The Fearful Part

There is an exercise in the book “No Bad Parts” by Richard Schwartz that asks the reader to close their eyes and imagine walking down a welcoming path, no matter where that path might be. The caveat is to try to leave all your hurt “Exile” parts at the trailhead, reassuring them that you will be back soon and that they are safe to hang out.

The author spends some time explaining that your inner hurt ‘exiles’ may not be ready to be left alone and that it is okay for you (your ‘self’ /real adult) to stay with that hurt child/children to either to get to know them better and/or to reassure them that you, the adult self, are there to protect and care for them. That you, your adult self, is capable of handling whatever situation might arise.

There is an exercise in the book, “No Bad Parts” by Richard Schwartz, that asks the reader to close their eyes and imagine walking down a welcoming path, no matter where that path might be. A path of your choice. The caveat is to try to leave all the parts of you that are hurt “Exile” parts at the trailhead, reassuring them that you will be back soon and that they are safe to hang out.

All that to say that my response to this exercise was surprising to me. Maybe it is because I have done so many years of Alanon-type work in allowing myself to care for all the hurt parts of me and to ‘detach’ from the person or people that are causing me pain in the present. It is the biggest feat in finding serenity, no matter what the addict or other(s) are doing or causing. To know you ‘got this’, and will be all right regardless of the outcome of the behavior of other(s).

My response was to skip down that path feeling freed from all the pain and restraints of those hurt parts. It’s like the part(s) had evolved enough to allow me to go forward without them, at least for a time. It was freeing to feel light and carefree and stable. I felt truly able to care for myself on that path, even though it was a (real) path I have hiked, one with many bumpy areas, drops and crevices. That path is at the seashore and leads to a wonderful wild beach where few visit.

I felt excited to bound along it. I felt that my hurt parts were finally able to let me enjoy my life and explore without having to cling to me. They felt like my cheerleaders instead of my burdens. They were actually happy for me.

It was marvelous.

This is not to say that I do not have a hurt part of me still rear her little head at times. I was conveying an incident from my young childhood..maybe three or four–in which I decided to try to help my mom and bring in the milk bottle from the porch (back in the days when the milkman delivered). I felt so grown up and helpful. Well, in my excitement, I failed to notice the screen door did not clear the milk bottle. You guessed it, the bottle broke.

My mother was so angry at what she saw as my carelessness, that she sent me to my room and made me get coins out of my piggy bank to pay her for the spilt milk. Who knows how bad of a day she was having, but this crushed me. It implanted in me the tendency, to this day, take on responsibility for errors, or even perceived possible errors, as my fault. It brings up that mortified little girl. My goodness, I just want to hug her.

Because of the opportunity of this exposure to ‘parts’, I have been able to see that little mortified helper child and realize that she still lives within me. I can truly tame her fear and guilt when I recognize her.

I used an example of present day. I run an air bnb out of our home. Occasionally a guest will either rate us lower than top ‘5 stars’ or will complain about something like the room temperature or not enough of the kind of tea bags they prefer available. My first impulse is to feel fear and to feel wrong/ careless. I feel that I should have known to realize whatever their complaint is about before they had to voice it. That I am that little girl who, even with the best of intentions, was seen by her mother as naughty and thoughtless.

Oh my goodness, what a revelation. What a gift to be enabled to pause and hold that little girl part in high esteem as valuable and good, so that I can move forward in my grown up self to deal with the issue at hand with vastly reduced fear/guilt reaction. I can now allow present reality to sink in, freeing me to behave in a more realistic evaluation of the situation and put it into perspective. I am a well meaning, valuable person who would never intentionally harm another. I am enough.

Trauma In Being Female

Powerful and gritty truth. Amazing more women do not become betrayers, violent, users etc…

My jaw drops at how many of these admonitions I have heard personally in my time on earth. We often fail our boys with our cultural expectations. So too do we fail our girls.

Well worth the read..and reread….

Be A Lady They Said

The Betrayed: Widows Without Life Insurance

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The bottom dropped out of my marriage on February 29, 2016. It had already been severely rocked by financial betrayal and the emotional abuse/isolation of living with a man who had a secret life and multiple addictions. The revelation I had been cheated on since 1989 informed me of my widowhood. In reality I had been living in a one sided marriage for those twenty seven years. To find out brought the darkness of death to the man I thought I knew. In an instant, my husband died.

