However, in my life with my new husband, I have had to deal with so much anger and so much pain and so much betrayal that I am having to face the abyss and it is deep. This relationship has broken me and shattered me and changed me in so many ways that I am in very real danger of losing me...the me that I knew and thought that I was. I almost lost me without realizing it...and then I saw clearly that something bad was happening inside and I had to face it and deal with it or lose all that is dear to me.
So much of the anger is at myself. How could I have been so stupid? How could I have not seen? How could I have been decieved? How could I have allowed my life to totally come apart? I have no answers...but I know that the lonliness that haunted me all of my life was just under the surface, hidden but never dealt with. So that when Jon began to talk to me, to pretend to care for me, to describe this life that we could have together, my heart of lonliness cried, "Yes!" and leapt into the fray, taking the rest of me with it. A chance to live the "happily ever after" that I never, ever believed in! Oh, my silly, silly heart.
So here I stand, strung between my two sets of children...torn and shredded and unable to see a future for me, for all of us, anywhere. I want to go back to Washington and spend the last couple of years with my older children before they grow up and totally have their own lives. But I feel that if that happens, the destructive cycle will begin again. And my younger children, who love their father, will want him to go with us. I want big, happy family things for our future...and with this husband I fear that that will never happen. So I stand, staring into the abyss...not knowing which way to leap to save myself. Reason and logic dictating one course of action, heart dictating another.
I am trying to learn to forgive myself so that I cease to be paralyzed by my mistakes. I am reading and reaching out to God and others, searching for a church home where I will have community. I am trying to understand that people break promises to themselves, even though this is difficult for me to understand. And that sometimes we make promises to ourselves in the pain of childhood that we simply cannot find a way to keep as an adult. I feel I betrayed my inner self. My children, my family, my God. And the healing is just now beginning, as I face this chaos I have created and decide that, no, I will not lay down my life, but I will pick up the pieces, recognize that it will NEVER be the same, and build something good out of what I have. This is my hope. Good out of pain and heartache, peace out of chaos. Forgiveness out of bitterness, resentment and anger. May we all find the way home...
