However… bringing myself back to MY center, my blog isn’t about what’s been done to me only. I am, after all, in my forties. My blog IS about how I’m living on earth. So, I hope you’ll take the annoying journey to update a URL or add me as a blog favorite or change a link if I’m on your blogroll.

I’ll keep this link here to so if you don’t make any changes and you don’t mind clicking from here to my new address, that works too! Thanks for witnessing my journey and caring and posting and commenting. I know the “I’m not alone” feeling can be life altering. I seek and offer proof that there are really no new problems or issues or complexities. Perhaps, some are living without words. Some make life more beautiful with humor, others with amazing song lyrics and some with a gift to make us laugh. For those, who like me who find the world makes more sense if experiences are described in syllables, sentences and phrases -  I write.

 I had visions, as recent as six weeks ago, that if we couldn’t be a husband and wife, maybe we could be friends. Not cordial and polite. Not mere friendly. But friends. Friends who meet and go to yoga together, who get together over coffee and talk about parenting and life. I imagined we might be able to share holidays together and still have warm cranberry bread on Christmas morning. If we couldn’t date and love as a romantic and sexual couple, we might still enjoy each other’s company, cheer each other on in the healing department knowing strong and good health is essential.

 I knew in order to get there I might have to let go of being husband and wife, that to move to a place of genuine regard, I’d also have to protect my heart and my sexual health against addiction and the worry of relapse. I was not sure I’d ever be able to forgive the way the addiction violated me or ever mend the broken trust, the deep sense of betrayal given the history we had: one in which we talked openly and often about childhood trauma, abuse and the damage secrets do to souls and family systems. He led and joined in those conversations, and we had, I thought, supported each other in a many year journey of healing and recovery, individually and even as a couple.

 Now I know he was lying to his own therapist and to ours. The lies, to cover the addiction, are as painful in different ways, as the disclosure of the activities he was involved in. The lengths he went to in order to protect the addiction, the places his lies have traveled are like stained blood on a white carpet. The entire rug is colored, in effect, by impact even though some literal strands and fibers have not been touched. As months passed, each awareness of what had not been true, the lie told to cover the actual truth, started to leave me feeling as though I had been battered by the past, that it was not indeed as I had experienced it in the first place.

Intellectually, I understood he had rationalized, justified, compartmentalized. It wasn’t only me who he was lying too, he was lying to his therapist too, and to himself and that the healing he was in was more intellectual than cellular.

As time passed on, awareness made me feel less hopeful, and as though more and more of the future, the past and the present had been, were and would be infected by deceit. I wanted to say, almost daily, but he lied to me. I knew addicts lied, that stupid joke about “How do you know if an addict is lying? His lips are moving” had new meaning to me. Not us. We didn’t have that kind of relationship, denial or acting out. We were in recovery.

But we had not been in recovery. We had not been healing together. I remembered how I always woke a feeling of anxiety and a nagging, “What’s wrong with me? Why aren’t I happy? I should be happy. I have everything.” I was most anxious after sex. I assumed that’s my childhood trauma, that’s the one place it lingers most, has charge. He’d tell me, “You don’t have to suffer even for a day with that anxiety,” and at the time I’d say, “That’s easy to say when you aren’t the one considering taking (or taking more) anxiety medication.”

As months passed, my anxiety abated, for the first time in my adult life. I have never had less anxiety than I have since disclosure. I had assumed that the past trauma, the post-traumatic stress disorder I had, knew I had, was managing well, had eroded my nervous system and that there would be a level of anxiety I’d always live with. When that shifted, when I realized how I felt that secret though I didn’t know I was being lied to with awareness, I grew outraged. This time, at my own self. I had trusted him more than myself, more than my body signals, more than my own alarm of fear.

I had such faith in him, such belief in his love for me, that I never questioned he had my back. Not that we didn’t have issues or problems, but I thought we were soul mates, people who would hold each other when grief hit and tears fell or who did the happy dance when life was joyful.

Early addiction recovery was awkward, absorbing and painful. Sometimes, it was even funny. But those jokes, and conversations and attempts at banter, something that had always been so easy had an edge.

Is there anyone named John in your group?” I asked one night, “Because that’s got to be hard. He says ‘Hi, My name is John,” and everyone starts talking.” We laughed hard and loud. We’d envision a Saturday Night Live skit based around a poor recovering guy who is actually named John and everyone keeps saying, “No really, man, what it is it?”

I referred to his sponsor as “binky,” once, and the first time was by accident. The second time, calling his sponsor by this name we had for our child’s pacifier wasn’t as funny. He didn’t laugh. “I’m sorry,” I said and I was.

I’d say, “Let me get this straight, you can’t order extra cheese on your pizza, because it’s too hard to assert that need and desire, but you were able to call sex lines and prostitutes?” He said, “Yes.”

When he couldn’t watch television, cuddled on the floor with our feet wrapped in each other and blankets, and our arms wrapped around each others because it was too triggering I said, “O.k., that might actually be the deal breaker.”

Some “jokes” I didn’t share with him. Once, while I looked for a part-time job, I said to a friend, “I need money. My husband can’t have sex with anyone but me anymore and I couldn’t be less interested. Maybe he could pay me for sex instead of professionals and that would help my marriage and my job.” We laughed. Later I cried. I cried because my life had become absurd, secretive and unrecognizable. I cried because I no longer knew how to be me and live in the truth of what I was facing.

My husband and I did have talks about some of the things we learned about ourselves in our own meetings and shared some writing from our journal and sometimes it was connecting but other times just painful. He’d “own” that he wasn’t thinking about me at all. I tried not to take the addiction personally. But to know I could be so back burnered, side lined and cast aside was also painful. He had always been on my mind. When we weren’t having regular intimacy I’d worry about his heart health, his longevity and feel the “bad wife” for not meeting his sexual needs. Later, I resented him for the guilt I had felt, realizing he’d probably live to 1000 if sex were the elixir for premature aging that Dr. Oz said it was.

