With the sun shining so brightly outside my window it’s hard to believe there is snow on the ground, but I woke up to snow on the ground this morning. So far for the season it has only snowed 3 times with the first two snowfalls being very light. This one was a little heavier though still light by comparison to the typical snowfall I’ve gotten used to since temporarily moving to the mid-west. I have to confess I have not grown to love it out here and will be happy when it’s time to leave. No offense to anyone who is from the mid-west; but it’s just not the location for me.
I woke up today feeling a bit unsettled thanks to some unsettling dreams. One was too horrific to recount. I don’t really want to remember the details of that so I’ll just try hard not to give it any thought while awake. The other dream was more typical of what I’ve had to deal with in real life with my husband over the soon to be 20 years that we’ve been married.
In the dream we were staying in the apartment in which I lived with my family in Brooklyn for the first 13-14 years following my arrival in the United States back in 1983. I guess we must have just moved in because there was stuff all over the place and I was trying to sort things out and decide what would go where. My husband and I were in the midst of a not talking to each other spell. He had done something that really upset me; and I had decided I wanted to divorce him; but he was refusing to leave and trying to force us back into a situation of going on with life as usual. At some point in the day he said he was stepping out for a minute. I happened to be standing near the door when he opened it and I noticed that he had put a lot of our stuff outside in the hallway. I asked him what the bleep was going on with that and he said he had left them out there because there was no room inside the apartment. So I started yelling and screaming about how it would make us look to the neighbors to have our stuff out in the hallway of the apartment building. Of course the way I was yelling and screaming would in reality look even worse than having our belongings piled in the hallway. And even in the dream that point came across loudly when a good looking woman came out of the elevator, and hearing the way I was yelling at my husband, picked up one of the things he had left in the hallway and gave it to him as an act of showing sympathy for what he was having to deal with in the form of a classless complaining loud-mouth of a wife. Of course he lapped this up, allowing his gaze to follow her wistfully as she continued on her way down the hall. Needless to say that drove me to another level of rage, and I started beating him up with what ever I could get my hands on of the things that were in the hallway.
I have to confess, during the first few years of our marriage, when I would get mad at my husband I would physically attack him. I once punched him so hard in his chest with my fist that he claims to this day he still experiences problems from the blow. I’m not sure if that’s actually possible; but I guess it doesn’t matter whether it is or isn’t. We’ve never really talked about those horrible episodes, and I don’t know that there would be any purpose to talking about it. I’ve occasionally written about my marriage on this blog and I’ve had feedback from some readers that basically encourages me to get out of my marriage based on the way I’ve represented my husband. But I’ve certainly done my fair share of damage to this relationship.
The way I acted in the dream is a pretty accurate reflection of the way I have acted in reality when my husband has made me angry. I stopped hitting him a long time ago because he sort of forced me to. It would have been nice to be able to say that I stopped because I came to realize on my own that what I was doing was not okay, and I went and got help learning to handle my disappointments and frustrations in constructive ways. But it was because my husband retaliated each time by walking out and not coming back home for weeks. The experience of being repeatedly walked out on forced me to learn to keep my hands to myself and more often than not to keep my mouth shut. Of course this meant my husband got away with a lot of things for a lot of years, until it all caught up to him in 2005. We were separated from 2005 – 2007 and since getting back together things have been mostly improved. But we’ve had random occasions where things have popped up out of nowhere to remind us (or rather to remind me) that we’re two fundamentally different people and there is no possibility that we will ever have a close and loving relationship. My husband will never be as I would like him to be and I will never be as he would like me to be. The question is, can we accept each other as we are, and I don’t know that I can or that I want to live with some of things that my husband brings to the plate. I’ve just turned 45. He’s going to turn 60 a few months before I turn 46. I just don’t think what I want for myself going ahead is more of the same of what I’ve had. I don’t want to be that woman in my dream having to be yelling and screaming at my husband because he and I are so fundamentally different that his definition of perfectly okay to do is my definition of absolutely not okay to do under any circumstance.
