I threw myself into school, into raising our daughter, into self-work, and counseling, thinking that somehow if I just tried harder, I could fix it. If I was better, if I was a successful nurse, made more money, looked better, prayed more, kept a cleaner house, made better dinners… maybe, just maybe he would SEE me. Maybe he would want to fight. The truth is, I went to battle for a man who never even laced up his boots.
The few months leading up to the phone call with the other woman, were interwoven with lies and justifications of suspicious behavior. When I saw the credit card charges to a hotel in a town almost 1,000 miles from where he was supposed to be, that was when I felt the tip of the knife in my gut — but somehow I still thought, maybe it was a mistake.
Did someone open a card under his name? The next day, the day I called that hotel room and heard his voice, his voice 1,000 miles away, and then heard her voice (the other woman) in the background, that was the day I broke.
My best friend flew to town that day. She stayed with me for weeks as I tried to heal, to snap out of the overwhelming numbness and pain that seemed all-consuming. She would take the kids outside to play when the pain and brokenness made it so I couldn’t breathe. Hiding in the bathroom, shower blasting, wasn’t enough to muffle the sobs.
All I kept hearing my counselor say was, ‘Eyes wide open Jenny, eyes wide open.’ I now get she was trying to help me to see what was there all along. Action does speak so much louder than words. Some days I felt strong, but some days I felt like I would never find true happiness as if somehow I couldn’t trust myself to throw all of me into life again, into loving others, because the reality of THIS pain was too much to journey through again.
I pushed forward like this for months.
Soon, I found myself in a large office, surrounded by fancy tables and chairs, staring at a stack of divorce papers, waiting to take on the next three hours that would change my life forever. The next three hours that I never thought would happen to me. The next three hours figuring out the rest of my life, how I will live alone, raise my children, AND work full time, and where I would live.
All I could think about is how we got here. Why wasn’t there something, anything I could do to fix the marriage, to save us? I felt so terribly alone. The depth of sadness was weighing me down with such force I [didn’t] know if I’d ever been able to hold my head high again.
