Sheila's Anguish

Recently I talked with a friend I’ll call Sheila, who was married in 1969 and had two children in the next three years.  As a child, Sheila’s major interest was religion and learning more about God.  As an adult, she continued to take her Catholic religion seriously and strove to live her spiritual life to the full.  When her children were still babies, her husband “Sean” began graduate studies, a choice that took the little family into a series of moves far from what had been home and from old friends and extended family.  The marriage suffered.  Immersed in his studies, Sean no longer had time for the companionship Sheila yearned for—indeed required—and her mental and physical health deteriorated.  His suggested solution was that she have another baby.  With too little money and not enough time for a satisfying family life, she had not thought twice about using contraception, although she knew the Church opposed it.  What she did take seriously was the sacrament of matrimony and the vows she had taken.  Lonely and exhausted, she struggled with the idea that her husband also had a right to decide the number of children they had.  She wondered if she was selfish not to give him what he wanted.  She did not believe in divorce and prayed constantly for healing in her marriage. 

Eventually, she put her dilemma to the psychiatrist she was seeing.  After that doctor met with Sean as well, it became clear to Sheila that the friend and lover she had married had become someone else, someone who was never going to give of himself sufficiently as a husband and father—and that another baby would not make them whole again.

Sheila says, “Eventually, I realized that unless both parties cooperated in seeing what was going on in our marriage and our family and gave that some priority, even God could not salvage it.”  She divorced Sean and moved back to her hometown with the children.  She also stopped going to Sunday Mass as the dynamics of hierarchy versus laity reminded her too much of the dysfunction in her marriage.  She has remained, however, keenly interested in the Divine.