I got intellectually that his addiction wasn’t about me, wasn’t a personal assault, but inside, though I never said to him, You are a Monster, part of me thought it. I couldn’t get past my revulsion that his fix wasn’t a needle, a bottle, food or powdery substances but other human beings, humans who were presumably of legal age but who were also most likely damaged, hurting, victims of sexual abuse and possibly even being coerced into their profession. I didn’t say how stomach turning the nature of the addiction was to me. I didn’t have to. He felt shamed by my own sadness, my grief, and also by the questions I asked. I did ask if he had ever been a voyeur, a perp and just exactly how far his addiction had escalated. On the one hand he was hurt and on the other he knew I no longer knew anything and doubted everything. These conversations, the mere fact of them, even in attempts to get clean and clear and informed and aware, caused further divides between us.

So while we could sometimes hold hands or lean up next to one another, we could never return to being a comfort to one another. He ached for me to be compassionate and caring and there for him in his time of need. He wondered if all the ways in which he had supported me didn’t count and wasn’t it my turn to be supportive? Supportive? Not only was I not the me he had wanted and hoped I’d be, I no longer felt he had been supportive because his supportive acts felt undermined by the lies.

I felt I was being generous in giving him time to get on his sober feet, by not upending his entire living situation while he was in his first 90 days or telling many people about what I was living with. The few people I confided in wondered how I could inhabit the same house. I cared about him. I loved him. I hated him and loved him. That was how. I wasn’t sharing the same bed but I could share the same house. We had a child. I worried where he would go and how he would be and I wasn’t yet ready to put my needs on the same level as his. I thought, “He’s facing the monkey on his back,” and I knew my pain was important but he was dealing with withdrawal, going to meetings, having work and trying to be an attentive father. Plus, I was also spinning. I didn’t have my feet under me yet either.

With willingness, openness and honesty and therapy and communication, would I have ever been able to be or desire to be sexually close with my partner? I can’t say. The honest answer is I don’t know. It was going to have to be, a “we’ll see,” and an “I won’t know until we are there.” I knew I would have to see, and only experientially how many of our issues were my own issues, his own issues and the couple issues. There was never a total faith on my part that we’d recover. I did believe, early on, and would often say, “We’ll either be giving talks someday at Omega about the devastation of unhealed trauma and the high cost of the sexual abuse of children” or we’d be having each other over, maybe with new loved ones, on holidays so our child wouldn’t have to choose who to be with and where to go. I never believed we’d not be friends. I never believed we wouldn’t be in each others lives in meaningful and significant ways beyond being parents.

Earlier in the process, I would still cut coupons for his favorite foods, had my daughter buy him penguin polar fleece to sew a scarf, and showed him my Shambala Sun magazine when he started meditating. He’d ask me questions about yoga postures and I’d show him adjustments to open the hip, align the spine and support or hold the pose. I’d protect his meeting times, make meals for the family even on days I was furious because I knew he was in the early period of recovery, doing exhausting and soul searching work. I’d hold thoughts or anger, when I could, if it didn’t feel I was overburdening myself.

Plus, I did see a change. Pink returned to his cheeks. He listened to more music. He was writing again. I could tell that he was out from under even though he had told me before he didn’t long to write, wrote enough at work, and I didn’t press it but I also wondered. I’d ask him once a year how he was about his writing as he had written stunning poetry, interesting plays and incredible prose. He repeated often that the work writing was his passion; maybe in his retirement when his lifestyle changed he’d do more. As soon as he disclosed, he seemed healthier, happier and unburdened. I had compassion when I thought of the cloud, the lead blanket of deceit, the fragmented self who probably didn’t want the mirror of words, who had to hide and had no one to share the truth with. I knew at the core it was a scared little boy and not a man. I had loved him. I ached for him. For a while.

And the shift, from compassion to anger happened, not at once or in a linear way, but off and on and especially after his ninety days was up and I started to realize the magnitude of his addiction. What really changed is I started feeling more compassionate for myself. And he didn’t. He couldn’t feel sorry for the way my life was shattered without feeling consumed with sobriety risking shame. I started to feel he viewed me as a danger to his sobriety. I started to understand he may never be capable of talking to me about my feelings, about the state of our relationship and that for him, that was secondary, at best, compared with recovery. I understood it intellectually but I couldn’t figure out how and where I could relate to him if I could not to be honest with him.

I knew I couldn’t make him hear, see or witness my feelings but I also knew I couldn’t co exist pretending I wasn’t mad or sad. I began to realize how we were growing further apart and that his recovery couldn’t include me. Believe me, that was a relief too. I was glad he had a huge circle of support and it did make me feel freer. I had felt bad for him, in a not healthy pity way, that while he had a super social job and many people he engaged with, he got few if any calls on his birthday or holidays from friends or family with the exception of mine. I knew he was a grown up, one who made choices, and he wasn’t the type to pick up the phone and call others. He said he liked his solitude and family time when he was home. I believed that but not completely. I did sense loneliness beyond his grief for the real loved ones lost. I also knew it wasn’t my job to make him make friends, to help facilitate, as a mother may, play dates and opportunities for connecting. If he said he was fine, I did wonder to myself and even say sometimes, Really? But not more than once.

I had two different support groups and a writing group. I didn’t need him to be there for me. But I wanted him to be. I wanted him to want to be. I felt rejected and hurt that the pain his addiction caused me and our child didn’t seem to register, or if it did, it was an afterthought.