I was plunged into a grief I have never imagined. Real life demanded I hide behind a mask of isolating secrecy and the shame that brought. I was weighted with an unrepentant partner who had betrayed me in hundreds of ways for years, sexually, emotionally, physically and financially. I felt violated, dirty. No choice whether to expose my children to this ugliness. He dropped the d-day bomb on me in front of them. I was cast into silent agony.

Grief stricken, broken and burdened, I struggled to breathe at the loss of everything I thought my life would be.

The husband I believed I knew was dead. I was a widow.

I stared out at an unrecognizable world with hollow eyes, uncomfortable, fearful, confused and frozen in heartbreak. Nothing made sense. Nothing was clear. Tears forced their way out from behind my lashes, blinding me, yet demanding I speak my truth. I yearned for it to all make sense, for it all to be a lie, for it to stop hurting.

My body coursed with adrenaline right down to my fingers. I hid to keep others from seeing them shake; struggled to keep the tone of my voice calm even as cracks broke through. I was desperate for affirmation where none was to be found. I risked reaching out to my new co-worker, hoping she might help stop my merciless pain.

“Thank you,” I said. Words impotent to convey the gratitude I felt for this woman who validated my grief.

“I’m glad you are here,” she offered in authenticity.

As my story unfolded in fits and spurts over the weeks, I hesitantly spoke the words ‘affair’, ‘lost retirement funds’, and paused to see her response. Would she flinch? Roll her eyes? I added, “grooming another woman” and waited to see if she’d recoil in disgust. No, in fact, she offered encouragement, even in her gentle silence.

“That sounds devastating”, she said.

I felt heard. No criticism, advise, judgement or deflection. Just her empathic ear welcoming me into what would become my only safe place.

Days turned into weeks turned into months. I looked to move on with one therapist, then two. Nice women, but not trained in betrayal trauma nor experience with its devastation. I will never know if the one local friend I had turned away from me because she too had experienced infidelity or whether she feared being tainted by the lurid nature of my now life story. Did she flee under the guise of her life challenges or simply avoidance of the discomfort of my story? No matter the truth, I now feel she is repulsed by my story.

I was alone. Unlike the kind of widow recognized by the general public as they understand the term, I have no compassionate support system. My husband has not left me with a supportive life insurance policy and the promise of financial stability. My new reality promised quite the opposite.

As the months passed, the sum of fears grew. I worried about my own health. It was so hard to eat, sleep, exercise or do most things approaching ‘healthy’. I worked daily with what felt like a fifty pound weight strapped to my body. Immense, invisible, it was tightly bound. No one saw the veiled burden I carried. My heart physically hurt. Palpitations now common.

It is exhausting to smile at clients, at people in the store. I wondered what they might be thinking of this shell of my former self so obvious to me.

Church used to be my safe place. Attendance now brought nothing but unwelcome tears and silence from my higher power. No peace. No comfort. I felt like an outsider.

Ever so slowly over the months, nay, years, a glimmer of who I am began to return as a flicker in my eyes reflected in the mirror. A slight uplift at the corner of my mouth as occasional smiles of real joy filtered across my face. I was, I am beginning to wrap my arms around the strong woman I have always been, now stronger through the gauntlet of betrayals.

I knew this fight consisting of support group meetings, deep reading, writing, research would determine my life, my future, my very being. I still see the dark shadows under my eyes representing the grief and exhaustion.

“When will this be over?” I ask myself, I ask Google, I ask the universe.

“I don’t know,” the reply.

“Will I be strong enough?”

I have grown to believe, emphatically, YES!

I am another widow of betrayal. My kind of widowhood is unique to the normal definition. Sadly all too common in reality.

We don’t receive benefits from a life insurance policy. No unconstrained hugs of empathy from our community. No casseroles brought to our door.

But I am amazing. We widows of this kind are amazing. I am tenacious, resilient, courageous, reliable, brave and so much more.

“Strength is not having the strength to go on; it’s going on when you don’t have the strength.” This, a precursor quote attributed to Teddy Roosevelt… and the beloved “Man in the Arena”

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

We widows epitomize the woman in the arena. We are “going on.”

