It has been a long while since I have blogged. I just couldn’t do it. The pain of B’s infidelity stung… morning, noon, and night. I felt stupid, angry and flogged myself way too often for my contributions to where we had gotten. Mostly, I just felt numb. Numb, not depressed numb, but numb to the point where love slips away and its existence becomes a distant memory. You know the kind. It’s like when you sit the wrong way and you try to stand up and almost fall down because your foot is all tingly and numb. The tingle hurts and the numb hurts worse…that is how I felt the first month of knowing.

The second month has gotten better. More tingle and less numb. B finally confessed all to his therapist and we have been seeing our joint one often. In addition, I see my therapist at least once a week…she helps keep my head above water when I feel like I have no more energy to keep kicking.

One of our son’s mental health has deteriorated after the discovery. It has been a very fine tightrope we have been walking keeping him on track and it has become obvious that just one of us alone could not cope with all the facets that unstable mental health brings to a family. I weep for this child of mine and hope that we can get him stable again because as a couple we are strong and steady against the storm that mental illness  inflicts on all involved.

B has been trying hard. Very hard. He is doing all the things he should have been doing for the past three years that he was cultivating his relationship with her. He has also come to see what that relationship for what it was…a woman who obtained a lot of money from a guy who had created the perfect woman in a delusional and illusional affair that was mostly conducted in his head. To me she remains a very expensive blow-up doll with a face painted on in whatever way it needed to be in order to convince B that she was his soul mate.

We have had our ups and downs. I have finally come to a place where I don’t ask a question or ask for clarification numerous times a day. One of these days I hope to be able to find a container to put all this painful crap in but I am not sure there is one that is big enough to hold it all. Or for that matter, find a container that is strong enough to hold all the toxins that have been leaching out of marriage. It feels dangerous… like nuclear waste seeping from those old storage barrels buried deep underground.

A little over two months ago I took off my wedding rings and returned the “committment” ring to B. It has been strange looking down and not seeing what I has been on my finder for the past 30+ years especially while his remains attached to him. This void remains a constant reminder of all that has been lost for so long. Trying to “repair” it has been like searching for buried treasure and getting suffocated by sand which keeps falling back into the hole.

ONE MONTH LATER

Well, things are getting better with a lot of hard work and hard listening. It’s painful but necessary if we are going to be able to keep this marriage going for both our sakes and our children. Can we climb this mountain and reach the top? I am not 100% sure but the odds are improving slowly but surely.

Today is our 30+ Wedding Anniversary. We are alone (daughter Nicole has the kids…thanks sweetheart!) on an island off the coast of Honduras. It is fun discovering ourselves as a couple again and I am enjoying B more than I have in a long time. I think he feels that same about me too. Laughing together so much is akin to a knitting needle stitching together those frayed ends of our marriage but this time we are using bright colors that match in order to shake up what remains of the threads of our lives. With my permission, tonight at dinner B put my wedding ring back on my finger as the sun sank below the horizon.I think it will serve as a good reminder to me to keep putting into place those things we are practicing in order to strengthen our relationship. It was a lovely evening sitting at our own private table about two-feet away from the water’s edge.  It defininately was A Once In A Lifetime kind of evening.

Of course, an island getaway does not guarantee a future together but with the changes we are both trying to incorporate into our lives there is once again hope, which is so badly needed, if any sort of permanent repair is to be made. I am just hoping that we can bring back with us some of the playfulness and admiration that we have found for one another over the past month.

Since this all began almost three years ago I have been in more pain than I ever thought I could endure. Forget global warming…I have personally made the water level of our oceans rise with all the tears I have shed. But, I have also come a long way working on myself and those parts which have needed my attention. I have learned that I am stronger than I ever knew I was and braver than Braveheart himself.  I am proud of who I have become,who I am yet to discover, and I am finally learning to sit with my emotions rather than let them control me. The only consistent thing that has happened is that I have loved B throughout all of this; even when I didn’t like him very much. In my mind the tenacity to keep putting one foot in front of the other when I could have thrown in the towel is something to be admired. While I know many will not agree I have to say that, for me, I know I have no regrets because I have taken the time to hang on rather than turn and run prematurely as I had done in my first marriage. Now I know that no matter what, I will have no regrets because it isn’t about B so much anymore…it’s mostly about me!

So hello from Honduras. May the remainder of my days resemble this one and may my love for myself stay strong!