I go up in the morning and carried Dora to the bathroom. Then I fed her and David [their son] and changed him and then went to work. All I could think about all day was getting back to Dora and David. I worked like a madman so that I could come home early and be with them. I was on automatic. Nothing else mattered. I wasn’t unhappy at all.
Unfortunately, while Jim felt quite good about his role as parent (in many ways to both Dora and David) and as reliable breadwinner, this very stance caused difficulties in the relationship between Jim and Dora. Dora indicates that during this three-year period she felt very isolated, particularly with Jim going to work every day. Previously, Jim had been unemployed, which meant that he was around more often. Now, he is working, and she is confined to her home because of a new-born child, because of her own broken pelvis, and because of the dangerous community to which they had moved: “I didn’t like being pregnant and immobile for six months after. We became holed up, like hermits. I was in shock at not being able to get around, even if I could go outside into the bad neighborhood.” Dora also suffered from a change in her perception of self: “Before the pregnancy, I was a size one. Afterwards, I was fat. This totally changed my self-concept. Jim was surrounded by these gorgeous women all the time. Maybe because I was in bed all the time, I was not very grounded.”
The stage was set for a marital crisis. All the ingredients were there. Jim was annoyed. He had finally become a responsible adult and was loving his role, only to find that Dora resented his work and his time away from home. She felt lousy about herself and about the predicament that she and Jim had put her in. Dora recalls that she “was agitated about everything,” Jim asked her if she wanted a divorce. This is the critical point. Do they want to work toward a redesign of their relationship, or do they want to give up and turn to independent paths? Dora answered Jim by saying “no.” She backed this up by deciding to return to school after her pelvis healed in order to mend her self-concept:
Jim paid for me to go back to school and earn my degree. He has provided everything we have ever had, physically. He bought us this house, which brought us to this [much safer] town. I didn’t want to move here, but he got a good deal. This put us in a major transition in our lives.
Thus, they were able to turn around Dora’s envy, by coupling Jim’s enjoyment in becoming a reliable breadwinner with Dora’s interest in improving her self-image through further education. Rather than envying Jim’s success, Dora was able to build on it by allowing Jim to pay for her education. In addition, rather than blaming Jim for their move to a new community, Dora went along with the move and found some real benefits in moving to a much smaller and safer town.
Rather than complaining about the isolation, Dora saw it as an opportunity to come closer together as a family: “this house isolated us. We began to clean up. We also stopped fighting as much.” Jim noted that: “we moved away from the party crowd. We left the wild times, the bands, the drugs and alcohol.” In getting away from the party life, according to Dora, the two of them “didn’t have to try as hard any more to grow up. It solidified our growing up.”
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