Marital Talk

Ok, I want him to take some mental responsibility here.  I want him to take some of the grief out of my brain and carry it around in his brain for a little while.  Over 3 months ago I informed him that he was in charge of finances.  I’ve done this many times and he always gets out of it some how.

This time, he kept saying, "let’s do it together" and I said, "no because his way of us doing it together is me doing it all".  He promised to help and blah blah blah. 

Since that time, I have continued to carry the financial burden in my brain while I try not to say anything to him and force him to be responsible for it.  It hasn’t happened yet. 

Today, I lost it on him.  I explain to him that the main reason we went to counseling was his inability to take responsibility for "stuff".  (Never mind that I took this as an opportunity to remind him that I asked him 3 weeks ago to move the garbage cans -long story, but it was 3 weeks ago?)

Then, he is short and snippity with our kids, then gets mad when they are smart-mouthing him.  I call it teaching him the skills you want him to use, my husband calls it, "I’m the adult, he is the kid."

I’m trying not to paint a terrible picture of him because he is not, you know that from your previous readings, but this issue, these two issues, one of lack of taking responsibility and the other with the manner in which he talks to the kids….these 2 issues are really bothering me.

I certainly do not wish to alienate anyone and this is not a male bashing post.  What I am interested in learning is how to prepare my two young boys as they grow and learn to cope with the outside world.  The fact of the matter is this, my husband depends on me for a great deal of the family responsibility.  No, he works, he his the bread winner but he has no clue how the money is spent.  A few months back I insisted that he take charge of the checkbook and the bills and see if he could manage any better than I could.

Thus far, he is slowly slipping out of the responsibility and I am taking over once again.  I know that part of that is related straight to our personality types.  I am a type A perfectionist, he is more laid back and is a horrible at time management.  He was in the army where he had to be responsible for himself so I know he can do it.  When he returned from the army, he had to get a job and find a place to live, etc and he did just fine. 

Later he married and he let his first wife handle all things that related to the responsibility factor while he merely sat around and let her work it out at her own discretion.  And, here now, 10 years later and he is doing the same thing. 

As it is right now I make his doctor’s appointments, I take care that his blood pressure medication and ADD medication are filled and refilled at the right time and as it stands, I’m back to handling the finances.  I make the decisions on the children’s health, dental, school and schedules even.

So, what I’m wondering is this, how do I foster a sense of independence and responsibility in my two sons as they grow so that I do not have a son who can’t even remember when to take his own medication?  I know that my father is the reason I have the attitude that I have but he isn’t around for me to ask and who knows, he might not have a clue what to do with my wee tots in this generation.  So, I come to you, any suggestions?

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I suppose that most of you have figured out that I basically write about what’s going in my life.  If you have a topic you would like to discuss, please leave a comment here or email me so I can do it.  For now, I’m just pulling from our own lives and making examples.

We are on our way on vacations.  I made the decision to keep our 5 year old out of kindergarten this coming up week.  His teacher sent his work home and we are going to work on it during our week off.  We are going to the beach.  And, we are strictly going for rest and relaxation.  Nothing more.

The city we’ve chosen to visit is one I’ve been too more times than I can count, even if I take my shoes off and we all there last year.  So, we know what we want to see and do..and basically it is very little. 

Wayne and our vacation well together.  He is a little more antsy to get up in the mornings and get going and I prefer to sit back and enjoy the morning watching the waves crash and surfing.  (And if Guidor, Gordo, Gustav or what ever his name is holds true to the weather man’s forecast, we won’t have to worry. 

And, if it is just rain we get off of the big guy, that’s fine too because like I said, we have similar expectations.  We’ve worked unbelievable hard in the last year and half.  Owning your own business is difficult on a marriage, especially when one of the partners is more dedicated and the other has to work his/her own full time job. 

So, basically, we feel like we deserve this vacation.  We’ve been on many short trips together but we really splurged on this one and will be staying for a week.  I absolutely couldn’t be happier.  And, like I said, we both want to sit and relax, hang by the pool and watch our children play in the kiddie pool, the kiddie bowling and we will eventually be rested enough to get in the big pool with them and play.