I understood his need to be in active recovery and having laser focus and ultimate absorption in recovery. It felt, that all of the distractedness I had always attributed to work, and then learned was addiction, became distraction about recovery. He was still not terribly available or present or pleasant. It was like having a roommate one doesn’t know well, is awkward with and tip toes around. I avoided the living room if he was in it and hid in my bedroom at night. I started to feel boxed in and as though I couldn’t inhabit my home freely. I’d resent him because I couldn’t express my anger or sadness. He resented me for not understanding how my feelings made him feel.

It’s not like recovery was the first big shift in our relationship. It wasn’t. Becoming parents was. When I became a stay at home feminist our relationship changed. I wasn’t, as I had been, in the same daily flow and schedule and work life as my partner. We didn’t both arrive home having faced the same traffic and deciding to cook or get take out. The day to day of our lives had shifted and I would talk to other parents and friends about potty training, our child’s trouble sleeping, the pre-school that might be best, and the play groups. My partner and I weren’t parenting the same way. I didn’t know what it was like to juggle parenting and a full time job any more than he understood the unending hours of being available around the clock. He couldn’t understand how I’d missed work and though I was exhausted I believed our child needed me home. I’d tell people, “I’m a feminist. Child is not.”  

I now know that during our entire marriage he was acting out. The pressures of parenting, the grief of losing his parents, his own unresolved trauma all bubbled up in him and I was no more available to him than he was to me in that time. In many ways, instead of the “perfect” marriage and the soul mates we had crowned ourselves as, we started looking a lot like people with those typical marriages. We’d move in and out of closeness and distance.  

We had a joke that “phone wife” left nice messages, was full of love and optimism, waking like dog each day ready for a new start. “Phone wife” might call him on the way to work with plans for fun and recreation, for couple and family time and by the time he was home from work, “Tired mother” pulled rank. Tired mother was full of resentments, feeling unappreciated and resentful being home 12 hour days, doing physical therapy and special play groups to attend to our child’s attachment needs.

Tired Mother helped fuel the addict I later learned. Tired mother made the addict feel justified about getting his needs met outside the marriage, as though he were somehow taking responsibility for himself and not adding another chore to Tired Mom. It was much easier, I now believe for him to betray Tired mom than it was to lie to Phone wife and to even compartmentalize me. But, that’s just me trying to get inside his addiction and that’s actually not something I can do with any accuracy.

I can say Tired Mom wasn’t too concerned if he was feeling neglected as a husband or sexually frustrated and Tired Mom didn’t want to be a cruise director making plans for fun. I was happy to let Overworked father bond with Child and go off and nap or read or write or visit with a friend. We stopped being the most amazing couple anyone ever met though we’d often hear that’s what we were. Maybe we coasted on that description and idea even when it stopped being our reality.

Still, I never thought we’d get to a place where we didn’t speak to each other in our native tongue, getting each other for the most part, if the defenses were down enough.

Had I known, asserting my needs and being honest about my feelings would have cost, at least for today, the marriage and the friendship, would I have had the courage to go down this road? I can’t say. I had not imagined it possible. But we have, in putting ourselves first, become estranged in a way that makes me wonder what the glue was.

So, while my truth for today is still stubborn and clinging and insistent that my pain didn’t injure him the way his pain injured me, I am aware that people read this blog. For those who do, my understanding is new, in infancy, not even a year old. My understanding of addiction is not intellectual, it’s impacted by my own bias, my own perspective, my own reality and pain. My first priority, in truth, is nursing myself, caring for myself, keeping myself as healthy as I can so I can present for myself and my child. In an effort not to abandon myself, I am healing my own self and not, as I would have done in the past, getting my PhD in addiction to understand my partner before even checking in with how I feel. That still feels like a healthy choice for me.

But, the knowing that my compassion about sex addiction is still in development is also noted. So, while I don’t understand sex addiction today and can’t tell what’s a weed, a wildflower or a planted bulb, I am willing to explore my thoughts, my ideas, my judgements and bring a book on gardens with me: I can look at the origins, the climate and the conditions on the earth where I stand.

For those who visit this blog looking for more education, here’s a link to another blog with a post with information about sex addiction. 

http://www.blogcatalog.com/blog/married-to-a-sex-addict

 I’m almost done with Heart-Broken: Part II, a series inspired by http://aroomofmamasown.com/ where the writer shared a seven post series about learning her husband is a sex addict. Mine isn’t the same but the idea of giving history as well as capturing the present was inspired by her.

Peanut sauce on noodles with fried tofu is good warm or cold and good as breakfast or lunch.

Varied, interesting, talented friends who call often and chat about everything under the sun.

The cards on my mantle. One in elegant writing with braille that has the letters, “WTF?” for what the f-ck? One with a stunning open sunflower facing upwards towards a sunset with an invitation to go to a yoga class? Another with long and wonderful words about “I believe in you” and getting through and another about the power of friendship and bearing witness and being there for one another.

One of my cousins who is blossoming into a young adult with her own passions and interests and helping to educate me about healthy eating. It is such a privilege to have a relationship that has spanned decades and to have seen someone grow from a little girl who loved piggy backs, playing trouble and pretending to read grown up books while in pre-school not noticing she was holding them upside down as she pretending to be outstretched on the couch.

The warm wind on a fall day lifting red maple leaves up off of the ground.

Public transportation for making trips to the close by adventures.

The soft fur of a bunny who is nibbling away on greens.

The clinking of ice cubes in a glass making the milk and raw sugar and coffee mix into a yummy delight.

The smell of lavender.

The honor of being a safety base for a child who uses me in the best way possible as a trampoline base which provides a cushion for the needs and helps launch the next jump or risk. I am so grateful to know how essential self care is so I can be available, present and flexible in my parenting.