If you know one of us—the invisible widows, offer a loving ear—and a casserole.

Who Are Your Back Seat Drivers?

Most of us who have experienced betrayal have, at least for a season, anger as our front seat driver.

So who is riding in the back seat, fueling our angry driver?

Fear? Frustration? Betrayal, Sadness? Loneliness?

Who are your backseat drivers?

Once I uncovered loneliness and injustice as two of my backseat driver emotions, I discovered that loneliness/unjust judgements were part of my childhood– when I struggled to be the ‘good child’ as my parents were trying their best to handle a difficult son, my only sibling.

More damaging than that was my mother’s very human tendency to worry about me. Would I go down the same path as my er-do-well brother? Would I stay out late? Smoke pot? Lie and sneak?

Of course I knew that was not part of my character. Hey—I was the ‘good child’. I earned good grades, flew under the radar of the drug culture of my high school. I was not interested. I found those sort of choices scary, repugnant. I wanted to live a life of no regrets.

Why didn’t my mother know that?

Perhaps, in her heart of hearts, she did. I remember one evening she came after me, already upset, and accused me of planning to do the things my brother did. I went ballistic. So out of character. I NEVER went ballistic. (Good children are seen not heard) I railed, “How could you possibly think that of me?”

I was shattered. How could my mother, the woman who ostensibly knew me best, accuse me of these things I had not only never done, but would never consider? Why didn’t she give me the benefit of the doubt? No…more than that—why didn’t she praise me for all the hard work I actually did—all the ‘right’ choices, all the giving, loving behaviors?

Looking back, I realize she was under tremendous emotional stress with the challenges of parenting my brother. Special classes, principal office and counselor visits, rebelliousness, suspensions. He was in fact all that.

I was not.

My mother was having a melt down that had NOTHING to do with me. Just as my husband’s choices to betray had nothing to do with me. Both of these human choices, the foibles that led to my personal pain and destruction, were about their woundedness.

That incident of my emotional explosion highlights my character defect or sensitivity to unjust criticism. I have a lifelong trigger, if you will, to being accused of intentions I do not have. In my mind, I work too damn hard at being a good responsible person, to be cast in such a negative light. Such aspersions cut me to the core. They break my heart.

And so the revelation of my husband’s years of infidelity–sexual, emotional and financial, quite understandable and naturally sunk a dagger into my invested, responsible, loving, giving, hard working heart. His casting blame on me for not being enough for him–“What did you expect? You didn’t have enough sex with me?” –ripped the thin scab off the wound of ‘not good enoughness’ present from MY family of origin. All the criticism poured over me by a mother who felt that was the road toward molding a good citizen (me), was in a instant, proven ‘right’.

At least that is how it felt.

How could a man who had benefitted from all my care, my support, my huge investment in home, children and him, choose to abandon our marriage? I knew I was more than enough. I knew I was an excellent housekeeper, employee, mother and wife.

Volcanic rage, held in check– to be told I was not.

This rage did not come out immediately. Oh no. Good, responsible Christine had to see to the hearts of her adult children who had just been devastated with the news. (Yes–their father told me of his long term affair in front of them) It took me many weeks of torrential tears, sleeplessness, agony and sadness to get to the underlying rage.

I journaled that rage. Pages and pages. I filled notebooks. In moments of isolation at home, I would verbally rage at the imaginary him. I spent months and months venting this powerful, very human reaction to being betrayed. Oh the injustice of it all!

…Until the energy of that injustice lessened.

The sadness is still there. The pain resurfaces sometimes when I am tired, hungry, lonely. The difference is that now I have allowed myself the time to grieve. Yes grief. The anger of the injustice of being ‘judged and (my character) executed through betrayal has been vented. Revisiting that anger is less and less powerful.

e- motion= energy in motion. It has taken enormous energy to vent.

As an adult, I can find healthy ways of coping with, mitigating and healing my sad loneliness….and my anger. These methods may include, but are not limited to: therapy, support groups, 12 step, safe friends, going to church, prayer, meditation, exercise, gardening, and other fun hobbies such as painting, writing, reading.

This helps me to relieve my loneliness as I heal, mostly alone, and thus disarm it from influencing and ‘driving’ my anger.

