Anyway, the problem should be fixed by Monday, God willing, and I'll update you on some new developments. Meanwhile, call me today or Sunday night if you get the chance. Excited to share what happened to me in group this week!
Friday, May 30, 2008
M.I.A.
Hey, I haven't disappeared. I just told anyone in group that is also part of the book study, that I am having computer related issues. The fan in the computer is turning off randomly and then the computer shuts down to protect itself. Gee, that sounds like every relationship I've ever had!
Anyway, the problem should be fixed by Monday, God willing, and I'll update you on some new developments. Meanwhile, call me today or Sunday night if you get the chance. Excited to share what happened to me in group this week!
Anyway, the problem should be fixed by Monday, God willing, and I'll update you on some new developments. Meanwhile, call me today or Sunday night if you get the chance. Excited to share what happened to me in group this week!
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
On Swallowing a Bomb
I was thinking yesterday about something that has really been bothering me since last January. It's weird. I don't know why I'm waiting until now to write about this because, even now, I'm not completely clear on why I feel the way I do. Maybe someone else has felt the same way and has some insight.
Last year, after my husband's third polygraph (failed the first two), I was presented with ALL of the truth about his acting out behaviors. For me, this was a good thing. I was able to decide for myself whether, after knowing everything, I wanted to continue in the relationship or walk away. Obviously, I chose to stay.
Here is what is bothering me. Part of the information that came out of that third polygraph was that my husband had a real live affair within the first two years of our marriage with a girl/woman he went to college with. Her name was T, and she was known by the guys in the dorms as "the roach." I still have no idea why they would call her such a thing, but that is how they referred to her.
T was sort of plain looking. She was just a little shorter than me, very thin, very pale, freckles, dark brown hair, dark brown eyes, smoke stained teeth. She probably went unnoticed a lot in a crowd, because her personality was sort of absent too. I tried to be friendly with her a few times when I would visit P's college, because I wanted to get to know his friends, but there was this impenatrable force field around her that didn't allow me to get to know her at all.
In the time P and I dated, I saw her a few times at parties and over the course of a weekend for a wedding we were invited to, and then we drove out to see her and another college buddy when they lived in Florida and we lived in Texas. I knew that she and P had been sexual when they were in college. P and I weren't married or even seeing each other at the time when that happened, so it was something that I was willing to look past because it was part of P's past. Everybody has a past, right?
Finding out about the sex between them after the polygraph was a strange experience. I was in the parking lot of the local supermarket, picking up a dessert to bring to the friend that I was going to visit moments later. I had left an email message for P that the polygraph results had come and showed deception on one of the questions. He called me over his lunch hour and said, "I have to tell you something. Remember how I told you that at that bachelor party, I kissed T? Well, it was more than that."
I stood there in the parking lot with a grocery store bakery layer cake in a yellow plastic bag hanging off of my arm, getting the news that he had in fact cheated on me, on my cell phone. I tried to strong arm our preschooler into her carseat, while cradling the phone between my ear and my shoulder, at the same time balancing the chocolate whatever-it-was so that it didn't lose all of it's icing.
"Hold on" I said. I set the cake down on the front seat of the van, buckled up the protesting four year old, and said to our son, "Watch your sister!" I clicked the door locks shut, and watched the van from about 20 yards away. "You want to tell me this NOW?! I'm going to D's house for lunch this very minute. How the f--- am I supposed to compose myself by the time I get over there?"
I snapped the phone shut and forced my body into the van. My son had the "oh, sh*t, mom's mad" look on his face. All I could think of was, "How am I going to pull this off? How am I going to look like I didn't just swallow a ticking bomb? How am I going to put on the "everything's just fine" expression?
But I did. And I wore that expression for two straight hours while we sat talking about the school district, and our other children, and how well our boys get along together, and their new trampoline, and their bedroom renovation, and what a great summer we were going to have together. And that bomb just kept jumping around in my stomach, threatening to pop out and onto the table for D to see. But I just kept holding it back.
Then we drove home. And the bomb just stayed there until I could finally speak to my husband again at 4:30, when he would be driving back over to his mother's house. And finally, my insides exploded. "HOW COULD YOU!!!" But not for the obvious reason, although that was one of them.
How could he? How could he have slept with THAT woman? How could he keep that secret from me for 17 years? But most weighing on my mind was how could he have kept me a slave to my own shame over the affair that I had had (when he was in anorexia mode), when he had done the same thing? He kept saying to me every time he would act out, either emotionally, or m-ing or ex-ing, "At least *I* didn't go outside of our marriage!" HOW COULD HE let me keep punishing myself for my own affair? How could HE shame me over the same thing he was guilty of?
