The move in

Of course after dating for a year long distance, we decided it was time to move in together.  We started looking for a place in his home town.  We found one right away and it was very very new and clean and open.  It was small, we couldn't get all of our things in the place and there wasn't a yard for the kids, but we were just a couple blocks from a park.

Bring on the stress!  Moving in together, kids, bills, food, relationships.  I didn't have a job to help out with the bills, and having a 3 year old and a 6 year old, strugling to find a babysitter and all those good things that stress families out.  I soon found a job after about 2 weeks, as a cashier at a supermarket.  It didn't have fulltime hours, but close and the pay was decent.  That helped a lot.  James was in just about full-time job, like me.  But he was also attending night classes at the local college.  he was on his way to getting his high school diploma and eventually an arcitec.

After just a few month of life, James wasn't able to continue with his schooling, it was too hard with the stresses of life.  I was obviouly not understanding the social phobia and was not as consoling or understanding as he needed me to be.  With two kids and a house to run, it was hard for me to stop everything, ingore everything, and go be with him.  At the time, I was very persistant that he just had to push through it, that if he wanted to he would do what ever he wanted.  Living together put a strain on us right away.  We started to drift apart also, we argued often, out sex life just about stopped.  Cutting out school helped with the stress, but it didn't fix the rest of out life together.  It was very hard for us, me not understanding and him struggling.

I deal by talking and figuring things out, which as I now know, doesn't always work for a social phobic person.  James told me it was hard to talk and he didn't like to do it, but, I didn't relate that to the social phobia.  I thought, he's a guy and doesn't deal with feelings.  So I pushed harded, and, if anyone knows anything about social phobia, that doens't normally work.  And it didn't.  James took off one night without talking to anyone and drove accross town without his glasses to his parents place.  I started to realize that there was something wrong and that we had to deal with it together.  I still didn't understand the extent or the reasons behind it though.  But thought agian, he would push through it and we would get better, if we wanted to enough.

I switched jobs that would allow me to be home more with my kids and for the house and to be home every night with James.  It was a dollar more an hour, but almost half the hours.  Now we did save money on the babysitters and some eating out and  we managed ok.  James still couldn't look at going back to school and so we focused on working at our jobs.  We didn't really fix anything, we just made due and went on.

We decided after 6 months of the small place to start looking for something bigger and better, more space and a place for the kids to play will make things easier right?

Not so much.