Hello all, this is my first post so I thought I would tell a little about
myself.
I have been a full-time stay-at-home dad for almost 4 years. about
2 weeks ago my wife told me she wanted a divorce after 14 years of being together, 10 married. We have 2 kids, ages 5 and 2. She told me that she didn't think I was the one she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. She said I'm not motivated to do certain things or worried about
the future and that we are not a good fit anymore. She said the person I am she does not think she is in love with anymore. My world came crashing down on me. We had been discussing going to marriage counseling and then a few weeks later she dropped this on me.
Later that night I confessed some things to her that I had never told anybody in my life. I tried 1000's of times to tell her over the years but could not bring myself to do so. I was scared to say the words out loud. But I wanted her to have a better understanding of who I am and why I am the way I am sometimes. I've been fighting depression alone for most of my life. I've been hiding from it, burying it, drinking it away. Nothing ever worked and it has had a negative impact on my marriage. My depression started many years ago and probably began after I was sexually abused by an uncle when I was about
10yo.
After hearing all of this my wife agreed to try marriage counseling to see if we could make our marriage work. She said she can't promise anything because she feels she has changed and we are no longer a good match. She has lived with my depression for 14 years and never knew it. The signs were there and she did ask me a few months ago if I was depressed but I said no. She is the best thing (besides my kids) that has ever happened in my life and now I'm close to losing her.
I'm pretty sure a few other traumas in my life added to the depression. My mom (also fights depression and has for many years) and dad separated when I was 17yo but eventually got back together 6 months later. When I was 19yo I was taken hostage in my car and robbed . When I was about
23yo a friend OD'd and died in his bathtub. When I was 26yo another friend took his life. Nothing was really going well. I abused hard drugs in my early 20's but got tired of that destruction. I continued to abuse one drug until we had our first child. That was surprisingly easy to quit for me after all the years of using it to numb my head. I continued to drink quite often until about
2 weeks ago when I was finally able to tell my wife the things I had been wanting to tell her for years. All of the sudden drinking didn't seem important anymore. I have had a couple of relapses since but realized that all it did was take me back down into the deep dark pit I was in before. My days and nights are still full of sadness about
my life and anger at the abuse. My stomach hasn't been right since and my appetite is shot. I've lost 9lbs in 10 days, which is good actually since most of that was beer weight.
So we have an appt to go see a marriage counselor in a couple of weeks when the kids go back to school. I am also going to see a psychiatrist to work on my own personal issues with the former abuse and my depression. I'm hoping it will work out for us because I do love her and want to be the person she can love again, too.
Thanks for letting me ramble.
Reason for edit:
I have just taken a few of the details out about
your abuse as they were quite graphic and we have minors who use this site. Darren
Post Edited (rzg) : 8/19/2008 7:41:21 AM (GMT-6)