Midnight in a Perfect World

Ihawi — Tue, 27 May 2008 13:53:16 GMT

Please be respectful but realistic. I am looking for genuine feedback. For the most part I get extremists who preach to me or a request for inappropriate personal information to illicit any commentary. If you can't comment, no problem. But this is not up here as an incitement to argue - it's a plea for how to reconcile, and I'd like to start off there instead of digressing. With that in mind, I am *not* going to give you the whole story. It's so convoluted and twisted, no one would make it and I'd be banned forever. Suffice it to say, my husband and I come from two countries at currently at war with one another (and which have been for sometime ~ no, it's not Iraq, Iran, or Afghanistan, and that's all I'll get into geopolitically speaking as I don't want this to turn into a debate about politics.) I was on the very far left in my country, as he was in his. I worked for Human Rights, volunteered as a field medic, brought in Relief Aid...etc., and faced tanks, gunfires, and beatings. He refused the mandatory draft in his country as a Conscientious Objector and endured a year of extremely harsh ill-treatment (bordering on torture) the recruiters bestowed on him to discredit the medical discharge he eventually got for the legitimate medical condition he has. We both went on, we met in NYC, we got engaged, we worked in the field together, I met his family (all of mine except one younger brother are dead or ill,) but his family liked me, I assumed they realized our political agenda, our beliefs, our intention to continue in our respective fields...etc. I also thus assume that realization brought with it some things that (to me,) seemed liked they'd be a given - but obviously weren't. I felt like they accepted that I was outspoken, confident, somewhat of a fighter, but not an adversary. I felt they were interested in hearing my point of view so I tried to show respect and patience and compromise and courtesy. I spent months and months living with them alone - and this was after 6.5 years working in the field in Relief Aid, and almost 10 years of my husband working to campaign for Human Rights and Conscientious Objection. The things were represented should not have been, and did not seem to be, new to these people. My husband has two older brothers, one ~ 6 years older ~ is a classic nihilist who believes pain and suffering is unavoidable, natural, and therefore, irrelevant to oppose or fight. He'd gone A-Wall during his time in military, had some harrowing experiences after being found, imprisoned for 6 weeks, battered chastised ultimately released dishonorably to a lifetime living mute with his mother (where he still is, and has been, for almost 13 years now.) My oldest brother in law is sort of Johnny Bravo type who, despite having an accident -stemming from mere oblivious stupidity - during his time in the military that lead to him being beaten and imprisoned, professed nothing but support for the country and its actions. He expatriated here to the US less than an hour after being discharged, but returns to the country 3 or 4 times every year to visit. He homeschools his kids in a specific program that prevents them from being exposed to information, TV, internet, or other individuals that could supplement the very puritanical and perfect picture they have painted of his home country in any negative way. He built his home himself - completely out of concrete, with no insulation, flooring and heating only on the top floor, and one of his kids, who's about 10, recently had a celebration of him being able to put his socks on all by himself. I know kids can be freaks, but you have to remember that the house is all cement, they're in New England, and when I asked my brother-in-law about whether or not the socks eventually smelled, he said, "Oh no, not at all, he (my nephew) would wash them in the shower and then run around until they dried.' I didn't know what to say. I had nothing to say. I wanted him gone. Unfortunately he is the oldest brother, my fiance looked up to him, wanted him as some part of our life - especially if we ultimately got married and moved here to the US. At first we worked in and around Europe - to do that, we had to have a 'civil' ceremony. It was a cultural, religious, or in any way personal wedding, but it was a legal ceremony and our union was at that time official. Only a few relatives from a nearby EU nation came as witnesses. It was not the cultural occasion that I had imagined nor mirrored anything beyond a visit to the Post Office. We stayed in the EU but after some terrible experiences with the healthcare system there - and a decision to work with some colleagues of mine here in SF who were doing a documentary on the particular conflict we stem from, we decided to come back here, have a real wedding (we even offered to fly out my husband's family,) spent about $10,000 in preparations and reservations alone. We invited 350 people with a year's notice, and offered to try to help anyone we could with expenses - and in many cases we would have been able to. Soon afterward however, my oldest brother-in-law responded to something he was talking to us about with something like this, "(My Name) only did what she did in (the relevant region) because of her own mental illness. She's a professional victim and she doesn't care about any of the people she "helped" more than she cares about perpetuating her own suffering. She's responsible for all the pain she's seen and endured and specifically chose to work in Relief Aid to be a professional victim and use her flawed selfish motivation to perpetuate