DRIPPING

I’m holding a colander underneath the cool running water in the sink.

The water is running through and down and around, but I can’t figure out why.

Someone who is involved in sexual sin thinks that the colander won’t leak.  Even though I knew in my brain I was holding a bowl designed to leak I saw it as intact.  I thought I could hold all the water in, but instead it just ran out all over the place.  And I’d made a horrible, devastating mess.

Everything I was doing was beginning to fall apart.

I was trying to hold together two relationships:  one given to me by God and one that I had taken.  I didn’t want to lose my husband and my daughter, but I didn’t want to end my affair.  I didn’t know HOW to end my affair.

But it all began to break down.  I lied so much sometimes I didn’t even know if I was telling the truth or not.  I began to become overly obsessed with my weight including exercising and eating habits.  I thought this other man loved me in a way that was different than my husband loved me and I thought I needed both in order to be whole.  During this time I would try to hold it all together, like water in a sieve, but it all just ran out.

Alcohol in unhealthy quantities was also a regular part of our weekends.  My husband and I would go “out” in groups (after getting overnight babysitting) dancing and drinking and doing things married people, God’s people, should not be doing.  He would be there too, along with my husband.  This was one of the ways I saw him and fulfilled my own twisted desires to steal (someone’s husband), kill (my love from my own husband),  and destroy (both relationships).  My husband and I hated being alone together during this period of time because it was “no fun”.  The truth was, we were too scared to see what would happen if the dust settled and we were forced to really look hard at each other.

So we filled up our emptiness with other things, people, trips…

And through this whole time, we’d show up to church the next day after a night of excessive drinking and act like nothing had happened.  Sometimes I’d still be drunk on Sunday mornings.  But I was great at hiding it.

I became wildly polar in my emotions.  One afternoon I’d be uncontrollably crying and that same night, I might be basking in the attention of being the life of the party.  I was depressed and I loathed myself and what I was doing.

One night, when I was out with a girlfriend and we were both very drunk, she asked me directly if I was having an affair.

I denied it, but I knew she’d seen it in my face, in my demeanor and in my actions.

She asked me again and I caved easily. I told her just enough to satisfy her incessant vodka-motivated questioning.  She told me to end it and tell my husband.

Of course I will…

But I didn’t. And a month passed and she asked me again if I’d told. And I hadn’t.  Because, namely, I didn’t know how.  I didn’t know how to tell the truth anymore.

I’d begun to know myself best as

Faithless.

Disloyal.

Untrue.

The train crash that happened next was both the worst and best thing that ever happened to me.

It maimed me.  But it also healed me.

[PART FOUR: CRASH will be posted tomorrow.  To start from the beginning, Part 1 and Part 2]

PART TWO:  CLICHES

He was everything my husband wasn’t.

He looked different.  He talked different.  He listened to me.  He was there for me.

[Does this sound like a cliché yet? Because it does to me.]

Believe me, none of these are excuses.  But in the long sense of this relationship, there were reasons why I cheated.

No one wakes up one day and decides to commit adultery.  I don’t know what other people have told you, but something like this takes a hundred million tiny poorly-made decisions layered on top of one another.  Never excuses, but certainly reasons.

So I began to take advantage of the lack of boundaries in our marriage and spend more and more time with this man.  I took advantage of my husband’s faith in me. Before text messaging, we talked on the phone.  A lot.  Too much.

And we met to talk and have lunch.  We talked about our spouses and our growing need for each other as friends.  [By this time I’d become a skilled enough liar that not only was I lying to pretty much everyone I knew, but I was also telling myself I needed this man.  I obsessed that only with him in my life would I be happy.]

Our relationship, from beginning to end, would last for nearly 3 years.

I was more obsessed than I was in love.  I was more lustful than I was caring.  I was needy and self-absorbed.  I always knew it would end someday and somehow but I just didn’t know how.  I didn’t know how to extricate myself from this elaborate cage I’d created around myself.

In the middle of this time my husband and I decided we wanted to have a baby.  I know what you are immediately thinking.  My affair, although in full emotional swing before I got pregnant, was not fully physically intimate until later.  I never questioned the paternity of my daughter.  I believe now that this was one of the ways, even in the midst of my stupidity, that God had his hand on my life.

Maybe it was an effort to cement a quickly disintegrating marriage, or maybe we were both being selfish by wanting to create something that loved us both unconditionally.  Maybe we could start over with this new little life…

I thought new motherhood would reform me.

Another cliché.

But six months after my daughter was born, I found myself in the same vacuum I was before: longing for something that wasn’t mine, trying to steal someone’s husband because of my own depression.

This man and I’d spent some time emotionally celibate, trying to piece together what we could of our broken marriages, but time apart only fed our desires.  We came back together with renewed zeal, and this time, entered into a physically intimate relationship.

I’d given him my body and my heart, which really weren’t even mine to give. They belonged to my husband but I thought he was doing such a poor job with them that I was justified in giving them away to someone else.

I will spare the internet world the horrifying details of the next 18 months.

