The Road to Hell via Good Intentions

Today, the whiteboard in our living room reads “I love you [husband's name]” in big red letters. If you look very very closely, up in the wee lefthand corner, there is a lower case “g”. Yes, it is a message FROM him TO me. Even our daughter thought it was a message from me to him. But he fails to see these things. And what may be the saddest thing of all, is he doesn’t really even love himself.

Sooooo, that is where I am for now. Somewhere between a whiteboard and a hard place. I think my girls realize I am probably nearing the end of this Earthly journey. They are rallying around me, and I find great joy in that. I love my children endlessly.

My husband repeatedly assures me he is “really trying to do things for” me and I think the way he thinks, he truly is well-meaning. It’s not effective and it’s darned sad really, and it isn’t even that his heart is in the right place – it’s that he WANTS his heart to be in the right place. It’s how I think that the “road to Hell is paved with good intentions” saying breaks down to mean. It doesn’t say “good intentions paved the road to Hell.” So it isn’t good intentions that are bad or lead to Hell or add up substantially. And it isn’t failed attempts that pave the road to Hell, either. That’s not what “good intentions” means here.

The operative word, I believe, is “intentions.” He INTENDS for his actions to be good, but fails to follow through and do the work. It’s like as if I INTENDED to fix a bottle for the baby and I really love the baby and I want the baby to live, but I never got around to fixing the bottle and the baby died. My intentions aren’t the problem: my intentions were good. It’s my lack of action that paves the road to Hell, and the consequences of my inactions. It isn’t that I failed in preparing the bottle… if I’d tried, I would have been taking action and probably succeeded in feeding the baby. And if I couldn’t feed the baby, I’d realize I couldn’t and probably taken action to find a way TO feed the baby. It’s by not acting – by INTENDING to act – that the road to Hell was paved.

I can’t stand any more philosophical sh*t right now. You probably have overdosed on it by now. I love you. Thank you for reading.~GHC

Sexless in Seattle; or "No Sex For You"

Warning: Frank discussion about sex life ahead. Feel free to bail if you wish. No body parts mentioned, one act referenced. Would be considered PG at worst, I imagine. ~~GHC

Sexless in Seattle, or “No Sex for You”

I don’t say this is universal truth, just that this is truth in my own life. Desire for sex is closely tied to desire to prepare food. When the type of food I prepare is ridiculed or insulted, I feel much less like having sex. When the food I prepare is disparaged as in “I only eat because I don’t have enough sex” then I am even more unwilling to prepare food. When my worth as a human being and especially as a wife and partner is equated with whether I rise and prepare a hot meal for breakfast and stop what else I’m doing to prepare a hot meal for dinner, I feel much less like giving of myself in either area – food preparation OR sex.

I used to revel in food preparation. I wanted to find new and exciting ways to prepare food, new foods to experiment with. I wanted to share these experiences with him. I wanted to sample new tastes and textures. What I got in return was disgust, rejection, that’s-not-how-mom-makes-it. “I’ve never seen it done THAT way before.” This made me feel shame and embarrassment.

“You’re so nasty.” Hard as I tried to wrap my head around how those words were a good thing, I did try to wrap my head around it somehow even though it went against everything I’d ever thought about myself. That I think was the beginning of the disconnect I came to feel about sex. I didn’t want to feel nasty. I didn’t want to be a bad girl. I didn’t want to be punished. No, thank you, spanking is not sexy to me. I was beaten and abused and horribly punished throughout my life. I don’t equate those experiences to healthy, happy sexuality. I see sex as a positive thing.

I began to see sex as dirty, to see him viewing sex as dirty which made me feel dirty because I didn’t see sex as dirty. Which after a long, full, rich sex life started seeming dirty. Which in turn was confusing.

Sex is a gift. Sex is a trust experience. Sex is me being open and giving and trusting and free and happy. Foreplay is the entire day preceding sex. Hearing how useless what I’m interested in doesn’t make me feel open or giving or trusting or free or happy. Devaluing my experiences doesn’t turn me on. Having my requests ignored – nay, spit on – doesn’t prepare me to have sex. “Please don’t block my side of the couch with objects.” I come home, my side of the couch is blocked with objects. Daily. I come downstairs in the morning after he’s been there. My side of the couch is blocked with objects. I literally have two, possibly three requests I make of him. This is one: Please don’t block my side of the couch with objects. It’s just disrespectful. It is.

