Our post-dragon lives

Anyone can slay a dragon
he told me, but try waking up
every morning & loving
the world all over again.

That's what takes a real hero

(From Traveling Light by Brian Andreas)

The crisis is over. The dragon is slain. You've got the details. The decision is made to either stay or go. You've told anyone you're going to tell and hidden your pain from anyone else. All that's left now is...the rest of your life.
Scary huh? The rest of your life. Carrying the knowledge of just how deeply you can be hurt. Understanding just how wrong you can be about your own life and the people in it. But knowing too that maybe you did sorta kinda did know. That maybe that dragon had been circling for a while and you didn't want to see it. Or maybe that damn dragon really was cagey and clever and cunning.
No matter. It's slain.
And now's the time for heroism because it turns out it's not enough to just slay the dragon. We need to carry on, careful to strip ourselves of armour so that our hearts are exposed, but knowing that dragons are real. And that one might show up again.
The rest of our life can seem like a long time when it's dark. When we can barely make out what's around the corner let alone what's far ahead on the road.
And yet, thinking we could see decades ahead was a lie. A delusion that made our world seem safer.
It's not just us whose future is uncertain. None of us really knows what's coming. And for those of us who've been blindsided by any pain, including betrayal, that's particularly terrifying.
And yet, we have our toolbox. The same one we've always had. The one that can hold what we need to get through the days and years ahead: Compassion for ourselves. Boundaries. Self-care. Self-respect.
If we lack those tools, then now is the time to discover them. If we've lost them, now is the time to recover them.
We need them. We've always needed them. If we weren't using them, it's probably because we were relying on somebody else's tools. But somebody else can't build our lives. Only we can do that.
And we do it by being the heroes poet Brian Andreas refers to. By slaying the dragon, sure. But then by waking up every morning afterward and walking forward into our life. By removing the armour that protected us short-term but shields us from open-hearted living. By loving the world even when we know the suffering it can hold. By trusting ourselves to hold that love and that suffering in the same wide-open heart.
Anyone can slay a dragon though I take issue with Andreas' suggestion that it's easy. I think we do it simply because we have little choice when a dragon picks a fight with us but to battle like hell. And it's tempting to reach for our armour rather than our toolbox. To close ourselves from pain rather than arm ourselves with boundaries and self-care and radical compassion.
But the hero isn't the one who slays the dragon so much as the one who lives with the knowledge of them in the world and loves anyway. 

Your Kindness is No Small Thing

I just finished responding to Phoenix and Still Standing over on the Separating or Divorcing (Part 2) page. There's so much pain there as these incredible women come to terms with a loss they hadn't predicted. But there's hella resilience too. 
There's also much gratitude for this site as a place where women feel supported, no matter what they're going through and how things are unfolding. While I created this site to make me less lonely as I worked to rebuild my marriage (and to assure myself that I wasn't a complete doofus to believe that it was possible to rebuild a marriage after betrayal), I didn't intend it to be only for reconciliation. For one thing, I wasn't sure just where my marriage was going to end up. I had one foot out the door for a long time. Besides, however things turn out, we're not so different. It's the experience of betrayal that marks us. And the women on this site, without fail, have responded to that most painful of experiences by reaching out to others and lifting them up.
It's incredible, really. To think that, at our lowest point, we are still able to acknowledge pain in others and reach out. It speaks to the courage of all of you here. It speaks to the depth of your compassion, the reservoir of kindness that you each still have, even when life has served up betrayal and cruelty.
I'm convinced though that it's in that reaching out, that lifting up of others, that ability to take in another's pain and hold it for them, that opens the path to our own healing. In keeping our hearts open to others, we keep them open to our own lives.
In feeling each other's pain, we are able to process our own.
We heal together, bound by compassionate hearts.
Our healing won't take us all to the same place. Some of us will rebuild marriages, others will dissolve theirs. But as long as we're able to see in each other the beauty, the strength, the courage and the integrity with which we're responding to our hearts shattering, then we can acknowledge it in ourselves. And that mark of betrayal will become a badge of honor for having not only survived but having kept our hearts open to the suffering of others.
There are days that what I'm saying will seem impossible. Days when it's all we can do to breathe in, breathe out, when we need to put our hearts under glass. Those are the days when others can remind you that you will survive this. That there are days for giving and days for receiving.
That the grace we show each other isn't a zero sum game.
And that ability to offer or receive grace, to experience a life-changing kindness, is no small thing.

Having each other's backs

I was pulled aside at my son's preschool one day because of something he had said. His teacher wanted to talk with me about his language. I gulped.
Apparently he had called some boys in the schoolyard a "bunch of idiots". I asked for context. She told me that these boys refused to allow a friend of my son's to play soccer with them. While my son was included, this friend was not. And so my son threw an arm around his friend and told him that they didn't care about these other boys because they were just "a bunch of idiots."
I assured the teacher I would have a chat with him about his language but that I would also tell him how proud I was of him for standing by his friend, for being loyal and for having the courage to stand up to a "bunch of idiots".
Now 15 years old, he's still that kid.
I was that kid.
Which is why, I think, my husband's betrayal was such a shock. I thought he was that kid. I thought that, no matter what, he had my back. After all, I had his.
That, I figure, is what marriage is. After the crazy can't-live-without-you phase is over, after the why-can't-you-put-the-toilet-seat-down arguments are settled, after kids and mortgages and sick parents, marriage is about always having each other's backs. It's our safe place.
Or should have been. But wasn't.
Those of us choosing to try and rebuild our marriages are really trying to create that safe space. And it's hard when one of the partners doesn't feel safe. It's hard when one of the partners doesn't seem to have our back at all. When he's working so hard to protect his own back that he forgets he's the one who put the knife in ours.
But I'm wondering if the husbands who also want to rebuild their marriages might understand that we need them to have our backs, no matter what. Might they understand that better than rules of "no contact" or rules of disclosure? Can they commit to trying to always protect us from pain? Can they understand that we were hurt because they let their guard down. Because they didn't have our backs.
It might seem like semantics. Or it might seem like minimizing the devastation of betrayal.
But then again, it might work.
If they can wrap their minds around this idea that marriage is about watching each other's backs. Like guard dogs watching for threats and being conscious of any time they are the dangerous person in our lives. Then maybe they can feel less daunted by what's needed of them. Maybe they can step up and be the man they want to be. The one they should have been.
Back then.

Tuesday Truth Hug