Grace...ah, yes. struggling to accept it in other parts of my life. and puzzling that it's such a struggle! perhaps after years of not measuring up, being criticized for things such as how loudly I chew, how I sit down, how I hum without being aware--and then ultimately being rejected because I'm "cold and distant"--unconditional and undeserved love are even harder to grasp. Funny--in years of ministry I was pretty effective at making sure others felt loved by God, but it seems I was always feeling like the vessel and not the recipient.
It's not so much that I want to see xH suffer as much as we have suffered. It's just that thriving at our expense reinforces the denial of his responsibility, in fact reinforces that he is still a wonderful, warm, sensitieve, pastoral guy to so many people who have found it convenient to cut D and I out of their lives. It loops back into my grief about losing so much more than just my marriage--but also my family, most of my friends and my church community (concurrently, but not because of xH). It just seems that D and I have suffered all the consequences and I can't, for the life of me, figure out just what I did wrong. And I'm stuck there.
M60 H52 D20 M14 yrs OW-old gf from 1986 bomb-5/18/08 H filed for D-9/10/08 D final 4/24/09 xH remarried (not OW) 2012