HomeāForumsāRelationshipsāStruggling to find balance
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October 22, 2019 at 1:48 pm #319189
MarkParticipantHi Valora,
I don’t get a sense of appreciation but that might just be me.. expecting too much….I struggle with my wife because she can be the most wonderful person .. i have literally seen her give away her coat off her back to someone more needy… but I have also seen where she will lie (small white lies) to get what she wants… I resist the urge to jump to the conclusion that she is taking me for a ride.. taking me for an idiot.. but I keep struggling with this over and over… I told her to proceed with paying the attorney for her moms green card.. but there is no telling how long this process will take .. she says 3 to 6 months…
We continue to come up with plans for her mom to be somewhere else .. but each time we set an agenda.. it falls through and I get angry/hurt by it .. We didn’t have any time together as a newly married couple without her mom being with us.. If we had been married for 10 years and her mom needed a place then maybe I would feel differently … less agitated .. but it feels unfair that the woman has been here from the very start …
October 22, 2019 at 1:53 pm #319191
AnonymousGuestDear Mark:
I understand. To understand better I ask:
1. Did you explain to your wife clearly how uncomfortable you are in your own home living with her mother and if so, when did your wife become aware of your great discomfort regarding her mother living there?
2. What did your wife tell you in response to #1 since she was made aware the above (#1), did she do anything to accommodate you (was it her idea that her mother live with the cousins/ her daughter/ France relatives?)
3. What is your wife’s relationship with her mother- do they talk a lot (in French and in your presence, so you don’t know what they are saying??)
(I will soon be away from the computer for a couple of hours or so).
anita
October 22, 2019 at 2:12 pm #319193MarkParticipant1. I have tried many times to explain how uncomfortable this is for me… She seems to dismiss it because she can’t understand it… She thinks I am wrong in feeling this way.Ā I have discussed this with our priest, and my previous therapist and both have said that an upset child just screams louder.. so each time, I try to be more assertive and more vocal.Ā She knows I am not happy with the situation.
2. Her accommodation was the suggestion for her mom to live with her daughter .. but that was doomed from the start … again culturally, no 23 yr old American girl is going to want the old world perspective on how to live her life. She never spent much time with her grandmother, so there isn’t much in common there. The other trips were my suggestions in trying to get this woman out of my house.
3. They speak all the time in French.. I just sit there and try to zone it out, and I do not know the content of their conversations. My wife told her mother that i want her out, as the woman was crying at me on the couch.. I couldn’t explain my feelings to her any more than i can explain them to my wife… They just don’t understand… I tried to tell her is wasn’t her as a person.. it was just an unwanted presence in my house… my own mother, or anyone else for that matter… but that didn’t go over… or make much of an impact…
I even suggested that my wife and her mother go find an apartment close to my wife’s job… but that would end the marriage .. so I am trying to be patient and hold myself together .. until I just can’t .. and everything blows up ….
October 22, 2019 at 4:49 pm #319211AnonymousGuestDear Mark:
I want to return to your thread tomorrow morning when my thinking is clearer (in about 13 hours from now). If you want to add before I return any information that may be relevant to understanding your wife better, for example her relationships with her daughter, her sisters, past- and present relationship with her mother and father, her attitude toward men in general, please do.
Also, if your wife is Moroccan, I may be helpful to you in regard to the cultural perspective. Let me know.
anita
October 23, 2019 at 8:49 am #319305AnonymousGuestDear Mark:
I re-read your posts this morning.
It doesn’t read to me that your wife planned for her mother to live in the house the two of you share. Reads like it just so happened to be, that her mother liked your house and wanted to stay. She tried living here and there (in the US and France) but she didn’tĀ like those places, sheĀ likes yours!
She has 12 children. I suppose right now your wife is her very favorite (adult) child and your wife probably feels good about it, finally being the preferred oneĀ out of the 12.
Your wife is a hard worker: “she works all the time and I come home to her mother in the house”- she works all the time, and she brings money in. It is the two of you together that paid the $9000 for her six family members to travel for your wedding. And you wrote that you okayed her spending the money to start the green card proceeding for her mother, money she makes working so hard.
You wrote: “I was afraid of the truth.. that she really had this planned from the start and that is the real reason.. the only reason .. she married me to begin with.. I feelĀ like I have been taken advantage of… I am trying not to feelĀ so taken advantage of.. trying not to feel betrayed… I still feel wounded”-
– I didn’t detect any evidence that your wife planned that her mother lives with you. I didn’t detect any evidence that she has taken financial advantage of you. She works a lot- this is not a woman who sits home or travels the world, spending her husband’s hard earned money. Also, she tried different options for her mother, other places for her to live and is working on the green card thing.
