Blame

It has occurred to me lately that I have become more and more unhappy, less and less my real self over the past few years.

By nature, I am a person who takes responsibility for when things go awry.  I have always taken on a lot more responsibility than is really mine.  My sister does the same thing.  Our brother, the compete opposite, takes no responsibility whatsoever for anything.  I think it makes sense that all three of us spun out of the same parents/family/upbringing.  Maybe at that point it is a XX vs XY thing.  Maybe a male swimming in that gene pool is different than a female.  Maybe, as the only boy in the family, he was taught a little differently.  Maybe lots of things that are all in the past and the "fault" -- using the term very loosely, since I have long declared that we are what we are and it is useless to blame our parents -- lies somewhere out there.

Anyway, I recently found myself in a huge yelling fight with Bobby and what came out of it for me is that he is incapable of hearing anything negative about himself.  I, on the other hand, am hard pressed to accept a compliment or believe anything too good about myself.  How's that for a recipe for disaster?

When you take a person who defaults to feeling the blame for everything -- regardless of how possible it is that she is actually responsible -- and you pair her with a person who, deep down and vehemently believes that he has no faults (or at least very few), you end up with a very unequal relationship.

For us, that has resulted in several things:
1)  I have very few close friends, because I isolate myself in my unhappiness and my inferiority.
2)  I have low self-confidence because I have had little encouragement and lots of preying on my insecurity.
3)  I frequently turn to wine to escape myself/my situation/my mind.

In this most recent blow-up, I said -- okay, screamed -- just that:  that he is unable to hear anything negative about himself and that he spins situations to make the blame fall on me.  Case in point:  he recently admitted to me -- after 20 years -- that, in his teens and early 20s, he fathered three abortions.

Egregious, I think.

But what I am really hung up on is that he revealed this to me at the most inappropriate time possible -- at my sister's house, during a family party where we were also entertaining friends of my brother's, over Thanksgiving.  No apparent reason for the timing, except to say that he "just had to tell me."  That he felt divinely led to that conversation at that moment in that situation.

Before I can even deal with the morality or immorality of the confession, I am hung up on the selfishness that led him to bare his soul right then, right there.  And I find myself analyzing the selfishness that has framed our relationship -- and apparently his previous relationships.  I see more clearly now that so many of our rough spots have been, not because of inadequacies of mine necessarily as I have always assumed they were, but because of his selfish nature.

Even during this fight, I said to him that I realized I am hypersensitive to his selfish behavior on the tail of his confession, but that I had finally recognized that there is a trend to his actions in thinking only of himself -- in impregnating three different women 20-odd years ago, yes, but perhaps moreso in choosing that time and place to tell me about it.  At a bonfire, with bellies full of wine, with strangers and with family, in an already tense situation at the holidays.  His admission served no one but himself, and as it has played out, it didn't even serve him very well.

His response was to say that he was sorry he even told me.  That he was being honest with me for the first time in our relationship and now I was making him regret it.  I was.  Then, he went on to say that it was apparent that I couldn't accept his apology because I am too sensitive.

Not that his apology, such as it has been, is inadequate.  Or that he has gone on with selfish behavior in the few months since Thanksgiving.  Only that it is my fault that we can't get past this because I am overly sensitive.

See?  That's just not right.  To make it a shortcoming of mine instead of accepting that there are chinks in his armor as well.  It is well documented that I have faults and areas that require work.  My default is kind of lazy and weak.  I try to push past that.  Sometimes I can, sometimes I am not so much.  I have often crawled into a bottle because it is easier than dealing with the reality of my life -- or it at least gives him something to blame for our problems.  When there is alcohol in a relationship, of course it is rocky and unstable and unfulfilling and difficult.  When it's just the two people, blame has to fall somewhere and it CANNOT fall on him.

In years of couples therapy, he has tried to insist that I am clinically depressed and that I am an alcoholic.  What I am beginning to get my arms around is that he is anxious to pin labels on me so that he can not only have no blame himself, but also be the object of sympathy.  Oh, poor Bobby with the psychologically unstable wife.  Bobby, the saint, takes care of his alcoholic wife.  When, in reality, the wife is just dealing the best she can with a warped reality in which she can do little right and her husband can do NO wrong.

So there is no room for selfish or weak or lazy on my part.  I have to get up ready to fight for myself everyday.  I have to demand honesty and shared responsibility.  Or I will disappear forever.

And all this before I even touch on the fact that he got THREE different women pregnant. . . .