I turned 46 and it didn’t matter to anyone. No birthday party, no cake, no best wishes. I spent the day driving back from Ohio where I had just handed our soon-to-be adopted daughter back to her birthmother. Not ready to write about that yet.
My husband is going to school to pursue his dreams. I am in a deadend job that I hate, and in which I am trapped until he completes his studies. I committed to it, so I stick it out with a three-year old and a high stress job. If I sound like I’ve got self-pity, that’s true. But the feeling of being trapped in a life not of my making is overwhelming.
I wanted all my life to pursue the truth of myself. I’ve put it on the back burner, squeezing pieces out every now and then in the form of an isolated performance, song, play, and, most recently, parenthood. I have never had the luxury of the thing I hold most dear being the focus of my life.
On my third marriage, I have always placed the husband’s goals ahead of mine. My second husband is thriving on the back of a business I helped to build, and for which I never received a paycheck. Now, I am helping a husband 9 years my junior achieve his dreams just in time for me to get beyond 50 and have a ton of his student loans to handle (he just informed me that he no longer wants to go to law school, but rather prefers to be a professor, so student loans are going to be a reality for me for years to come).
I will never be what I dreamed of being, and I’m married to a man who doesn’t care as long as he is liked by everyone. He wants to be a professor because he wants to be the center of attention and the smartest in the room. For that, my life is being flushed away. I’m sick of it, I’m trapped, and I can’t get out.
Somebody help.