Conversely, he has innumerable requests of me. Concerning spaghetti, for instance: Don’t use the whole wheat noodles. Don’t get the meat kind of sauce. Get the garden vegetable sauce. Don’t get Prego, get Ragu even though you prefer Prego. Cook ground beef to include in it even though you don’t eat ground beef in yours. I like it when you add in mushrooms, lots of mushrooms. Make sure you cook the noodles long enough that they are mushy. Be sure to add parmesan cheese. I refuse to eat leftover spaghetti. These, you see, are requests just about spaghetti. I just want to be able to sit down in my place in the living room without having to move six things.

Why does he think it’s a power issue? I don’t want/need/even feel like I hold ultimate power over sex. I am however one of two people necessary to create this sexual being called us. I should have at least equal say in the experience. If I don’t want to participate, then I won’t.

Today I blurted out to him that the reason *I* get to say when we have sex is the same reason why if I want him to eat and try to force-feed him food, that he has a say-so and the right to decline it. It doesn’t matter how much I want him to taste it, or that I made it for him. What I didn’t say is that if I really want him to eat it, maybe I should try to entice him by describing the ingredients or how good it will taste or how much I love him or why it would be good for him, or I dunno, maybe in lieu of manipulation just say that I have something good to eat and see if he’s interested. I imagine if he’s hungry, he’ll come to the table.

What I want is to share my very being, my essence with him. I want to be heard. I want to be felt. I want to -- well -- share. I want to pour out my spirit to the human being I have chosen and who has chosen me to spend our mortal existence with. And when I feel cut off from doing that, when I feel unwelcome and unwanted and unappreciated, when I feel my entire value is how often I spread my legs or give head or cook food, I want nothing less than to spread my legs or give head or cook food.

When instead of asking what’s wrong or listening to what’s wrong or even appearing to CARE what’s wrong, he makes shitty comments like “it’s hard to care when we have sex every ten months” – see, that just reinforces to me that my feelings don’t matter and not only that, the fact we had sex a few weeks back doesn’t matter either because as long as it’s not the way HE wants it to be, it will never be RIGHT so it doesn’t matter. I don’t withhold sex because I can. I withhold sex because I am no longer willing to participate in a one-sided unrewarding activity I am totally disinterested in (and the funny part is that the only sentence in this entire essay that will be understood, retained, and repeated endlessly in the future will be this last one). It won’t matter that I am hurt and feel abandoned and devalued. It won’t matter that I want more than he does to feel passion and love and romance, that I crave acknowledgment, that I beg for attention on a real and deep level. It won’t matter that he could have a raging sexual maniac for a wife if he would only treat me as an equal human being with feelings as valid as his and at least as deep as his.

It won’t matter that he could be experiencing the best sex he’s ever known on a frequent basis, so much sex that’s so good his head would spin from it, if he’d just stop worrying about his damned self all the time and his own needs and feeling so neglected. He is spoiled. And like all spoiled people, he’s lost connection with anyone but himself. I’ve created a monster by not holding him accountable. And for that, I am accountable. And for that, I suffer. Terribly. And for that, I have no answer, no way back from as far as I can see because he refuses to listen to my side of it, to hear how I feel or to look at himself.

So here we sit. Sexless in Seattle, except we aren’t in Seattle. But we are sexless.~~GHC

I apologize for the personal nature as well as the ranting nature of this post. I'm sure you cannot think of a word to say in response to it, and that's okay. I considered not posting it at all, like ten thousand other things I've written, but I decided that SOMEONE SOMEWHERE might benefit from reading it and, for me, that would be enough.

