When It Hits the Fan

My husband has two married siblings who live in the same town, his home town, and a teenage sister, who all dote on my kids. I also have a sister who lives there, and says she is willing to pitch in. I know they will be alright, but I still worry about them, mostly because I’m not so sure about myself.
My own parents are aging. I know there are more fail-safes with my in-laws, and the environment is one that is familiar to the kids, nothing new to adjust to, like my parents’ new apartment. My decision also has something to do with an inability to admit failure to my own parents.
My mother-in-law, on the other hand, has seen me falling all over myself for the past seven years, pretty much. She knows me in all my current persevering tenacity as well as my most pathetic weakness. This is both a source of comfort and bitterly galling. I think that I am blessed to have a mother-in-law who does not lord it over me for having this knowledge. I will find out otherwise in a few days. But it makes me feel particularly vulnerable the night they leave, especially if my marriage were to permanently go south. I say permanently, because its been heading in that direction for quite a while now since I got sick, and I keep hoping somehow we’ll be able to pull the nose up out of this dive, but I’m currently at a loss as to how.
So now, the only thing that I feel I’ve ever been particularly good at, motherhood, is in the balance, my offspring in the hands of what could prove to be “the enemy” if things don’t change, and I have no power to do anything about it because I hurt too damn much. I didn’t think I could undertake the trip with the kids, although I was invited, because I thought I’d be a certifiable basket case after traveling six hours on winding roads in winter weather after a trip to the doctor the other day made me cry like a baby every time we hit a bump. But now, in the middle of the night, I think I’d be willing to undertake the journey on foot, in a blizzard, barefoot, just so long as I didn’t have to be so afraid I might lose my babies for good.

Over the previous three days, with the kids safely out of the picture, all the stress that my husband had been dealing with reached critical mass, and without an audience there for him to feel self-conscious about, he had the freedom to tell me exactly what he thought of me and everything I’d been “putting” him through. He was not particularly kind about it. In fact, he was quite brutal. At first I tried to defend myself, and it was fighting, but after a while I was just too tired and hurt too much to fight, but he just kept verbally pounding on me, and it wasn’t fighting anymore, just him taking out his frustrations. By the end of the three days, when he stopped yelling at me at about 3 a.m., I was a physiological mess, and drove myself to the hospital again, heart racing, head pounding, extremities shaking wildly. When the ER doctor essentially shrugged me off, saying he didn’t know what else could be done for me, I went home.
I sat in the car, a tremoring bundle of painful and dysfunctional nerves, and knew I simply could not go into my home and deal with my husband for one more second, or I would go mad or strangle him. I felt like I had imposed on all my friends in town far too much lately, and could not impose on them any further. I contemplated going to a hotel for a day or two, but thought my husband might think I was abandoning him, or fear I was getting suicidal again. The thoughts about my children that had haunted me the previous night came to mind again, and all I could think of was that I desperately wanted to be with them. Letting them go had felt like the worst kind of defeat, and I just needed to feel like I mattered in their lives. I missed them so much, and I knew that if they were around my husband wouldn’t have been so brutal in his verbal attacks on me. I just wanted them home. I decided that I would just get on the bus and go to them, and if I needed a couple of days to recuperate before we came back, I thought surely my mother-in-law would allow me that. After all, initially she had invited me to join them. I just hadn’t thought at the time I could handle the trip. Now I knew I had to.
My parents' new locale was midway in my journey, and they greeted me with both warmth and concern. For a little bit, it was like coming in out of the cold. I spoke to both my husband and mother-in-law on the phone briefly. My honey spoke to me like I was a dangerous lunatic, and his biggest concern was that I was not going to run off with the kids and endanger them. I was insulted that he would even think that, and hung up on him. My mother-in-law sounded just plain mad. I hadn’t expected that, but I accepted that she might be disappointed that I wasn’t spending the time working on my marriage, or that she’d have to put up with another houseguest after all. It really had not even entered my thoughts that she might think I was abandoning him. It seemed obvious to me that, if I was planning on leaving him for good, that the last place I’d want to go was to his mother. It wasn’t so obvious to her, I guess.
Perhaps my judgment was impaired, because even my Dad expressed concern that I was running straight from the swarm of bees right into the hive. I still believed that everything would be alright once I could be with the kids. I refused my parents invitation to stay for a day because I just wanted to see the kids so badly. My sister came and took me on to my in-laws, where I arrived too late to do much more than kiss the kids good night and go to bed. Not that I slept.
In the morning, once everyone else was off to work and school, I found myself alone with my mother-in-law. Out of courtesy, knowing she was not happy with me, I gave her a chance to express her feelings before I tried to justify my presence. I had no idea what I was in for. Operating under the assumption that I was leaving my husband and had come to take the kids, she let me have it. She told me everything she had ever thought was wrong with me and then some. She called me a host of colorful names and accused me of all manner of wrong-doing in my marriage and in my dealings with people altogether. I was so astounded, so unprepared for this attack, that I could barely summon a response, much less a defense. I knew in my heart she was wrong on most counts, but there was just enough truth in some of her accusations to sting me to the core. I knew I had not been easy to live with over the last few months. I knew it had been hard on my marriage and the kids, and I hated myself for it anyway, so for her to rub it in my face and call me the Wife from Hell and an Unfit Mother, etc. etc. just made me feel horrifically awful.
Perhaps the only thing that saved me was her accusation that I had been selfish in sending the kids to stay with her, because I knew wholeheartedly that was wrong. Letting them go had been one of the hardest, most selfless things I had ever done, and I knew that deeply in my soul. I also knew deeply in my soul that I was still too sick to take care of them properly, that they were in good hands where they were, and that I could not stay. I called my sister, and for the second time in a week I had to relinquish the care of my kids to someone else, which had been hard when I trusted my in-laws to do right by me, but a thousand times harder this time around.
I had no choice now but to return home to prove my husband and his mother wrong about my intention of bailing out of my marriage. It probably would have been beneficial to my health to stay with my parents a couple of more days, as they invited again, but I just couldn’t let those unfounded fears fester. It wasn’t a question of pride, but rather of knowing that if I balked now, it would be my kids that would ultimately pay the price. If anyone was going to bail on this marriage, it wouldn't be me. I could not risk my children ever believing I would intentionally give up on our family.

(Unknown to any of us at the time, my mother-in-law was herself ill at this time from what would prove to be fatal cancer. She was also having her own domestic squabble with some of her siblings, and my kids, my problems, and I were just three things too many for her to handle with grace. As a result of this fiasco of a trip, she and I did not speak to each other for over a year, a year I sadly regret now that she is gone. We made peace with each other before her passing, but we both said things that permanently altered what had once been a friendly relationship. Do I blame myself or her? A little. Do I blame the cancer? Not at all. Do I blame the Effexor? Most definitely!)