The Journaling of Conway 952

After 30 years of abuse, a man on the verge of panic attacks finally turns to his wife, able to find no answers, just the problem.

By Brigitte Goerdeler

“My heart’s beating hard,” the woman exclaimed, suddenly complaining of pains in her chest and throat. This was early 1978, when she was 19 years old, the daughter of a middle-class couple living in Germany. sex viet Her husband and sister were divorced soon after, but not all had ended up healthy. Only the woman and her two-year-old son remained in the house, desperately wishing for respite, which never seemed to be coming. “I was all the time afraid of a heart attack. We had no doctor or nurse and I could not go anywhere that might see one. We were always crammed into my father’s small studio flat, with a small window in the door. There was no toilet so I sat on a sofa I’d found behind the sofa, watching for fainting spells that never came. vlxx There was no way I could be out without the whole family seeing me and then I felt humiliated having to explain I was ill.”

A frightening energy coursed through her: the first few years after the divorce had been horrible. Her father, diagnosed with dementia, had been spending his days wandering around the flat. Meanwhile, all of his belongings were scattered around the house — always neatly folded and beautifully in place, but missing from a place which was always a pile of garbage. As the house-cleaner, the woman was supposed to rid the place of rubbish, but she was exhausted by all of the work. She could not help but feel hopeless and angry: “He never took my father to a doctor when his condition worsened. He was a ruthless chauvinist.”

Not long after her divorce, the woman fell pregnant with her son. She says she could not find anyone to help her: “There were no role models in Germany for divorced women. None of the professional organizations I’d heard about urged us to return to work. Our job prospects were none of their business, of course, as we were all newly parents.” The people they tried to recruit also suggested they wait until their son had reached high school before putting themselves back on the job market: “It was not reasonable, that there was a salary freeze in all professions then. The only thing we wanted was a proper, paid job.” nonolive

“My husband would not take this even half-seriously. He laughed at me: ‘That’s no good, go and find a man who’ll pay good wages and be nice to you.’ A man never existed for him. He would talk the talk, but never walk the walk. He was always discussing other men instead of facing up to the issues that really mattered.”

She says it wasn’t just her mother who felt insecure and alone: “His family in Germany was untouched, because they lived only slightly better than us. At the same time, as we live in Baden-Württemberg, we can talk about politics without being ridiculed. We would never dare say the things he did; his family would have made fun of us, told us we were disgusting, that it was our fault, that we were not to be trusted. We were miserable.”

Her father would be let down by his time in Germany. “My father grew up poor and did very little work — when he came to Germany, he worked in a knitting shop and rented a room at a hotel-restaurant. In hindsight, I realize how badly he had been fed, treated and made to feel ashamed.” The woman was soon much more critical of her husband than her mother. “My father never took me to see a doctor. We never went out with him. I was often depressed and this only worsened when he would break out in attacks of rheumatism.” As they had no support, she put herself back on the job market, working as a hotel cleaner. “After months of stress, I had nervous breakdowns. I kept people from knowing about my sick father and any kind of illness I had.”

Finally, the woman came to the conclusion she had to leave her husband and finally move out of the house. “At first, my father was not happy about this. We tried to put a façade on our relationship and lie to each other, but after two months I was so exhausted I didn’t remember how to break the news. He did not accept me at first and the divorce proceedings took so long that the man I was with was robbed of his rights.”

For the woman, like other women,