My Life Collapses

I was a Business Analyst and did Project Management-type work for an Information Technology consulting company. So I worked as a business and technical consultant on client sites building large-scale business systems. I started my career as a technical person (computer systems analyst) but was now doing more of the people and business-side of the projects. The non-technical side of systems design was fairly new to me at the time. I started a new project as a Business Analyst and Team Leader for my first 'offshore' project. That means we had a programming team on our client site that was fresh from India, and we also had another programming team that worked in India on our project. There were a handful of us from North America that were overseeing the business and planning side of the project and managing the technical teams from India.

The company that I worked for was now an Indian owned company. What had happened is that the year before, they bought the two largest and most successful independent consulting companies in Columbus and merged them into their company (CBSI - Complete Business Solutions Inc.). I was an employee of one of the bought companies so was now a CBSI employee.

We quickly learned that there is a HUGE difference between managing an offshore project than there is in managing a North America-only project. The skill and communication levels are totally different, and though very technically sound, the communication and level of 'instruction' required for your technical team was VERY different. It added an entire layer of management 'overhead' that we were not initially expecting.

I won't go into any further details but this project quickly became a 'project from hell' where I literally was working from 8:00a until 8:00p every day and most weekends. Being a salaried employee in the U.S. I was only getting paid for 40 hours a week as well. As one of the Team Leaders, my job became increasingly difficult, time-consuming, and EXTREMELY stressful. I have never failed at anything in my life, so in typical fashion I poured myself into it and did whatever it took to get the job done sufficiently. In the end it was successful, but by no means was the final product my usual 'quality'. I also suffered some 'political' set-backs where I was taking a lot of the blame for one of my team member's 'short-comings'. Being new to this, I didn't play enough 'cover your ass' politics. I didn't realize that I had to. I was just focussed on a team success and getting the job done. But in the process was overstating some of my team's accomplishments, and understating my own. Meaning, I had a team member that I originally wanted removed from my team because of his 'inability' to do his job. But for political reasons (it would look bad on my boss) this was not possible. So, I ended up having to do most of his work for him. (His heart and effort was in it, but he just lacked the 'understanding' to be able to do the required work.) But we still logged it as work that he had completed, even though I was the one showing him how to do it, and in the process ended up doing all of it myself. If I didn't have to try to teach him how to do it, I could have completed it in half the time it took me to explain to him, and in the end I had to fix it for him when he couldn't do it anyway.

Meanwhile my wife's career was also taking a nose-dive. She was also a supervisor for a group of residential care homes (people and adults with higher-functioning 'special needs') that lived independently in assisted living houses. My wife managed/ oversaw the staff of all the different residential care homes, and also was responsible for drawing up the 'life-skills' programs for each individual resident.

Her very capable manager who just gave her RAVE reviews during her annual evaluation was promoted up. The person they got to replace her was someone who was doing the same job as my wife (a supervisor) and now was promoted to overseeing the supervisors. Unfortunately, he was quite incompetent at that job. More and more he was starting to get repremanded for 'shoddy' record keeping, and for shoddy management of the residences. This caused him to lean much more heavily on the supervisors, and caused him to implement policies and procedures that shifted the supervisor's focus away from caring for the residents and more towards 'cover-your-ass' type of politics.

This did not sit well with my wife as she is all about caring for the residents and felt that 'cover your ass' record keeping was not only not part of her job, but also would keep her from doing what she considered her real job. This caused clashed between her and her new boss (which was a former friend/ coworker). This caused her to start being singled out as one of the 'problems' with the organization.

In particular, there was one troubled house that she supervised that ALWAYS had misbalanced books (accounting). Every week, the books didn't balance. That's the job of the staff that my wife supervised to do that, but for this one house it just was never done right. This was one of the many things that my wife's new boss was getting criticized for. He told her that above all else, her number one responsibility was to make sure that those books balanced every week. She essentially refused. She told him, flat out, that her primary responsibility was to look after the care and development of the residents. If she had time left after that (which she rarely did) then she would make sure the staff is balancing their books properly. So, the books never balanced, and she was getting reprimanded EVERY week for the same thing. Not balancing that house's books.

For the past nine years I (along with her older sister) was my wife's number one supporter. I was always the one that she could count on to be on her side. I was always the one who could lend my own strength and energy to her to get her through her troubles. It's the relationship that we had always shared. Given the extreme stress that I was under at work, I didn't have the time, energy, or strength to be able to give any of it away to her. It's the first time in my life that I was under such extreme stress and was in danger of failing in my project. Meanwhile I also had to manage all the bills, and yardwork, and whatever else at home went along with being a new home owner.

For the first time ever, I did not support my wife in her stance at work. I took her boss's side. I told her, that if her boss told her that her number one priority was balancing those books, then her number one priority was balancing those books. It didn't matter what she felt her job was. It was up to her boss to determine what her job was. That is just how business works. (She'd never considered her job a business before, but it is.)

I also didn't support her when she stated that she wanted to quit her job and go to university to get a four year Pharmacy degree. I replied that I would LOVE to quit my job too, but we can't. Six months ago it would have been fine. But we've just bought this house and have expenses now. When we decided to buy the house, we both agreed that we'd have to both work for the next two years to pay down all the initial expenses. Besides, I've already put you through college. When the time comes, it's my turn to go back to school.

