Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Chapter 1, the beginning of the end....

The realization that things wouldn't be the same happened for me in August of 2008.  I discovered that the man that I had loved since I was 17, was married to, and had just given birth to our 3rd child was betraying me in the most horrific way.  Let me just say nothing, and I do mean NOTHING prepares you for the moment you hear the harsh truth that the Man you trusted with your heart and your future was seeking out and paying women to have sex with him.

The moment my worst unimagined fears had been confirmed....I couldn't breathe....as if the all the air had been sucked from the room and a crushing weight of the" what now?" fell upon me.  I couldn't cry..... why couldn't I cry? I had, as  many of us do thought about what I would do if I was ever betrayed, however never in my worst nightmares did I imagine this big of a betrayal.

I sat in disbelief. I could hear my own heart pounding as he begged for me not to leave...to forgive his unforgivable betrayal.  As if a loud warning straight from God my house alarm which had never been armed in all the years we had lived in our home, began screaming loudly for the entire neighborhood to hear.. piercing that beautiful August night. The alarm sounded for what seemed like an eternity until I ripped every last wire from the control panel begging God to just make it stop, to this day the wires still hang from that box as a sad reminder to me of that horrible day.

I spent most of the next 2 1/2 years in a fog, a paralyzing denial.  I wanted more than anything to just erase that memory, I would have given almost anything to Un - Know what I knew.

What I knew, the man I had married, had been sleeping with prostitutes aka hookers, aka paid whores as well as a married co-worker named Sheryl, and a college girl from Toronto named Laura he meet while in Las Vegas during a managerial conference (the last one on the very day I was 7 months pregnant and laying in a hospital bed being evaluated because my baby had quit moving). How do you come back from that? The answer to this question at least for me is...you can't. There is more betrayal that happened, but at this time I cannot bring myself to write it down, as it is hard enough for me to think it or say it out loud.
 
Fast forward  3 years, 5 months, 23 days or 1271 days or 1,830,240 minutes (give or take) I am nearing the end of the divorce from a Man I had been with for 18 years of my life. I am soon to be a divorced Mom of three kids, no real college education and 11 years outside the workforce. Scared doesn't properly portray what I feel right now.

What will the next year bring to me? I hope for a growing peace with the past and finding ways to take joy in the little things day to day that the rest of the world see's as chaos.