12.22.2004
Into the Light
My journey into the light began with D. leaving me this past spring. As she was leaving, I found myself in the midst of a homeowner's crisis. Our house is built on a plot of land that is near the top of a significantly steep and terraced hill. Built on the fourth terrace down, our backyard contained an inground pool with a concrete deck that sat at the top of a really severe slope -- darn near vertical -- overlooking the neighbor's back yard. And the privacy fence which had been built atop this was leaning over the hillside.
In early April, I led the children and D. in a work party to dismantle that section of fence in order to scope out the logistics in replacing it. Money at the time was in very short supply, so once we got the fence torn down, I put up one of those orange, plastic mesh barriers to keep small children and animals from falling into the pool and drowning. While waiting for the money to install the new fencing, I decided to begin preparations to open the pool. However, when I went to check out the skimmer, I discovered that it had become torqued and cracked as a result of the concrete apron sliding over the hillside. The previous owner had built this pool on top of this steep hillside without installing any kind of retaining wall. As a result, the pool was now unusable.
After discovering that the cost of repairing the damage to save the pool would be in the tens of thousands of dollars, I decided to fill in the damn thing and plant a lawn. Step one in this process was to rent a 90-pound jackhammer for the next two weekends to break up the concrete decking. As I mentioned, I had little money, so this was going to be a total do-it-yourself project extending out over several weeks.
I had no idea at the time I started this just how 'by myself' I was going to be. D. left just after I finished the concrete demolition. As she took load after load out of the house with the assistance of a neighbor, I stood atop 60 tons of rock-riddled fill dirt with shovel watching her departure and felt that old, now-familiar sense of abandonment.
By all existing standards, our separation was a rather cordial affair. D. and I seldom raised our voices to each other, and while we disagreed on the need to end our marriage, there was no name calling, no villification.
D. decided to leave, in my opinion, because she saw no hope of fulfilling her vision of what a happy, loving marriage should be. We are two very different people in many ways. There are few interests we have in common. I like sports, literature, politics and trying different types of food. She prefers music, dancing, basic meals and working on household projects. The only affinities that we shared were for freaky sex and a tendency to isolate. Neither of us had any real friends that we could do things with, so all of the weight for our personal happiness fell onto our marriage. Collapse was inevitable.
Beyond that, we each were having problems relating to each other's children. Her boys are starved for male attention, affirmation and guidance -- having been essentially abandoned by their father in toddlerhood. While very eager to provide that for them, I found that their damaged psyches were producing behaviors that I could neither understand nor tolerate. Gradually, my attempts to provide structure and discipline became lopsided -- to the exclusion of patience, gentleness, kindness and respect -- and they and their mother aligned against me with the effect that their behaviors worsened.
D. was equally flummoxed by my children, who being older and much more like me, were acting out in their own frustrations over losing part of me to these strangers and having their space invaded by the two little boys. D. also experienced for the first time the clash of cultures that I had been dealing with since V. and I divorced. You would never confuse V. with June Cleaver, whereas both D. and I like to keep a neat home. I sort of fall in the middle of this scale, having lived with V. for 10 years and learning to accept a certain amount of chaos that comes from living with a messy wife and four small children. D. had a very difficult time with the fact that these children, coming from a home where it was OK to eat bowls of cereal while watching TV in the living room, didn't value a clean home. And she found herself reacting to some of the things my kids said -- and did -- to hers.
For my part, I had pretty much withdrawn into anger and sulleness over being trivialized in the day-to-day raising of her boys. She often overruled me in front of them, giving them the excuse to disrespect and disobey me. Not that I let that slide, but the situation deteriorated rapidly into a power struggle of futility. I decided to just avoid as much as I could by watching TV, and if they got in my way or damaged any of my stuff, they got whacked.
However, there was another force pulling on me during these days. The power of the Holy Spirit. We had been attending our church since February, and I was finding the teaching compelling, biblical and convicting. After D. left, I began attending an evening group called Celebrate Recovery, a Bible-based, twelve-step program and support group. Between these two influences, I made a commitment to remain married, even if D. refused.
This was an interesting and difficult concept for me. It meant that I was not going to give in to her attempts to divorce, nor give her quarter in her rationalizations for this course of action I took every opportunity to counter every argument with my understanding of the Biblical principles concerning our situation, and I was as tenacious as a pit bull. There was another aspect to this chosen path: I was choosing to remain married, even though my wife had left. Previously, I had taken off the wedding ring in anger at her leaving, but now I wore it again. I had thought that maybe it would be nice to find someone new from the church to date, but I closed that door. The only things I continued to struggle with was the occasional lapse into smoking pot as a way to numb the pain -- and several binges into Internet porn.
I also had to choose to forgive when I could have easily ended it because D. slept with someone else.
D. and I continued to see each other and talk to each other during the entire course of our separation, and we often ended up sleeping together. I'm not sure if that was always the best idea, but I figured that we were married and that it was better for us to relieve our pent up desires with each other than it was to pursue other outlets. This arrangement was disrupted one weekend in June when I called D. up to ask her out to dinner. She informed me that she was unavailable until Sunday that weekend. When I asked what she had going on, her instant hemming and hawing told me all I needed to know. So I asked her straight up if she was going out on a date. She said she was going to see an old friend in Akron who happened to be male, but stopped short of calling it a date. I stepped back, took a deep breath, and accepted that this was not an unexpected thing, considering her refusal to place any hope in the restoration of our relationship. Then I asked if she would be available to get together on Sunday, and she said that we could get together for lunch after church.
Well, D. does not show up at church, and my anxiety deepens. I called her cell to see if she was still available for lunch. No answer. Later that afternoon, she calls me and tells me that she is sorry, but she just got my message. We agree to have dinner together.
Dinner was uneventful, until I start asking how her date went. She was vague on details, but it was clear that she had slept with this guy.
After quite a bit of cat-and-mouse, I look over at her and say, "Look, I don't know what the deal is, but I need to know what happened before I can continue in any kind of sexual relationship with you."
"You don't have anything to worry about," was her reply.
"What does that mean? Did you have sex with him or not? And, if so, were you safe?"
Ultimately I came to know that she had had protected sex with the guy both the night before and that morning.
Now here's the interesting part. We went into the house, continuing to discuss this new turn of events. As we talked things over, I found myself becoming extremely aroused, and we ended up having very hot sex shortly thereafter.
The next morning, I was deeply troubled. Not only by her infidelity, but by my willingness to brush it aside in the face of a sexual turn on. So troubled, in fact, that I called the church and made arrangements to see a pastor for counseling. There I was challenged to choose between the paths of forgiveness and reconciliation or divorce under the justification of 'adultery'. Given my own history of depravity, the right path was pretty clear.
I went back to D. and told her that I still wanted us to get back together, but that I could no longer be sexual with her if she was involved sexually with anyone else. She decided the next day to end all contact with her friend from Akron, but didn't make any commitment to anything else other than going to counseling.
D. was very convinced that divorce was the right thing for her to do in the situation. She looked over the issues we'd had, our differences in interests and temperament, and concluded that we had made a mistake in getting together. My position was very different. Yes, we had differences and hurts accumulated in our time together. And, yes, our decision to marry was driven more by our genitals than our brains. Certainly, we never prayed to God to affirm our decision, nor followed any of His precepts in how we conducted our relationship from the very start. However, we WERE MARRIED, and now God was a part of our lives. If we were going to continue to claim to follow Him, we needed to start at the point where we were placed in His Plan.
Over the course of the next few months, we continued to spend more and more time together, worshipped together at church, and continued our counseling sessions. D. was still very skeptical about taking that plunge to trust God and come back together under the same roof.
Beginning in late August and into September, God began to do some amazing things that softened D's heart. It's difficult to enumerate or even remember them all. In fact, I'm sure I don't even know all of the things that were going on with D. Nonetheless, every day seemed to bring a new word of encouragement or act of kindness or startling collision of circumstances that all pointed to God's blessing on our relationship. Finally, D. agreed to come home. She and the boys stayed with me at the house for most of the month of October, with us finally moving all of her stuff back at the end of the month.
Despite the miraculous turnaround, the past two months have not been easy. The move back was kinda rushed in order to have us all together for the holidays -- and therefore very stressful. I had grown accustomed to having my own single guy routine back again, and I found myself resenting the 24/7 intrusion. The move resulted in quite a bit of clutter, as boxes blockaded most of the front room on the first floor. There were school activities and football practices, work and every other weekend crowding with my kids. It was like starting the adjustment process all over again.
The counseling sessions became roller coaster rides -- one week we'd be up and chummy, the next near despair and enmity. One theme did emerge from this period of upheaval, however, and that was that we were doing this in faith and obedience. We didn't really know whether we even loved each other, but we did know that God had affirmed His Will that we be together as husband and wife. We simply fell on our knees before God and submitted to the circumstances.
Once we made it to Thanksgiving, however, things started to settle back into place. Over the past few weeks, we are finding those feelings for one another that we feared we lost or never real in the first place. We talk, laugh, flirt, kiss and even cuddle in a way that is not fearful. We've weathered so many storms and come back together, that I believe we have finally given up our contingency plans.
Oh, and by the way, we now know that we love each other, even though it's sometimes scary to admit.
I'm not going to close this with some cliche happily-ever-after homily. Things can still get tough. Two days ago, after a wonderful weekend with D.'s father and step-mother, I sucuumbed to the temptation to get on the Internet and look at porn. D. busted me when she was trying to fix the Internet connection later that evening and saw the recent history. This sent her into a tailspin where she gave in to her worst doubts and fears.
Thinking that there would be more evidence of malfeasance on my part, she dug into my email and saw some correspondence from blog readers and drafts of the last few entries I've made that I emailed to my home account. She read my thoughts and feelings concerning my journey and came to the conclusion that I had unfinished business with V. There were other violations of my privacy, but I don't need to go into that.
So we are faced with another challenge. I've been confronted with the devastating impact that having a secret life can have on our loved ones. The hurt I caused by my foray into swinger fantasy cut me to the core. I risk the loss of one the most wonderful restorations I've ever seen. For nothing. A fantasy.
This is the walk, however, as I've come to experience. This entry is not a testimony of reaching a faultless state, it's a chroncile of a sinning stumbling through a journey in the light. The light exposes all that is wrong, as well as that which is right. It is only when I crave the darkness to hide the black splotches staining my soul that I risk losing it all. I have been learning, and continue to affirm, that it is my willingness to examine these blights in the illumination of God's Spririt that provides the real hope.
Because only when I face my ugly truths for what they are, am I in a position to be set free from their curse.
- posted by The Drake @ 3:54 PM