None of this sat well with my wife. She did not convey this to me at the time, but she now felt that I was no longer 'on her side' and that I no longer was supportive of her. Now the only person that she could 'trust' was her sister, back in Winnipeg (Manitoba).

There is a few other things that I should explain about my ex-wife. Number one, she had a BRUTAL childhood, which makes her a LOT more insecure than your average person. She also has some hereditary 'chemical inbalances' that she takes medication for. Namely she had Attention Deficit (Hyperactivity) Disorder (ADHD) from her dad's side of the family, and clinical depression from her mother's side of the family. Because this is also the field that her and her (much) older sister are in, they are experts on the subject. Especially when it came to the ADHD. So it usually didn't impact our life together, becuase she knew exactly how to counteract it's affects, and exactly how to explain to me how I can help. EXCEPT, when her job started getting more stressful, she started getting more and more anxious about being able to 'manage' everything. So she went to the doctor and changed her anxiety medication (which was working MARVELOUSLY for years) into a fairly new drug called Paxil. (I have learned to HATE Paxil.)

Even though the affects of the Paxil made her feel more 'secure' and comfortable with herself, it also made her much more 'flakey' and withdrawn and disfunctional. It greatly contibuted to her 'screwing up' more at work as well. It also made her a LOT more paranoid. I didn't realize this at the time though. These are things that I came to realize 'after the fact'.

The other thing that I should explain is my ex-wife's extremely deep relationship with her older sister, who is 16 years older than her and is more like a mother to her than a sister. My ex-wife's mother had clinical depression throughout my ex-wife's childhood, and as a result was always 'high' on prescription pills. Basically she layed around on her couch all day like a zombie. It was my ex-wife's older sister who actually raised my ex-wife. So she really is like a mother to her. Also, when the marriage of her sister failed, my ex-wife moved in with her sister and helped her raise her three ADHD children. So they can a MUCH stronger bond than most sisters do.

Basically, my wife pretty much 'shut down' at home the last six months that we were together. I was never home anyway. I was ALWAYS at work, and ALWAYS under a lot of work-related stress when I was home. My wife was also under a lot of work-related stress as well. That's the primary reason that she changed her medication and was now more 'shut down'.

There was a lot of distance between us the last few moths of our relationship. We were both very focussed on our problems at work, and we were both under a lot of stress. We definitely both weren't at our best, but we weren't argueing or fighting or anything. We just weren't communicating much. Even though we were in the same room together, it's as if she wasn't even there anymore. I felt very alone when I was with her. I was also less 'understanding' of her needs than normal because of my stress, and because I harboured some unrealized resentment towards her shutting down and shutting me out of her life. She had shut everything out of her life really. It was the Paxil that was doing it.

A couple months after she had (mentally) shut me out of her life, I began doing the same to her. I didn't even realize we were doing it. We were just so focussed on our troubles at work. Seeing she would never talk to me at home any more, she was like a 'zombie' just sitting on the couch, doing her needle-point (a hobby), and pretty much 'zoning out'. She would even place things between us on the couch, so we couldn't sit with one another. I started staying out after work some nights. Mostly Monday night, because I was in a corporate golf league that I went to from work every Monday night. But I started hanging out at this bar I used to frequent from time-to-time after the golfing was over, so that I could at least talk to someone and forget about my troubles and stresses at work. Occassionally I would stay out quite late, which would only fuel the paranoia that she was having about me. Only at the time I had no idea she was having such thoughts ab0ut me.

Eventually, I became consciously aware of the fact that we were shutting each other out of our lives. I remember one night trying to address the issue with her. I talked about our troubles at work, and how that was making us behave much less like ourselves and that it was only temporary, and that my project would be over in a couple of more m0nths and then I'll be much more myself again. And much less irritable and more understanding of her needs. I also talked about how I realized that I had been shutting her out the past couple of months, but that I started doing it a couple months after she had started doing it first. I also addressed the issue that I didn't think that her new medication was working very well, and that she seemed so much more 'flakey' and 'out of it' than she normally is. (Throughout our nine years together, this would occassionally occur with her medication, and once we identified that it was happening she would go to her doctor to 'adjust' the medication and she would be her normal self again.)

We talked a little bit about it anyway. She wasn't really prepared to talk about it though. She had said that she knew that our troubles were only temporary, and that she needed time to sort through what was going on in her head. This was not unusual. That's part of her ADHD. Sometimes she has to organize her thoughts before she is able to talk about them. So we left it at that and went to bed. Back to work in the morning.

I later found out (after the marriage was over) that pretty much the only thing that she got from that conversation was me saying "This is all your fault".

....well, you can see where this is going. The marriage did eventually end, before the project did actually. My wife got fired from her job before then too. I will explain more details in a later note. I guess finish this note. But in summary, there were contibuting factors on both of our ends. But in the end it ended when it should have. The first eight years that we spent together were absolutely WONDERFUL. Everything I would think a young successful marriage should be. Even that last year which wasn't by any means good, it wasn't bad either. I mean, our jobs were SUCKING, but there was no bad memories about the marriage itself. To tell the truth, I have no bad memories of my marriage. Very few divorced people can say that. But I do know that we had grown apart that last year, and the marriage would have had more 'issues' if we stuck it out and tried to keep it working.