Guilt

I feel like I can get no where with my husband. He does not hear me in the way I need to be heard. I read him a quote from Resilience the other day to try to explain to him what has been lost and why it is so difficult for me to pick up where we left off, which seems to be his expectation.

"Last year my husband told me of an indiscretion, and my sense of what I meant to the people around me, to put it lightly, shaken. We had, I believed, a great love story, bound as we were by triumph and defeat, by exhilarating achievement and shattering grief. We had walked side by side for three decades and in my foolish dreams would walk side by side, hand in hand, for three more. But even if my illness somehow allows me those days, it will be necessity be different because, at the very lease, I am a different person now. I was not wounded, not afraid, not uncertain before, and now I always will be. He can try to treat the wound, and he has tried. He can try to make me less afraid, and he has tried. But I am now a different person. I am the Army wife, too, with a husband I don't quite know, and I have to accept him, if I can, with the new scars - many self-inflicted- which he now bears. The way we were is no longer the way we can be. A new reality. Maybe a new life."
-Elizabeth Edwards, Resilience 40-41

He manipulates everything. He just threw that in my face that she decided to stay with her husband and maybe I should read her book again and figure out how to do that.

I'm sure the fact that she is dying, not hurting for money and isn't married to an alcoholic who continually relapses with the family from hell - all help Elizabeth Edwards stay married. It also appears to me that John Edwards is kissing her ass and trying to make it up to her, for a single indiscretion among 30 GOOD YEARS OF MARRIAGE - whereas my husband just whines all the time and tries to make it all my fault. I'm tired of his guilt trips. He always tries to use the kids to manipulate me. He has no shame. I did not put us in this situation. He did.

Here's another one from Audre Lorde:

"I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees."