Friday, April 17, 2009

At a loss...

So I have been rewriting this post in my head about a million times. Do I write it, do I not write it? In the end I decided to write it because the purpose of this blog is for me to get my feelings out and at the same time have some sort of path to look back on and see how I got from Here to There. My blogging has been sporadic and I hope to someday remedy that, but since it is mainly for me and I honestly don't even know if anyone reads this I will just continue to write here.

I made it through the one year anniversary of John's loss and really felt like I was going backward instead of forward. February and March were pretty much blurs of sadness. It felt like I was never going to heal, as if the rest of my life was going to be this continuing pit of feeling alone and lost. On March 31st, a Tuesday I went to bed so filled with sadness that I prayed to God, to John?, to anyone listening that I needed help to get past this sadness. I was so tired of feeling like I was just functioning but not living. I cried deep, sobbing cries, the pain was just eating me up and I finally had to let it out.

You know the saying..."Be careful what you wish for!" .... you have no idea how true that really is. The very next day, April Fool's day to be exact I found out that I was the biggest fool ever and I went from being sad to being so fucking angry I could hurt someone...or to be specific two someones. Apparently, my wonderful, loving, devoted husband wasn't as devoted as I thought. I received a letter telling me that my children's Social Security payments were being reduced because there was another child who was being claimed on John's account. A child born less than a year after Caitlyn my 4yr old was born. It took me about 20 minutes to process the information and realize it wasn't a mistake... and the second it sunk in I knew immediately who it was. Off on and on, from the very first moment I met this woman (John & I both worked for her father) I had this feeling that something wasn't right. Anytime I questioned it to John he would tell me that I was imagining things, and for whatever reasons I had I choose to ignore my gut instinct, that this woman was a danger to my marriage, and just blindly trust in the lies he fed me. Even as I come to terms with the truth, it is so hard to believe that he not only had an affair with the office slut (she slept with every single one of her father's employees) but he fucking got her pregnant!

There are no words to explain how angry, hurt and betrayed I feel. What pisses me off the most, is that the entire time I was telling him that I had this feeling that I couldn't trust this woman, he was telling me that she was a slut and that he would never think about touching her because who knew what sort of diseases she carried... and all along he was fucking her. All of the times that he would tell me that he loved me, all of the letters he wrote telling me that I was the love of his life, that I was the only woman he wanted, that he would be lost without me ...it was all a lie and I have to wonder if he was trying to convince me or himself? I don't know if this was a one time thing or an ongoing thing... I am pretty sure it was NOT a one time thing although the only person who could tell me would be the slut and I don't want to hear anything she has to say. In all honesty, does it really matter? Once or a hundred times.... it is all the same... my husband was a liar and a manipulator.

As I process all of this shit, one thought keeps coming into my mind...I feel as if he died all over again. Seriously, it is lucky for all concerned that he is already dead because I honestly don't know what I would have done if I would have found out while he was alive. He always made jokes about being afraid of my Hispanic temper... he should have been very afraid because I could beat the crap out of him right now. Here is the hard part, how is it possible to still love and mourn for someone that you now hate? And the real question is do I really hate him? I am still struggling with that, I want to hate him but I think I mostly hate myself. I fucking knew something wasn't right and I completely ignored it. And as much as I hate this situation, part of me is thankful for not finding out until after he was gone because the reality is that I would have left him and he would have died with this anger/hate between us and I would have been the one who had to live with that guilt. Because regardless if I knew or didn't know, he still would have got cancer, he still would have died...no one deserves to die alone.

So the sadness is still there but most of it has been replaced by anger. This anger is motivating me to do things that I should have done a long time ago but felt too guilty to do. It is hard to lose a spouse, someone who everyone including myself described as "the love of my life" and not feel guilty for being alive while they are gone. How could I ever date again knowing that it would be impossible to fill the shoes of my "one true love"? Notice the sarcasm here? Am I ready to date? Fuck no... it will be a long time before I will trust myself to find someone worth my time, but do I want to keep that option open? Yes! I am 36... my life is far from over, John may be dead but I am not and someday I hope to find someone to share my life with. Even before I knew this horrible truth about him, I knew that someday I would be ready to move on and every time I thought about it I felt guilty. Well guess what? The guilt is gone! I was able to remove all of his stuff from my room and am working on doing the same for the rest of the house. Wedding pictures of the two of us will soon be removed and they will be replaced by pictures of him with the kids. My wedding rings and the heart necklace he bought me are now in a box to be given to Caitlyn some day, his shirt that I have slept with for almost an entire year has now been boxed up along with the rest of his stuff. The anger motivated me to do all of those things that might have taken me years to do otherwise. For that I am thankful.

For the first time in over a year I feel free. I am not bound by mourning, I no longer feel the need to define myself as the grieving widow. I no longer feel honor bound to build him up and be his secret keeper. I can now see him as a man, a man that I still love, but one that was flawed and broken when I met him, a man that I made the choice to marry and love, a man who was human and not the superhero I made him out to be when he died. I am working on forgiving him his mistake, because that is what that slut and her child are, a mistake. I know how much he loved me, I know that with all his heart he wanted to be a better person for me and the kids, I know that the most important things in his life were me and our seven children... there was no place for her or even that child in that. When we found out he was dying his only concern was me and our kids, not once did he mention his mistake or her child, honestly I think he was somehow able to separate himself from that and from them, they never belonged to him, they were no part of him. Would I have respected him more if he would have confessed this to me before he died? Yes, but do I understand why he didn't? Of course, for the same reason why he lived with this lie for over two years. He loved me, he loved the kids and he didn't want us to hate him, he didn't want to lose us or the respect we had for him.

So how can someone who loved me so much do something so stupid? I am working on coming to terms with that, I don't like the fact that I ignored all of the signs, but I can live with that. I refuse to feel ashamed or guilty about something that has NOTHING do do with me. He didn't sleep with the slut because there was something wrong with our marriage, he didn't sleep with her because I wasn't giving him enough love, or sex or understanding, he slept with the slut because he was sick. He had a sex addiction that I was aware of, that I did my best to understand, that I did my best to ignore because I felt that I would be enough. The problem with addictions is that there is never enough, it has nothing do with feelings or emotions or love, it is a sickness just as much as drug addiction or alcoholism. It doesn't take rocket science to draw the lines between growing up in a family effected by alcohol and marrying someone with another type of addiction. My entire life has been spent trying to fix people and things as a way of not dealing with what is really going on inside of myself. When someone doesn't need me to fix them, like my first husband who wasn't broken until our marriage ended, I question the relationship, if I wasn't there to fix it then did they even need me, what was my purpose? It also isn't too hard to understand that I found broken people in my life because I wanted to feel needed, I wanted to be the person to make everything right because that is my "job", that is how I have defined myself. So can I really blame John for fitting into the mold I needed him to fit into? Placing blame isn't going to take away the past so it really doesn't matter, what does matter is where I go from here.

I needed a wake up call and if I don't get it right this time then there is honestly no hope for me. I am now taking two BE classes, one to help me deal with this betrayal in my marriage, the loss of what my marriage was to me and grieving for John all over again, the second is for myself, to figure out how to make myself happy, to be happy with myself so that I don't gravitate towards another person that needs to be fixed. I have a lot of work to do but I have a lot of support and lots of blessing to be thankful for. I have so many people who believe in me and who have been there for me through all of this. I have every reason to get it right... and guess what? That is exactly what I am going to do!
 

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