Foggy week

The last past week has been stressing.

C has been feeling miserable most of the time and obviously, this had a huge influence in my mood as well.

I would like to think that all this stress was due to so many things he had to cope with at the same time: he had to prepare himself for a singalong, he was performing at the annual school play (also he composed all the music for the same play) and he was struggling to adapt himself to a new job as an Art Teacher.

Obviously the new job is probably the big issue here.

When he got the job, the first days of August, I saw it as a fantastic opportunity for him to commit himself into something he likes and he is prepare for (he has a degree in Fine Arts) in one of the best schools in this country (if not the best). It's an american school (the only one here) and its first language is English (second language Spanish) while in every other bilingual school it is exactly the other way round.

Children from diplomatic families go there and, only 30% of its students are local. Considering this aspect and that the teachers are from different parts of the globe, there's a cosmopolitan feeling there that, in the whole, makes it attractive to C who still struggles so much with our latinamerican culture.

His salary is not completely arranged yet but he felt he could communicate good enough with the new Head Director (an american guy who has only been here for a month) and he accepted the job.

He teaches Arts to Elementary and Primary School and Music as an extra curricular activity. He was very positive at the beginning, he even bought books related to the subject, and had a lot of projects to start working with them. However, the first week proved to be hard.

I do understand that dealing with small kids could be difficult. However, I've been in one of his classes and I was amazed at how well he could handle the kids, how easily he communicates with them, how patient he is and also I could appreciate how the children responded so well to him too. Not all classes are supose to be like that, but I got the picture.

Being a teacher requires a lot of work outside the classroom and preparing for his classes proved to be painful as he moans all the time about not having time to play his music as he used to. I do believe that all that extra time at home guitar playing was a bonus he had to take advantage of. Sooner or later it would come a time when he should have to commit himself into getting an income, for his own expenses and for contribuiting to paying family bills.

But these changes only made him very unhappy. I started to hear only negative comments: the kids getting difficult to deal with, the crowded bus trips to the school, the rushes from one school to the other, the heat, the cold and everything.

I did what I could, try to did my best to be out of his way, to be positive and to make him look at the bright side of all it.

I can not remember a single warm gesture from him during that whole week. Probably he was too busy to notice I was there. I stroked his back everynight as usual in an attempt to make him feel better. But again, this is something that I usually do until I fall asleep.

One day in the the middle of the week I made a short visit home at lunch time to organize a little bit the house work so that everything would be more or less ready for when we all return home in the evening. I did supermarket shopping, I collected the washing and put some more washing outside, washed dishes, etc.. I had to rush as I only had an hour and a half before returning to the office (the trips at 100 km/h along the coast also counted). But I still had time to left a bar of chocolate on his desk, the one the I know that he likes so much, with a little funny card with a cartoon of a smily cat on it. I wrote a few words in it, wishing him a sweet afternoon (I knew he would arrive home in a couple more hours) and I rushed back to my office.

In the evening when I returned home, he didn't even move from the coach in his studio, he didn't even make any attempt to kiss me and he had that miserable face again. His only comment was "sorry, but I eat all the chocolate", I replied that it was for him anyway. I went downstairs and started dealing with dinner and my son's homeworks. After a while he came down to the kitchen too... only to serve himself some more coffee and to throw some papers into the dustbin.

And then I saw it.

He was throwing away my card. Suddenly I felt tearfully. In that apparently insignificant, silly event, I saw him as summing up his last days' attitude. And I felt pathetic, stupid, utterly sad. All the frustration of the last days was fighting not to be shown together with my tears.

I let the days pass as I knew there were important things to come in the following days and I didn't want to put more pressure on him by having a conversation that, I acknowledged before hand, at least, would stressed him. Friday was the singalong, Sat and Sunday were the last performances of the school play (and we were also taking the kids to watch the play).

It was already Tuesday of the following week when I managed to send him an email putting into words some of my feelings and some of my pain. It felt a relief to be able to get out all those words that have been boiling up inside me for so many days.

Again I repeated to him that I do not want him to work anymore if he can not put up with the frustration of "working for other people" as he usally says. But what I can not deal with is his misery.

Of course I also explained to him that I don't agree with what I was suggesting: I strongly believe that being at home, spending his days shutting himself up indoors was not a "healthy" option at all. Wasting hours and hours of his precious life in front of a screen, and watching porn is not "real life" and it is not what I want for him. I stated this very clearly.

I explained to him how concerned I am about trying to make everybody's lives better and easier. That I do my best, and that I had the feeling that even this was not appreciated at all, that I could be killing myslef but I was taken for granted. I didn't pretend to moan, but I wanted to let him know that even when I have my own worries, concerns and frustrations, I still try to be positive and have a smily face when I arrive home.

I also said to him that I've always wanted us to have an open and honest communication but that lately, I've been struggling to express how I feel as I am so afraid that he may say things that I do not want to listen.

I told him that I tourture myself all the time thinking that he may regret everything he did to be with us (me), that he even regrets becoming a (future) father, that he may regret leaving his ex partner and his former life with her as all that I hear is how much he wants to come back to the UK.

And how much this whole week of silence between us hurted, this whole week of not doing any good to our relationship with that attitude, this whole week of not taking care of it.

I got a big hug when I arrived home that evening.