These four and a half years have been the hardest, most painful of my life. They have also provided opportunity toward the most personal growth. I have been put in my own driver’s seat toward healing. And I knew I didn’t want that seat to be forever occupied by a raging, bitter woman. I needed to really believe exactly who and what I am, despite other’s beliefs and actions.

This life experience has reinforced the truth. I am a good, invested, giving and loving person who has been misjudged, accused, tried, found guilty and treated as someone guilty of –something I am not—by a person wounded by his own life circumstances projected oh so painfully onto me.

His inability to see my love in no way diminishes the reality of all the years of caring, giving, support—LOVE that I gave. Hey—I AM that loving person who would no more harm, ignore or abandon my family than I would fly to the moon using my arms. I gave all I had to give. I lived my life as a loving person.

That is reality.

And the broken accusations and behavior of another–even if that ‘other’ is my mother… or my husband, can make other’s beliefs and pursuant behaviors just–or based in truth.

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Good Guy, Bad Guy – Which Is It?

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So which is it?

A man who would betray his wife is the ‘bad guy’, right?

“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?”
Scrooge trembled more and more.
“Or would you know,” pursued the Ghost, “the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it since. It is a ponderous chain!”

A guy who works hard at a lucrative career affording his family the niceties of life and a great vacation each year—goes to church on Sunday and votes in every election. Good guy—right?

You may have just been caught up in the same sort of black and white shallow judgementalism that pervades most addicts thinking. And the thought patterns that lead to destructive choices, such as betrayal.

No one is born ‘bad’, as most of culture defines it. We are molded through our upbringing mostly by people who have likewise been molded–to have strengths and weaknesses, good and bad qualities. And you know what? Most of this modeling has no nefarious intent. It is the result of the unexamined life. The failure of generation after generation to do the difficult work of realization, responsibility and change.

It takes courage and fortitude to break old patterns that are ingrained from childhood. Old, rusty, ponderous chains. Often these patterns were survival mechanisms that allowed us to adapt to scary or difficult situations when we were powerless youngsters. Coping mechanisms that did the job as kids, but when carried on into adulthood reek havoc with selfhood and relationships.

A little boy who is sent to military school run by nuns, ostensibly to gain a foothold on the path to college by parents who struggled to pay for this schooling, but could not see their way to making any other choice when overwhelmed by multiple siblings, one of whom was deaf, and an alcoholic dad. Bad people? Hey, they sent their seven year old to boarding school where his tender heart was terrified by a system meant to mold young boys into men. There he learned to hide and lie and cheat to survive. Fly under the radar. Don’t get caught or reprimanded. Bad kid?

No matter the good intent of the parents. No matter the innocent child turned to manipulative survival skills. No matter. The intent to pass on destructive life coping skills was not there, yet it happened…worked like a charm.

“The best laid plans of mice and men.”

Where was the introspection of the parents when they made those decisions, convincing themselves that discipline and structure would be to their eldest son’s advantage? Where? When Dr Spock was touting ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’– and ‘let them cry it out’? Where was the language of the heart that could have looked into the innocent eyes of the eldest of four and seen a young boy who needed his family so much more than a structured college bound education in isolation? How else could that tender heart have taken it, but to feel rejected and punished. A human doing, not a human being any longer. Straighten up and fly right, boy.

We are not born to lie and cheat, steal and break vows. We are carefully taught –mostly by people who are justifying their choices by convincing themselves they are doing what’s best. Until and unless they figure otherwise, the legacy goes on. From grandfather to father to son the story continues. Until and unless someone can look deeply into self and reality to say ‘no more’.

How do you break the cycle of learned self-deception?

Why? via the opposite. Truth. Vulnerability. Hard conversations. Courage like one has never before had to muster.

Breaking the code of silence.

Breaking the chains of addiction’s mandate. Secrets and silence.

Breaking away from passive, looking the other way existence.

Unabashedly sharing one’s heart and the pain overflowing from all the mistaken choices made and enforced in one’s own childhood. Grieving innocence lost. All those years missed in the loving bosom of an imperfect, but caring family. The message internalized: ‘I am not worth loving.’

