In the middle ...

This is actually something very hard for me to blog about ... I feel like I am standing naked in front of all of you that read this ... but I had to do it ... I had to share the truth about the past ... and my feelings about the present ... and right now ... I only have like eight people that read my blog on a regular basis anyway .... so maybe that helps?!?! ....


Throughout my marriage I had to deal with a lot of drama with my in-laws ... from the day they found out we were engaged, my sister-out-law was horrible, and my mother-out-law had her issues too ... they made my life, and to some extent my marriage a living hell ... always with their disapproval, always with the pessimism, avoidance, passive-aggressive behavior (like refusing to ever even take a beverage in my house ... none the
less eat anything) ... always pointing out everything wrong with me ... up to and including an "intervention" with my ex just before our first anniversary ... where they sat him down as a family to basically tell him how horrible I was ...

Here's a sidebar of sorts ...

Now ... I will admit that I am not perfect ... that I did things on rare occasion to antagonize ... but for the most part ... all I wanted was acceptance ... or at the very least ... to make life easier on my husband ... who wants that? ... Who wants the love of their life and their family to not get along? Who wants to constantly be told that they're married to the wrong person ... that they should have made a different choice? ... Yes, these were people that outside of him I just would have walked away from ... not cared what they thought and gone on with my life ... but there wasn't an outside of him ... this all hurt him ... it was hard on him ... and it was for his sake that I tried everything within my power to be the bigger person in the situation ... no matter what they said or did, I was always polite to them ... no matter how they hurt me in both aggressive and passive-aggressive ways ... I was always polite, always trying to cater to them ... always trying to make it easier on my ex-husband ... I was beyond civil ...

... sure he and I would have our conversations after the fact ... I would run things by him, because he knew them better than I did .... we would talk ... nicely ... to each other about the issues that were there ... but I tried with all the power I had to be the bigger person ... to be the adult in a situation where I was the youngest ... to be the one that didn't instigate or make anything harder or worse ...because this was the family of the man I loved ... the only family he had ... so I tried ... constantly overlooking things ... constantly smiling through things ... constantly asking God to keep His arm around my shoulder and His hand over my mouth ...

... end sidebar ...

So, back to this "intervention" .... he came home from this discussion with his family with a whole bunch of statements of how they were right ... mostly saying that I was a snob and looked down on them (the only thing I ever looked down on them for was their complete and total lack of compassion and empathy, and the way they treated their own family) ... but he had a laundry list of things I had done wrong .. things I should apologize for ... things that made his family hate me ... and I remember asking if he was serious and if they took responsibility for the horrible things they had done and said (from his sister telling me the morning after our wedding that she thought we shouldn't have gotten married, to completely disrespecting our home with criticism and a refusal to eat or drink in it) ... he told me they had their reasons ... at that point in time I was not in a good place ... my thyroid was way out of whack ... I had been searching for a job (I had one, but I needed a better one) ... and getting not much response ... I was having to borrow money from my family ... and basically it came down to I felt like I was nothing but a burden to anyone ... to my family .. certainly to his ... and to him ... well, he agreed with his family ... so ... I took an entire bottle of beta blockers (which slow the heart among other things) ... and called my sister-out-law and told her she wouldn't have to worry anymore about me because I'd be gone ... I threw the phone so hard against the wall when I hung up ... that I broke through the drywall completely ... I was by far at the lowest point I had ever been in my life ... then ... I realized what I had done and ran to the bathroom and tried to make myself throw up ... to no avail ... so an ambulance ride ... a whole lot of charcoal and 2 days in the ICU later ... I actually had saved my own life in multiple ways ... it turned out from blood work that I was in the middle of a thyroid storm ... for those of you that don't know what that is ... it can kill you ... and it presents itself as delirium and psychosis ... on top of physical symptoms that aren't very noticeable ... people in thyroid storm are often thought to be on hallucinogenics among other things ... but ... by taking all those beta blockers ... my endocrinologist believed I had saved my own life ... how is that for ironic .... and not only that I was in a hospital where they took my blood ... and they treated me for it ... but also ... I think that it made me realize who I lived for ... it wasn't for anyone else ... it was for me ... I wasn't here to make my family happy, or his family happy, or to make him happy ... I lived, I walk each day of my life for me ... I turned into a much calmer person .... and my ex ... well ... when his family showed up at the hospital he asked them to leave ... his sister stopped talking to him for more than three years after that night ... and his mom, well, she still talked to him, until another fight that happened between my ex and his brother drove her away ... and she didn't talk to him for about a year and a half ... I never understood the kind of people that could cut off their own family that way ... but that's just because I never really could ... I can avoid, but I can't cut off ...

... five months after that wonderful ICU stay ... I found out I was pregnant with my oldest ... and my life changed again ... I now did have someone else to live for ... someone else that I wanted to be happy (although as a parent it is far from my job to make sure they are happy) ... but through all of this I think I became a better person ... more capable of love, more capable of empathy, more capable of compassion ... and actually much more capable of being the bigger person ...

So, now fast forward to today ... I stand in the shoes of my ex-husband ... and to be honest it's even worse than being in my own shoes that many years ago ... when the person that you love, the person that is your world doesn't get along with your family ... it just about kills you ... every snide remark from either side, every comment, every moment of uncivil behavior ... is like twisting a knife that is dug so far in that it hurts all the time anyway .... so now ... I stand helpless ... not wanting to be in the middle ... not wanting to hear one more negative thing from any of them .... just wanting everyone to step up to a place of civility and realize that if they all want to be part of my life and care at all about me ... that they need to care about me enough to stop ... because I don't need anymore twists of the knife ... and the last thing I need in my life right now ... is more negativity ...