Yesterday's Shrink Meeting

So I'm seeing a shrink at the moment.

I have a lot of issues to deal with (childhood abuse/neglect; post-traumatic stress; Asperger's; gender dysphoria - and those are only the ones I can think of off the top of my head) and I've been pressing my GP to refer me for counselling for the past 17 years. I haven't had any counselling since my early 20s when I lived in South Africa, and I've been struggling for the whole time since then. The NHS, in spite of being thought of as the 'envy of the world', is actually crap. It's fine if you need some emergency treatment (such as if you break a leg or something) but if you have anything more long-standing, such as mental illness, cancer, physical deformities or my issues, you're pretty much screwed. It's an uphill battle to be seen at all.

So yesterday I had a session with my counsellor and much to my surprise, the main subject of our meeting turned out to be my anger towards my husband, which I have kept very well hidden. I hadn't acknowledged that I'm very angry with him - not even to myself.

When we first got together, I thought he was Mr. Perfect. Well, close enough anyway. ;-)

He's kind, thoughtful, attentive, and he was quite romantic at the time. He said I was the best thing that ever happened to him and that I am the most important thing to him. He promised to always put me first, and I promised him the same with him.

We discussed the usual subjects: marriage (we wanted to marry a year to the day after we got engaged); buying a house (we wanted a small starter home, then upgrade to something nicer); holidays (I love travelling and he said he did too); children (we both wanted children and I said from the start that I wanted 3 kids; he agreed).

So we got married and everything seemed kosher for about a year. And what a year it was! We got married, bought our first house, and I gave birth to our eldest child, all within the space of 1997.

But as I was progressing through the pregnancy, thinking how great it was going to be to have a child (something I'd always wanted) and how nice it would be for me to take a couple of months off work looking after the baby before easing my way back into the workplace, Hubby & I started assessing nursery schools and childminders, testing the water to see what facilities would be available for when I'd eventually start going back to work.

And all of a sudden, Hubby changed from the generous, loving man who put me first. Rather than appreciating the fact that I was giving him a child (and going through all sorts of trauma to do so), he started pressuring me to sign up for childcare to start as soon as possible (i.e. from when the baby would be 3 months old). He said that we desperately needed my salary coming in every month so that we could afford to pay the mortgage, so he heaped enormous pressure on me to go back to work early. This started months before I'd even given birth.

I was extremely distressed by this. When I planned out how I wanted my life to unfold, I'd always known that if I worked hard at school and college, and was ambitious in my career, I'd have a far more stable financial background than my mother'd had. She raised her first two children until the youngest (me) was 3 years old before going back to work, so I would surely be able to do the same since I was far more successful (careerwise) than she was.

I'd been working since I was 16 (I was 26 when my firstborn arrived) and had buried my mother, moved countries, gotten married and was expecting a child all within 2 years... so having a baby was a perfect opportunity to take 6 months-1 year off work, spend time enjoying my baby, before re-entering the workplace. Right?

Wrong. Dead, dead wrong.

You see, I had indeed done everything right career-wise to deserve this time with my child, but I hadn't factored in that in order to take time off work with a baby, you need a supportive husband/partner/whatever to bring home the bacon while you do so. Sadly, I didn't have that.

Hubby was working as an administrator at the company for which I was Production Manager (I put him forward for the job). His wasn't a particularly taxing job, although the bosses could be extremely taxing on a regular basis. When I pressed Hubby about my not wanting to abandon my poor baby at 3 months of age, he insisted it was the only way forward as he wasn't earning enough on his own to cover the bills.

Now, many men in this situation actually fucking do something about it. I certainly would. I have, my whole life.  The sole reason why I worked so damn hard in school and college, and have been so ruthlessly ambitious throughout my career, is because of my mother's experiences. You see, after having experienced a very comfortable middle-class life with my father, she eventually found herself in her forties, divorced with two teenagers and a toddler to look after on her crappy secretarial salary, which was a fraction of what she was actually worth. We lived in some very ropey accommodation in some really shitty areas, and there were days when there was absolutely no food whatsoever in the house and entire years during which I received absolutely no new clothing, but she did the best she could and we all made it out in one piece (well, apart from her, but her breast cancer wasn't her fault either).

