Wednesday Word Hug: Starting Over

Betrayed Wives Club: A Community to Help You Grieve

"Happiness has become the new mecca, and anything short of that often leaves us feeling that we have done something wrong or failed to live up to the acknowledged standard. This forces sorrow, pain, fear, weakness, and vulnerability into the underworld, where they fester and mutate into contorted expressions of themselves, often coated in a mantle of shame."
~Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

Did you imagine the profound grief that came with betrayal? I, for one, did not. I'm not sure it's a failure of my imagination or an overestimation of my emotional fortitude but I always imagined betrayal, if it happened to me at all and I was pretty sure it would not, would be met with my anger. I would throw him out and that would be that.
Anyone who's read much on this blog knows that, instead, I responded like so many others. Anger, yes. I screamed and said horrible, cruel things. But more often, I felt pinned beneath the weight of my pain. I found it hard to breathe. I had trouble forming coherent thoughts. Somehow my young children survived. I got them to and from school. I fed them and put them to bed.
I participated in hysterical bonding, struck by a lust that would have made 20-year-old me blush.
But, mostly, I ached. My pain was so bad that I even wondered about taking my own life in order to be rid of it. I couldn't imagine coming to point of not feeling such pain. Which is what depression does, right? Convinces us that what we're feeling right now is what we will always feel. It lies to us.
And I won't lie to you now and tell you that I felt hopeful. I didn't. I was sure I would never, ever feel happy again. But because I couldn't leave my children without a mother, I decided to live, resigning myself to sacrificing my own life for theirs. Melodramatic, I know. But, again, depression thrives in absolutes. Always/never.
How I wish I'd stumbled on a community like Betrayed Wives Club when I was in such a dark place.
Not because this site would have protected me from experiencing the darkness but because it reminds us that darkness is necessary but not permanent.
Which is what Francis Weller, above, is telling us.
We fear sorrow and grief because we have such little experience with it. Our culture hides it away. Sorrow, we think, implies weakness, a lack of determination to be happy, a refusal to buck up. We celebrate victors and vanquishers. Those who go inward to tend to their hearts? We avert our eyes. Pain is private and we like it that way, the better to give ourselves permission to ignore another's sorrow. We tell ourselves we don't want to make the other person uncomfortable, that it's none of our business. But the truth is it makes us uncomfortable. Better to pretend we don't notice.
And then it happens to us. And we discover that sorrow and grief aren't weakness at all. We discover the courage it takes to stay with it, to walk through it, to hold it and not numb ourselves with distractions or delusion.
I wish I'd know this then. I wish I'd trusted that the pain I was in was temporary and that I had the strength I needed to get through it. I'm convinced it isn't the pain itself that cripples us, it's the misguided belief that it will never lift. And most of us discover something else too that's paradoxical: The more we face our pain and tend to it, the more quickly we move through it. And the more others are able to be with us in our woundedness, the more quickly we heal.
This community exists so that you will know these things to be true, sooner rather than later. It exists to provide a community of people who aren't afraid of this pain and who can help you shoulder your grief. We can't make the darkness lift but we can remind you – we can promise you – that the light will return.
We can remind you of your courage. We can salute your strength. And we can put our arms around you and sit with you in your sorrow.

Our Stories Can Save Us

"According to recent neuroscience studies, the act of remembering triggers nearly the same activities in the brain and its circuitry as the actual experience.... However, narrating what you remember, telling it to someone, does something else. The more a person recalls a memory, the more they change it. Each time they put it into language, it shifts. The more you describe a memory, the more likely it is that you are making a story that fits your life, resolves the past, creates a fiction you can live with. It's what writers do. Once you open your mouth, you are moving away from the truth of things. According to neuroscience."
Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water

We all have our D-Day stories, don't we? We all go back and pore over the days, weeks, years that led up to D-Day. Was he cheating when we were visiting our sister? Was he cheating when we were pregnant? And on and on.
We beg for details to help us fill out our stories. What we don't know, we invent. The Other Woman was a gymnast in bed. She had long legs. She laughed charmingly at his stupid jokes.
The mind movies are devastating. We lie in bed playing them over and over again. Or they ambush us when we hear a certain song, drive past a certain restaurant, notice a certain time of year.
Thing is, we weren't there. We will never ever know what it was really like. Nothing is ever really as fabulous as we think it is. Not the celebrity lives we envy in magazines. Not the other moms' lives with their kids who never seem to whine. Not the Other Woman with her imagined sexual sorcery.
Which is why we need to tell our stories with ourselves cast as the heroine. Maybe a tragic heroine, but a heroine nonetheless. Our stories can save us, if we let them. I'm not talking about creating a fiction, necessarily. But as Lidia Yuknavitch notes, there's a ton of brain science about the value of stories in healing trauma. It's why rape survivors need to tell their stories. It's why plane crash victims need to tell their stories. Over and over and over.
And it's why betrayed wives need to tell their stories. It's how we make sense of what's happened to us. And it's how we re-insert ourselves back into a narrative that we've been written out of. Our husband might have conveniently ignored our role in his life, the OW might be able to pretend we don't exist or that we shouldn't exist. But we don't have to buy that story.
No way.
Our story begins and ends with us – fighting like hell for our bodies, our hearts and souls. Yuknavitch's book, The Chronology of Water, is about a resurrection, a rebirth. It's about a woman who refuses to give up on herself, who refuses to accept others' stories. She is whole, just as we are. Not bit players in another's story but stars in our own.
Tell your story. Tell it as many times as you can to anyone who will hold it in their own hearts, without judgement, without flinching at your pain. Tell it until it fits your life and resolves the past. It is your truth and it will be your rebirth.

