BESTSELF™ ICEBREAKER | Life Lessons 15
DESCRIBE AN ARGUMENT YOU HAD THAT HELPED SHAPE THE PERSON YOU ARE TODAY.
The cardinal rule of my marriage was that I was not permitted to cry. So I didn’t.
At least, rarely out of sadness, but there were most definitely tears of frustration and anger. Rarely shed, but they did burn.
My then-husband had a job that took him out of town a significant amount of time during the month, for months on end. One summer, his parents visited us, arriving from Alberta on their way to visit family in Québec, and he adjusted his schedule to “work from home” - meaning the home office. I was doing my best to keep everyone fed and entertained. At the time, the kids were 5, 4, 2 and 1.
I was treading water. Barely.
It’s my bet that his mother, though never diagnosed, was clinically depressed and told the most awful stories, which (I joke) all ended with “and then they died.” She sucked all of the energy out of the room and resented that I wasn’t French-speaking and not open to her advice or care of the kids - which included giving (sneaking) the kids “the Pepsi.” My father-in-law was lovely and played with the kids in the backyard or took them to the park in shifts. Their son, when he’d arrive home well after dinner, after baths, and mostly after tuck-in, each night he completely avoided his mother and would go outside to talk with his dad while I fixed him a plate to eat (good little wifey).
After a few days of this, I was exhausted and angry. Why didn’t he take a couple of days off? Why was I the one to entertain his mother? Why was he avoiding his mother? Could we please just order in a pizza? We paid for them to visit us, and yet he didn’t spend any time with them. I remember this conversation getting louder and louder because I wasn’t getting any answers.
After fuming and yelling over how much he didn’t want his parents there in the first place. After all, it was my job as the wife and mother to do everything I needed help with - what was wrong with me? He stood up, looked at me, said, “I hate the drama,” then proceeded to hold out his hand in front of him, moving it from left to right in a flat line, explaining, “this is how our life should be.” I was incredulous. A flat line. Like death? Like no growth? Like, what?
It was at that minute I realized that I was in my marriage alone. I didn’t have a partner in parenting. I had a fifth child.
That conversation forced me to make choices for my children and myself as the priority going forward. Life, of course, had other plans and created plenty of (un)avoidable drama. I think about that argument often when I visit the “what if” moments.