And so the same story, different scenery and timeframe, but the same broken story is repeated again and again.

Until someone says

“No more.”

The destruction stops with me.

Tears in My Ears

How many nights?

Meditate … ask God to direct my thinking.

Some times success–a calm gift, a way to help myself or another.

Some times no chance, no choice

In floods the sadness

Like an unwanted storm

A guest uninvited, unwelcome

And before I know it the tears pool

In my ears

Like so many souls before me

Betrayed

Hearbroken

Forever changed

Never to be the same

Dreams shattered

Unchangeable history

Happy memories forever tainted

By a new and ugly truth

God help me

Take this heavy burden

For it will surely smother me

Smother me

Tears in my ears

When ‘Good’ Things Go Bad

My UH has been trying to take on more actions toward getting things accomplished. I have requested, for years, that he maintain his own list or method ‘tool’, as he would do at work, to facilitate his participation in the household responsibilities. He is ADD, but manages to use tools of accommodation for it at work. Why not at home?

BIG issue over the years.

He – under invested. Me- over invested.

Anyways– day before yesterday he arrived home (when he said he would by text– a good thing) wearing a Santa suit. He’s been talking about getting one for three years and in fact it has been on the list. So a ‘good’ thing, right? Not for my lizard brain PTSD nervous system. To take an action, even a ‘good’ one, then use a white lie “I’m swimming” he texted, to cover up that he was Santa suit shopping so he could ‘surprise’ me–not good for a PTSD nervous system. Not good to tell even a white lie when you have been lying for years and keeping secrets. Not good.

Yesterday he walks by me while I am painting and says “I’m taking in the Vespa”. WHAT? Although we have talked about getting the Vespa up and running again for four or five years, he did not run it past me that he wanted to do it now. He loves the Vespa, even though it is ‘mine’–given to me by him in 2007. (He rides it way more than I do–yeah, that kind of gift) We had agreed to put it off until we had expendable income. He got a refund of old pay a couple months ago–so he figures he can do this. All true. Good thing.

What is NOT good is when he goes ahead and acts without keeping me on the page. What is not good is when he ‘works’ on list things that are fun for him, but not on the list things that are less fun. You know, those responsibility things. Balance is all I ask.

So I sent him an email 4:25a.m because I did not want to wake him (even though I am triggered by my lizard brain and not feeling safe) and I wanted to organize my thoughts to present calmly and graciously. In the email I applauded his list efforts and explained how untenable any ‘surprises’ are for me and my PTSD lizard brain. Especially ones that leave me in the dark about actions (kind of part of the definition of a surprise/secret) I’ve told him not to surprise me any more. My nervous system gets triggered.

We’ll see how he reacts. Will he ‘get it’ and apologize/empathize or will he get angry/defensive/make it about him with some version of “I can’t ever do anything right” (shame- see photo of man in box looking like a caught bad little boy, above) All I can do is make a request. I am not responsible for how he reacts. I can only be gracious, reasonable, kind—and request.

Not “Just Friends”

After years I recovery, I am finally reading the classic Affair recovery book by Shirley Glass, Not Just Friends. I think it was Mong one of the library books I checked out months ago, but it got put aside amongst the avalanche of other materials I was trying to pour over.

It is still triggering to read, even though it has been focusing on the sort of affairs that come about through casual contact t the office or in the neighborhood that grows. That was NOT the case with my UH. He intentionally pursued his AP–not doubts or other intentions.

Shirley Glass says that such ‘for sex only’ affair are nearly always a result of entitlement and/or sex addiction. Not surprisingly, my UH has both.

It is difficult for me to ascertain which is more painful—the unintentional slide of morals caused by close proximity and attraction, or the intention pursuit. Of course it feels like my UH’s intentions being fully focused on satisfying his desires from the get go, feels much more harmful than had he stumbled into it. Other betrayed wives may disagree. They may feel that sex addiction somehow answers why the UH did what he did. That he couldn’t help himself. To the I say ‘poppycock’. It might be a reason but not an excuse any more than unintentional beginnings excuse the poor choices.

I toyed with another stumbling block today that has been there from the beginning. How do Sex Addict’s wives ever manage the feeling of being no more than an object to their UH? How do they get past the non consensual aspect of being deceived into having sex with their spouse? (Spouse knowing their wife would not have sex with them had she known they were sleeping with someone else? How do you shed the feeling of being so used. That sick in the pit of the stomach icky abused feeling?