I quickly justified my sin, "I was at least *lonely*, you were just *alone.*" (Sidenote: what I did was horribly wrong, and I will never condone nor defend what I did. It was WRONG. I was WRONG.)
But that is just how I came to find out. Afterward, he also told me that when we went to visit her and P (a friend) in Florida, that he laid there that night, m-ing, reliving the memory of cheating.
Believe it or not, THAT was the day I came to understand that he was an addict. The day that he admitted sleeping with HER. Please don't misunderstand me. I've made it clear before that I am not "all that." Physically though, I am certain that I have more going on than she does. I know that sounds horribly vain, and I realize that physical attraction is only one aspect of a person's makeup. BUT, my husband didn't want her for her personality that night. He wanted little more than fifteen minutes of her time.
I know, that was a long way to go to get to my point, but bear with me. It's almost over.
What is concerning me is that, my anger towards her was so fleeting. It lasted about a minute or two, relatively speaking. Even now, I can't really muster up a whole lot of feelings when I think of her sleeping with him. I could probably still invoke some anger for all of the people he's had emotional affairs with. I won't, but the point is I might still resent some of their behaviors with my husband, where I'm willing to give her a free pass. I just don't understand this.
One of the reasons I've come up with is that maybe the emotional affairs bothered me more because they were ongoing and they were based in feelings, and could have easily been based in love. Whereas, the physical affair was a one time equivalent of getting an itch scratched, although I do understand that it is not as simple as I make it sound. But the physical affair didn't drag on and on with drama. It was very cut and dry.
Another reason I think it may have bothered me less is that it didn't mess so much with my already low self esteem. Maybe I felt superior to her in the looks department, so I wrote her off as being "less" than me. God forgive me if that is the case.
The last reason I can think of is that I have been characterizing her lately as a sex addict. My husband told me that she certainly acted like the other female sex addicts in group and that he would classify her as one, having been with her several times. But, my question is, is the crazy codependent in me feeling sorry for her, thereby forgiving her for committing adultery but not completely forgiving all of the others that didn't commit adultery.
So anyway...that's where my head's been lately! Forgive me for rambling.
Last year, after my husband's third polygraph (failed the first two), I was presented with ALL of the truth about his acting out behaviors. For me, this was a good thing. I was able to decide for myself whether, after knowing everything, I wanted to continue in the relationship or walk away. Obviously, I chose to stay.
Here is what is bothering me. Part of the information that came out of that third polygraph was that my husband had a real live affair within the first two years of our marriage with a girl/woman he went to college with. Her name was T, and she was known by the guys in the dorms as "the roach." I still have no idea why they would call her such a thing, but that is how they referred to her.
T was sort of plain looking. She was just a little shorter than me, very thin, very pale, freckles, dark brown hair, dark brown eyes, smoke stained teeth. She probably went unnoticed a lot in a crowd, because her personality was sort of absent too. I tried to be friendly with her a few times when I would visit P's college, because I wanted to get to know his friends, but there was this impenatrable force field around her that didn't allow me to get to know her at all.
In the time P and I dated, I saw her a few times at parties and over the course of a weekend for a wedding we were invited to, and then we drove out to see her and another college buddy when they lived in Florida and we lived in Texas. I knew that she and P had been sexual when they were in college. P and I weren't married or even seeing each other at the time when that happened, so it was something that I was willing to look past because it was part of P's past. Everybody has a past, right?
Finding out about the sex between them after the polygraph was a strange experience. I was in the parking lot of the local supermarket, picking up a dessert to bring to the friend that I was going to visit moments later. I had left an email message for P that the polygraph results had come and showed deception on one of the questions. He called me over his lunch hour and said, "I have to tell you something. Remember how I told you that at that bachelor party, I kissed T? Well, it was more than that."
I stood there in the parking lot with a grocery store bakery layer cake in a yellow plastic bag hanging off of my arm, getting the news that he had in fact cheated on me, on my cell phone. I tried to strong arm our preschooler into her carseat, while cradling the phone between my ear and my shoulder, at the same time balancing the chocolate whatever-it-was so that it didn't lose all of it's icing.
"Hold on" I said. I set the cake down on the front seat of the van, buckled up the protesting four year old, and said to our son, "Watch your sister!" I clicked the door locks shut, and watched the van from about 20 yards away. "You want to tell me this NOW?! I'm going to D's house for lunch this very minute. How the f--- am I supposed to compose myself by the time I get over there?"
