A personal story of blurred boundaries, betrayal, and the difference between taking responsibility and carrying shame.
I have always had a hard time differentiating between my responsibility and accountability as opposed to yours. This probably stems from my childhood. My mother’s nervous disposition was my responsibility to alleviate. Where I finished and she began was always a blurred line, and no responsible adult in my sphere would correct me or tell me otherwise. I was also responsible for my younger brother’s well-being. Both my parents would shout, “Make sure you look after your brother,” from as early as I could remember. And making sure he was OK at any cost was how I stayed alive, for not fulfilling my duty, I thought, would mean abandonment through exile by my parents. Taking public transport alone as a six-year-old with my toddler brother in tow was “normal” in those days. As a result, over the years, I became particularly adept at putting up a wall to keep people out to protect myself emotionally. Still, over time, inevitably loneliness would creep in, and by then I dropped my shield momentarily to let their foot in, only to be disappointed by the heavy neediness of others I felt that I needed to fix, just like my mother’s nerves: your guilt, my shame.
But I digress.
As an adult, I married someone who reminded me of my mother. Emotionally up and down, moody in the mornings (before coffee), clingy, and nosy. He would invite himself to my self-help group meetings or sign up to the gym I was a member of. I convinced myself and my therapist, who I was seeing at the time, that this was a good test to bring someone like him into my life and to learn how to deal with them, while my body, from the back of my neck to the bottom of my solar plexus, was screaming NO and to run away from him.
Soon after we married, after a very short nine-month courtship, he was still blaming his unemployment, my minor weight gain, and our messy house on my emotional “deficiencies” that I came with as someone who has been treated for mental health issues much of her adult life. Apparently, being employed but depressed is the reason why one’s spouse is in a bad mood and physically unable to help maintain a clean home. Still, the person I was then would cater to his emotional needs by providing financial stability and paying the bills, much like how I would look after my brother and keep the peace, whilst my mother wept in her bedroom because she could not stand the noise that her two children, whom she willfully bore, were making. And as with my family of origin, his guilt slowly became my shame that I willfully worked to remediate.
Years later, when I was building up the courage to ask my soon-to-be-ex-husband if he wanted an open marriage, my heart was racing as I sat in bed with him, watching him play Smashing Four on his iPad, oblivious to the shock that I would introduce to our lives. My earlier, intimate texts with my ex-boyfriend from 18 years ago, together with the recent rejection from my married partner, gave me the resolve to carry this through. I am opening this marriage up for my selfish need for physical intimacy that I miss, despite being the culprit of a dead bedroom. I convinced myself that I will open this marriage only if he says yes, making sure that my soon-to-be-ex-husband is complicit in the demise of our 15-year marriage. I was not going down by myself, and I was not going to be solely responsible for the weeks and months of arguing that ensued.
(Part 2 to continue)
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