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Outside the Box
by Tabitha Amber
Struggle is a key word. Many of us have been struggling with this for many years, sometimes it seems forever. For those of us who grew up pre to mid 70's, that struggle takes on a whole new meaning. I wont go into what life was like in the 40’s, 50’s,60's, but leave it said that the hippy and sexual revolution was not what the history books said it was. Maybe in San Francisco and Greenwich Village it was a time of enlightenment, but for the rest of the US and Canada it was business as usual. Not much changed in society in any way shape or form from '45 till the mid '70's. Especially if you were out side the society "normal" box.
To that end, we build up a lot of mental baggage and special protective metal shields. Protection of our not understood secret was vital. Anything outside the "norm" was fair game for violence, even to the very young. I got the scars to prove it. What we in effect do to our loved ones, is take 30, 40 or 50 some odd years of fear, guilt, disgust, self loathing, and a whole host of other mental baggage and dump it on her in one fail swoop. Here honey, here is 37 years of my mental anguish just for you,.....plop...... Now she has no choice but to take it, whether she wants it or not. To add to that, as she tries mightily to deal with our "gift" to her, she now gets to build up her own pile of doubts, self doubts, fears, concerns, anxiety, guilt, at the same time she is trying to make sense of it all and understand what this is all about and how it relates to her.
Let’s be honest ladies, we have just destroyed her sense of self and her carefully nurtured world. We have forced in a very short time, a matter of minutes, hours at best, two lifetimes of pure chaos. We have given the one we love the gift of new mental baggage of her own plus ours, saved up over our life times. The millions of questions that must flood her mind all at once, I don’t need to start a list, you can all figure them out, we have been asking ourselves most of them for years.
Again let’s be honest, you can take out all the books you want, download and print all the web pages you can find, talk till you are blue in the face, but we really don’t have answers for all her questions. Our own fears and anxiety and guilt does not put us in the best position to be 100% truthful or honest. Not with her, not with ourselves. How can we be perfect in helping her understand and cope when we ourselves don’t really understand nor are we perfectly at ease with ourselves. And yet we have the gall to expect acceptance from her. With just a few words we have sent her into a tailspin of questioning her entire existence.
I just cant adequately put into words what we do to the ones we love most. And to top it all off we are not real good in the method place or time we do this to them. Most of us miss the boat on the proper time. We almost always wait until it’s too late, forcing it on her when her choices are limited. The common comment "I'm still the same person you married" is so cute. To us we have not seemed to change, but let’s face the facts, we are definitely not the person she thought we were. Nor is anything the way she thought it was. We force her to even doubt what she thought of herself. We literally toss her whole world out the window and demand she rebuild it. But can she???? Do we have the right to expect her to. I'll readily admit. I am no better than anyone else in this. And in our selfishness we don’t take into account our loved ones own turmoil from her past. Do we think we are the only ones who live with deep dark secrets.
The point I'm trying to make is we don’t think about what we do to our loved ones, nor do we take it into account in the after math as she is trying to put her life back together. To their credit some SO's are able to put there lives back together and even include us to some degree. some of us are blessed and our loved one openly accepts us and steps in with both feet, others accept us limitedly, and others pack it in. Mine Packed it in.
I don’t have the same problem with my girlfriend Deanna. she knew about me before I even met her. She had the choice. she knew what she was getting into before I even talked to her the first time. That ability to consciously choose is something not very many of our loved ones get.
For those of us out there, who have ‘come out’ to their SO, when you think about the richness of your family on this day, and you wearily crawl into bed tonight, if you have a loved one join you, be very grateful she is there. No matter how accepting she is or what restrictions, if any, she has requested of you, remember she has reinvented her life to be with you.
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