Looking Back/ Looking Ahead

Today is the beginning of a new year for me; the beginning of my second year alone. As I look back on our almost 44 years together, some things were good and some things could have been better. I married to keep my family, my husband married because he wanted family and that aspect of our marriage was good except that my husband found it difficult to accept my daughter as his own and she found this very hurtful. He also made it more difficult for me to maintain close contact with my first daughter because she was uncomfortable around him. He no longer stands between us because he is not at home with me.

My husband also married because he wanted his own social life. That turned out to be defined as people from his own background, church and family and tended to exclude people from my background, church and family. For years I maintained those connections alone and now they are what sustain me. My husband's church family is in crisis and his birth family has died except for one sister who dropped us shortly after our marriage.

My husband's family's opposition to his marriage made our life more difficult than it should have been and destroyed the trust that should be part of every marriage. Because he could not trust his mother, sisters and brother, he was also unable to trust his wife and so I never felt sure of him. That was too bad and quite unnecessary but that seemed to be the way that family operated. We also had financial difficulties during the first ten years of our marriage but eventually that also stabilized.

My husband was not one to express his thoughts and wasn't interested in hearing me express mine and so our relationship often left me feeling lonely. He seemed to me critical of many of the things I valued, my ethnic community, my church, my education, my taste in music, even my taste in clothes. Being critical was another trait that his family seemed to embody. Since my mother was a critical person, I was used to it to a certain extent, but also very sensitive to it. Now, my critics are gone and I can be myself, whatever that means.

That's the past and I am glad to be able to put it behind me. I now enjoy long evenings reading, listening to classical music and look forward to travelling in the future. I am reconnecting with friends and family and think life will be better in the new year for me than it has been for many years. The last four years particularly were a bit of an endurance test but I'm still here, and hope to be here for a while yet to enjoy - and just be!