I snapped the phone shut and forced my body into the van. My son had the "oh, sh*t, mom's mad" look on his face. All I could think of was, "How am I going to pull this off? How am I going to look like I didn't just swallow a ticking bomb? How am I going to put on the "everything's just fine" expression?
But I did. And I wore that expression for two straight hours while we sat talking about the school district, and our other children, and how well our boys get along together, and their new trampoline, and their bedroom renovation, and what a great summer we were going to have together. And that bomb just kept jumping around in my stomach, threatening to pop out and onto the table for D to see. But I just kept holding it back.
Then we drove home. And the bomb just stayed there until I could finally speak to my husband again at 4:30, when he would be driving back over to his mother's house. And finally, my insides exploded. "HOW COULD YOU!!!" But not for the obvious reason, although that was one of them.
How could he? How could he have slept with THAT woman? How could he keep that secret from me for 17 years? But most weighing on my mind was how could he have kept me a slave to my own shame over the affair that I had had (when he was in anorexia mode), when he had done the same thing? He kept saying to me every time he would act out, either emotionally, or m-ing or ex-ing, "At least *I* didn't go outside of our marriage!" HOW COULD HE let me keep punishing myself for my own affair? How could HE shame me over the same thing he was guilty of?
I quickly justified my sin, "I was at least *lonely*, you were just *alone.*" (Sidenote: what I did was horribly wrong, and I will never condone nor defend what I did. It was WRONG. I was WRONG.)
But that is just how I came to find out. Afterward, he also told me that when we went to visit her and P (a friend) in Florida, that he laid there that night, m-ing, reliving the memory of cheating.
Believe it or not, THAT was the day I came to understand that he was an addict. The day that he admitted sleeping with HER. Please don't misunderstand me. I've made it clear before that I am not "all that." Physically though, I am certain that I have more going on than she does. I know that sounds horribly vain, and I realize that physical attraction is only one aspect of a person's makeup. BUT, my husband didn't want her for her personality that night. He wanted little more than fifteen minutes of her time.
I know, that was a long way to go to get to my point, but bear with me. It's almost over.
What is concerning me is that, my anger towards her was so fleeting. It lasted about a minute or two, relatively speaking. Even now, I can't really muster up a whole lot of feelings when I think of her sleeping with him. I could probably still invoke some anger for all of the people he's had emotional affairs with. I won't, but the point is I might still resent some of their behaviors with my husband, where I'm willing to give her a free pass. I just don't understand this.
One of the reasons I've come up with is that maybe the emotional affairs bothered me more because they were ongoing and they were based in feelings, and could have easily been based in love. Whereas, the physical affair was a one time equivalent of getting an itch scratched, although I do understand that it is not as simple as I make it sound. But the physical affair didn't drag on and on with drama. It was very cut and dry.
Another reason I think it may have bothered me less is that it didn't mess so much with my already low self esteem. Maybe I felt superior to her in the looks department, so I wrote her off as being "less" than me. God forgive me if that is the case.
The last reason I can think of is that I have been characterizing her lately as a sex addict. My husband told me that she certainly acted like the other female sex addicts in group and that he would classify her as one, having been with her several times. But, my question is, is the crazy codependent in me feeling sorry for her, thereby forgiving her for committing adultery but not completely forgiving all of the others that didn't commit adultery.
So anyway...that's where my head's been lately! Forgive me for rambling.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Finished!
Well, I finally finished Step Seven. Yay! I think I may have been taking a long time doing this Step for a few reasons. One, and probably the biggest one, is that finishing Step Seven means I am on to Step Eight. Making my list of the people I've harmed and becoming willing to make amends to them all. At this moment in time, it seems like an insurmountable request. I don't know where I am going to summon up the strength to do this.
See, it would be easier to do if there were any effective communication in my family of origin. I just picture myself as Lisa Simpson from the sitcom "The Simpsons" giving my letter to my sister (played by Nelson Muntz) and the trademark, "HA, HA" coming out of her mouth. This is the part in the show where I walk away from Nelson wondering why I even bother, dragging my saxophone behind me.
Looking at it now, I can see why I would dilly-dally and not try to go barreling into Step Eight. Being the laughingstock of "Springfield" isn't on my list of "things to do" this year.
Another reason I think it took so long was that (again) I was aiming for perfection. I wanted my prayers to be perfect. I agonized over them, writing and rewriting, as if God was my ninth grade English teacher with a penchant for red pens. Have I learned nothing? I really need to be saved from myself.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)