambivalent feelings around the concept of ”home.” My feelings about “home” certainly were.

Maybe because of that background, I was determined to create one. I was as ill-prepared to do that as a chef who had never stepped foot in a food market, much less a kitchen. Home was foreign territory.

An abused child is powerless. The only option they have is to adapt and survive the environment they are in. When bad things happen or they see bad things happen, an abused child often believe it happened because they did something “wrong.” Children are notoriously egocentric..

I eventually came to distinguish feelings of “guilt” from feelings of “shame.” Guilt is feeling bad about a mistake you made. Shame comes from the feeling you are a mistake. Major difference.

I only know that I emerged into young adulthood with the twin challenges of navigating life having grown up without the basic blueprint everyone else seemed to have.

A label that sums up my childhood environment might be “bohemian intellectualism.” Or “intellectual bohemianism.” Basically an environment of free thinking adults without many rules and utterly inconsistent.

Which is pretty scary for children. If there is anyone on the planet who needs structure and boundaries, it is children. They need limits for many reasons. First, they cannot impose them on themselves. Their judgment isn’t all that. Children don’t always realize “when is enough.”

I have come to understand that setting boundaries and limits on children allows them to safely test the parameters of their lives. Life is overwhelming enough for adults to say nothing of small children. It is why parents try to protect children from life’s harsher realities before they are mature enough to handle them.

Trauma teachers frequently reference the resiliency and survival skills of abused children. All children are known to have some innate ability to “bounce back” from loss and disappointments. I believe I had that characteristic. But as a child, I remember wishing there was someone or something to guide and protect me. I concluded early that my parents weren’t capable of doing that.

Not for a lack of trying on my parents’ part, to be fair. Neither of them had healthy coping skills themselves and very poor judgment when it came to hiring babysitters and caregivers. My memories are mostly neutral or unhappy looking back on the dozen or so housekeepers we had come and go when we were children.

Caregivers infractions ranged from the benign irresponsibility of a babysitter having her boyfriend over while she cared for us. Greater violations came from imbuing trust in troubled adults to take care of vulnerable little girls. It seemed there were so many of these defectives who came into our life.

Home was never a place of safety for me. Those final few steps before arriving home from school often churned up a mixture of apprehension or anxiety. Maybe Mom was passed out on the couch, or in her bedroom. People might be sitting around drinking. Well before the sun went over the yardarm.

Those were just the daytime anxieties. On many nights, especially after guests’ drinking heavily, the anxiety got worse. One night I went into my bedroom and found a man I didn’t know passed out in my bed. I’m not all together sure where I slept that night. Maybe the couch in the basement rec room.

The work of keeping myself calm internally – both in my heart and in my mind – still requires effort. Like any “practice,” remaining calm and centered and focussed especially in the face of severe overwhelm and stress, takes commitment and repetition.

Life guided me to a healing path. I’ve figured out that the home and safety we crave is ultimately found within us. It took a long time to learn that. It is a process of building trust and belief – in the world around us and in ourselves. I don’t know which of those was harder for me to achieve.

When I compare how I am now to how I used to be, I drolly remind myself and those who witnessed me struggle, “I am much better now.”

It has taken a long time and much personal work to shake off that desperate and dogged insecurity. I have read that a loving and happy marriage can heal emotional wounds if the partners are truly there for one another.

I appreciate the safe harbor I’ve landed in. It might never have been. I look at this loving relationship with the same degree of wonder as I look back on what it took to me to survive.

Mine has not been a “normal” path. But I learned to keep myself safe and that I was worthy to have it. The evidence being that I am here now.

I can write down heartfelt words of gratitude for what is and, most especially, for what no longer is.

Happily Married

Happily married? An oxymoron in my world. My family background is filled with marriages that ranged from just okay to horrific. And everything in between.

My oldest paternal uncle drank to excess. It was a family disease. His wife solved the problem by keeping up with him. I am told their daughter cut them out of her life after one visit with them. Cleaning under the bed after her parents went home, daughter Betty found countless empty booze bottles. High marks for the integrity of not trying to cover up their problem?