I had a near rape experience in college that comes nowhere close to eliciting the deep feeling of revulsion I feel over having sex with my UH during the same time he was sleeping with her. It makes my skin crawl and my heart sick. Not all the time, like an obsession that rules my life, but certainly any time the thought of marital sex goes through my mind. I can’t imagine feeling attracted or wanting sex with my abuser.

Perhaps it is because he has done little to no repair work with me. I try to imagine what it would be like if he were apologetic, empathetic, remorseful etc. I still feel revulsion and deep violation. It is a quandry. One that he seems complacent in addressing. That said, he is a prostrate cancer survivor that would have to go through hoops to regain sexual function, if that would work is unknown. SO it may well be a moot point anyways.

It grieves me the our lives have taken this turn. That I will most probably never know what it is like to be sexually loved again. It is sad. Sad how that part of my life has ended.

It is beyond my ability to heal. I turn it over to my Higher Power.

My Heart – Break

When I met my future husband, my heart was all in. He was naive, sweet and smitten with me. He said he adored my never ending giving nature. He said I loved others like no one he’d ever known.

And so I believe he ‘got me’ right. He understood my heart, my life.

It has always been in my nature to give my all to those in my life. As a child that was my parents. I worked to please them if that meant only to see the corner of their mouth lift as they watched something I did. Neither of them were demonstrative or appreciative. They asked for much and gave much. Much like their daughter.

I’ve always had difficulty understanding how others can give half heartedly. It still baffles me. In every cell of my being I want to give. I want to please. But more, much more than that, I want to support those I love to reach for their dreams.

And so I unwittingly supported my UH to carry out his years long affair. It simply never occurred to me that a human heart could be so duplicitous. Not one whom I had chosen to love. I gave my everything to him. Everything that I was and am went into each day, each action, each thought and plan. I always considered how what I did would effect the family. How could I make their way smoother? How could I add some sparkle to the everyday? What could I do to make their existence special?

Whether grocery shopping, looking for a job or cleaning the bathroom, my goal was always the same. To love them well. To be their rock in hard times and their reliable life embellisher. Every interesting TV segment or article on how to make life healthier, more pleasant or enjoyable perked my ears, my attention. Every shelf at the store was a potential treasure trove because it might hold something that would please or uphold them– my beloved family.

This nature of mine has never been sacrificial in feeling. It is my very lifeblood. It is what gives me joy and purpose each day. My payment is living in the presence of whatever joy my efforts might bring to the family. If my work was not for present fulfillment of needs it was looking to the future to do things together that would brings us new experiences. I remember thinking and praying that I might have some means of making my kids lives into adulthood somewhat easier than mine had been. I didn’t want them to have to struggle and count pennies the way I did. I wanted them to be able to throw their heart into something they loved without the ever present weight of making ends meet. I prayed for a way to help them keep a roof over their head without the bulk of their time spent doing it.

I also dreamed of taking them to Europe so they might get a feeling for the place and the people from which their ancestor’s had come. I knew how much a year abroad had bolstered my life and opened my eyes. I wanted them to have this backbone experience too. It is why I took on my full time teaching. To afford to take us all and to have the vacation time to do it. I waited until they were in full time school so I wouldn’t miss out on time with them too much. While I found some solace in achieving recognition as a great teacher, it was not my heart. My heart was at home. My heart was in every healthy meal I prepared. Every art project that decorated the kid’s rooms, every suit of clothes for my husband to wear to work found at discount but looking like a million bucks, every swipe of the sponge, scrub of the tile, mow of the lawn, weed of the weed, wash of the car. It was all for them. For the beloved US.

And because it was for them, it fed my heart too. It gave me purpose and life.

To have the husband I’d sworn to die in his arms tear out my heart by betraying me is more than I can convey in words. To give my everything to him and my kids to have him turn his back on what was exclusive and precious between us. To lie to my face day in and out. To bring another woman into our family–her presence there for twenty seven years, she always an option to share intimate knowledge and body with, all while allowing me to believe that I was his one and only, his precious wife. I truly thought I was his special one. That he only had eyes and heart for me. Surely giving my everything to him would be appreciated and used for his good, his achievements and dream weaving.