I saw her struggle every day to make ends meet and I was determined that I wouldn't allow the same fate to befall me. So I worked hard and pushed my way up the career ladder, to the point that I am now a senior manager at a very prestigious company. But despite my best efforts, I found myself in almost exactly the same situation as my mother was when she gave birth to her third child: her (alcoholic) husband was a useless provider, so she had to put him in childcare when he was 2 months old so she could go back to work and keep a roof over our heads.

But my Hubby? Hubby came from a family where his parents were about 10 years older than mine (and much more old-fashioned; it's amazing what a difference a decade can make). His parents have always practiced strict gender roles, with his mother doing the cooking & cleaning and being very proud to do so, and his father doing the DIY & being very proud to do that too. Neither one of them could do the other's role, and they're perfectly happy that way.

His Dad worked as a draughtsman (coincidentally, the same job my own father had - in fact, both of them worked on the design of Concorde, although they didn't know each other at the time). He worked his way up to a supervisor/managerial role so he was certainly well respected in his field. However, due to their age, he retired not long after I met Hubby.

But it occurs to me that it's quite strange that his mother had to go out to work too, particularly in the 1970s.

She had three sons, one of whom very sadly died as a teenager, so she certainly had plenty to do. But Hubby's recollections of his childhood were very much working-class, with the family piling into their Mini to drive down to Cornwall on holiday, and it generally involved stories of inexpensive outings and purchasing potatoes & cabbages etc. in Cornwall to take them home because they were cheaper. (Whereas my childhood holidays involved international flights and fortnights spent in exotic locations such as Cape Town, Durban and Bophuthatswana.)

I know it was unusual for women to work in the 1970s. It certainly wasn't unheard of, but the societal expectation at the time was that the husband was the provider and the wife was the homemaker, but we were becoming enlightened enough that women could go out to work if the family wanted that extra bit of income. However, the everyday bills etc. were expected to be covered by the husband's salary.

Soooo, back in the 1970s my father paid for all our bills and we lived a very comfortable middle-class life in a large, detached, three-bed two-bath house in a nice neighbourhood. We'd go out socialising every single weekend (or we'd have friends round ours) so all-in-all it was quite a good lifestyle. But my mother decided to go to work when I was 4, because by that stage I was old enough to benefit from nursery school and she was getting a bit bored being stuck at home all the time. So they agreed that she'd get a secretarial job (which is what she'd been doing before having us kids) and that her salary would go into a savings account, to save up for nice holidays, home improvements, and stuff like that. The luxuries, basically. So that's where our jet-set lifestyle came from: my mother's contribution to our family was that we could do that little bit more than just the good, comfortable lifestyle my father's salary could provide.

By contrast, Hubby's mother worked in a factory, and then later in a charity shop. And from Hubby's description of his childhood, I believe that every single penny she earned was essential to enable the family to keep the wolf from the door. No luxurious overseas holidays for them; they were lucky if they got a week in a caravan. They scrimped & saved to keep their house in tip-top condition, and over many years they eventually decorated it to a high standard. But they still live in the house that my Hubby was born in 42 years ago.

So this is the environment in which he was raised. Is it any wonder then that he expects my support in providing for his family?

Now, I've always been a hard worker, and I've always been utterly selfless with my income. Every single penny I earn goes towards the family; in fact, I pay out more in bills every month than Hubby brings in as income. So I don't begrudge at all paying my fair share. And in these times, both partners in a marriage can reasonably expect to need to step up to the plate in order to provide for the family, as the days of a sole breadwinner are sadly in the past for most of us.

But would it have been too much to ask him to get a second job, or a better-paying first job, to cover the six months or so I needed to be off with the baby?

