Elgan speaks
...and her words thunder across the land

I don’t know if the grass is greener, but it does look that way.

Thursday, Sept. 10, 2009
9:46 a.m.
The comments I received in my most recent post have prompted me to write this entry. It won’t change things, but it might partially explain why I am so frustrated right now.

My parents hardly ever traveled together. My father was an incredible cheapskate and if something cost money, he simply forwent it. The only exception to this was the C0nn organ he bought when I was 10 (and then replaced a few years later with a more expensive model) and from which he derived countless hours of pleasure playing. His ideas of vacation time were to putter around the house, working in his enormous backyard garden (which supplied all our vegetables for the summer and beyond), playing his organ, and not spending money. When he died, my brothers and I inherited a respectable sum each from him, money which I rather he had spent on himself than hoarded, but that was the way he was.

My mother, on the other hand, didn’t have the same problem with spending money. She was the only driver in the family (my dad never learned) and bought cars as necessary. She traveled the world with bird-watching and nature groups, regularly visited my brother in Israel and often, on these mostly middle-aged-and-older female jaunts, was asked how long she had been a widow, since it was so unusual for a married woman to be traveling husbandless. In order to finance these expenditures without having to account for them to my dad, she did social work, making a respectable salary, a lot of which she was still able to sock away for her retirement.

My husband, on the other hand, did not witness this kind of behaviour. His parents have always traveled together. They’ve been doing the Caribbean vacation thing since he was quite young, and even took his grandmother along with them after she was widowed. My in-laws do absolutely everything together. I can’t imagine one of them going off without the other, and this is the example my husband has grown up with. He deplored my own parents’ relationship, which I’ll admit was pretty tempestuous, and has no desire to emulate any of their examples.

The weird thing in all this is that both of our parents were married a very long time. Mine lasted 53 years before my dad passed away (and my mother still misses him a lot, nine years later) and my in-laws have enjoyed 58 anniversaries thus far, and are still going strong.

I love my husband and I want to travel with him. But I also want to do things on my own. As you’ve already noted, he is rather old fashioned in his views and feels that if we take separate vacations once, that’s the end of our holidays together. He has already gone off without me to Florida to visit his folks a couple of times. I simply don’t like Florida, that’s all, and as much as I love his parents, I don’t want to be cooped up with them for a week. I need my space.

And it’s this needing of space that is the issue, really. Hubby has his activities, apart from work, that do not include me: composing, playing jazz, playing tennis. I have my activities which exclude him: sitting for hours on end at the computer talking to my online friends and playing spider solitaire. There’s writing group, but this fall marks the last times we will meet. There was belly dancing, but that kind of petered out. The places I want to go are mostly places we have already been. I like to revisit, he likes to see new things. We are at an impasse.

A lot of the things we did together once when we were younger we no longer have in common. When Hubby was playing classical guitar, we would prepare and perform concerts together. He can no longer play that repertoire because of the dystonia in his right hand. His jazz trio is instrumental only and, if I sing with them, it’s only on special occasions, such as that concert we did a few weeks ago in N. HatIey. I can’t play tennis (or squash anymore, sadly) because of recurring tendonitis in my right shoulder. And, as I have mentioned previously, our intimate life has waned because I no longer want to endure pain for the sake of someone else’s pleasure.

At age 52 with my children out of the house, it seems that I should be able to reassert my individuality and independence. Hubby loves me and is afraid of losing me. While I have never wanted to leave him, the more he shortens my leash, the more the grass seems greener in my neighbour’s yard. I cannot explain this to him because he simply does not see things as I do. It leaves me very frustrated and unhappy. I simply don’t know what to do.



|

<~~~ * ~~~>