Self-serving.  Lost.  Dangerous. Hateful.  Wrong.

And I began to know myself as

Adulteress.

Ashamed.

Angry.

I searched and didn’t find.  I tried to gather and gain, but it all just slid through my fingers.  The harder I tried to hold on to my own sanity, the more I felt like I was losing the grip on myself.

[PART THREE: DRIPPING will be posted tomorrow. To read Part 1, click here]

PART ONE:  STIFLING

I can be stifling sometimes.

I mean there have been times in my life when I’ve chased people away because I’m so intense. I don’t mean to be; I’m just programmed that way.

No matter how many “times out” I take for myself, or self-analysis afternoons I carve out of my schedule; no matter what I actually change in my actions and relationships, when it’s all over, I might behave differently, but I am still pretty much the same person on the inside. I’m intense.

It’s a good thing because so is my husband. He’s almost as intense as I am.

We match each other word for word, hurt for hurt, and love for love equally. We raise our voices together, we debate issues with intelligence, we both ask difficult questions of the other and expect smart answers in return. He’s never shied away from me and I’ve never backed down from my intensity for him either.

We are a good match.

And that is one of the reasons I got into the biggest trouble of my life about nine years ago.

It is no excuse, but I have a hard time doing anything half-way. In fact, there are no excuses good enough for what I did. I really screwed everything up.

Every good thing in my life had been handed to me carefully, beautifully wrapped with thick gift paper so that just the act of opening it was half the happiness. I had a husband who adored me, a good education, a solid job, a group of friends who were kind to me and loved me. I was 25 years old, the owner of a home, and full of a lot of narcissism and pride. I thought everything I had I deserved.

And I was ungrateful. I was beginning to become unhappy. I was stifling. I had no self-monitor for the passion in my life and my marriage was beginning to fall apart. I was a controlling wife and needed to be in charge to feel normal.

In reaction, my husband turned inward (like any normal husband would with a stifling and overbearing wife) and away from me. We had already developed diseased habits in our young marriage for communication, problem solving and intimacy. Four years in to our marriage, even though I knew with my whole soul that we were meant for each other, I was tired of it. I added to an already sick relationship some initially small, but very poor choices.

Without searching it out, I began an emotional affair with someone we both knew. And even though it began slowly and took many months to gain any ground, soon it ballooned into something I had difficulty controlling.

I’d prided myself on “control” and “passion” but with this, this affair, I felt unable to control my own feelings. It was its own monster that I had allowed to grab hold of my heart, my God-given marriage, and my soul. I’d created it and now it was controlling me.

I hadn’t lost any intensity, but instead I’d transferred it to something, someone, else. Someone who wasn’t mine but I’d stolen anyway.

Fraud. Thief. Liar. Soon-to-be-Adulteress. These were my new names.

I didn’t know it then, but it would soon lead to much more than just an emotional attachment.

It would become a full-fledged affair.

[PART TWO: CLICHES will be posted tomorrow.]

How do I know if I choose correctly?

Because seriously, some things look the same.  Feel the same.  Even smell the same.

Like picking produce.  There are ways to figure out if the orange will taste good:  heavy fruit means lots of juice.  Color has little to do with taste.  And pineapples:  more yellow (I’ve been told) on the outside means it’s riper.  And if the leaves in the center come out easily, you know it will taste good.  I’ve tested this on two pineapples this summer and so far, I’ve chosen well.

But sometimes, even the heavy orange doesn’t taste good.  Or the nectarine that smells so much like a July morning doesn’t actually measure up.  I cut open the deep red strawberry and the inside is white and bland.  On the outside, it looks just like the one that tastes like sugar.

Sometimes you just don’t know.  You have to commit to the fruit and take a bite.

So what about real life?

Schools for my girls.

Charities we give to.

What I spend my time and energy on.

Sometimes it all looks the same on the outside.  One school may look, feel, smell the same as the one down the street.

And how can I possibly choose between the thousands of viable, worthy causes on this planet?  Do I give my money to dig wells?  Buy shoes? Fight disease? Stop war?  I’m only one woman with limited money. Where do I give it when they all are deserving?

And then there is my time.  When I get some time to myself, do I spend the afternoon doing the writing that I’ve been pushing aside for weeks? Do I call the friend I haven’t spoken to in months or do I clean my daughters’ rooms, giving them a fresh place to play when they get home from their grandmother’s house.

All of it is good.  Or seems good.  How do I make the choice?  There are no good produce indicators on things like this.

I think it’s a little like eating a strawberry.  I have to use my best judgment and take a bite.  Choose the best school that we feel comfortable with.  Choose  a charity that I know is doing good things and spending money wisely.  Choose the to do the most pressing thing with my time and trust that the rest will be completed in time.

I just have to commit and take a bite.

Because sometimes, one thing really isn’t better than the other.  If this is true, with certain things, I can’t really make a wrong choice.

HOW DO YOU CHOOSE BETWEEN THINGS THAT SEEM EQUALLY GOOD?