No More Mr. Nice Guy

Living with Mental Illness

The bathroom was dark when I woke up this morning, and I knew it was going to be a bad day. There are no windows in the upstairs hall or bathroom. We keep the bathroom light on 24/7. It serves as a beacon to the stairway and the landing. It functions as a nightlight for the entire upper floor of the apartment. We can all sleep in utter darkness, safe in the knowledge that as soon as we open our bedroom doors, there will be a guiding light to lead us to the bathroom. When I awoke today, the hallway and bathroom were in darkness.

My husband urinates in the bathroom sink. It doesn’t bother me; if I could pee standing up, I would probably do it too. Seems practical to me. The principle is the same: elimination in a porcelain bowl that is washed away with swirling water. But when he falls into the bowels of depression, he can’t bear to look at his own face in the bathroom mirror. He turns off the light so he doesn’t have to – literally – face himself.

I decided to go back to bed for awhile because I figured I needed the extra rest to fortify myself for what I would surely endure later. Eventually, I woke up again and went downstairs. We keep a whiteboard on the front door where we leave messages for one another. When there’s no new message, we just leave the old one there and it remains, sometimes for weeks. Our messages always revolve around our love for each other. The message that had been showing was “I love you, G” in my husband’s handwriting with “For forever” followed by a drawing of a young girl – the last two added by my daughter. The message board had looked like this for several weeks now. This morning, it had been erased. It was blank. The board has never been blank since we bought it several years ago.

So my husband took away his love message, and took away my daughter’s as well. This was symbolically his way of un-loving me, of punishing me, of hurting me. When he’s depressed, I experience a constant barrage of these little slights, these emotional slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, these expressions of his pain and anger. For example, I suffer from near-constant back spasms and it is painful for me to bend forward. Consequently, I have repeatedly asked that no one set anything down in my customary place on the couch. I have also explained – numerous times – that the meaning I make when I go to sit down and my place is blocked is that I am unwelcome. Silly, but it is how I feel. I am meticulous in making sure my husband’s seat is always open. It’s a twist on the idea of setting a place for Elijah.

My seat on the couch was, of course, covered with a blanket, an empty bag of potato chips, and a book this morning. His side was bare.

Last night, he came in after dark. I had made a conscious decision not to turn on the porch light. This will sound petty, and I agree that it is, indeed, a small thing. But so is a head louse and if you’ve ever had one, you know its impact is nothing if not huge. He says, “The porch light was off” or something profound like that, meaning “I noticed you didn’t turn on the porch light.” I looked up from my laptop and replied, “I didn’t turn it on tonight. I have always made a point to turn the light on for you and our daughter, but I’ve noticed that nobody ever turns it on for me. So tonight, I didn’t either.” Obviously sensing something was wrong, he apologized for not turning on the porch light in the past. He immediately associated what I said with himself. Of course, there is a “himself” component to the issue, but there are four I’s and one me in my statement about the porch light, and only one you. I also realize that we filter everything through our own consciousness and weigh things against ourselves. But not everything is about ourselves. Especially in a marital relationship.

When I express sadness, my husband immediately makes the meaning that he has failed me. Then he wallows in HIS sadness and failure, ignoring me. It then becomes incumbent upon me to comfort HIM. His “ME” is so big that he can’t see anyone else. His “ME” hurts so much that he can’t feel anyone else’s . . . anything. He constantly views the world through funhouse-mirror glasses.

See, if it had been me, I would have wondered what made my spouse decide that NOW is the time to stop turning on the porch light. I would have wondered what changed their way of thinking and acting. What suddenly changed a decades-old behavior pattern? What’s wrong with this picture?

There is a difference to the dynamic today, however. See, I decided last night that I have grown tired of forgiving and tired of understanding, tired of the tyrannical petty abuses and insults followed by tearful apologies, texts, IMs and mid-night confessional sessions that never resolve anything. I am tired of the acting out childishly, the horrendous treatment that no one else would ever stand for, that he could not “get away with” in any other situation. In short, Grace is gone. She collapsed last night in a barrage of passive-aggressive bullets. No one knows if she will survive or not. Time will tell. For now, there’s a new kid in town and I don’t know her name.

On a lighter note, it's been sixty days since I last smoked. So far, so good.