I saw the movie last night with Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler called "just go with it" and it reminded me of how often, in order to keep our sanity and equilibrium, we need to tell ourselves the same.
When I came home at Christmas after working my tail off to get this business started, my husband of 26 years, told me he was not happy with the arrangement of me being gone all the time. He is, after all, 11 years younger than me and has different "social needs" that I do. He wanted fun and romance and hot sex and would not settle for anything less, so brought up the D word... I was devastated.
Just to give you background, my husband and I had worked for the same company. He lost his job 2 1/2 years ago which was a huge financial loss for us, and the burden fell on me for supporting the family and making ends meet. Then as our company went belly up I lost my job in the process and was looking frantically to put together a business plan to get a job ( Looking for a job in the fashion industry when you're over 50 is like auditioning to be the Sports Illustrated swimsuit model when you're 30 lbs overweight and have leprosy. You might as well be dead!) But I did everything I could think of , including taking a part time job doing demo's at Sam's club while flying back and forth to Florida to visit my terminally ill Mother ( Dad had just died the year before) There was no stress! Right! I actually wonder how I even got out of bed every day! Hot sex was not on my list of priorities or even on my list and had not been for awhile. It was survival only... Taking care of my husband consisted of supporting both of us, trying to help him keep up his morale, ( including sending him on a golf vacation with his buddies and encouraging him to visit his cronies at the local pub once a week, putting up with his bad moods and anger and keeping us out of bankruptcy. I thought I was being a good partner, and even gave him a job he really wanted as sales rep for the new company. Apparently that fell woefully short of his expectations, and in my absence he had already moved on.
So here I am, going on 60 with savings and 401K depleted from the events of the past few years, starting over with nothing and no one to ever take care of ME for a change. I could go with the feeling of being used, and abandoned. It would be easy to go with being angry, and even vindictive by firing his ass...( If you want to live without me so bad, then get your own job!) Despite the obvious joys of being with good friends at the Dorm, I have spent a fair share of weekends curled up in a fetal position trying to deal with the emotions that I am finally starting to feel from all of the losses of the past few years.
But in the end, I have to Thank God for the warm supportive friends I have in my life and as I count my blessings I'm staring to see that they would not BE my friends if our relationship had been as one sided as my marriage was. So I'm going to chose to "just go with it" and be grateful that he took the initiative to get what he wanted, because I would have never gone there for myself.
Sometimes "going with it" is the best possible path we could choose!
