I wrote another letter to W (one I have no intention of giving her, but wrote it as a form of catharsis.) I need to post some of these here for journaling purposes. Here's today's letter:
Quote:
W,
I am writing this letter after more reflection on the problems in our marriage. It has now been almost 3 months since we separated, and while it was not by my choice, it has given me a lot of free time to read, talk to others and to think very heavily about our situation.
I want you to know that I feel I am now on the right path in life, or at the very least that I recognize that is a far better path than the one we were on up until you "dropped the bomb" on me in June. I am trying to examine what happened to us and to truly learn from my mistakes. (And they were grave mistakes indeed.) I am working to fix those flaws in me that allowed this to happen. I have made fundamental changes to the way I approach life now, such that I will be more in touch with my inner self more and in so doing avoid the severe depression that has cost me/us so much. I have reordered the priorities of my life to what is spiritually sound and healthy. I now place my relationship with God above everything and then my family.
This is still a journey, and I have not fully found the person I am meant to be. But I feel confident that with God's help I will continue to grow.
You continue to take credit for this change in me. You continue to attribute my awakening to your actions to end our marriage, and by extension to your leaving me for someone else. Forgive me for saying this, but that is utter B-S. Your actions certainly helped to precipitate my coming out of my depressive fog, but I resent the fact that you are trying to justify your infidelity as something that might have "helped" me come to my senses. Thanks, but no thanks. I don't need such "help".
Furthermore, you want to take credit for something that I beleive belongs entirely to God. God is the one who woke me up, not you. Your actions and your sins are your own. God did not want you to break your vows and to cast your husband aside for another man. But because he has given us free will, he did not stop you. What He did do was to use your transgressions to help splash cold water on me. It is just like what God did with the sin of David and Bathsheba; despite their sinful act for which God was extremely upset with David, God brought forth Solomon as something good from that union. (Of course the story goes on to say that the seeds from that sin still took root and David ended up continually paying for it, especially with his son Absalom.)
So I thank God for using your unwise choices as a means to wake me up from that which was killing my soul.
You know what though? There's more. You compounded the problem in running away from yourself and your marriage by allowing yourself to get emotionally involved with another man. You see, if we are to take your word that you had intended to leave me anyway, then you would have at least been on your own voyage of self-discovery. You would have continued to find out who you are and who you are becoming. Thus the time apart from me in our separation would have truly benefitted you and helped promote your personal growth. Even if it meant you were to grow and become someone to whom marriage to me was still over, I could more easily accept that.
But the minute you entered into a new relationship, you froze your growing process. You stopped looking at yourself to see what needed to be fixed and improved upon. You stopped looking at your own contribution to the destruction of our marriage and thus stopped trying to learn from it. No, now you have someone else to tell you everything you want to hear. Someone to say you are perfect and wonderful just as you are this very moment, frozen in the middle of your development. So now you see no reason to change, to grow, to learn. No, on the contrary, someone else validates you just as you are: incomplete.
So, as it turns out, our separation has had no positive benefit for you ...other than getting me out of your hair so you can continue to have your affair. And you no longer recognize your half of the responsibility in the failure of our marriage -- in your eyes, it's all my problem now. While I would gladly take all of the blame for this if it would truly help you, I know it would not, in fact it would only harm you more.
That is why, until you can truly accept and own your failings, you are doomed to make the same mistakes over and over.
Our old marriage is over. Our old relationship is gone. We will never get that back. But given how it devolved, and how much pain we caused each other at its end, it is just as well. I don't want to go back. At the most, I would want the two of us to start over. To pick up where we were before our old marriage and start afresh with a new relationship together. To promise to continue to grow along parallel tracks, in respect and love for each other.
But while you are frozen in amber by this relationship with this other person, I feel that you have lost your momentum and the drive to move forward, and I am leaving you behind. All I see is stagnation for you, pulled over on the shoulder of this road of life. All I see is repetition of old habits, old mistakes, including mistakes by you that echo those made by others in your family. That's the view I see in my rear view mirror. And I am so very sorry for you.
I continue to pray for you every day, often several times a day. I pray to God that you now wake from your own fog.