Reads to me that your belief that she married you with theĀ intent to move her mother in, and that she is taking advantage of you, is a belief formed way before you ever met your wife. It started when you were a child, having been abused, and continued as an adult during your 10 year marriage. You are inaccurately projecting this belief into your wife and your marriage.
When you see your mother-in-law, you see being taken advantage of, you see betrayal. This is why it hurts so much to see her every day. Every time you see here, there it is, the intense distress in these core beliefs: I-am-being-taken-advantage-of, I-am-betrayed. The wound of past betrayal remains open, seeing her mother in your house keeps that wound open and bleeding.
I can understand not wanting her mother living with you, I would feel the same if I was in your situation. What I am saying is, that the intensity of your distress is about having been taken advantage of and having been betrayed as a child, and onward, before you met your wife.
You bought a house, “a nice house sitting on top of a mountain top with 13 acres of woods.. away from everybody”, and yet you have a somebody inside the house, in your living room that you don’t want there, speaking with your wife in a language that you don’t understand. The 13 acres don’t help when you can’t have privacy in your living room.
It is not fair that you are in this situation, living with her mother. You shouldn’t be in this situation. Your wife cares more about her mother’s feelings than about yours. Not that she doesn’t care at all about you. She cares about and for her mother more.
I am guessing that her mother will be moving if one of her other 11 adult children can offer her a better setting, a better home. Or if it became very uncomfortable living in your home. She already knows you are uncomfortable with her there (she cried on the sofa when your wife told her so), but it doesn’t bother her that much that she wants to move out. Neither does it bother your wife too much as she is in no hurry to have her mother move out.
If you want, process my input here and let me know what you think and feel, and I will be glad to reply to you further.
anita
October 23, 2019 at 1:21 pm #319333MarkParticipantThank you Anita,
It feels right.. that I’m still dealing with the “unfairness” and “the lack of control” of the past situations and seeing/feeling that pain in every day exchanges that are not as dramatic or as destructive as they currently feel. The sense of fairness is a big trigger for me… as what happened to me when i was seven wasn’t fair…which is why I am trying to find another therapist … to help me deal with the present instead of projecting the past into the present.
Yes, my wife works too much… it is admirable but I keep suggesting that she find something else.. she works 7 days a week and often they are 14 or 15 hour days… it’s not healthy … she comes home and sleeps and goes right back out again… One of my frustrations is that her mother being here is empowering her to to work all the time.. her mother cleans and cooks so my wife doesn’t feel guilty about not being there to do so herself. … although i cook and do the laundry oftentimes myself.
And Yes.. moving away from the world … doesn’t move me away from my own past… everywhere i go.. i take me along… so running away is the very definition of insanity… The fact that my mother paid our abuser to babysit us when we were kids was a surprising awareness that just came to me recently through therapy… so my tolerance of a “mother”.. any mother is pretty low…The fact that our parents could not/ did not keep us safe has a lot to do with my motivation to run away from everyone… and to not want to tolerate her mother being there all the time. The fact they my parents let this individual move into the upstairs apartment in our childhood home and have access to us (my two sisters and I) means my own home has to be deemed safe and my wife’s mother destroys that safe feeling in my own house … again, not her issue, but my own..
She has to go… and we will have to have some rules about how often she can come back and how often she can stay with us….but I get the impression that no matter what agreement we come up with, it won’t be adhered too… I have to hope that the green card process doesn’t take more days than I can tolerate … Again, I shared all of this with my wife, she knew of my past and my issues.. I was unaware of my own past until it came out in therapy 10 years ago. The therapist had me verify with my two sisters who told very similar stories about horrors that I have no recollection of… yet, i still react in strange and unusual ways to triggers that i am unaware of …
My point is my wife knows all of this.. but she still cant seem to comprehend my feelings about this situation. I still feel like a little kid screaming out my discontent with no one listening to me…Ā Ā Ā but it helps to have this forum for me to vent
October 23, 2019 at 1:37 pm #319337MarkParticipantMy wife is from the Ivory Coast… West Africa… and she is the oldest. Culturally, I am told that the oldest is the most responsible for everyone else. so she feels obligated to take care of her mother. My wife is 48 and has never been married although she did have a child at 24. She has often said she felt like a man.. having to bear the responsibility of making sure everyone else is okay.
She never felt like she needed or wanted a man in her life..(until she met me) .. . Her father left the family when she was 18 and she had a hard time forgiving him but seems to have come to terms with it. She feels sorry for her mother and on some level, II think she wants her mother to follow in her footsteps… come to America, learn English, get a green card, get a job, become a citizen, have a whole new life … but her mother is much older and I cannot see this happening.