The invention of candles without flames. My neighbor gave me one with a vanilla scent and a timer. It gives soft soothing light but has a timer and a battery operated bulb. No risk of fire.

The purring of our cat as she walks over my belly, stopping to be pet, to lick my hand and then moving to the base of the bed near my feet.

Clean blankets and pretty floral patterns which make me stop and awe at the fun of lime green, the softness of pale rose and the way the colors together bring to mind a garden scene.

Interesting articles and blogs that engage my brain.

The irrepressible desire to learn new things and the endless opportunities intellectually as well as emotionally.

Ibuprofen when it’s that time of the month simply changes the quality of my day. I am grateful for that over-the-counter pharmaceutical support.

This is not a light and funny blog or one where I share other passions and interests. Some days it feels my whole life is consumed with recovery or resisting it, with healing or feeling stuck, with obsessing about my partner’s choices. There is beauty, bounty and joy in some part of every day. To know and feel and recognize this even as I feel pain and grief makes me so aware of my own humanity and how connected I feel not only to this big dramatic story line unfolding but also the constant and continued bounty I’ve always had access too and lean into and dip into and allow to soothe my spirit now.

Grateful.

At the time, it felt like my marriage was over. That seems so minor now in comparison to all I have learned but what it did, in an instant, is make me realize I didn’t know my husband as well as I thought I had. The man I knew and loved wasn’t capable of writing an email like that one. It was crass and raunchy and sexually explicit in a raw way. It wasn’t even well written and he’s a writer. I couldn’t believe he had written it. At first, that fact alone, stunned me. As has the thought, “The man I knew…. The man I loved….” because I wonder now who was that man? Was he real? Was I living  fantasy as well.

That night, we fought. I cried. I asked to read all the emails he has written to that woman. He let me. I stopped after seeing several which were just as explicit as well as seeing the emails he got back from this woman. This woman, was a woman I had never met, but who had been a trauma survivor, like me. He met her through work and at first was in an advocate spokesperson type of role. He’d tell me how he’d get emails from her in the middle of the night, when she couldn’t sleep, and how she would reach out to him because he was kind and knew so much (from being with me and having a rough childhood himself) about trauma.

I had said, “I am willing to talk to her if it would help” as I had learned to manage many of my own symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. I had known brutal anxiety, the fear that fear would stalk me for life, and that I would never have peace. He, in fact, met me while I was in my own early recovery, maybe a year into facing the demons and abuse of my past. I was in my early twenties.

At that point, my mission in life was to break the cycle of abuse. I had more than ten cousins. My goal was to a person who could be loving, kind, reliable and not abusive. Back then, I did not even hope for becoming a person who experienced peace and happiness, who had my own house, home, family and a life built from  choice and freedom. I wanted and worked hard not to be a victim.

In college, I stopped dating. I had been in a four year relationship with an alcoholic from the time I was sixteen until I was twenty. That man, four years older than me, never quit drinking while we were together. But before I was to leave for college he asked me to stay, to not go, because he was really going to get sober. I considered not going to school. But I was the first person in my family to get into a four-year school. How could I not go? I had saved money and worked after college in order to go. And I went. I chose myself. I chose my own future. I chose school.

I am the daughter of an alcoholic.

I studied feminism, social psychology and I started to read about family dynamics. Reading, feeling and understanding how unhealthy my family of origin had been, for me, and generationally was painful. I interviewed my mother, Nana and Grandmother. I interviewed my Great Aunts. Story after story was about the spouse who drank or abused or gambled, the “overachieving” drunk who died at 50 of cirrhosis and the cruel great grandmother who everyone wished had died sooner because she was so violent and cruel to her children and grandchildren for her entire life.

Safe. Really, I just wanted to be safe. A safe person to love and to live in a home where I wasn’t afraid to go to sleep.

When I read my husband’s email to another woman, especially the woman it was to, I realized the trust and faith I had in him was not warranted. I was angry, sad and hurt but I was also open-hearted. I wanted to understand. Did we have the type of marriage where we were going to tell each other if we were getting attracted to another? I had crushed on a boss and left the job when I was afraid the frequent travel would tempt me. I was getting a little too concerned about how I looked before heading to work each day and I knew my heart was starting to shoot arrows in two directions. I told this to my husband after the email.

I wanted to say, “I have been tempted as well” and maybe we could learn to open up. I had wanted to understand why, how and if this was perhaps a cautionary crisis of some kind. Maybe, this had happened in order to prevent a “cross the line” into flesh on flesh rather than just email. That is what I had thought.

But something about the way he responded didn’t sit right with me. I kept asking, “Are you sure there’s not more,” and sometimes, “If there’s more, you better tell me because if I find out later that there is….” and he was emphatic that there was not more and that he loved and adored me, that it was meaningless banter. At first he minimized it and my reaction and then he was sorry. So sorry. Really sorry. But something didn’t feel right. I got a book and asked him to read it. It was about emotional affairs and after he read it he said how sorry he was and that he could see the betrayal did hurt, even if it was “only” email.

I couldn’t look at him the same. I no longer trusted him. I didn’t believe there wasn’t more and I wanted to let it go but I couldn’t. I kept bringing it up. One night, on a Friday, he stormed out of the living room and said, “I don’t care what I did, you can’t talk to me like this,” because he felt I was hammering away at him, making accusations, distrusting him, assuming intentions he didn’t have, assuming his not sharing was inconsiderate, etc. He was fed up and tired and annoyed.