sympathy for a people who don't deserve it. A child's life is just as valuable as a soldier's life - whether he's responsible for that child's death or not. My brother in law didn't mention the 6 years I'd been in school, 2 for my Masters in Social Welfare and 4 to learn a language that was particularly difficult. He didn't mention the hours and weeks I'd volunteer to carry medicine and water to people who couldn't reach it because they were ill or injured or the infants I helped deliver - sometimes in their homes or sometimes in the street - because the ambulances couldn't reach them. He didn't mention the homes I helped rebuild, the people (from his own side of the conflict - from his own country) who'd worked with me and whom I'd gotten to know and respect. He said only that I did what I did because I was 'mentally unsound' and that I used my beliefs in Human Rights, particular to the area, to make myself look more honorable than I really am. I'm not perfect. I do get angry. In a few ways, my brother in law was right. I have struggled with Depression, feeling alienated (especially growing up as an orphan,) when I was younger I did things like self-mutilation and scarification ~ primarily for people I've been close to whom I've either lost, emotionally or psychologically. Maybe lots of people disagree with that - maybe it doesn't make me 'unsound' To me, it's a release of the grief and a memorial, similar to a tattoo. I'm not going to debate that here. My husband said he understood, empathize, and held solidarity with not only my hurt over what our brother had said, but supported my fighting back, standing up to him, and preventing his ignorance from permeating our lives any further than it already had. So that's what I did. It was bizarre. This is getting long so to wrap it up I'll say this: ~ We tried to reconcile (me and my brother-in-law.) ~ It didn't work out so well as, it emerged, he is a Transcendental Idealist who believes hurt and suffering aren't real and pain and agony only negative things if one "believes" them to be. He didn't realized he'd hurt me because he was capable of being hurt himself (He said, he just wasn't "wired' that way.') He said it's a similar problem to his sympathizing with the people on the other side, with me, with anyone. He said we "make" our own pain. He said I 'manifested' my fiance's death (even though I was in California and he was in NYC when he was killed,) and that basically torture and trauma (my particular fields in Rehab,) were only painful because the victim (who's only a victim because he sees himself that way,) makes his experience painful. I realized it was like trying to talk to a brick wall - so I wrote a short narrative about my experiences in the field that I thought would speak to him. ~ And it did, he finally started talking to me like a real human being, let down his guard and admitted that he was afraid, ashamed....everything that we already know. It was a good development. But as this was going on, the rest of the family decided that, regardless of the outcome, they were angry that there had been any arguing at all - they were apparently only interested in 'keeping the peace' and weren't interested in who started it, who was right, who was wrong....Despite the fact that my brother-in-law apologized, admitted he shouldn't of said what he said, and learned - in a positive way - from the experience, the rest of the family were angry - at me - for causing any unpleasantness with him and felt I should have let him say whatever he wanted and sort of let it go in one ear and out the other. (Something I've never been very good at - Something I was surprised my in-laws would expect of me after meeting me, spending time with me, and knowing who I was and what I did.) ~ The family intended to ostracize us over the incident, not attend the wedding or visit us here as was planned. At the time (since we relying on translation here,) I was told that my husband's mother, in particular, did not sympathize with us and said that pain was subjective. She said that losing our wedding shouldn't be a big deal and that it's our responsibility to make it that way. Now I knew where my brother in law got his ideas. ~ I was very angry and hurt and my husband seemed increasingly supportive of me emotionally and spiritually but psychologically more and more unstable as he became almost catatonic with passivity and constant sleep over the ordeal. Finally we canceled the wedding. I was devastated and my went into a serious depression. That, combined with my husband's near narcoleptic stress response also meant we had to give up the work we'd been doing on the documentary here. Eventually my brother in law began to talk again and we became friends. It was good. He acted as a liaison to the family and magically they listened and opened up. It was becoming increasingly obvious that my brother-in-law (who's 10 years older than my husband,) did not hold the influence or command over familial communications that my brother in law did. Eventually things started to improve but this came with an increase in my communications and relative closeness to my brother in law. It was all very platonic, very brotherly/sisterly, not devious, however it was affectionate in many ways and he revealed things to me that he (said) he'd never revealed to anyone, cried with me for the first time in 32 years, and spent a considerable amount of energy getting to know me and integrating me into the family. The more he approved of me, it seem, the easier it was for the rest of the family to do so. I sort of took it as a sign that my husband who's younger than me, still had