What do you get when you add the heightening of pregnancy hormones and a millennial marriage with spouses who are addicted to dysfunction………………. My Life

I’m in a constant battle with myself about what I perceive as a simple misunderstanding and my Husband thinking I’m a punk. 9.5 times out of 10 I’m perceiving it as the latter.

My husband gets away with so much because I lose my cool so quickly . So it’s easy for him to blame my reaction. Easy to point out that I’m raising my voice or cursing at him. As Ivanlya Vanzant would say “Your delivery diminishes your message” .

Now that I’ve been trying to be a better person for my unborn babies I’ve been learning to think before I speak. Sometimes I even take it back to college days and write a short hand draft of sub points and main points so I stay on task and topic. The funny thing about my change and growth is, it messes up my husbands game plan. Now I’m not raising my voice or cursing so his action is the only thing on display . We are no longer focused on my reactions. Here lies the foolery.

Now we are standing there with the elephant in the room ( his action) and I’m feeling light and free because this is all him. He has to deal with this big ass elephant now without using me as a distraction or diversion.

One thing you need to understand is my husband has a gift of gab. He could talk his way in and out of everything without really saying anything. Of course my addict ass fell in love with that quality and now it bites me in the ass every chance it gets. The thing is, I know what I signed up for but my “expectations” of him growing and not acting out of survival is what lead to my big blow up reactions .

I found myself giving up and feeling like I couldn’t compete with the gift of gab anymore. I found myself working harder to keep an image of happiness than actually being happy. I found myself through with excuses to justify his actions. I found myself consumed with all the negative that I turned a blind eye to any positive that existed.

Now when an addict feels like there is no hope and that their efforts are too much to handle they go look for that familiar comfort in their drug of choice. My drug of choice unfortunately is Dysfunction. I thrive in dysfunction. I function in dysfunction with no problem. The thing is in 2018 it’s so easy to resort and get a hit because dysfunction is everywhere, it’s in an arms reach, it’s in a DM, Snapchat message, text message, familiar phone call.

I was at a point where I felt as though I did everything right. I was a “good” girl, always committed, school was priority, wasn’t into drugs or having babies by randoms at a young age, finished my degrees, pursued my career, fell in love and got married. I felt like I did everything how I was “supposed to” yet I wasn’t as happy in my end result as I thought I’d be. As if I reached the last level of the game and was suppose to win a prize but instead I got a slapped in the face with REAL LIFE and to be honest I hated it. I thought “what the hell was all that for”. All the sacrifices just to end up like everyone else. As if I was above smh. As if I wasn’t human. As if I don’t eat, shit and sleep just like everyone else. The “Clueless” AUDACITY.

I remember a time before I was married, looking at my past relationships and being so happy they ended. Thinking to myself, “why was I involved with such toxic dysfunction”. Not realizing we all have our dysfunctions but they show up differently and at different times. It’s kind of like a spectrum so it plays with your mind.

At one end you have the physical abusers. Then there’s the mental abusers, who think they are better because they can’t see the scars they leave like the physical abusers do. Then you have the non communicators who think they are above all because they remove themselves from situations to avoid abuse but in reality they are actually avoiding the whole relationship and leaving you to sit in all the emotion alone.

I knew it was bad when I was thinking I would’ve been better with one of my past dysfunctions because “at least I knew how they felt, at least I was able to get out the frustration and then get over it“. I’ve never been punched in the face or anything like that before, Thank God,but I’ve had some mental warfare’s in my day and to be honest those were the most exhilarating arguments. At the end you got everything out and you could choose to call a truce or leave. With my non communicative husband, I don’t know where I stand. Just like I felt with my mom and that thought scares me. My fear is that my relationship with him will dissolve like mine did with her. Very daunting thought. I’m happy I had the experience I did with my mother. It’s one of those “oh this makes sense now” type of situations where I had to go through something in my past to help in my future. One thing I can say about my husband is, I see he wants to be better which gives us something to work with. I’ve also recognized my ability to go from 0 to 60 in a matter of seconds and I want to be better. The moment we lose sight of that, then that’s when I know it may be game over.

I know it’s not wise to tell your business to the world but I think that may be the problem with society. We all go through similar situations, some worse than others but the foundations are the same, yet we walk around acting like everything is okay until one day it’s not. I know you’ve had the girl on social media that posts the beautiful pictures of her family but you know her husband /father of her children /boyfriend is in someone’s Dms being super inappropriate because you have the screenshot in your group chat. Or the woman posting her MCM with the beautiful caption about her “king” and last Saturday was doing some questionable things with someone other than that MCM. If no one will be honest I will. I’ve seen it all.. or I should say, I see it all and it seems to just be getting worse. We take the easy way out and think that the grass is greener when in all reality it’s just more foolery because no one is having REAL conversations and everyone is condoning it. I  don’t want to take the easy way out because I may be a complainer but  I am not a quitter. I lost sight of that for a while but I’ve taken responsibility for myself and started Psychotherapy to get some of this confusion out in a safe productive way.

If I have to use my experience to make at least one person feel it’s okay to speak or that they are not bugging then I’ve done my job. I believe we shouldn’t need to get to the breaking point of suicidal thoughts or harming others before we change our situations for the better. If you are feeling low or confused you should be able to voice it and have support to do so WITHOUT judgement.

I’m starting to realize my fear of judgment messed with my head so much that I was even afraid to judge myself. I placed my self on this high pedestal out of fear of judgement. I can tell you with confidence that fear is gone. I realized I’m creating the fear. It exists only because I put a face to it. At this point I have to be the change I want to see. I feel like I’ve lived life for myself and the memory of my twin sister for so long and somewhere in between stopped and just started trying to survive this cold world. Now the only thing I care about are my babies and giving them a fighting chance at life. Granted they may still come out batshit crazy, they’ll still go through trials and tribulations but I’ll be damned if I’m the root of any of their hurt, pain or confusion. They are my reason to stay sober.

You’ve been an amazing crowd. Get home safely,

-Otivia the former addict