This is MY house

Yesterday I discovered the major cause of marital dysfunction. I think it probably can be applied to both men and women. Do you want to know what it is? Grown ass people stuck in childhood and they don’t realize that they’re the adult now. How does that happen? Bad parents.

As for my childhood transition into adulthood, I was one of the lucky ones. I learned all I needed to know about raising my son from my mother. Aww, “how sweet” you might say. But it’s not what you think it is. I learned all I needed to know from my mother by NOT doing what my mother did, because I knew from a young age that it was flat out wrong. I was a strange child with an uncanny wisdom for knowing when I was being treated unjustly. I was given no respect as a valuable member of the family who actually had feelings. In their eyes I existed only for the feeding of their egos. I was supposed to be a trained monkey. “Look at what my daughter can do! Aren’t I a great parent?” And I was supposed to owe them something for their having raised me and fed me and given me a roof over my head. Well, here’s a newsflash. I didn’t ask to be born. They CHOSE to bring me into the world. With making that choice comes great responsibility.

You as a parent are not automatically owed respect from your children. You are not automatically owed their love and fidelity. You have to earn it. Yes, YOU. For every decision you make in life you must ask yourself this: “How will this affect my children?” For me, probably the biggest emotional kick in the teeth I got from my mother was when she broke up with her boyfriend of ten years. The man truly loved me and he had become my father figure- the father that I never had. Now, no one’s saying that she had to stay in a relationship if it wasn’t working anymore, but did she even ASK me if I was devastated by it? No. All I heard were crickets. She never gave it the slightest thought that her breakup might be tough for me. The only person she thought about was herself, and that’s downright disrespectful to me as a person. Since the time I was a baby until I escaped (yes, I used the word “escaped”) as a young adult she allowed me to continue to live in my abusive grandmother’s house. She knew Gram was abusive. Gram was abusive to her too. But we continued to live there so she would have the money to buy herself designer clothes while I wore the neighbor’s hand-me-downs. She never stopped to think, “I have to get my daughter out of this house. It’s not fair to her.” No, these things never crossed her mind. I was very lucky in that even though I wasn’t given any respect by my own family, I knew I was a valuable human being and deserved it.

A lot of people I know, when they have their first child, are very worried about being a good parent. I was never worried in the least bit. All I had to do was a better job than my mother did, and because that bar was set so low I knew it would be a piece of cake. All you need to know about becoming a good parent is one golden rule: Treat your children how you would like to be treated. That’s it. The end. And that applies whether your children are two or twelve or twenty-two. Now, I’m not saying that I’m the perfect parent. Far from it. But when I make a mistake, I own it. I tell my son, “I shouldn’t have handled that the way I did and I’m sorry. If you ever see me doing that again I want you to call me out on it.”

Mr. P’s father can best be described in one word: an egomaniac. His mother? Inattentive. I find it incredulous that the day Mr. P was raped in the bathroom at school that Inattentive Mother never noticed any change in his demeanor. My son has a bad day in Algebra and it’s written all over his face. I know what it’s like to be a child and get no respect as a human being from the people who are supposed to be your champions in life. Now if you add in being molested at school, who can you ever trust? How do you develop any form of self respect? The result is that you stay stuck in childhood, always looking for it. Never getting it. Not realizing that it’s your right to it as a human being.

I didn’t realize until after D day that Mr P was faking self-respect all along. And not only was he faking self-respect, but also faking respect for me. Instead of seeing me as a partner in our journey through life together, he saw me as Mean Mommy. Ever see a husband or a wife roll their eyes at their spouse? That’s Mean Mommy Syndrome. Mean Mommy Syndrome robs people of their lives. Mean Mommy Syndrome is epidemic. Mean Mommy Syndrome is everywhere.

Mr P’s Mean Mommy Syndrome used to rise to the surface occasionally through our marriage, but it’s so common that I didn’t think much of it. “Baby…can you put this laundry away” is just “our laundry needs to be put away” but instead it was interpreted as “Mean Mommy’s making me put the laundry away”. “Can you pull those weeds on the side of the house” is just “those weeds need to be pulled from the side of our house” but it was interpreted as “Mean Mommy’s making me pull weeds.” Now, I’m no doormat. When I saw those Mean Mommy eye rolls and heard those Mean Mommy sighs I shut that shit down right away with “What do I look like, Wonder Woman?” But that was interpreted as “Mean Mommy is such a bitch.” And this kind of stuff was not a regular occurrence or I would have split with Mr. P long before D Day. It was only occasionally that he couldn’t keep his Mean Mommy Syndrome hidden and it would bubble up to the surface, and then he’d apologize profusely. He was a very loving man when he wasn’t having a temper tantrum. But after an argument he’d secretly retreat into his double life and retaliate by paying a whore. He convinced himself that he didn’t owe me any fidelity because I was Mean Mommy. Now, I wasn’t his inattentive mother and I wasn’t his egomaniacal father, but in reality I was a stand in for them.

