The Old Me Is Dead

… not buried.

I’ve been the walking dead. A zombie of sorts navigating days in a haze of shock and grief. Blindsided by the one person who vowed to always have my back, my best interests at heart. Promised to love and cherish.

Heartbroken. Shell shocked. The earth torn from beneath my feet in one terrible moment of confession.

My life lived in an illusion of his construction. I robbed of any say. No vote in how I wished to live. No license over my own body or heart. No choice rendered. No consent. No consent.

Three years ago, I learned my life was not what I thought. 

Yes. 

Over half my life I’d been living in an illusion of his construction. 

illusion  [ih-loo-zhuhn. noun. something that deceives by producing a false or misleading impression of reality. The state or condition of being deceived; misapprehension.

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The person I thought was my partner in life, kept a huge secret. 

Society calls it infidelity.

Or perhaps you prefer the fancy, carefree term– ‘affair’.  

Massive betrayal. Sharing secrets and stolen hours. Taking the intimacy that belonged to me, belonged to what I thought was ‘us’, and spending it on an empty shell of a woman who agreed to the deception in spite of knowing me and my children. She pretended she cared about me. But like all who fall off the personal integrity wagon, she cared only for herself–her need for validation–and damn the consequences to anyone else. The epitome of selfishness. 100% self centered. The devils playground. Evil personified.

It matters not that a third of the years of illusion were sexual and the rest ‘only’ emotional connection with all the ugly innuendos and back burner ploys they employed to keep each other on the hook.

He was hooked. And he didn’t even know it. Didn’t recognize the monumental destruction that occurred every hour of every day the dirty little secret was kept. Destruction of self respect, of respect for family, commitment and love. Destruction of intimacy. No ‘in-to-me-see’ exists in a sea of secrets.

Before you get the notion that there was any seduction on her part, let me clue you that it was all him. He cast the die. The decision made to pursue her as ‘cake and eat it too’ addition to his life, made and executed by him; validation for the bottomless pit off need of a fragile childhood, a damaged ego. And she said yes.

Yeah, he is broken. 

Just like all of us.

Thing is

“No amount of trauma in your childhood excuses you from personal responsibility in adulthood.-Kathy Kinghorn LCSW

There are NO excuses.

None.

I died on February 29, 2016

I died to the illusion of a loving committed partner. The open, loving and intimate woman who shared all her joys and struggles, died. The woman who so passionately wrote love stories, who cried at romantic films, who was swept away on the tide of beautiful love songs—died. The woman who trusted—died.

My experience of never ending love, so true in the lives of my parents, my grandparents and in the depths of my heart, shattered on the rocks of his self centered choices. Choices made over and over again, once the web of deceit was cast, and the elixir of limerence drunk. His choice to tell me, not made out of care or hope of relational survival and healing, but out of vindictive retribution for resentments built over the years in a mind full of story telling. History rewritten to favor the deceiver. Justifications. Minimizations of hurt rendered. Exaggerations of need. Self deception. Self, self, self.

Lord knows I never expected, nor received a relational rose garden. Years of struggle, years of toil, years of ups and downs, of raising children, of the isolation of being on the stay at home side of a military career. Sacrifices made gladly in love. All taken in stride.  Love, by choice. Love, the commitment. Love toward a better and brighter future for us and our kids.

“I never stopped loving you,” he said.

Really?

I’m told by others to believe that. Told that an unfaithful man often maintains love for his committed partner, his wife. That he compartmentalizes his ‘real’ life from the fantasy fulfilled in the arms of a lover. Hard to impossible to wrap one’s mind around when the choice to be in that lover’s arms is in fact stealing from his store of time, thinking, emotional ‘disc space’ and relational presence. Hard to consider this new definition of ‘love’. A love that feeds his needs and ego at the expense of truth and the exclusivity promised before God.

Hurt?  …… Unless you have experienced this level of deception and betrayal, you can not fathom. Science says emotional and physical pain are centered in the same area of the brain. Betrayal will define what it means to be in that gut searing pain. Deep soul wrenching physical pain. Minute after excruciating minute for days, weeks and months on end, before the balm of time begins to soften the razor sharp edges of betrayal. Tsunamis of triggers leveling the assaulted, night and day. Movies of the covert lovers having sex, in full technicolor across the screen of the mind. Soft love songs on the radio leaving torrents of hot tears streaming down the betrayed’s cheeks. A heart tied in such a tight knot as to cause physical illness. Physical pain. Shaking, sweating, nausea, insomnia—affliction, torment.

The dream is gone. Anniversaries a lie, a bad joke played on the faithful. Exclusivity eroded by the acid of betrayal. Triggers everywhere –every film, television show, song that glamorizes infidelity, more torture to the soul-weary betrayed.

This is the “Red Asphalt” of modern times. The blood and guts of  the unilaterally

committed stain the blacktop beneath the shattered relationship; ugly excrement the harvest of the ‘fun and frivolity’ of an affair.

But there is hope, we so distressed are told.

Be patient.

Extend grace.

Strive toward forgiveness. Forgiveness will set you free.

And watch.

Observe if he works toward change, toward being a new man of integrity.

And wait.

Working toward my own resurrection. With or without him.

In the valley of in between.