Next to this woman it was cozy and calm, she immediately attracted something deeply soft, gentle, maternal. Only there was sadness in the voice, some kind of deep sadness. It’s surprising that she still decided to seek help. Maybe because she was older, I immediately got the feeling that I could snuggle up on her shoulder, share my secrets, ask for advice... However, we started a leisurely conversation. Irina, let’s call her that, was married to one man for almost forty years, although the relationship was not always easy. The children grew up and lived their own lives. Everything went on well-trodden rails. Before her retirement, the woman worked in a kindergarten - the kids loved her, her parents doted on her, and her relationship with her boss was good and even. For many years now there has been a small dacha that brought joy in the fall with its harvests, albeit small. The husband was not a bad person - he didn’t drink, didn’t party, didn’t squander money. But according to Irina, she had the feeling that for him she was always “in last place.” Her husband skimped on her in everything, and there wasn’t much understanding between them, they just “got used to it that way.” While I was more busy, somehow there was no time for all this. But the children grew up, the five-day work period ended, and I began to notice that there was not enough joy in life, everything seemed to be fine, but there was sadness in my soul, there was no satisfaction, no happiness. I began to cry, little by little, when my husband couldn’t see. In her youth, when she studied at school, sang, and loved to dance, she was loud, even perky... How did it go unnoticed, where? She got married for love, her husband courted her, wooed her. In their intimate life, they were not very suitable for each other, but she had no idea that it could be otherwise - it was not customary to give girls any knowledge in this area, so they lived as they lived. She was silent, sometimes she endured, sometimes she pitied him. I thought it was normal - she’s a wife. When did this start? When did she begin to notice this thriftiness of his towards her? Perhaps when the first child was born. Due to cramped living conditions, they decided that she and the newborn would live with her mother for some time, and he would come every day, help, and sometimes stay. I remembered how I saw him off once and went out into the street with the child in my arms. He was taking something out of the trunk of the car and she saw the groceries he had bought for himself. They were much better and more expensive than those that he laid out and left for them with the child. I should have asked here, but she remained silent again... Before the birth of her first child, my husband sometimes gave me something - earrings, a dress. She herself didn’t ask for anything; it was somehow awkward. But after that, he completely stopped buying her anything, even her mother bought clothes several times - she could no longer see what her daughter was wearing. But he didn’t say a word, so put them on and okay. It wasn’t all pleasant, but she didn’t feel offended. We tried to return to the past, to that state, and Irina felt that it was more of an annoyance. And not at him, but at yourself. And indeed, it was not he who initially devalued it. She herself endured, was silent, allowed, gave in out of pity, out of some incomprehensible false sense of duty, because of an abnormal idea of ​​\u200b\u200bwhat it means to be a wife. There was no knowledge of how it could be otherwise, normal. And besides this, there was something else... They began to find out how her mother behaved with her father. No, my mother was a lively, determined woman. Everything in the house was as she wanted. The father was not bad, but one from whom the daughter could receive neither protection, nor refuge, nor support. Irina was not exactly a Cinderella in her parents’ house, but she didn’t look like her mother either. They forced her to babysit her younger brothers, forced her to do the cleaning, and scolded her for getting bad grades. And for my mother, the brothers always came first, and she came second. Irina remembered that she often heard from her mother: “be patient,” “there’s nothing, it’s only imagining it to you,” “just think, what nonsense, everything will go away on its own” ... “They didn’t particularly offend me” - “it was Soviet times, that’s how everything was then lived." There were quite a lot of good things, there were also warm, sincere childhood memories. But here...