I began to wonder whether I had asked too much of life, whether I should just accept my situation: learn to live without love. Of course, in the beginning, I was happily convinced that my marriage met all that was required in a proper match, but now nothing alleviated the feeling that I was not sufficiently loved.
I had not yet realized that this feeling was an “old” emotion with origins in my childhood. I sincerely believed back then that I wasn’t loved because I wasn’t understood. As usually happens in an adolescent girl’s life, this attitude was triggered by my relationship with my mother. She regarded me as a challenge merely to keep up with, let alone understand or control. Of course, I was just going through the usual travails of a young teenager, ignorant of what being a mother to someone like me was like for someone like her.
She did love me of course, but I felt none of it. The net result is that I felt hopelessly misunderstood. I refused to see the love I was given as genuine, and was blind to the emotional and developmental consequences of equating love with being understood. One consequence was a “real” sense of not being loved for whom I was and not getting the affection I felt I deserved from my husband.
And so, in the summer of 1995, I experienced tingling and numbness in my legs, a symptom that was greatly aggravated by warm baths. I kept losing my balance due to the weakness I felt in my legs. It was as if they had even lost the strength to keep me standing. I knew what this meant.
In case you missed my journey with MS here are the links:
