When I started this blog last year, I had the intent of telling 1) The Story of Me and 2) why I started this introspection: the bomb blast of the adultery. My husband was amazing, I think: in the middle of his own pain and mistrust, he agreed to start sharing his part of our story here - since our perspectives are so different on separate sides of the blast.
We both had gaping wounds, each inflicted by the other. Both. Of. Us. I cannot emphasize this enough. Gaping, bloody ones with jagged edges. The kind of wounds that have to heal from the inside out, and will not knit together in a pretty thin line.
We were trying to process our new-to-us lives the best we knew how, while walking around like those zombies from Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video. We were in counseling together. We talked more, instead of just the necessary running-the-household-and-raising-kids conversations. There was guarded effort toward a better marriage on both our parts. We were not moving very fast, but there was wee snail movement toward a different and better relationship.
We each bemoaned the fact that I'm doing the best I can ... I'm doing all I can do ... Our counselor called bullsh!t on that right quick-like. We were each doing what we were willing to do at that point in time, but we were not doing everything we could have done for each other. Doing so would have involved a leap of faith that would cause extreme discomfort for each of us, considering our FOO and individual baggage.
Relational intimacy was hard for us in the best of times, much less in an aftermath of emotional gore like we were experiencing. Therefore, we wanted better, but could not/would not make the leap to getting it.
It's akin to an analogy I heard about faith in God; I think this was a Frank Peretti anecdote. He spoke about believing in God in the same way you believe in that chair across the room. Yes, that's a chair, it has four legs and a seat. Looks sturdy.
Yes, but will you go SIT in it?
You can lip-service all day, and intellectually drone on about the engineering of the chair and how it is structured to hold you up. But when the rubber hits the road, will you go over there and trust it to hold your weight?
There's the test, I think. And while I failed it for most of my life, I'm seeing how not sitting in the chair, from a place of relative "safety" across the room, is ultimately not in my best interest. Comfortable is not working.
I need to leap. I need to sit in the chair and trust it to hold me up. God is big enough to hold me and my baggage. He won't drop me. I know that intellectually. I do believe it. But I haven't walked over to sit in the chair. I haven't leapt in my faith. Shame on me.
I didn't leap in my marriage relationship, pre- or post-bomb. I waited to see if it was safe. I'll step here, if you'll go first. If you will, I will. Oddly enough, our relationship together started as a testimony to leaps of faith, of love. Probably the first and only time either of us stretched like that, before or since. And doing so rewarded both of us. It's astounding, in retrospect, how love moved us big time. Mightily.
Then it got less and less comfortable to make big steps. Always glancing out of our peripheral vision at each other: what's he/she doing? because if he/she's not making an effort to [whatever], i'm not stepping out by myself. Ugh. It's exhausting to look to someone else to guide your steps (or your non-steps).
Eventually we quit sharing our hearts at all. Married to a relative stranger. Familiar only in the routine of life, but not where it counts. Ya'll know.
Do I need to be looking to another person to guide my steps? No. I need to look away from the other side of the bed and look up. That's where my hope is. I'm just now figuring that out in a real way, not just a yeah, i know that kind of way.
When my husband was actively posting here, and we were routinely discussing our relationship together IRL, it was okay to blog the adultery and stories about him - or at least fairer. And while I hope it isn't always the case, he no longer posts his story/firsthand wisdom here, and we don't discuss Big Picture Issues daily. Because of that, it seems less 'okay' to blog about those things currently. I could be wrong, but we'll go with it for now.
I do want to tell you more about my husband as a person, what made me love him from the get-go. What contributes to why I still can. Just so you don't know him only as 'the adulterer'. Because that's not fair, and not who he is. I've posted a lot about my pain, because, hello, it is very real (see above reference to jagged wounds). But so is his.
I don't intend to go down the rabbit holes of my marriage and adultery specifically as the Main Plot Point to my blog. That's not to say I won't talk about either, or both, in relation to my story, or throw some lyrics into the mix that mean something to me personally. But I have a plethora of my own issues to work through, back stories of crazy-making and poor judgments that contributed to my unique chaos, and eventually helped lead to problems in my marriage. That's what I intended to do initially, and I hope to get back on track. Stay tuned.