Her daughter is a social butterfly… gets bored easy with the man of the moment and moves on quickly… The daughter got married young and pregnant and left her husband withing a year … she is 24 and has moved in and out of 3 or four different men’s houses/relationships in the last 2 years. She never had a father in her life (though she has gone to France twice to see him now) and I think she is constantly looking for a father figure in her life. My wife continues to try to support her emotionally and while I think the young lady is a few french fries short of a happy meal, she is a sweet person… My wife keeps telling me how smart her daughter is… and i just nod in agreement although she really isn’t very intelligent .. (cannot figure out what 20% off on a sale means dollar wise)Ā I have a fear that at some point she will move her daughter and grand baby into our house also…which will present another opportunity to test my patienceĀ ..
October 23, 2019 at 1:42 pm #319339AnonymousGuestDear Mark:
You are welcome.
Your wife working 7 days a week, often 14-15 hours a day while her mother is in her house alone, or with you when you come back from work, makes me think that she is running away herself from her mother, similar to you staying later at work so to not be with her mother.
Imagine, your wife has her own demons, not wanting to be with her mother, like you.
I am so sorry this person abused you and your sisters while being paid byy our mother, while being given an upstairs apartment in the home, access to sexually abuse three children. No wonder you have suffered so much, and you still suffer.
Interesting that your wife will probably benefit from her mother not living there, but her guilt may be what is pushing her to accommodate her mother. She may not have suffered the sexual abuse that you did, but she suffered some kind of abuse. Maybe all 12 siblings did, 11 of which are getting a break from their mother while your wife-and-you are relieving all 11 from this burden.
“I still feel like a little kid screaming out my discontent with no one listening to me… but it helps to have this forum for me to vent”- not only are you venting, but I, for one, I am listening. So keep talking, keep making yourself heard, and I will do my best to really hear you, hear what it is that is in your heart and mind.
anita
October 25, 2019 at 5:34 am #319649MarkParticipantHi Anita,
I always had difficulty with a sense of “unfairness” and lack of control but never knew why. I have struggled in all of my relationships and again was at a loss to explain it. I always thought of myself as an intimacy vampire… always seeking intimacy and not sex.. which seemed a bit wired compared to all the other guys I grew up around. So at the end of my second marriage ( this one is number 3) .. I sought out counselling…
I started to see Doctor Ellis in Cherry Hill NJ. After 8 sessions, he asked had there been any child sexual abuse in my past. I said no, that I would remember such things. He said that I wouldnāt remember and that my inability to handle Chrissyās (2nd wife) verbal abuse and alcoholism might have some roots in my childhood experiences. He told me to consult my two sisters. When I pushed them, they both related the same story in detail with only one slight difference. I have absolutely no recollection of any sexual abuse in the past but now both of my sisters have said that yes there was a historyā¦.
We had an older male cousin who started babysitting us when I was 6. My younger sister relates six years of rape, my older sister relates stories of getting molested in the stairwells of the house but since she was older, she appears to have been spared the more aggressive aspects of Stevieās appetitesāā¦ Stevie moved into the third-floor apartment of our new house when I was about 9. I believe the abuse started before that, at the older house, when I was 6, but cannot verify that for certain.Ā My older sister was the one who initially placed me in the sceneā¦ saying I was helping Stevie rape my younger sister. There is some uncertainty as to what role I took on but certainly I was in the middle of everything. My younger sister says I was raped and tortured, tied up, forced to watch the mutilation and burning alive of cats and dogs. She also states that she would be locked up in a closet for hours not knowing what was happening to me as I was left alone with Stevie in the bedroom. I can only imagine and since I have no recollection, thatās all I have left, is my imaginationā¦
Stevie apparently died in prison in early 1980āsā¦ for beating his mother almost to death …there is no one to ask about the incidents that took place. My parents are typically unsupportive and as a matter of fact, my mother recently statedā¦ āYou know, outside of that little Stevie problem, Sally was a great tenantā … I am left with supposition and conjectureā¦ but it explains why I struggle with aggressive people…
October 25, 2019 at 6:46 am #319657AnonymousGuestDear Mark:
Horrific abuse suffered by three children is what happened in those two houses where you lived as a child. I will not call those homes, because there is a connotation of something good in the word Home.
He, the abuser, this monster beat his mother almost to death and died in prison in the early 1980s. His biggest crimes are what he did to children, three of whom are you and your sisters. There may be more, depending on what was available to him.
“outside of that little Stevie problem”, your mother recently stated-
– your mother knows of what that monster-Stevie did to her children… and she refers to what he did as a “little.. problem”????
If the answer is Yes, she knows. And you are in friendly contact with your mother, you shouldn’t be. You should not be in the same room with a person who said what she said except if the room you are in with her is a court of law where she stands trialĀ for her neglect (or possible knowledge of) what happened in her house to her unsupervised children. She should pay for this “little Stevie problem” with a large amount of money awarded to her three (now adult) children.