some actualizing to do in his communications and confidence. He agreed. He said he realized that what his brother and I had was positive - especially in regards to the family's reactions - and should move forward. It did, for a short while, until it turned very quickly into something else - an increased motivation to talk to me on the part of my brother in law and an uncharacteristic trust on my part that we were actually coming to bridge the massive gap between us for real and becoming a real family. As soon as this happened, my brother in law disappeared, wouldn't talk or respond to me, to my husband, or anyone, and only emerged a month later with weird Post-Modern phrases like: "I'm not saying your book is bad, it's just that it isn't a good book to read." (he'd formerly called it a 'Masterpiece,') "I'm not saying that I won't visit. It's just that I'm going to do everything else that I'll ever need to do in my whole life first." "It isn't personal, it's just that I never want to see you or know anything about you for the rest of my life." "I'm not saying you're a bad person, just that everything that you think and do is bad." I was very hurt, confused, weirded out, and my husband was very ineffective in empathizing but tried nonetheless to bridge the obvious divide and misunderstandings that we taking place. The family were questioning him and immediately began to think I was at fault whenever anything at all seemed wrong or out of place - especially in regards to our brother in law, whom they adore. In the end, it didn't work out. I had outpatient surgery that my brother in law had promised to come out and support us through. A month before the pre-op therapy started, he completely stopped talking to me. He wrote and said that he wasn't interested in bridging any divide between us, being there for me (or my husband) through the surgery - which was particularly scary and painful - and only intended to talk to us if and when we were interested and 'ready' to see that his ideology was the 'correct' way to go. I was hurt and crushed and angry. It had been something like 13 months. The family once again felt I was causing distress for no reason, my husband was shutting down over the stress, my brother in law seemed to have been a complete facade, and no one seem to sympathize with where I'd been, the surgery I was facing, or the support that (I'd thought) was very natural to me to need and want. Admittedly, I got really angry - I got drunk, I threw things, I threatened divorce. I was tired of the duplicitous talk that never seem to come through in actions and I was weary of feeling as though I'd made my identity, needs, and beliefs pretty clear - especially to my husband and brother-in law, who'd known me very closely, for 5 years and about 2 years respectively - only now to be left feeling relatively hanging and abandoned. Maybe I'm being too needy. But when I heard my husband on the phone with his mother explaining that he agreed we should divorce, I couldn't believe it. He now says that he didn't empathize with me for the entire previous year and a half, never knew how important the wedding was to me, and lost respect for me when I fell into a depression over losing it. He tells me that his brother did nothing cruel (only to retract that and then re-retract it,) and tried his best and my idea - to call the DHS in their state about the fact that they have only concrete walls and floors with no heat, running around in wet laundry, in a non-collegiate approved homeschool program designed for a specific political agenda ~ oh, and did I mention that he makes his own biodiesel fuel in his own home ~ about some of the things his brother does, was actually what was cruel. My husband said he had a very different understanding when he married me - that being a part of a family who didn't want to demonize me would be important (when our two countries are at war,) that he had no idea that his brother would become so important to me (when we'd talked about how his older brother needed particularly to fulfill that communication gap in bridging my identity with that of his family as he himself lacked the confidence and command,) lost respect for me when I became depressed over having to cancel my wedding, saying that he never knew how important it was (when we'd spent close to $10,000 by the time we had to cancel it,) and lastly now says that whatever his family thinks of me has nothing to do with his brother's skewed idea of what happened. (Although I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who are going to point out that this is only my side and yes, you're right. Unfortunately, no one else is interested in what other people think, maybe they don't know exactly how to phrase their own opinion, or maybe they too afraid of what they might hear. I personally believe that my brother in law - who's only ever been with his wife sexually and they've been married for almost 20 years now, who thinks pain isn't real, and who repressed a really traumatic experience from his time in the military came to some realizations about himself that confused and frightened him, and, especially when I was undergoing the surgery and really needed to feel like there were a number of people I could count on, he felt particularly inept, faced with mortality that he's not able to deal with - even at 40 - and ran. Now, he's ashamed and doesn't want to look bad, so he's drilling it into the family that I'm a bad influence from the other side who creates lots of problems, doesn't "keep the peace" (meaning let him say and do whatever he wants whenever he wants without opposing him,) and am 'controlling' my