So here is something I would like to share. I am Emma Strong, a woman who started dating my husband five years ago, then decided to marry and have a child.
The lockdown has been very strange for us, it has allowed me and my husband to live together and work together. With this it has opened up some serious compatibility issues.
Let me dial back a little, before meeting my husband I was an international athlete, won medals for my country. Decided to quit sports and study sports medicine. When I met him I had just defended by PhD thesis, and had a manuscript accepted in Nature. We met on common campaign trip and one thing led to another. It was all going great. My first real job, after my PhD was a Post Doc position, and that didn’t go well for me. I struggled with emotions throughout and found lack of respect from peers. The regular and unfortunate, situation faced by women in academia. But the story is not about that.
Come 2020 and the lockdown I lost my job, my position was made redundant. But I got another one in 3 months, that paid a six figure salary. A huge promotion and equally huge grant to build my research lab and a team. Here in my hometown, this was my dream all along and it was happening in front of me. We were all celebrating the achievements and he recognised the importance of such big promotion. I thought I had it all, but I didn’t. A month before I started, I was moving my research space around for my partner’s party and my world came crashing down as I lost 10 years of my work. I sat there crying, while he made fun on me, and he bursted in hysterical laughter. Which put me down the rabbit hole. I got mad and angry and enraged. With every angry outburst, he recorded me and shared my reactions on social media. All this was witnessed by my mother, who was on the phone. So we know how he drove me downhill.
Fast forward 2 months. When I started teaching my students, he started overhearing our conversations and would often tell me “my teaching methods were wrong”, “ I shouldn’t do this or teach this”. This happened a lot, as often daily, he would eves drop on my phone calls! One day the overlooked my coursework and said “what your teaching is inaccurate, your University should penalise you for this”. I shared research links to prove my point, including paragraph of the textbook I referred too, and that I was correct. But he is not someone who has a PhD or researcher my field, or a professor. So does he have the rights to comment and insult my methods? This humiliation went on and on, each day I recorded my lectures I had to re-edit them and it took hours. My research struggled because of this. When I had my team meetings with my students I had to tell them that there are disturbances around. Fast forward 6 months to present day, I won accolades for my teaching methodology with excellent reviews from reviewers and students. So the moral was that, I wasn’t wrong but someone has started showing signs of extreme controlling behaviour.
We finished that part of my life’ and currently we are on summer break. I recently joined my squash friends and loved to be back on the court. Soon I realised hey, maybe I can start this again. Other night, I was talking about ball types with someone, and there was that noise again, “you think you are the best, don’t you?”. Where is this coming from? I don’t know. It feels like I cannot have a conversation in my own house. And the worst is when his family tells him, hey look she is a monster remember last year!
I don’t know the future but for our relationship it looks grim. I see how he insulting me is now rubbing onto my child. My child who is now 3, started revolting! I feel I want to move on but I cannot. I don’t think I have freedom or often I feel caged, because my husband insults me almost everyday. If he talking about some controversy and I say, “you need to look into it by understanding research articles”, I come across as argumentative and aggressive. But am I? I have earned my qualifications and gained my sport experience. I know he or his family cannot take that away from me. But I don’t understand is why they even want to bother me!
I felt women could have it all: “a good job, a good career and a family”, but I am not sure if that’s true. Tell me there is hope!
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