Looking Out For Number ONE

I am not sure if I mentioned this already, but before Dick and I were married my father gave me a wonderful piece of advice. We were talking about marriage and I said something to the effect of marriage being a 50/50 proposition and Dad corrected me. He told me that was where most people make the first mistake. It is not 50/50, it's 100% both ways. If you both don't give 100% for the other, it won't work. I thought about it and realized he was right. I took it to heart and tried to follow the 100% rule. As you have probably guessed, Dick did not. He was absent the day they handed out the marriage rule book. There is however a problem if only one of the people in the marriage is following this rule. If they are thinking only of the other's needs and the other person is thinking only of his own, then everything becomes about that one person and the other one gets left on the side of the road somewhere. That’s basically what happened to us. Very rarely during our marriage was anything done because it was good for me. Inadvertently it may have been good for me, but the only person he ever considered was himself, as in how something would affect him. Dick is and always has been self-centered, self-serving, and basically selfish. Every decision he ever made was based on his needs or desires...never 'ours'. My big mistake was wanting to please him and make sure he was happy. This of course came back to bite me in the ass, because it came at the expense of my own needs and desires. I‘ll give you an example. Dick likes to take a banana in his lunch. If I wanted to have a banana and there was only one left in the fruit bowl, I would not eat it. It wouldn’t matter how much I r-e-a-l-l-y wanted that banana, I would not think of touching it. I would eat something else or nothing, but never the last banana, just in case Dick might want it. I would feel really bad if I ate it and then he went looking for it and it was gone. Often Dick never wanted the last banana but that banana could sit there until it began to rot, because I was not going to eat it. I just couldn’t take the chance because he might want it for his lunch. We through out a lot of bananas over the last 25 years! There were other situations that when I think about them now I can’t believe I let him get away with. Our mattress, for instance…big bone of contention…I mean huge. It was firm, very firm. Truthfully it was like trying to sleep on a slab of slate. The carpeting in our bedroom had more cushioning. In the beginning it didn’t bother me because I mostly slept on my stomach, and I was a lot younger then with many less aches and pains. I was also much thinner and that made a difference in the comfort levels at the pressure points. After I had breast cancer sleeping on my stomach was difficult because of having had a mastectomy. I tried my side, but the dam mattress was so hard my hip would ache after a half hour or so. My arm would fall dead asleep because the circulation would get cut off to it. Nothing like waking up in the middle of the night wondering what the hell that lump is under your pillow, only to realize its your own arm that is completely numb. Anyway…after a while I started leaving the bed and going out to the couch. I would give myself an hour and if I was still tossing and turning…see ya! I made sure I waited until he was asleep so as not to make him feel bad that I was leaving. It got to the point that I rarely made it to bed. I would fall asleep in the recliner and just stay there. Then Dick started to complain that I wasn’t sleeping in the bed anymore. I felt bad about this, because it wasn’t right that we slept apart, but I told him…for the hundredth time, that the mattress was too dam hard. If by some miracle I did fall asleep in there I would wake up in the morning with in such pain I would feel like crap all day. I needed to sleep and the only way that was going to happen in that bed is if we got a new mattress. Guess what he said? “But I like that mattress.” “Well then,” I said “I hope you two will be very happy together, because I can’t sleep on it.” Besides the fact that he liked the mattress made of rock, he was also very concerned that he would not be comfortable on a soft mattress Me, me, me…I, I, I…its all about Dick. What’s best for Dick? Is Dick happy? God forbid Dick should not get a good night sleep. We wouldn’t want Dick to be uncomfortable, now would we! The truth is though…Dick could sleep on anything, anywhere, anytime. If we had a dog house he could sleep on the peak of its roof like Snoopy and be perfectly comfortable. Finally I got to the real reason he didn’t want a new mattress. He said, and I quote, “A new mattress is expensive. What if we buy one and you can’t sleep on that one either? Might as well just flush that money right down the toilet.” Money…it was always about money. What an ass. He is still sleeping on the same mattress and I have a very comfy air-bed. I have slept better in the past 10 months than I did over the last 24 years. So that as they say is that.