My entries about my divorce ramblings will be pretty random because I'm just going to blog about what's on my mind. This is a journal entry from last September.
"10 years ago we vowed to love each other until death separated us. We vowed to forsake all others, to stand by each other through good and bad. On that day I made those vows with my heart, knowing at times it would be hard, but believing our love was strong enough to make it. We saw our share of trials and at some point our paths began to separate. I held tight to what we started with, doing all I could to fix it, change it, perfect it. You turned elsewhere, shutting the door to your heart, never letting me in again. I can't seem to figure out how...
Was it a gradual thing or something that happened overnight? The pain that came that night on November never left me, no matter how hard I tried. I can still vividly remember weeping by myself in the living room all night while I cradled my very pregnant belly, feeling like a knife just went through it. For years I tried to make sense of it, daily wondering why I just wasn't enough. It doesn't matter what all the books and professionals say. As a wife there's never a good enough explanation to ease the pain and the lonliness that a husband's betrayal brings. And no one gets it unless they've lived through it.
No I understand why the Bible "allows" a marriage to end after adultery. There's no recovery from the emotional depth of betrayal, even though for years I tried. Betrayal takes everything you are and leaves you doubting yourself. It has a strange way of producing guilt, even when you weren't the one to break your vows and turn to someone other than your spouse. It makes you question what kind of person you are, inside and out.
Much like infertility does, it makes you question your worth, your value, your identity. Because it doesn't matter how hard you try or how badly you hope and plead for a miracle, the fact is that you're just not good enough. Not enough to fulfill desires, to meet unmet needs, not enough to make him happy and satisfied.
What is too hard to fathom or accept is that you make these choices...you decided to break our vows, you betrayed our family, our marriage, our life together. Yet I am the one left broken and reeling. I'm the one who traded 12 years in for brokenness. For a hurt so deep it feels like one breath will crack my chest open. Even though it's all "new" revelations, my heart knew a long time ago that you were gone, that you had checked out. But you made it about me, blaimed it on my emotional heart, made me feel guilty for feeling and the shame in that is that I let you. The pain has been there for years...years of lonliness, years of my open heart being met with a cold and calloused one. The same one who vowed to love me, honor me and protect me. Ironic that the one thing I needed protection from was the only man I gave my everything to. How is that fair? How did God let me do that? How could I have allowed it to go on for so, so long?
So that leads me to Hope and the anger I have towards it. For 12 years I hoped...longed for, begged and pleaded with God for a marriage where he loved me as much as I loved him, even though my love was more often a choice not a feeling. It was committment to the realization that even though I didn't feel "true" love, I made a vow and I would do everything in my power to fulfill that vow and hope against hope that it would be returned.
All those nights alone...
the tears cried in secret...
the ache of dying to be held...
just wanting to be loved.
And then the happy face, the portrayal of what everyone wanted to see. Lies and deceit while secrets so deep and painful ate away at my heart, buried deep within, changing me from the inside out.
So am I any different than this man that stole my life? And who is the judge of that? I lied, I hid away the truth in order to cover up and protect. But what angers me to my very core is that instead of protecting, I only enabled him and harmed myself. And why? Because I gave up hope a long, long time ago. I realized very early into our marriage that it wasn't at all what I had hoped for and I wondered how I could have been so blinded. But he made me feel so unworthy, that I didn't deserve to be loved the way every little girl dreams, the way God made our hearts to be loved. So I shut down and gave up what mattered to me. I only let my heart out through journaling. But now I question who is to blame?
Am I just as guilty?
Who was I protecting?
Him? Me? The kids?
I feel like I did the damage to some extent...
I allowed it to go for so long
Out of my own fear, pride and cowardice.
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