husband like a robot. I'm open to hearing that everyone in the world thinks that's true also and maybe it is - just remember and think about the fact that he can't even look a person in the eye if that person disagrees with him in any way. My husband says all the compromises he's had to make for me (these include, I'm supposing dealing my depression in Australia, having to see his brother fulfill a role that he really wanted to fulfill, and having to stand up to me when I wanted to tell the DHS about all the violations his brother is committing,) have 'eaten his soul.' He says he 'still' loves me, but doesn't, and hasn't empathized with me. But he cares about me and we can 'work through this.' However he really only responds to me if we have liaison/mediator that we both trust and unfortunately those are hard to come by. Every time we start to try to talk, he gets very mean, exasperated, accuses me of many of the things his family has accused me of, yet tells me he doesn't agree with them - only that he wants to 'protect' them. His tone gets very cruel very fast and when I react to it, he says he's like that, because I've been so mean throughout this ordeal. He says he doesn't believe that his brother would do many of the things I've said and that I'm lying for my own purposes - I was, for example, connected to my brother in law on Flickr, but as I have a lot of photos relating to the conflict in our home region, they're photos that only my friends and family can see. One day I made them public because I noticed that my niece - who's now 15/16 had an account there and I was looking at her photos (I hadn't gotten to see her in almost two years,) and I wanted her to be able to see my pictures. The next day, I was deleted from my brother in law's contact list - out of something like 1300 friends. I was the only one which had been deleted. My brother in law tried to tell me over and over again that it was a technical error - one that just deleted me out of 1297 contacts, right? Maybe it was. It's hard for me to believe. But my husband tells me, he believes his brother now, not me, that he's convinced I'm holding something back or purposefully twisting the information - which, in this case, I don't even see how that's possible. What is clear is that, in this case, as with all the others, my husband agrees/sides with/feels more comfortable with/is trying to protect...whatever his family and to do that he has to pull support away from me. He can give it to me if we I can acquiesce/compromise however I'm finding increasingly difficult to talk to him as his cruel exasperated tone which quickly uses any anger I've had in the past to excuse itself is causing me to feel very helpless. I have medical needs, costs, and particular physical help that my husband agreed to give to me when we married and has continued to give through this time (however he now is telling me it has turned me into someone he takes care of instead of a wife he respects.) Basically, if I'm compliant, recognize the sacrifices he makes/made (which I suppose are the financial, all the times when he said and did things he didn't mean because he either didn't realize that's what was happening or was too afraid/embarrassed to tell me he disagrees, the times when he had to tell things to his family that at the time he said he believed in - but which he now tells me he doesn't, and didn't, and supported many ideas only to placate me, oh, and also I'm told it was a compromise to leave his home country - which, for years, he said he was so happy to be rid of, the country that tortured him, and the people who ostracized him for his military objection, to move here to San Francisco and gain residency through me, is apparently also a compromise.) If I'm able to recognize how much these 'compromises' hurt him, allow him to be passive to his family's demonization of me, in agreement with his brother's treatment of me, and sort of be passive and "keep the peace," then there is a future. This is against everything I believe in and everything I have lived for all my life. However, I am also reaching my early 30s, facing a long term illness, and for the first time ever, been able to give a home, through my husband, to my little brother - who basically grew up on the streets. Anything I say is labeled a incorrect and anything I feel is defined as incomprehensible. I am suppose to see the good somewhere in keeping my mouth shut and pretending everything's okay, letting it work itself out...so far, that's consisted of me losing 40 lbs in a month, the virtual loss of motor coordination in my life side due to stress, dizziness and fainting spells and migraines from anxiety attacks that nearly gave me a concussion. My husband says he's 'seen these symptoms before' (and that's true - when I'm extremely stressed, but never this bad,) and is thus "not too worried about it." Right now, I can't tell if he'd even care if I dropped dead right in front of him, but if I were to let him know that it would be used against me as fuel to define whatever happened as my own fault. The whole situation is making me crazy and I have no idea whether there's real hope or not. I feel like the last four years have been somewhat of a lie. I would love to know what other people think. I'd really prefer not to get hate mail, but as I know it's unavoidable, I will say that I won't even read it, only real replies will be forwarded to me and spam and hate mail will go directly into the trash through a physically third person who will only pass on the genuine replies. Thanks for listening~

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Midnight in a Perfect World