It felt like a knife to the gut. Shaking, in shock, every breath seemed to twist the knife a little deeper until I felt as though I couldn’t breathe anymore. Oh, I had been hit before, little slaps of reality, every few months.
I somehow numbed the pain before letting it do its job, before letting it sink in and hurt enough to do something about it. Anger, sadness, self-doubt, and shame, are what hit me that day I found out about the other woman, but most of all, I felt like such a fool.
I will never forget that day, that phone call, the lies and pain that followed. The blessing that was the knife that almost took my life. All the signs of the other woman were there, for years. How do you live with someone so long and not know who they truly are? Was I blind? I must have been because everyone else seemed to see it but me.
I grew up in a loving home, but somehow always chose the wrong type of guys. So when my husband came along, my family and I were swept away by his charm. Less then a year later, we were married (at 19 and 21) and moved to Texas. Life was busy, it was easy to avoid the heavy conversations and for the most part, we did.
A short three years was when I started to feel it. He started to withdraw, to invest in other relationships at the expense of our marriage. We would fight, talk, come up with a game plan on how to make the marriage better, but somehow always found ourselves back at square one. Lies and deceit crept in.
I thought there my be the ” Other woman.” Somehow I always fell short. I wasn’t enough to fight for, I wasn’t enough for him to give up the attention of other women. I. Was. Not. Enough.
