Persistence

It’s probably not surprising that my current circumstances have led to a fair bit of soul-searching. I’ve been thinking a lot about the type of person I am, the type of person my husband is (as opposed to what I thought he was) and to the type of people I want my children to become. I’ve also been thinking about how all this will change all of us, probably in different ways.

The other day I was helping Guerita with her homework. She was getting frustrated because she couldn’t do it easily. She didn’t want to keep working at it because it was too hard (I actually think it was too hard for a 5 year old but that’s a whole other post). We had a long talk about trying our best and not giving up when things got hard. Of course, we were just talking about homework, but for me there was certainly a bigger message there and I realised that this is one of those things I will probably hammer home emphasise with my kids in years to come.

I know that I am a persistent and determined person. At times, you could call me stubborn (many have), but I like to cast it in a positive light, so I am going with persistent. Which is another thing I know about me. I am glass half full kind of person; an optimist, I guess. I tend to try to see things in a positive light and not dwell too much on the negatives. What this means is that when I want to do something, I am confident there’ll be a way to achieve my goal, even when there’s obstacles in my way, and I don’t give up when the going gets a bit rough.

One of the (many) reasons I find my husband’s behaviour so difficult to accept is that he apparently isn’t so persistent. Apparently, when things get a little tough, its easier for him to give up. I don’t think any marriage is ever perfect or that we can be blissfully happy all the time. We all have our ups and downs but apparently I was alone in thinking we should work through the more difficult periods, that we had a responsibility to ourselves and to our kids to do everything we possibly could to keep our family together. He might not see it this way, but I’ve made it pretty clear to him that I think his method of dealing with our situation was a cowardly and selfish way out, and I don’t like what that says about him and about his ability to stick with something when things get a little bit tough. I spent the first few weeks after this bombshell saying everything I could think of to convince him to try and work things out. As difficult as it would be to overcome the obstacle of his betrayal, I didn’t want to give up. I felt we owed to the kids, to each other to try as hard as we could.

So, going through this process had made me so acutely aware of the messages I want my kids to learn, the values I want them to grow up with. I hardly need to say that one of the things that scares me the most is that my children will grow up with a warped view of marriage; that they’ll grow up thinking that when things are hard, it’s OK just to give up. I know now that I’ll have to work extra hard to instil the values of loyalty and determination in them. It breaks my heart that they might look back on their parents’ marriages and think “they didn’t try hard enough”.

Maybe, knowing how stubborn persistent I am, that is why I find it so hard to believe that after all we’ve experienced together that it can be so easy to throw it away. In my eyes, a refusal to TRY is a worse betrayal than anything else he has done. The last thing I said to him last night was “I just hope you don’t give up on your children as easily as you gave up on me.”

[Can I just say at the end here, that there is obviously a lot more to this situation than I've revealed here. It's a really difficult thing to do, to share the details of such a painful situation so publicly and I still grapple on every post with how much to say and leave out. I'm conscious that the details of my messy life might make you uncomfortable, so I completely understand if you don't want to read all about it. I also completely understand if you're curious about things I haven't said and trust me, I will not be offended if you want to ask questions about it. I may choose to answer them privately by email, or not to answer them just yet, but I really don't mind if you ask. I guess they will mostly all come out eventually on the blog, perhaps in a trickle, perhaps in a gush if I'm feeling particularly raw that day. Who knows?]