I don't think it would be. I've worked two jobs simultaneously before, and it is very tiring but I had responsibilities that I had to meet. Nothing quite as important as a wife who was bearing my child, though. But Hubby simply didn't have the get-up-and-go to do that. Instead, he piled huge amounts of pressure on me when I was very vulnerable (and hormonal), even going so far as to change the childcare plans I'd arranged for the baby.

So with a breaking heart, I was forced to hand my little 3-month-old daughter over to my mother-in-law, and hope she'd do the right thing by her. I was robbed of the opportunity to try to learn how to be a mother to my baby - and this was something I was struggling with for more reasons than one. Hubby didn't know it at the time, but one of the reasons why I so desperately needed to spend time with the baby was because of gender identity issues. I was trying desperately to be a 'woman' and I saw motherhood as an ideal opportunity to explore that side of femininity and see if I could be comfortable with it. But it was not to be. She was ripped away from me long before I was ready to let her go. And I very much doubt the femininity experiment would have succeeded anyway.

So I'm pissed off with Hubby about forcing me into this situation with my baby, but then I had Baby #2 just under 3 years later. And the situation hadn't improved; in fact, it was much worse.

Whilst we'd agreed from the outset that I'd have three kids, and two before the age of 30, Hubby was quite traumatised by the introduction of our first kid. Firstly, it was a traumatic birth for various reasons, which shook him terribly... but secondly, he reacted very badly to the intense way in which I needed to care for the baby. I breastfed my children for two years each, and that's a full-on role when they're little as they need to be fed & changed every 2 hours. He couldn't cope with the intensity and the intrusion into our marriage, so he started to become quite distant towards me even though I wasn't actually doing anything wrong.

Once the baby got to about 18 months, I reminded Hubby that we'd agreed to be having Baby #2 around that stage. Suddenly he was vehemently against the idea of another baby. He said he'd found the introduction of our first child so difficult to deal with (what did you have to deal with, son? I know she was a demanding baby, but I was doing 90% of her care, so apart from the obvious trauma surrounding her birth, what was your beef?) that he couldn't stand going through it again by having another child. I was hugely upset, because this was one of the things we'd agreed to before getting married, and he was now going back on what we'd agreed. So I told him that I can be patient for a little bit but it would be a dealbreaker if we don't have the second kid, so he very grudgingly let me fall pregnant a second time. But all the way through that pregnancy, he made it perfectly clear that he did not want this second child, and that he'd only agreed to it because it was what I wanted and he didn't want to lose me. He let me know in no uncertain terms that Baby #2 was conceived under duress.

Oh, hang on - there you go. That was one example in which he did actually put me first. It's probably also the last time that this has happened. Moving on...

So once again, he piled on the pressure that I'd have to go back to work at 3 months just like the last time, because blah blah blah blah. He'd had 2 years now to improve his qualifications, get a better job, or get a second job so that I could finally spend time with at least one of my babies (and I'd have them both home at the same time - yay!)... but predictably, he hadn't bothered. So once again, I bawled pitifully as I now handed both of my children over to my mother-in-law when the little one was a tender 3 months old, and went back to being a wage slave to keep the fucking bank happy.

Waitaminute... that was me putting Hubby first, as I always fucking do. So that cancels out his previous achievement then.

And now to my complete surprise, I started talking to my counsellor the other day and all this repressed rage suddenly came out of nowhere about how much Hubby has let me down over the years. I cried as I told him about the babies, our isolation & lack of social stimulation, his laziness with simple things such as DIY (which he'd told me he was excellent at - and he is, as long as he can get off his arse and do the fucking thing), his financial incompetence, the fact that we're still living in a shitty little starter home in a crappy area when we should be onto our second or third home by now, his emotional distance and lack of support when I've been going through traumas, and so on and so on.

I realised that one of the big problems I've had over the last few years, particularly since 2006, is Hubby and the way he's been treating me. So I resolved to sort that problem out, one way or another.