Well.... It kind of looks like Hope has my back

Yeah, things were bad for a long time.

There was a perfect storm of things that came together in the last few years. Me and the kids are separately in counselling, and decompressing together on stuff.

My daughter is doing a class in school on family life. One of the topics now is relationship red flags and recognizing abuse. She comes home and tells me about the ways mom verbally, emotionally, and financially abused me and our family. Good times.

Tish, this Board helped me to recognize that I wasn't at the root of all evil in my home. At every turn, every escalation in stuff at home, there was something else about myself I was supposed to examine more deeply and apologize to her for.

Our oldest was a state level athlete in middle school and early high school. We were at state championships in 2018, and he remembers me sitting on the floor in the hotel room while mom was on the bed, telling me how she couldn't wait to get home to divorce me. He was competing that day.

On the topic of sex.....

Beware of triggering material.... This is big.

On the topic of sex.......

Things that impacted our ability to be intimate.

Sex was painful, in part because she wanted it over with. There was no foreplay and no warm up. So, I knew I was hurting her whenever we were together. I wanted to have sex with my wife and didn't want to hurt her.

She went for over a year worried that she had breast cancer. Our doctor told her repeatedly there was no reason to believe that. She had small benign cysts that grew and shrank with her menstrual cycle. Fibrocystic breast changes. After over a year she had a mammogram done and then we celebrated for a week that she didn't have cancer.

And.... The one I have never talked to anyone about, ever. She told me for years that she was sexually traumatized when she was in middle school. She hinted strongly at abuse and told me repeatedly that she didn't want to talk about it.

Then one day she told me she was over it. Just.... Over it.

Um. Ok. Why?

Because she talked to one of the women at her work and she told my wife that what she experienced was normal, so it was normal, and therefore OK.

WTF?? So, are you actually going to tell me what this was about all these years? Because this is over 10 years into our marriage, and a couple of years into marriage counselling.

In middle school the girls had to change for gym class. One day the girls began teasing each other about who had pubic hair yet or not. The girls began chasing each other around the locker room trying to pull each other's underwear down to see who had started puberty.

So, that was the traumatic event that shaped our sex life for years, that went away after another adult woman told her that was fairly typical behavior for middle schoolers.

Then we just acted like she had never said this to me and it had never been a barrier to intimacy.

RDM