rheanna

CK1,

I can understand that this is confusing and painful for you. Bless you for trying to find out as much as you can about menopause. It must indeed be a mystery to someone whose hormones change gradually over years, and not hourly and drastically.

May I suggest that I see two things here that are causing problems. One is that your wife wants change in her life. The other is that your wife is making many of those changes in a way that excludes you and your daughters. I would like to suggest that you treat these issues separately.

We women often grow up with the message that we are fulfilled only when we do things for other people. We are given praise for doing things for other people. We are told that we are "selfish" (horrors!!!) for thinking of ourselves at all. Of course it is important to do things for other people. Children need nurturing and training, and being nice to one's spouse and other people around us makes for a positive functioning society.

I know many women who find when their children leave the house that they have no hobbies or interests. They don't even have a clue about what they want to do with all this free time. (This goes for a lot of men, too, who reach retirement age, but that's another story!) These women haven't developed interests or hobbies or training in other areas because it somehow is considered "selfish" (bad bad selfish!) to do something by yourself or with just your girlfriends. And horrors if she wants to go away for a week to take art lessons!

My point is that your wife, while I'm sure not this extreme, may have not taken the chance to find out what she is interested in (painting, writing, acting, a new career requiring going back to school). This requires alone time, or at least time with just people who are pursuing the same adventure or training. This means that the family can be left in the hands of someone else for a while (an hour during class time or a weekend during a retreat).

You have made sacrifices in your own life because you feel that spending time with the family is important. And I suspect that you are hurt because you wife seems to be saying that you and the children are not important to her -- or not important enough. She isn't waiting for the agreed upon amount of time before she branches out and finds interests outside the family.

Which brings me to the second point -- the manner in which she is deciding to change the time plan. If she has been trying to live up to the "ideal" wife and mother for the last 20 years, which means devoting her time and energy to making other people's lives fulfilled, then she may not have actually been spending much time at all on the things that might make her fulfilled. The hormonal upheaval that takes place for many women makes us emotionally sensitive. It becomes harder to deal with emotions that may have been submerged for 20 years, because those emotions are considered selfish (horrors -- that a woman would want to do something that has nothing to do with the family!). If she has indeed been submerging any thought of what she wants to do with her life, then now, when the hormones are going crazy, she can't ignore what's underneath any more.

And what's underneath seems to be a great desire to do something, anything, that is for her and her alone. If she hasn't been exploring this for the last 20 years, she is going out in different directions trying to explore it now.

You can't do anything to stop this. If you do, you'll wind up divorced for sure. My suggestion is to let her know that you support her in her attempts to find out who "she" is (not wife and mother, but "she-as-individual"), but also that you want her to be still a part of the family. This may take couples counseling, because it's hard to exchange emotional thoughts with each other without both of you getting defensive, and a neutral counselor can provide an environment where you can both present your thoughts and feelings without things escalating into an unfortunate fight.

I'm sure it must be difficult to be around someone who appears to be pushing people away rather than being the nurturing person you have known for 20 years. But all this drama that she is creating around herself (and affecting the rest of the family of course) is because she doesn't know any other way to do it. She will find other avenues besides the family to fulfill herself. The question is, can she find these other activities without leaving the family?

Please don't present this to her as an either/or option (she may actually be seeing it this way in her own mind). Please don't say that she has to submerge herself for another year or two until the children are old enough. What the two of you need to address (and I know she's not making this easy!) is how to start doing it now without throwing away the family in the process. It's not going to be easy. I wish you luck. I admire you for trying to look for as much information as you can.

And thank you for posting things from the "other half" point of view. Sometimes when we're in the middle of our own crises we forget how difficult this is on other people. Just remember that it's also difficult for us as well.

--Rheanna