I felt bad. Sad. Guilty. And mad. That Sunday, I sat down, and said, “Will you just take a lie detector? I don’t want to keep worrying about what else and what more and if there is or isn’t anything else. I just don’t trust your word now.” I don’t even know if I would have gone through with it. I had seen how some doubting spouses on Oprah did ask spouses for lie detectors. I can’t say it’s an idea I would have thought of on my own but it gave a measure of peace to people.

He squirmed in his seat. He was on the end of the living room couch and he seemed to shrink and grow pale and the couch seemed to envelop him. He looked like he was disappearing before my eyes. The substance of the man I loved vanished. He started and stopped and said “i don’t know,” and “that’s a little invasive,” and “i have to think about it,” and with those responses. I knew.

“You are lying. Oh my god, for the last two mos. you have been lying. I can tell. I can see it. Right now, you are lying to me.” I didn’t need a lie detector. The thing that made me know, without any doubt, was the distrust. I had always given him the benefit of the doubt. I had even thought before, “he works lots of late night meetings, if he was someone elses spouse, I’d wonder,” but I KNEW I KNEW him. I KNEW I didn’t have to worry. I KNEW I didn’ thave one of those marriages.

I didn’t know what I thought I knew.

“It’s not what you think,” he said and the he told me about phone sex, prostitutes, advertisements and personal ads and meeting people “to save money” where money wasn’t exchanged.

Sickness. Nausea. HIV. I was stunned. It was not what I thought. What I had ever even considered or worried about. Phone sex? Hookers? Casual sex. Huh? Who? What?

Did the ground still hold me up? Did my knees still bend? Were stars still twinkling in the sky at night? Stunned. I gaped a silent cry before I turned to horrific sobbing. I cried and cried and cried in the bathroom where our asleep child wouldn’t hear. I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.

He sobbed. He cried. He begged me not to kick him out. He had no where to go and no one who would take him in. He begged me to let him stay at the house. He sobbed and cried and said, “What am I going to do?” I was cruel. For the first time in our marriage, his crying did not make me want to hold him. I was angry and annoyed and in shock. I handed him the phone and said, “Now, why don’t you call someone?” I headed to my bedroom upstairs and said, “I hope it was worth it.” I don’t remember if I said, “You make me sick,” but I may have and I was literally gagging.

We were in ugly agony individually. I felt I no longer knew anything about him. Stupid and ashamed and shocked is how I felt at first. Then, when I went to bed and saw my asleep child, a mother tigress woke in me, “How dare you?” I thought. He had risked his life and mine and in doing so perhaps burdened my daughter with sick or dying parents. I wondered who could be capable of such cruelty and carelessness and deceit?

My husband.

And what wife could be so oblvious and stupid?

Me.

My child is sad, teary, angry, grumpy and home with a fever. I hate not speaking the truth. As a child, living in a home where there was abuse, secrecy and a hue so heavy it was a tangible fog that didn’t allow people to see clearly, hear, witness or observe what was happening right in the house. My buttons are triggered by the secrecy aspect of protecting anonymity. I don’t mean with the grocery store clerk, the mail woman, the neighbor  who has never shared a cup of tea. I’m talking with this precious being who has known one reality and now knows another and doesn’t understand what happened.

Is this true in any separation or divorce? I don’t know. So I struggle with what to say and what not to say and notice myself biting my lips and tongue more often than I am used to. Child feels it’s my fault that her father isn’t here and is mad. I am SO GRATEFUL to hear the true thoughts and feelings inside which come up in frustrated or gut-wrenching tears. It also breaks my heart. And, I get so angry. I want to say, “He chose addiction over us. We were no match. Not me, not even you sweet child, not even you for addiction. A fix was way more important than us.” But Child does have and deserves to have TWO PARENTS, TWO people to feel safe with, who love and cherish.

This is where my spouse’s sobriety matters to me. He is sober, in recovery and for our child this is WONDERFUL. I can’t assume too much about that sobriety other than it is healthier than the alternative and that is AMAZING. If not sober, the level of distraction and the level of carelessness, even when one loves another, does not make one capable of parenting well. My partner agrees so I say this not just as a judgement. If relapse happens, visits are supervised. That’s how serious this disease is.

And yet, we don’t acknowledge Daddy has a problem. And that doesn’t feel right. There may not be a “feels right” answer only what is in child’s best interest at this age and given what is true now? I am grateful to have a professional versed in our child’s special issues to get guidance from and help.

My bes friend told me to be grateful child isn’t going underground with feelings, trying to pretend all is o.k., working to please parents but knows it is o.k. to be mad and sad and expressing in words and emotion feelings. It helps to hear this because it doesn’t FEEL good to be with the anger and sadness. I KNOW it is healthy but it is hard. I help my child in my arms as tears flowed last night. First child was missing me. Next, missing her Daddy. The feeling of always having to miss one parent to be with another. Ugh.

I go to the parenting books, to books about allowing emotions and being with them without fixing, attacking, lighting a fire underneath them, just to be with them. With child, I give support as well as witnessing.

Child is so versed in “it’s not your fault” that child has said, “Why would it be?” as though it were the most ludicrous thing ever said.

New territory in parenting.

My child still has two parents and I am grateful, for her especially, he is in recovery. He feels he’s living his amends by being sober. For me, that doesn’t address the hurt the addiction caused or the trust betrayed, but sobriety is essential. For my child, to have a father who is sober is enormous and I am grateful not be in a bitter and ugly separation.

I feel we are in the process of ending.  He feels we are in the process of individuating. I feel we are dismantling the marriage. He still has hope for the marriage. We speak two languages. Right now, we can’t hear one another. We see lips moving and tears flowing but we can’t hear. I got some guidance from a therapist to help our child with the separation as she has some special issues. Therapist asked how things were going. I was able to say we can’t communicate. To me, sobriety is the beginning but doesn’t seem to help with accountability. It seems to me that my spouse wants recovery and the marriage separate much the way he wanted the marriage to be separate from his acting out. The therapist said, “For accountability,there has to be attachment. Without attachment there can’t be accountability.”