So what happens to someone when they have no self-respect? They build up a wall around them to protect themselves from hurt. The wall means that no one gets in. It also means that they themselves never get out, because if they get out, the world will see that they’re a fraud. So they hide in their little world. Any threat to it is met with hostility. Everyone else is stupid. All their problems in life are everyone else’s fault. No, there’s nothing wrong with ME. It’s all YOU. YOU deserve my contempt. YOU deserve no respect. YOU deserve no fidelity.

I asked Mr P if he thought that banging hundreds of women made him feel like a man. Yes, he tells me. But how come he never made the connection that they were only with him because he was paying? Post D Day he knows that they didn’t want him. Post D Day he knows it was all about the cash. What I have a difficult time understanding is this: He’s a very smart man, so how could he have been so misguided, and to put it frankly, so stupid? He sums it up this way: Using prostitutes makes you dumber. Hanging out online with all the other users of prostitutes makes you dumber. You have to dumb down in order to suspend disbelief. You have to dumb down to protect your ego. You have to dumb down to stay behind your wall.

D Day was like an atomic bomb for Mr P. He quickly realized that the problem was not Mean Mommy. Mean Mommy did not even exist. She was a figment of his imagination. He realized that the problem all along had been him. Just him. Nobody else. And for the man who came to the table with no self-respect to now also have to take on the shame of what he had done all these years has got to be a personally devastating thing. So for the betrayed wives out there, please keep that in mind, and please be as patient and you can. Yes, I know that’s a lot to ask. Now, that doesn’t mean you should squelch your own anger and pain and outrage. It’s your husband’s job to help you through that and if he really wants to put your fractured lives back together he will do whatever’s in his power to move that along. I write this for you so you can have a better understanding as to the big question of “Why did you do this?” which doesn’t just have one answer. It’s like a prism, with many different sides. Mean Mommy Syndrome is probably one of those sides.

And now for Mr P’s and my personal revelation. Throughout our healing process Mr. P often reverts back to his child-like self that never got any respect as a human being. To me, it’s infuriating, because I am NOT, and never WAS, Mean Mommy. I was always kind and respectful to him. I always treated him as my equal partner in this marriage. I always showed my love for him and my respect for him. To now act like I’m Mean Mommy is insulting to me and I’m offended by it. We got on the subject of how he’s going to rid himself of this occasional child-like persona and I don’t remember exactly how the conversation went but at some point I said, “Don’t you understand? You’re the man in this family. This is YOUR house.”

And he got a look of awe on his face then and was just staring ahead, looking at the wall in front of him, like it was the first time he’d ever seen it.

And he said, “I built that wall.”

(He actually HAD built the wall he was looking at) and I said, “Yes. Yes you did. And the one upstairs in the bedroom too.”

“This is MY house.”

“Yes, of course it’s your house. This one, and the one we lived in before too. They were both your houses.”

“It’s OUR house.”

“Yes, I know it’s my house too, but I don’t need the therapy right now, so we’ll stick to it being YOUR house. Didn’t you ever realize that before?”

But no. He hadn’t. He never really understood that. He never understood that he was a man, and this was his house. Not his father’s. Not his mother’s. HIS house. And we’re raising HIS son. OUR son. And he sat there for a long time, just staring at that wall in front of him and letting it sink in. You are a man. And this is your house.

And then he started talking about how when he’s outside and he meets our neighbor Jack, who’s an older man….retired, gruff, always out doing yard work or walking the dog….Mr. P always felt like he was a kid talking to the neighbor. He felt like he was back to being 15 years old and having to be respectful to a grown up. He always took the subservient position. I told him no- that’s not the case. You and Jack are both neighbors, homeowners, EQUALS. He owns the house over there, and you own the house over here. You are not a kid talking to a grown up. You’re BOTH men. You might be younger than Jack, but you’re middle aged, for cryin’ out loud, and certainly not a kid.

As for us? We are partners. We are partners in life, and partners raising our son. We are equals.

And then a wonderful thing happened. He could talk about what happened in our marriage in a confident, straightforward, honest and open way. And I felt more relaxed because I knew that I was having a conversation with the man and not having to tiptoe around the little boy. And now I think the man finally has self-respect, and it’s a beautiful thing to watch.