How could this man who swore he loved me abuse my everything? Abuse my giving, my heart, my time, my gifts? How could he seduce another woman? How could he touch her in loving caresses? How could he pour his body into hers when he told me he loved me? I will never understand it. How could this happen? How could he not only allow it to happen but be the instigator of it happening over and over and over again. How could he blame me? How could this nightmare be my reality?

My lifeblood is to give. My heart is to do for and pave a special pathway for my family. My heart and lifeblood was taken for granted and used to betray me. I acted in love and faith that my presence and my efforts would be used for the good–for the benefit of my husband and my family. To make their lives richer.

And I suppose in a perverted way my UH did enrich his life by experiencing another woman’s praise and body. By revelling in the excitement of forbidden love, he enriched his time–all at my expense. How could he be so selfish? How could he be so cold and uncaring and cavalier with my heart? How could he do the most vile, painful acts against everything we were. How could he turn his back on me, on us? How could he throw it all away for fun and frivolity? I meant no more to him than that? I the means to his ends and no more. I used. My time and love and efforts used to betray me, to make a mockery of our marriage, our life together? How does a person do that? How do they plan and carry out the shattering of the heart and life they swore to protect?

How do you shatter the heart you swore to love and protect–and do it on purpose?

Box It Up, Boxing Day Blues

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It’s Boxing Day, ostensibly to box up all the old decor and new gifts to stash away in proper place. Not sure too many of us still do this so quickly after Christmas. I know in my Catholic upbringing, we were to wait until Epiphany to take down the holiday glitter and lights.

“Epiphany is a Christian feast day that commemorates principally the visit of the Magi to the Christ Child, and thus Jesus’ physical manifestation to the Gentiles. Monday, January 6, 2020, this coming year.”

In our modern day culture most of us wait until the new year to clean house. From the perspective of Christmas Day, there is another night of revelry right around the corner and for those of us who have already used our balance of expendable energy and income, the dropping of the ball in Times Square is met with bittersweet anticipation.

Are we glad, we betrayed spouses, that our D-days are further distant in the rear view mirror? Sure. Of course we wish there were never the need for a d-day; that our spouse had chosen to be faithful to us, as they promised. But if I have learned anything in this blistering reality, it is that there is no turning back. This is our shit-show to deal with.

Welcome to a new year of recovery. Another 365 days and nights to plow through searching for the illusive new and better version of ourselves that is promised by all the recovery gurus, should we do ‘the work’. …Another unfair situation. We were betrayed and now we have years of work to heal, hoisted on our shoulders.

Nobody ever (truthfully) claimed life to be fair. In that arena, I’d say this infidelity stuff is about as unfair as it gets.

Reality. Yup–I know. Gotta face it. Gotta somehow learn to love it. I find that if I shift my perspective just a bit…nudge it to the right and look at this self reflection, this introspection as an opportunity rather than a burden–a chance to get to know myself better and like myself, respect myself more; then it is a positive indeed.

Life is, after all, about learning and growing into our best selves. This trauma has forced the issue and accelerated the process into a depth and breadth we may never have reached without it.

“But I could have had a perfectly happy life without this horrid betrayal,” I hear you (and me) thinking. Yes–so true. It is however, speculation at its finest to think we may not have been dealt a different brand of bad. And if we had not, we may have remained forever naive, trusting without a thought and living in a cloud of simplicity without ever having know of what we are made. Our mettle never tested to this extent, we’d not have chiseled a rough shod respect for the adult we are when the worst of what life can throw at us happens. We are amazing, strong women (and betrayed men)–more than we would ever dream, without this heartbreak.

So as we face the last week of the year, I plan to metaphorically box up as much of the burdensome old rehash of my misfortune that pounces upon me like a cat on a rodent. Place those triggers in a box marked “Stop”. You are living in the present and those memories are of thing in the past. Unchangeable and not to be revisited again. Goodbye and good riddance.

May 2020 come in unlike its twentieth century counterpart, ‘the roaring twenties’, and be a decade of peace, growth in our hearts, serenity and wisdom hard fought.

Peace.