I think, for my partner, it’s either too painful or difficult or complicated or soon for him to get sober and realize the impact his addiction had. I understand that with my brain. But my heart and being can’t compartmentalize.  I don’t even want to divide myself up in that way I can wait and hold and wait for the right time and place. But, right now, my emotions are not laundry and I fold up and put anger in the  sock draw and love where the jeans go and heartache where the work out clothes were. I can’t pick each  piece out, fold and divide and pack away until he says, “I’m ready to open that draw now.” Well, actually, that’s exactly what I have done for many  months but it’s not something I choose to do. I choose  not to live that way.

I have disconnected from my feelings and tried to get distance, MANY TIMES, from them especially when they were painful or complicated or heavy. For me, what I am learning to do is to let the feelings be, to experience and own them and then figure out, after feeling  them what I need and want to do, what I desire and choose.

I have sadness in my heart and gratitude today. Both. I never imagined my life going this way. It never even occurred to me that my marriage wasn’t for life. But this understanding that life isn’t to be IMAGINED but lived is a gift and one I am grateful for. How much of my life has I spent imagining or deciding how to feel and act and telling myself what I should think, do, be and feel as opposed to finding mature and effective ways of acknowledging and communicating how I actually feel.

I will be a healthier person and therefore a healthier parent as well. I didn’t know I wasn’t modeling authenticity for my child because I didn’t know that TRYING TRYING TRYING with only will and resistance is a kind of bullying myself into submission. On my knees, I surrender. It’s humbling and liberating and has made room for ALLOWING.

There is flow and letting in and letting out. Allowing in and letting go. The phone ring all day yesterday with loved ones wanting to know how I was holding up. I was touched by their love and kindness. Sometimes I couldn’t answer the phone. My child and I made pancakes and watched t.v. Other times, I picked up the phone to hear a loved ones voice. Sometimes I said I’d call later when child was with Dad. 

I cried after my child left. My family,  driving in a car to an apartment on a Saturday. I cried and cried and cried. And got on the phone. And worked out. And cried. And got on the phone. Sadness. Change. Love. Gratitude. All of it is spinning in the washer that is me.

What I Won’t Miss

Condiments. I won’t miss the twenty-nine jars of relish, hot peppers, four varieties of crusted edge mustard or the third 1/2 empty container of light Mayo. I won’t miss the jelly left to harden at the back of the fridge or the v-8 juice spills that aren’t seen. It’s RED juice on a white background, it’s not water or milk, it’s RED.

I won’t miss the seventeen styles of athletic socks all a slightly different height or with a different logo, or with a splash of color or a logo in just a certain spot so that pairing them turns into a matching game. Or hairs that do not clean up after themselves once trimmed.

Will he eventually notice that his hair does clump up the drain and will not remove itself? Will he remember what garbage day is?

I will not miss certain odors after certain foods.

I will not miss feeling obligated to send holiday cards to his co-workers, friends or relatives and guilt if he doesn’t do it as I refuse on feminist principles or guilt if I cave and do it because I don’t want Aunt Bertha to feel neglected.

One less person to share one bathroom with.

Repeating myself and competing with the t.v. Nope, won’t miss.

Wondering what and why and how and if and when I could change this or that than maybe….????

I will have empty spots where the relish used to be. It will take time to allow the space to be or to expand or fill with something else. I am heavy-hearted and grieving. But, there are things, immediately I will not miss.

A friend said, early on, “Do you really want to be with someone who has to go to three meetings a week not to have sex with prostitutes?” It stung. For me and for him. And it wasn’t meant to be mean. It was a way of saying “It’s o.k. if you choose not to do this.” At that point, early on, I was open to the possibility that maybe we could really come to a true and deep intimacy. Perhaps, we could become the true soul mates everyone assumed we were. Perhaps, we could find a way to be real and intimate in bed, and not just in conversations or debates or discussions.

He had stood by me when I was in my own crisis. When he met me I was recovering from the trauma of early sexual abuse. I was, underneath many coping skills, a mess. I could function well, dress up nice and look o.k. Inside, I was terrified. He knew this when he met me. He didn’t think me weak or scary. He called me a healing warrior. He said I was brave. I believed he saw me that way. I believed his words. Then. I don’t know what to make of him or those words now or then.

Perhaps, all of these years later, I am saddened by his secrecy. I thought we were the couple who confided in one another. Did he not trust me with his secrets? Was it always easier to lie to himself and to me? How could he know so much about childhood abuse and recovery, about sex abuse and recovery, about healing and be an addict? And once sober, he still clings to privacy which to him is a healthful boundary and to me is the same distracted, closed off, no access way in avoidance.

It’s not the sex addiction alone that I can’t face. I was willing to try, to see if we could achieve a deep intimacy and I have no idea if that would have been possible even with effort on both parts. I know that the unfinished business between us is relational. Some of it can only be healed in the relationship. I know patterns and dynamics repeat. I know I have work to do on my own self whether I stay or go. And there will be things I will have to address or redress in other ways, at other times, alone and/or with others shall I ever have another intimate beside myself.

Truth be told, I don’t even know if I’m any good for him. To me, he is a fraction of who I thought he was. Not because of what he did but because he didn’t voluntarily get help before being caught, didn’t felel a moral imperative to come clean or if not come clean at least  set me and his child free rather than leaving us attached to the bumper while he descended. He never came and talked and shared or said, “I have a problem.” Not even, “I have this problem,” but, “I have a problem” or “I am not happy,” or anything.