Even if she can’t afford that amount, she should be made legally responsible for what she did in a civil court of law if not in a criminal one.
It is not too late to exact some justice, some hint of justice.
anita
October 25, 2019 at 7:36 am #319661AnonymousGuestDear Mark:
I didn’t notice one of your posts of two days ago until just now because it so happens that you submitted it a few minutes before I submitted mine to you, and as I did, I wasn’t aware that you did (double posting). I want to reply to that post now:
Your wife is 48, grew up in the Ivory Coast, West Africa, the oldest of 12 children, she “has often said she felt like aĀ man.. having to bear the responsibility of making sure everyone else is okay”. She “feels sorry for her mother”, and wants her mother to follow in her footsteps: “come to America, learn English, get a green card, get a job, become a citizen, have a whole new life”.
Notice this: your wife wants her mother to “have a whole new life”, but she herself continues her old life of West Africa in the U.S. In West Africa she felt responsible for her mother, taking care of her and she does the same thing in the U.S., continuing the same life. She overworked in her original home, she overworks now, many hours per day, seven days a week. Same life, different places, different times.
You wrote about your wife’s 24 year old daughter and that you “have a fear that at some point (your wife) will move her daughter and grand baby into our house”- it is possible, but your wife most solid motivation is to house and care for her mother, not her daughter because when your wife was a child, the motivation to take care of her mother was already there, solid.
I imagine your wife at 24, when she had her daughter, through her daughter’s growing up years was very busy working hard and wasn’t available to be home with her daughter.
I hope you keep posting because my understanding of your situation keeps growing, and who knows, maybe some unexpected clarity will take place in your mind as a result of this communication.
anita
October 25, 2019 at 12:15 pm #319703MarkParticipantIt’s why I want to live on a mountain by myself… with my wife… and now her mother…. It ‘s why “Mother” has such a bad connotation for me. It is why having her mother in the house drives me so crazy… well .. one reason why..
It is also why I can’t deal with bully’s, overly aggressive people, or why I couldn’t deal with the ex wife when she would tell me how I wasn’t good enough for her… .because down deep inside… i believed her truth.. called it my own truth…My mothers truth about it being a “little problem” … even though it wasn’t reality. It explains why I can’t take a compliment, why I hate my image in photographs… It is probably why I became a police officer … so many years ago… and tried to be a priest… saving othersĀ because I couldn’t save myself… why I went to Haiti after the earthquake… My ex told me that all my good works.. all my good deeds stem from that history.. and I guess she was right about that .. I had a therapist one time tell me not to get into a relationship with anyone as I would only bring them pain… and it seems to ring true… although I resist that notion …but… certainly my self loathing makes it difficult for anyone to be in a relationship with me…
I keep thinking that surely I would remember seeing a cat burned alive in a 55 gallon drum… but my youth is a blank slate… I was in a men’s group once where the conversation was about whether it was better to remember or better to have blocked it all out… there was no consensus… remembering would be awful.. but in the absence of memories, one has a tendency to imagine all sorts of things… but I guess those imaginings couldn’t be much worse that whatever really happened… I wonder if it is why I seek comfort in food.. maybe keeping myself overweight keeps me unattractive and keeps my life simpler .. keeps people at a distance …
I only see my parents about once a year or once every two years… My sisters don’t see them often or when they do… they have to be drunk or high… I just stay away,,…these experiences did not bind us together… they just blew the whole family apart. The sisters don’t talk to each other.. I hardly ever see them or talk to them either. When I brought the history up to my father, he just said none of it was true and that both of my sisters are lying… but that’s not possible.. they both told me the same but slightly different stories.. they both said that they remember most of it and they both independently sought out therapy for it.
This didn’t blow up in my face until I was 50… so they found support 30 years ago and no one bothered to ask me or say anything to me.. sorry this is rambling and so long …
October 25, 2019 at 12:29 pm #319707AnonymousGuestDear Mark:
No need to apologize for “rambling and so long”- this is not a ramble. And you are only on your second page in this thread. Some other threads are 89 pages and going. So keep going. I want to reply to your recent post (and anything you may add to it) when I return to the computer in a couple of hours or so.
anita
October 25, 2019 at 12:59 pm #319713MarkParticipantThanks Anita.. I won’t be back on here til Monday.. so no rushing for a response. Have a great weekend and thanks for all you do for each of us…
October 25, 2019 at 1:04 pm #319715AnonymousGuestYou are welcome, Mark and thank you for your kind words. I will take my time then and reply to you sometime this weekend. I wish you a restful, calmer weekend.
anita
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