And, the boys have new sand shoes and sand toys so they will be ready to hit the beach and waste time there as well.  So, with that, I’m giving you the opportunity to tell me about you and your spouse. 

Do you travel well together?

Do you ever travel without one another?

Where is your favorite vacation spot?

What’s a typical vacation like for you and your spouse/family?

I’m waiting on someone to throw me a bone so I can talk about other stuff, so come on all, get to barking at me.

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Well, as it seems, we’ve had some visitors here.  And, with that, our Poll Results have changed a little.  You can see them for yourself but I thought it interesting that Money and Parenting cause about the same about of stress and sex and chores are equal.  Trust issues come in down there with a low six percent but I will be the first to admit that I had serious trust issues in my present marriage because of the garbage from my last marriage.

So, with that, let’s see what the strong points are in our marriages.  Take this poll and let me know what you think is most important.

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Well, at this time only ten people have participated in the poll but I full expect to see a couple more people in the poll later.  And, you can look for yourself and see that 40% of the polling people say that parenting is what stresses their marriage the most.

Parenting is terribly difficult in our houses as well.  Especially since my husband and I are both only children, we really have problems discerning when to step in and when to stay out of sibling squabbles.  And, of course, one of us always thinks the other one is being too strict.

Money received 30% of the votes and I can honestly say that we don’t argue about money in our house.  We don’t have much and we just pay what we have pay and I can count the few times that money was an issue.  Both of us are very giving and our children are no spoiled.  Neither my husband nor myself grew up in a home with an endless money stream so we know how to watch what we are doing.  Our children are learning this as well too I think. 

As far as the 20% of the people who chose sex as a stressor, I can totally understand.  There are so many factors to sex after children come along that it makes sex difficult.  Find the time, having the energy, slowing down to even spend enough time with one another that sex becomes a conscious thought.  And with so many drugs out there that treat serious diseases like diabetes, thyroid disorders, depression and anxiety, many people explain problems with their libido.  I’d love to hear more from you on this topic if you have time to comment.

So, with that, we will start our study on how parenting affects marriages tomorrow since it received the most votes.  And,, as the percentages change, I’ll keep you up to date.

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Ok, I tend to get wordy in these situations but my goal is to tell you about me and my husbands (yes  I meant that plural) as well as what I hope to do with the site. *I want to learn and I want to educate.  So, here goes:

My name is Jerri Ann and my husband is Wayne.  We’ve been married 6 years and we have 2 children.  One is 5 and the other is 3.  We have very different parenting strategies and it causes problems in our marriage.  We recently had our first counseling session because this seems to be our main marital challenge.  I will talk more about this I’m sure. 

We met on the internet.  He saw my online ad.  He sent me a message asking me to dinner.  I had a date with someone that I had been out with before but wasn’t sure I really liked.  I told him I already had plans and he immediately said, "what about lunch". 

There really is a point here, I promise. 

We went to lunch.  He asked me about dinner the next night.  I agreed.  But, I stayed out late that night and asked him to just join me at my apartment for pizza and a Braves game the next night.  (Would it be bad here to admit that I know that this was a Monday and a Tuesday but not the exact dates? It was sometime around the first of August.)  He ordered pizza and came over for the game.  He never went home. 

I am not kidding.  That is exactly what happened.  He had to be sent to Florida for business the next week and by Thursday he asked me to join him.  And, I did.  We bought a camper a month later (he worked construction).  I quit my job the next month.  We started trying to have a child the next month.  I got pregnant 2 months later.  I had a miscarriage but by this time we were living in Florida.  We tried again and immediately we were pregnant with our first child. 

At 38 weeks pregnant, I begged him to quit his job and move home with me.  He agreed.  He got a job.  We bought a home.  We had another baby.  And now…..here we are.

So, that was a trip down memory lane.  Now, a few more quick thoughts.  I want you to really know us and where we came from. 

He was freshly divorced when we met.  So fresh that he didn’t even have a copy of the papers from his lawyer.  He agreed to pay alimony and their house payment for five years.  Luckily, two years later, she got married, gave him the house and he was out of the alimony payment.

I…I am not so simple.  I married at 22 to my college sweetheart.  We grew apart.  I can’t say we tried very hard to keep the marriage together.  It ended 18 months later.  I married again 2 years later.  A rebound marriage to an abusive man.  He was verbally and physically abusive.  He wasn’t smart enough to manipulate me emotionally or intellectually. 