 The trust I lost was not only my trust in him but my belief that he trusted me. He did not trust me with his vulnerability, his pain, the ways he had masked his own childhood wounds. He did not trust me with his truth, the truth, and therefore made compromised the integrity of the relationship as well as endandering himself and me. He made me a prop in the story of who he wanted to be and wished he was but not of the whole person he actually was. It makes me so sad. He was the hero calling me heroine. We played our roles. Now he is the phoenix rising from the ashes acting as though I am trying to clip his wings and forgetting he is the bird who has left droppings all over my true vulnerability.

I don’t feel betrayed only by what he did do but by what he did not do. I know, so much of what I wished for, is not possible from someone who is living an active addiction. Few sex addicts come clean on their own, and though I wished that were different, still wish it were so I would have soe reason to believe he is sincere, much of what I wish doesn’t mesh with the reality tht is addiction.

But, he doesn’t share  even since sobriety. He has his meetings, his sponsor, his five times a day phone call people and those are the people who know him best. He logs twenty to thirty hours a week on recovery related meetings, calls, meditation, writing, prayer and therapy. He is consumed with recovery and the cliche about replacing one addiction with another comes to mind. But, this time he feels he’s ascending. And if he is at least not dragging loved ones under while he falls to the bottom that is progress, that’s his version of a “living amends” and it’s not nothing. And it’s not enough.

The people in his group have known him since sobriety. They have known him honest, sober and vulnerable. They can genuinely mirror respect, regard, hope and a path. He has not “dialed in” to meetings to the way he phoned it in at home. He has not been too distracted to return their calls. He keeps them higher than baseball games on him priority list and I have to say, it’s the green ugly monster of jealousy knowing I never achieved that rank.

And, they know the him he hopes and want and is becoming. They may know his vulnerable self better than it has been known to anyone. He may actually be more real with them than he is anywhere else. Not acting. Not pretending. Not playing a part. Not feining sincerity but being real. And truthfully, the highest part of me is so happy for him. He has a circle of men who he can cry with, both about early trauma and about living with and fightiing this particular addiction. That is HUGE and healing and he is surrounded in a way he never was before. For a man, to carry the shame of sexual abuse, I believe, is even harder than for a woman. Harder because we live in a culture where it is more difficult for men to own their pain and shame. He deserves to heal. He seems to be doing healing work.

I understand that we are both victims of our early wounding, wounding that happened before we met one another, wounding that is part of the reason we coupled.In the beginning, despite my shock, I wanted to stand by him. I couldn’t imagine us not sharing the rest of our lives together. Some of that was co-dependent habit but it was also because I thought we were a couple for life. And I wanted to believe recovery was not only linear for him but circular and inclusive. And I wanted to include him in my recovery as well. But, for him, he can only do one thing at at time. Right now, that is staying sober. He can’t work on rebuilding trust, explaining why he couldn’t open up during the marriage or even witness much of my emotional response to his addiction and betrayals. My responses, my feelings, my sadness and anger in particular trigger his shame. His shutting me out, even though I understand it is protective and necessary for him, trigger my feelings of abandonment.

So, we are, now, with awareness both making choices. Each one of us is saying, “I will not sacrifice me even for you, not my truth, not my feelings, not my experiences, nothing.” We may each be behaving with more maturity and regard for self than ever before. The cost may indeed be the relationship and any intimacy true or real. With each other. But, I will never again put his needs before my own, hesitate to tell him things I am afraid will hurt his feelings such as being intimate with you, sexually, was pleasant at times but never desired. In part because of my history. In part because of MY intimacy issues. Those things I said, often, but only a few times did I say, “I don’t feel closer to you after intimacy,” and later in the addiction, now understanding when he “thanked me” for a good job and didn’t even think to recipricate it didn’t just feel empty and as though I was being used, it was. He was used to being “serviced” and his praise was my tip. I did not feel soul connected, closer, more united. I felt sick to my stomach and eager to get dressed again. I felt agitated. I always assumed it was because of me and my past, an assumption he didn’t challenge. At least now he doesn’t pretend to be putting me first. He used to pretend that and I used to believe his words and wonder why they didn’t resonate.

I have been healing and in recovery for years. Not 12 step recovery but trauma recovery. I have been in therapy, done meditation and yoga and journal writing. I have read about trauma and development and attachment and health. Now, there is another level  of work. Now I own how I actually feel in the moment, not how I wished I felt, or what I think I should do or what someone else might be able to do.

I own my anger. It is real and it is deep. It also contributes to the wall between us. I know I am not the safest person for him to confide in. I am not a silent witness honoring his truth telling. I am an angry and hurt wife. I am an angry and hurt wife because I am an angry and hurt wife.  I don’t know if  I can ever look at him and see more than a mere fraction of the man I thought he was. I don’t know if I can look at his efforts towards recovery and sobriety and say, “Good Job,” and feel genuine pride. Right now, it still feels like I’m supposed to suit up in a cheerleading outfit and say, “Hip Hip Hurray for not Taking Our Marital Vows Astray.” I can’t get a, “I’m so glad you didn’t cheat on me this week” greeting card.

For him, getting sober is his way of “owning” what he did and taking responsibility for himself. I understand that has to be priority number one. But, because I didn’t know there was a disease present (a horrifying fact in and of itself) recovery alone only brings him back to the person I already thought he was, one who is honest and loving, one who is loyal and would not endanger himself or me, one who believes using prostitutes denigrates him, me and the prostitute. He can’t bear to hear the ways in which his acting out has pained me. I can’t put my anger or my pain down. I tried, in the beginning, to save my feelings and share them with others and give him a respite to recover, and at least get his first ninety days. But I can’t be in relationship and not be in relationship. 

