Total pages in book: 154
Estimated words: 142664 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 713(@200wpm)___ 571(@250wpm)___ 476(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 142664 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 713(@200wpm)___ 571(@250wpm)___ 476(@300wpm)
Whoever heard of needing a shrink to deal with being a wife and mother? It’s only now that the world talks about PPD and all the other horrors that women face as mothers, but back in the day, women were frowned upon and abused if they weren’t perfect little housewives.
That abuse didn’t come from their husbands, not in all cases anyway, but from the society we live in. I had no one to turn to when my own mind and body betrayed me, so I just walked into the dark one day and let it take over. I was too tired to fight.
What I didn’t know and didn’t have time to care about back then was the toll it was taking on my marriage. I didn’t think about who I had become in the eyes of my husband, who, because he wasn’t taught any better, still expected the girl he fell in love with when he walked through the door and not the worn-out, tired-as-hell housewife she had become.
I didn’t even realize when I stopped sleeping with my husband. My mind was doing all it could to hang in there, and as for my body, that, too, had betrayed me. I wasn’t the thin put together debutante of yesteryear. I was now the thirty pounds heavier mother of four who couldn’t lose an ounce if I starved myself for a week.
My body had changed, my mind was no longer under my control, and I lost all care about anything and everything. On the other hand, my husband, who didn’t have to deal with the changing body of motherhood or the hormones it came with, was just coasting through life.
He'd spend a few hours with them before bed each evening and on the weekends, but he had a life to live as well, and just like his father before him, that life didn’t involve spending too much time at home when there were golf games to get to and nights out with the boys.
Because you see, he was living the same black-and-white movie his parents had cut their teeth on as well, so for him, I was supposed to do the heavy lifting where hearth and home were concerned. Don’t get me wrong, he spent plenty of time with the kids, and they never went without. But we never stood a chance because we were fed lies and made to believe that life could be a dream.
When he told me about the affair, I think that’s the day my world stopped moving one way and went off kilter. That wasn’t part of the perfect script. Which part of the love story was that? After the hell that I had been through, fighting my own mind to hang on, he had the nerve to find solace in another woman?
Back then, I couldn’t see my own faults; I wanted to blame him for everything. I hated him enough to kill him. He was telling the whole world, our friends and family, that I had failed. My depression got even worse, but no one seemed to notice or know how to help because, as I came to learn, everyone else had their own demons to fight.
I still had my kids to think about, especially little Alyssa, who seemed to be doing even worse than me. It broke my heart to see her like that, but I was too deep in my own dark hell to do much for her.
The first couple of years after the divorce, I was a mess. I cried rivers, begged, pleaded, and made an ass of myself trying to get my husband back and put my family back together. And then, one day, I just stopped. I realized that I had to get use to a new reality because the world was not going to stop for me to get my shit together.
I don’t know how to explain it, but it was like something came over me one day, and I was no longer the same person, and in a way, I wasn’t. I was a divorced mother of four with a broken heart and no will to go on.
Then I looked at my little girl, the one who seemed more hurt than me, the adult in the situation, and knew that I had to do better. I didn’t make a big fuss outwardly, but inwardly, I had taken steps to make changes in my life. I had only one thing motivating me, to do better for my kids.
It wasn’t about putting my own needs on the back burner, I never looked at it that way. It was more about getting used to the new normal. It was then I realized how withdrawn my daughter had become. Maybe it was the fact that her last brother had gone off to college, and there were no longer any buffers to keep my notice off of her, but I saw it.