Why I hate my Mother-in-law
Aside from my personal Spiral of Despair over the last few months, other things have been spiralling out of control over longer periods of time, and I am just beginning to achieve sufficient clarity to identify them.
How long this has been going on, I don't know. And where it all started is something of a chicken/egg debate. One thing I do know is that pregnancy has exacerbated a problem that already existed in our home. The following discussion of which may be alarmingly frank.
On any given working day, whether I have been out on the road or catching up with paperwork in the spare room, I will return to the living room some time after 5.30, and find it a complete disaster area. Even if my wife has been home for 2 hours. It's worse if she's had a day off. She will have spent the day in there, creating a small hill-fort of rubble around her chair while she vegges out in front of daytime TV. So after a hard day's work, I wander into this f*cking bombsite, and being the pathologically tidy person I am, have to start clearing up. This, of course, is the first point of conflict.
Point of conflict #2 comes at dinner time. It's my wife's job to cook. Not because I'm sexist, but because she's just better at it than me. I think; she doesn't trust me to cook so much as a salad without interfering and, ultimately, taking over. But the arrangement works, to a point; the point being that, because she cooks, I do everything else. So after dinner she returns to what remains of her hill-fort, and gradually rebuilds the bits I demolished earlier while vegging out in front of primetime TV, while I wash up, clean the kitchen, put the rubbish out, maybe put some laundry on, and so on.
And when I eventually get to sit down, she will either be engrossed in some sh*te on TV, or if there is nothing sh*te enough for her to watch, promptly disappear to phone her mother for an hour or two.
All of which, over a period of time, has allowed plenty of scope for the relationship between us to get more and more distant. I have used porn to escape the frustration, and often anger, I feel at this situation. Which, naturally, increases the distance between us.
Pregnancy has exacerbated this because (a) she doesn't want sex, so any time we might have found for intimacy is now dedicated to sleep (usually in front of the TV) and (b) she needs to talk to someone about the child: enter, again, her mother.
My wife thinks I seem distant, detached from the whole pregnancy experience. I feel distant, detached from the whole marriage experience, never mind anything else. This ball of resentment grows because, rather than talk to me, she will phone her mother. And, knowing she's going to be talking for at least an hour, I find myself with an ideal opportunity to medicate my negativity with porn. Which increasingly detaches me from the reality of our relationship... and so on.
Yesterday - while she was on the phone to her mother - I confronted these feelings when they arose. First, boredom. I cannot watch TV just because it's there. I had been working at the computer all day; that was the last place I wanted to go. I thought about cleaning up; that just brought about a wave of anger at her laziness, so I found something else to occupy my hands, although my mind still went back to resenting my Mother-in-law.
And, of course, I realised that all this was connected to the porn issue. I realised that, during the course of the pregnancy, there has been an increasing shortage of intimacy (not just sex; cuddles, deep and meaningful conversations; just plain having fun together) which I have been replacing with porn.
That's not to blame my wife, my Mother-in-law or my soon to be child for my porn addiction; porn had already muscled it's way into my life, and was just waiting for the excuse to lure me back. Similarly, though, my wife's laziness and slobbiness, and the lengthy phone calls to her mother, have been present throughout our marriage.
I'm not going to start the chicken/egg debate. Turning to porn was wrong. Whatever caused that initially, I'm beginning to track down issues that have caused it to progress.
And that is why, I suppose, I should be grateful to my Mother-in-law.
How long this has been going on, I don't know. And where it all started is something of a chicken/egg debate. One thing I do know is that pregnancy has exacerbated a problem that already existed in our home. The following discussion of which may be alarmingly frank.
On any given working day, whether I have been out on the road or catching up with paperwork in the spare room, I will return to the living room some time after 5.30, and find it a complete disaster area. Even if my wife has been home for 2 hours. It's worse if she's had a day off. She will have spent the day in there, creating a small hill-fort of rubble around her chair while she vegges out in front of daytime TV. So after a hard day's work, I wander into this f*cking bombsite, and being the pathologically tidy person I am, have to start clearing up. This, of course, is the first point of conflict.
Point of conflict #2 comes at dinner time. It's my wife's job to cook. Not because I'm sexist, but because she's just better at it than me. I think; she doesn't trust me to cook so much as a salad without interfering and, ultimately, taking over. But the arrangement works, to a point; the point being that, because she cooks, I do everything else. So after dinner she returns to what remains of her hill-fort, and gradually rebuilds the bits I demolished earlier while vegging out in front of primetime TV, while I wash up, clean the kitchen, put the rubbish out, maybe put some laundry on, and so on.
And when I eventually get to sit down, she will either be engrossed in some sh*te on TV, or if there is nothing sh*te enough for her to watch, promptly disappear to phone her mother for an hour or two.
All of which, over a period of time, has allowed plenty of scope for the relationship between us to get more and more distant. I have used porn to escape the frustration, and often anger, I feel at this situation. Which, naturally, increases the distance between us.
Pregnancy has exacerbated this because (a) she doesn't want sex, so any time we might have found for intimacy is now dedicated to sleep (usually in front of the TV) and (b) she needs to talk to someone about the child: enter, again, her mother.
My wife thinks I seem distant, detached from the whole pregnancy experience. I feel distant, detached from the whole marriage experience, never mind anything else. This ball of resentment grows because, rather than talk to me, she will phone her mother. And, knowing she's going to be talking for at least an hour, I find myself with an ideal opportunity to medicate my negativity with porn. Which increasingly detaches me from the reality of our relationship... and so on.
Yesterday - while she was on the phone to her mother - I confronted these feelings when they arose. First, boredom. I cannot watch TV just because it's there. I had been working at the computer all day; that was the last place I wanted to go. I thought about cleaning up; that just brought about a wave of anger at her laziness, so I found something else to occupy my hands, although my mind still went back to resenting my Mother-in-law.
And, of course, I realised that all this was connected to the porn issue. I realised that, during the course of the pregnancy, there has been an increasing shortage of intimacy (not just sex; cuddles, deep and meaningful conversations; just plain having fun together) which I have been replacing with porn.
That's not to blame my wife, my Mother-in-law or my soon to be child for my porn addiction; porn had already muscled it's way into my life, and was just waiting for the excuse to lure me back. Similarly, though, my wife's laziness and slobbiness, and the lengthy phone calls to her mother, have been present throughout our marriage.
I'm not going to start the chicken/egg debate. Turning to porn was wrong. Whatever caused that initially, I'm beginning to track down issues that have caused it to progress.
And that is why, I suppose, I should be grateful to my Mother-in-law.
posted by M386 at 10:35 am
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