I’m not that big. I’m not that mature. I’m not able to not take the addiction personally. That’s my truth for today. I grew up in a house where it was unsafe to be. I was not safe while I slept. I was injured and hurt and violated while sleepy, before bed, under blankets and in secret. It is not his fault I was victimized in childhood. It is not his fault he was victimized in childhood. It is not my fault he has enormous pain. It is not my fault I have lots of scar tissue. It is reality. It is real.

I can deal with most anything, except deceit and even as I read that I know, well, I am dealing with deceit aren’t I? The thing is, I just don’t know if I can ask of myself to allow even one more person who has trampled on my heart to have the keys to it and my home. I can believe, and do, that he was acting out and that his addiction was not a dart aimed at my heart. I know the people who abused me were also acting out pain and dysfunction and trauma but that brain knowing doesn’t prevent the injury to the soul that already happened.

I am finally sticking up for the little girl in my own soul and psyche and saying, “You deserve to feel safe. You deserve to live in a home free from secrecy.” And, perhaps this is one of the gifts of disclosure. Now, knowing what I know, not guessing or trying to figure out or supposing, but KNOWING I am making decisions to protect myself.

There are people who find true connection, renewed love, a deeper understanding of themselves, their partner and walk in their own recovery, and do so as a couple. They make decisions with awareness and self care and love.  I do not see myself as capable of being one of those people. It’s not because my husband hasn’t stayed sober. I honestly can’t get that excited about his sobriety when for eighteen years it was something I assumed he had. It’s not like he was coughing and giving me second hand smoke and now the house and his lungs and my air is finally clear and I can say, “Wow, the air is cleaner. This is what I always wanted.” 

I didn’t know the kind of detector I needed wasn’t operating and I can’t live as a lie detector. I choose not to check phone bills or credit card charges, to dig though pants pockets or look at receipts. I do not want computer programs or special phone codes or to avoid television shows or movies in order to protect his sobriety. For me, that’s a level of co-dependence I can’t assume (for others it might be a form of self care I am only speaking for me). His sobriety is his responsibility. My safety is my responsibility.

I can’t count on him not lying to me and I can’t count on me knowing when he is lying. What I can count on, is myself and my ability to protect myself and make myself feel loved, cherished and safe. I didn’t get that in childhood and that hurt. I’m not sure what I did or didn’t give or get in my marriage. 

What I have learned, which is essential and which I am grateful to know, is self care is possible nd not only optional but required. I too have to take responsibility for the impact my traumas have had on me. I can nurture my own ability to recognize my own needs and meet them or figure out how to get them met. I can trust that I can treat myself like a long lost best friend in need of soothing and gentleness during this huge life transition.

I am grateful he is becoming a healthier man. I am grateful I am becoming a healthier woman. I am grateful our child will have healthier parents. How can I wish for anything else? Perhaps, for us, our parting is launching each of us into a new and deep level of self care. I can’t regret that.

Some days I rage at how this can be my actual life. But it is. And remembering improved health for each and both of us, even if not together, is a triumph. For today, that is enough. I admit that I do not know if I am good for him, if he is good for me and if we are capable of being good together. I admit I may not have what it takes to even risk finding out, that my heart may be too tender to expose it to more pain. For me, admitting I don’t know what is the “right thing to do” but going with my gut and saying, “Here’s my limit. I can’t do this, not now, and not the way we’ve been doing it. It doesn’t feel safe or productive.”

I am grateful to know how I feel and to have the courage to take action. I am where I am. I am who I am. I know what I need.  I am grateful.

I will miss the smell of Starbucks coffee, ground, as I open the bag each day to make his coffee for the next morning. I don’t drink that coffee but I’ve done that ritual for eighteen years.

I will miss the looking out the kitchen window and waiting for his car to pull in, to be happy to hear or see it as it arrives home.

I will miss the idea of travel together when we have more time and money, to Europe and Asia and to New Mexico too.

I will miss the illussion of unending time to figure out everything, do anything and work on it all.

I will miss reading poems and quotes out loud to one another.

I will miss holding hands at church.

I will miss movies with Twizzlers and Popcorn and soda, the kiss before the previews, and the talking about it on the way home.

I will miss looking at the special ornaments with photos and personalized messages.

I will miss the phone messages, giving and getting.

I will miss my nickname and calling him by his.

I will miss showing him slide shows on the computer of outings we went on while he worked, and his exuberance, and asking, “can you send me that one?”

I will miss the shared history, the references to movies we saw, places we lived, jobs we had and becoming parents together.

I will miss his feet under the covers and twisting with mine.

I will miss him brushing my hair when I ‘ve had a bad day.

I will making him his favorite foods.

I will miss our marathon length greeting cards to one another.

I will miss his loud laugh.

I will miss what I thought was his curiosity about what had filled my day, what I had believed was his desire to have time with me and my desire to see him.

I will miss missing him. I have stopped missing him already because I feel I didn’t and don’t know him. And even that I miss. Rarely do I miss him now.

I will miss the idea of being in a loving, safe, secure and supportive marriage with a loyal and devoted spouse who respects women in general and me in particular.

There are things I will not miss but today, knowing the end of our living together is coming, I miss. I miss. I miss. I miss. It feels so very forever. We aren’t saying it’s forever or shutting the door on the possibility of together. But I have said how I feel and how I feel is without an open door to my heart and as though the relationship, after 18 years in, took 9 months to unravel to a clear, “I can’t do this any longer.”

I will miss the idea of us old together, sitting together at our daughter’s graduations and caring for one another in old age.

I will miss believing I met and married and fell in love with a good man, a man who would not betray me so deeply.

I will my certainty about and my trust in him.

I will miss thinking I knew or was known.

Miss. Miss. Miss.