Wednesday Word Hug: Ya Got This

Wednesday Word Hug: Your Secret Battle

The strength it takes

There's a pervasive cultural myth that strong women leave cheaters and weak women stay. Staying is for suckers, for chumps, for women too pathetic to demand respect.
Thing is, I don't know a single woman who has stayed in a marriage after infidelity who fits that description. Quite the contrary. The women I know who've stayed do so for a lot of reasons, none of which are that they're too weak to leave.
At first I stayed because I was exhausted and knew that I couldn't create the calm and stability that my three children would have needed to deal with their parents' separation. Being able to consider my children's needs isn't weakness. It's a mother's strength.
I stayed in part because I had made a vow to my husband – "in good and in bad". This fell firmly under the "bad" category. It isn't weakness to stay true to wedding vows, even when a partner has failed to. I took those vows seriously. And I knew that, at points in our marriage, we'd be tested. To honour those vows takes strength.
And I continued to stay because I could see my husband working hard to figure out why he'd risked everything that mattered to him, to find a way through this mess to redeem himself, to learn how to be a better man when he was lost. To be patient, to allow trust to regain a foothold takes strength.
But perhaps, most of all, I used that time to begin to heal. To do the hard work myself of figuring out why I had lost myself to some extent in my marriage, why I had failed myself. With no healthy marriage as my blueprint (my parents' marriage was marred with addiction and infidelity), I had thought that my job was to be supportive, to compromise, to accommodate myself, to, I dare say, abandon "me" in pursuit of "us". To untangle my healthy ideas of love and marriage and carve out a place for myself in this "new" marriage took determination and patience. And a whole lot of strength.
Thing is, those on the outside have no idea what's going on within the marriage. I hear it a lot from Other Women, bitter because the guy whose words they believed goes back to his wife and his marriage and, they're convinced, suffers no real consequences for his behaviour.
I hear it from people who know the rumours about someone's infidelity and yet see the couple at social gatherings, sitting together, laughing together. Together. "Why does she put up with that?" they've whispered to me with no knowledge that I've "put up with that" too.
What people don't see is the work it takes to get there. What the Other Women don't understand is the effort that goes into rebuilding a marriage that has been shattered by infidelity.
I don't know a single marriage in which a guy who cheated (where his wife knows he's cheated) returns to the fold and is welcomed with no questions asked.
Recently, a man who cheated on his wife posted on this site, suggesting that it would be "better" for his wife if he simply walked away so she's not reminded of the pain he put her through. This guy wasn't interested in doing the work of helping her heal. He just wanted her to be over it already and, since she wasn't, he thought it would be helpful to exit stage left so she didn't have to think about it. Doesn't that strike you as cowardice? A guy who would rather not have to face his own moral failing every day when he sees the pain in her eyes? Sure sounds like that to me. She's not asking him to spare her the pain of his betrayal (a bit late for that, buddy), she's asking him to walk through it with her. She's strong enough to face it. Is he?
And that's the truth of a marriage after betrayal. It's about facing that pain, every single moment of the day. It's about working hard to keep your heart open when every ounce of your being wants to close it off to further pain. It's about showing up at events with your husband, possibly even laughing together, and then going home and sobbing into your pillow because everything hurts.
Don't tell me it doesn't take strength to get up each morning and fight your way through the day while he's at work, sometimes where the OW works too. Don't tell me it isn't strength that gets us to our own jobs, to parent-teacher meetings, to the grocery store. Or that it isn't Herculean not to openly flinch when every bloody song in the mall where you're shopping for rainboots for your kid reminds you of what he did.
And this, of course, isn't to say that leaving is weakness. Rather it is to say that doing what feels right for us – especially when the world has strong opinions about what we should do – takes incredible strength. To battle that inner narrative that tells us we've betrayed ourselves for staying, to fight a culture that insists that the only acceptable response to a cheater is to kick him to the curb, to ignore the cries of the "once a cheater, always a cheater" brigade, takes a strength that most of us never knew we had.
And until we realize that, statistically, most women choose to stay, we didn't know how much strength the women around us have. Strength we don't always see because women are so good at hiding our pain.
In the end, we have nothing to prove to anyone but ourselves. And what he have to prove to ourselves is that we followed the path that was right for us. Our reasons for taking one path over another are our own. But they are legitimate. They matter.
Weakness is letting others dictate our life choices. It's abandoning ourselves to be who others want us to be.
Strength? It's what you see every day in the mirror when you straighten your shoulders and turn to face a world that thinks it knows what you should do and decide instead to do what's right for you. Whatever that is.

Wednesday Word Hug: You Are Strong