Orlo and Aline produced four children and had long lives. Beyond the drinking, I heard of few other issues. The marriage seemed stable enough. But my mother shared Aline’s confidence that she spent the entire first year of their marriage “crying over the sink while doing the dishes.” Ergo, the compromise. Since Aline couldn’t beat him, it appeared, she joined him.

Within the family, I heard countless stories about regular and casual beatings of my female ancestors by their husbands. It was partly a familial characteristic but also a cultural one. Punishing one’s wife “to keep her in line” or “straighten her out” was seen in some bizarre way as a husband’s “duty.” Talk about a free pass. Go patriarchy.

Other marriages I heard of in my family were more benign and at least congenial. There were healthy working partnerships here and there. My father’s brothers made good marriages that could be called true partnerships. But inevitably, there were issues. My Uncle Doug died suddenly at just 49 years old. His wife Pat remained a widow for the rest of her life.

My own parent’s marriage fell in the horrific category. There wasn’t much to cheer about except maybe the black humor that came out of it. The marriage was riddled – as was my childhood – with pills and pain and violence and infidelity and histrionics. That marriage came to a decisive end with Mom’s suicide attempt at 42.

Having crawled out of the gutter of addiction and mental illness, Mom eventually found work at a city newspaper. Dad had moved to Newfoundland to find a paying job after the dissolution of his marriage and businesses in New Brunswick. On a visit back to New Brunswick to see his kids, he visited Mom in the newsroom.

A colleague of Mom’s gushed on meeting him: “Oh Mr. Brewer, I can’t tell you how happy we are to have your wife here with us.” (The labels die hard in New Brunswick, with intervening legalities like divorce a mere nuisance.) Without skipping a beat, Dad replied: “Madam, I can’t tell you how happy I am that my wife is here with you.”

To say I had skewed notions of what a marriage was or could be as I entered adulthood would be something of an understatement. A steady boyfriend in my late teens gave me a sweet anniversary card during our relationship in which he wrote: “Let’s make this the first in a long string of anniversaries.” I froze. I could not conjure a mental picture of what that life might even have looked like.

So, of course, I sabotaged the relationship and, in my mind’s eye, “released” him to find a steadier and more suitable life partner. Something stuck though. I never stopped regretting the loss of that relationship.

My first marriage on paper was an unmitigated disaster. I entered it for all the wrong reasons having succumbed to all sorts of social and familial pressures which had nothing to do with what I wanted or needed. In a way, the marriage was as much a victim of my immaturity as his life generally was of his own.

Then I met Hank. Later in life. On the internet. A half a continent away. From a different generation. Ballsed that one up pretty well, too the first time around. But the love didn’t die. We reconnected again three years after to broke up.

I wake up in a state of awe and gratitude every day. I am happily married. There’s that oxymoron again. My husband is like the manifestation of a dream I had a long time ago. Lots. of compatibilities in spite of different nationalities, different generations, and wildly different family backgrounds. On top of the list is our sense of humor.

As I have read it is supposed to be, those differences are strengths in our marriage. We are as much friends to one another as we ever were lovers. We are companions as well as each other’s critics and cheerleaders. He spends a lot of time rolling his eyes at me as I come up with yet another cockamamie plan or idea. I spend a lot of time feeling like the little kid who sulkily defers to the inherent wisdom of his age and experience.

I sometimes wonder what Mom would think. She never remarried after she and Dad divorced. Indeed, I raised my kids alone and stayed single for decades we often muse that god decided s/he was sick of seeing me and Hank flailing around in our respective lives and steered us toward each other.

Though no one can predict how much time we’ll have together, I prefer to focus on what we have today and every day: a happy marriage. Not without issues but full of love and fun and satisfaction.

Don’t know what I would tell Mom if she were still here today. Maybe, whodda thunkit?