Here comes the hard part.  I married again in 1998.  He was abusive.  Not physically, not verbally, but the emotional and intellectual abuse was far worse.  He became addicted or I should say re-addicted to drugs.  He quit coming home from work on Fridays and would only come home when he had no money.  I finally got the nerve to leave him.  I then spent a year hunting him so that I could get a divorce.   I found him.  He was back in jail and currently he is in prison again. 

I told  you that previous part because when Wayne and I first got together, I had serious issues of him going to work and leaving me.  It took a long time (and I mean like over a year and a half) for me to be comfortable with him going somewhere without me. 

So, we’ve not come to this marriage without baggage, without expectations and sometimes the expectations have been negative.  I gave you the one example of me about feeling like I would be abandoned again so now one about Wayne.

For Wayne, his ex-wife gained a lot of weight after he married her.  I don’t mean, like 50 pounds either.  I mean, she gained almost 200 pounds.  He told me honestly when we met (I weighed about 180 pounds, so I wasn’t a little person, he didn’t care though) that he didn’t mean to be so cold but that he would not sit around and watch someone do that again.  He wished he had intervened. 

Trust me, he isn’t all about physical looks.  He hasn’t said a word as my weight shot up to 225 pounds as of late.  He has done his best to help me.  Now that we know I am diabetic and have a thyroid disorder, I’m losing weight.  We have a treadmill and my plan is to get with it on Monday.  (Why Monday?  Because I’ve had mono and my doc told me not to exercise until she checked me, so I waited.  Monday, the treadmill gets to meet me.)

So, as I said in the beginning, I get wordy with these kind of things but I believe it is important for you to know who I am, who my husband is and how we came to be in this marriage that I would say is strained first and foremost by parental strategies and secondly by financial problems but overall, 98% of the time, we are very very happy.  I would say happy enough to make the folks who know us in real life beg to know the secret.  No secret, just mature adults, doing what we have to do. 

*I am going to save this for tomorrow…because, you know, I got wordy.*

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At some point I know I need to slow down and introduce myself, but for now, I’m going to go with the flow.  Friday at my house means payday.  In every relationship I’ve ever been in I am the person who was responsible for juggling finances.  I’ve never had a husband who was wealthy either.  Most of the folks in our neighborhood consider ten dollars an hour to be an awesome amount of money.  Of course, if you have two kids, car payments and house payments and the like, you know that one person working for that amount of money is not possible.

Well, I suppose it is possible, it simply wouldn’t be easy.  My husband makes more than that but I’ve made no bones about the fact that we are in a terrible place financially.  The daycare business (which we just closed) managed to suck the very life out of us.  Couple that with me being secretive with my husband about the actual state of finances in our house and it makes for a really bad situation.

I’ve always done it though.  I don’t want my husband to know that he goes to work and works hard, sometimes 48 to 55 hours a week and then we still can’t pay all of our bills on time.  Some bills simply don’t get paid at all.  I constantly rob Peter to pay Paul as the old saying goes.

About a month ago, I came completely clean.  If you have caught yourself doing what I was doing, hiding the little things, the expenses that you think your spouse just doesn’t need to know about or be concerned with, I suggest you find a time, pull out all your documents and make the liberating speech.  It will make you feel so much better.  I was surprised at how well my husband took the whole ordeal.  Really, he isn’t a very animated man but I really expected him to go a little nuts.

He is now technically in control of the finances.  But that wasn’t exactly what he wanted either.  He wanted for us to do it together.  We’ve had this talk in bits and pieces over the past few years and he agrees to help me but then he doesn’t and I start hiding things again.  This time, I turned it all over to him, checkbook and all. 

But, the mother hen in me simply can’t help but watch him, remind him what is due and how it is going to affect us as well as what we can pay and need to pay.  So far, we are doing better than we were when I was in control, but we’ve cut back drastically. 

I look for more good things to happen in the coming months as I am busily trying my best to drum up some work online.  So, I’ll keep you posted and I can’t promise that every Friday you won’t find me here…wondering which bill to skip this week.

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