Tag: Confusion

Powerless

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

The problem with marriage is that you take the power of shaping your destiny from your own hands and give it –at least partially- to someone else. I now realize with certain bitterness that this is where I am at. It is depressing to see my efforts of trying to forge ahead thwarted by the apathy of my husband. He doesn’t know what he wants, he doesn’t know where he wants to go, and I am forced to sit and tread water here with him.

I think that deep down he knows that the situation he finds himself in is his own doing. I did not hold a gun to his head and force him to come back, and I definitely did not have his baby without his consent. It was a mutual decision. Still, he does not know what to do next; he doesn’t have a plan and refuses to make a move in ANY direction. He moans and complains that he is relegated to housework, yet refuses any suggestion of hiring a domestic worker or a maid. So, you can neither walk in front of him or behind him, which is very annoying.

If it wasn’t for him, I would be starting a life somewhere; in a little village in the Western Cape, in Germany or even Canada. Living in a flat is not his kind of life, and not for him is the life in Europe, nor the rat race of Canada. The solution? none, just sit there and feel sorry for yourself. Yet, he has the nerve to accuse me of limiting his lifestyle and pushing him behind.

Face it man. It is always you who drops the ball. You had a wife and children, yet you dropped them and wanted to carry on with your life. You had a job for life in Saudi Aramco but you dropped it and left to go somewhere else. You had a girlfriend who adored you and cooked and cleaned after you and worshipped you like a good servant, yet you dropped her (because the poor thing had baggage and you couldn’t be bothered). Then you chose to marry some unknown quantity, somebody you met over the internet, much younger than you (yours truly) and you almost dropped me right away – I didn’t allow you though. I stuck with my choice, and put up with many miserable years, to see this whole thing through. You worked at IBM, they almost transferred you to Cape Town, again you dropped them and moved to some other company. Then you dropped these people too, although you had a great job and earned a truck-load of money. Then when we bought the gas station, I was with you every step of the way, but you made my life so miserable and pushed me out of working with you, then out of your life. I just had to drop you for the first time! Because you refused to give me an inch of breathing space, you controlled my every move. even my salary you paid into YOUR bank account, remember that? At least you had the grace to pay my tax bill. When you finally dropped the gas station you wanted to pass the buck on me. I was in Cape Town and you wanted to get back with me so desperately, you made me choke. And I choked, and I dropped you for the second time. It was only normal. I was powerless for seven years, and I was about to give you the power again, I was not comfortable with that, it was too early for my wounds to heal. In the end I relented, it was my choice though, I tried to get through divorcing you but found it against my nature and ethics, and I begged you to come back, and you did. I wanted you back because I realized I still loved you, but you came back to me because you didn’t have any better plans. We had a baby because you were so unhappy you thought MAYBE this is what was missing from your life. I had a baby because I knew this is what I wanted more than anything in the world.

The end result for me: I am still happy. I was always capable of being happy, and now my baby is someone I can love for the rest of my life. I will never be alone. My baby gives me so much happiness, yet he is also my ultimate trap. I can’t leave his father anymore, and with that you have the ultimate power over us. You can shape our destiny and our future, and I am not sure I like that.

The end result for you: Still unhappy, you never were, and you never will be. You keep rehashing the past, I dropped you twice, you say, the second time was on your birthday. True, but let’s suppose that I never did that; would things have been any different? I know the answer and you should too. Nothing would have been any different, we would still be here at the same juncture. The problem is not me man, it is YOU. FACE IT !

 

 

 

 

Let’s (not) Turn Him into a Pumpkin

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

Thirty five minutes left to midnight, and I am tempted to wait up and see whether my husband will come back as a pumpkin. Good for him, this is the second Friday in a row where he has been out. It makes me feel less guilty about the small tubs of ice cream, the Chocolate Brownie Avalanche, and the threesome mint chocolate bars I feast on while pretending to take the baby for a walk in the pram.

What a life, eh? I normally feel guilty whenever I go out without him; I doubt that he ever feels this way about me. Today, is the day after Valentine’s Day. I was never really big on pink hearts and chocolates, and I don’t remember getting any. Last year at this time I got a small teddy with a heart; it was a mass present from work. It still made me feel happy, because by then I knew that I had a tiny baby growing inside me, and the small teddy was going to be its first toy. For months it sat on top of my monitor, and whenever I looked at it I smiled and thought of my little baby. Now the bear is attached to my son’s mobile and he is the one who looks at it and talks to it every morning.

This year was supposed to be great, and it is really going nowhere so far. I am treading water, reading trash, knitting from stash and blogging nonsense. Today I tried to take a positive step and do some freelance work. I bid for a job and ended up doing its proofreading. It was hardly worth the effort, but I thought of it as a marketing strategy, to get to know new clients and break new grounds. I am bidding for other jobs and applying to agencies that are looking for a word-crafter. Hmm, that is actually a good name for a serious blog that combines knitting with writing, maybe one day once I get this nastiness out of my system. Will I ever get that far? I wonder.

Fifteen minutes left to midnight, and still no sign of my pumpkin. Tell you what, I am going to brush my teeth and turn in. I have had this glaring monitor and the humming of my processor fan keeping me company for almost five hours now; I have had enough of this miserable evening. I am going to meet some interesting people, in a trashy novel.

At five minutes to midnight my husband arrived. He said he prefers hiking to doing the rounds of the bars. Somehow I am optimistic that he will find more substance with me than with these false friends. Hopeful.

Money Matters

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment
My finances haven’t improved since I agreed to resume my marriage. It really frustrates me. When I was in the single/separated phase, it seemed that I could do no wrong; I bought what I liked in cash and got to enjoy the windfall and the fruits of my labour. Now it seems that I buy things that I do not think are strictly necessary, and do not get to enjoy any treats. In addition to all that, it looks like I have hit a real dry phase in my freelance work, so the money coming in is barely covering my expenditures.I have always been bad at this concept of “our money” in a married relationship. My husband always claims that our joint property and our bank accounts whether joint or separate are OURS. I put this to the test once at the point when I wanted to get divorced and things suddenly got sour. What was ours got suddenly reduced to our relative incomes and what each of us brought into the marriage, and of course I ended up with the short end of the stick. Yes, I could have fought him out in court and chances are that I could have ended up with far more than the meagre settlement he offered, but I chickened out. I found that I do not have the stomach for a long battle in court which will probably make me hate him in the end – although he does deserve it sometimes.

Well, I still have feelings for the man, and I do not want to walk the same road again, but I am angry at the fact that my contributions into the marriage – in terms of money spent far outweigh his at the moment.

Yes, I am the only one with a full-time job at the moment but he has at least 100K Dollars sitting in the bank and earning interest in several investments to my meagre 7k waiting to be spent on rent and telephone bills and electricity. I can’t catch up even to a point where I can have a small amount put aside into a Money Market account.I do not have a good feeling about this. People do not change, and my marriage still has a good chance of turning sour again and ending up in divorce, what then?

It is important for me to have this cushion of security – mine – for all eventualities, and in order to achieve it I am back again, to skimping on my pleasures to have some more security, because I can’t trust him to look after me when things go sour. I will be left out again in the cold, and I am still the same person who does not have the stomach to fight for what is rightfully hers. On the other hand he still might be the same stingy person. Why, he only indulges now in some pleasures because I happen to pay for them.

 

 

Summer of Discontent

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

I keep thinking of a small place, where I can live alone with my cat. I do not know why this is so when I am married and supposedly working on the rehabilitation of my ailing relationship.
But it is still not working for me. I keep feeling that I am living outside my normal pace, outside my comfort zone, I really do not know why.

My cat seems to have settled in fine, he is starting to explore his territory and expand it, slowly and with mixed results. Occasionally he gets frightened off by another cat or an unfamiliar sound, but he seems to be adapting. On the surface I am doing the same thing.
Yes, I suppose I am as guilty as my husband, because I do not give voice to my nagging worries, when ignoring them will not make them better, they will just fester and grow into something really malignant.
I see that the physical side of our marriage is waning again, and I fear that it will digress again into total celibacy. I keep wondering, why? In the past my husband used to initiate sex, now it is always me that has to, and my libido is very temperamental and relies so much on my emotional well-being and state of mind. I never had a truly fulfilling emotional life, and it has probably scarred me somewhat. I am sure that my husband has the same problem somewhere, on an emotional level too, because there is no disputing his performance power, he can f*** a woman brainless if he wanted to.

I might be the least demanding woman on a material level, but I could be extremely demanding emotionally, especially for a man who is bound to put practicality before sensuality, and I see this becoming a chronic problem.

Another aspect of my problem with the man, is that I am still a novice in many areas of my life experience, whereas he went through the gamut of experience throughout his youth, relationships and first marriage.
At times I find myself bitterly cheated of camping trips, dirty weekends, motorcar sex, hangovers, and even morning sickness. It is not my fault that I grew up in a sheltered and isolated environment, but since I am no longer there, isn’t it just nice if I could experience some of those “first times” that every other young person goes through.
How can I grow up when I did not have the chance to be young and reckless ? I am in a middle aged relationship, and there are not honeymoon photos to look back and smile at. It has always been like this, cool-headed and boring.
The funny thing is that I might project this image to the outside world, cool-headed and boring, nobody knows that underneath these calm waters are some turbulent currents of rebellion.

Round and Round

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

I don’t think that I can ever write in this blog with my real name. People might think I am a lunatic or something. This project started with the intention of mapping my life near the Cape of Good hope, it turned out into a study in hopelessness. It has been almost a year since I wrote here, and ironically it is again the season of heartbreak in Cape Town ! I feel edgy and unhappy, and confused.
Since my doomed crush on Aquarius went nowhere, I got cold feet regarding my breakup with Husband. I pulled the plug on the divorce, and coughed up the lawyer bill.
In the divine wisdom of pop culture : “Love The One You’re With” (If you can’t be with the one you love).
So this was great, I swallowed a big wallop of my pride, and begged Husband to get back. He left for a few months home to Canada, then came back, called the moving van and shipped loads of stuff to Cape Town. The furniture has been in storage ever since, awaiting the time when it can be set up in a place we can call a home.
The past few months I was happy – I think – living on makeshift and 2nd hand furniture, and having very few possessions. We spent lots of time together or in the outdoors.
At the end of October we moved from the old flat, gave away the old rickety ‘furniture’ or whatever you might want to call it.

Yesterday it was the day, the day we were supposed to get our nice things, and put it in our home. Yes, the furniture arrived yesterday, and along with it came the foreboding. I do not know what is up with me. All of a sudden I see the expensive things, the box of old love letters, the diving equipment and the sport bags — his things, and again there is nothing of me here, just a few crates of books, and suitcase full of coloured threads that I wanted to knit one day into and afghan, and a black emotionally disturbed cat.
Years back, we bought some things together : A bed, a leather sofa ( his dream was always to have one) and a desk for me, but Husband has had almost everything else longer that I have been with him. He calls these nice pieces a legacy, and now they are incompatible with one of the few things that I do care about … Petey my cat.
The cat is sleeping in the closet now, he is disoriented and sad to lose his home, and I do not know why I relate to him so much. I will have to figure this one out.