I haven’t posted to you for a long time, but I've been reading along.
I'm sad that you are still stuck in despair and depression and I wonder why out of all of us, and goodness knows many of us have come and gone in the time you and I have been here, you are still stuck in the dark, dark place you are sitting in.
It doesn't have to be like that. You don't have to stay stuck. Sure, your husband may not come back. Your son may go away to college. You will have friends come and go. There will be health issues, there will be family issues. That's life. That's what we all deal with. The thing about life though is that you just have to keep going. When you stay stuck and obsessing about one particular thing that went wrong, you are denying yourself the opportunity to have a fulfilling life.
What if your husband had have died? Would you still be acting like this if you were a widow? Why are you so special that you get to wallow in your grief for years and years? Do you ever wonder why God put you here on earth? What his purpose was for you? Do you think his purpose involved this level of suffering? You know, throughout life, pain is necessary, it helps us grow, it helps us become the people we are supposed to be …. Suffering is optional. Suffering is a condition we chose.
Have you ever thought about how many people are worse off than you? There are millions of them Rysmom. Millions and millions.
I’m working in a developing country at the moment. Yesterday I spoke to a woman who has been through amazing trauma and pain. Last year, her husband of 20 years ran away with another woman – literally ‘ran-away’ no one knows where he is. There are no laws here to support women who are abandoned, so she was left to raise her 8 children (although 2 are now deceased). She suffered incredible personal pain and shame, because in this culture, having your husband leave you is a fate worse than death. Indeed many women do take their own lives if their husband leaves. It makes you a pariah in the community and in your family and means you have no power to be involved in any community or family decision making. Only a man can be involved in those things.
She’s a subsistence farmer, she as to grow enough vegetables in her garden to feed her children and earn cash by selling some of her vegetables to have enough money for school fees (no public education here).
About 6 months ago, and not long after her husband left, 2 of her older sons (15 and 17) were helping her in the garden, they have no water supply, so she asked the boys to go to the river and get some water to water her seedlings in her field nursery. A big nearby mine has diverted much of the water supply, so the ‘river’ is now a raging torrent. Both boys drowned that day.
About a month later, when the family was still buried in the grief of losing the oldest sons, her daughter (11 year old) was walking home from school (about 15km, a long walk, but that’s the value people place on education because they know it’s the only way to change their lives) and she was viciously raped by a “pack” of men on the roadside. In that attack, she lost an eye, she was so badly brutilised she now has a colostomy bag and she’ll never be able to have children.
She told me, “at first, I was broken. I cried for my husband, I wailed for my boys. I swore at God for what he’d allowed to happen to my beautiful, pure, daughter. My family wanted to put me in an asylum. Then one day, I realized God did not want me to abandon my other children and he gave me these troubles, so I would know about them and help other women to overcome the difficulties life here on earth gives us.”
She has now established a Women’s Support Group for abandoned wives and women who’ve suffered sexual assault. In only 2 months she’s got over 300 members and those women are supporting each other as they deal with the trials of being women alone in a culture that really only tolerates families that are headed by a man.
Rysmom, that woman faced tragedy that neither you nor I can even imagine. Did she wallow in her suffering for years on end? No. She courageously turned her suffering into something positive, to make a contribution to the community she lives in and ultimately the world. Her hideous pain has been transformed into something amazing.
When I think about the kind of woman I want to be, I look at women like her, an illiterate, subsistence famer from one of the most remote parts of the world, a member of the second oldest culture in the world. Not only has she walked from the stone-age to computer age within the space of 20 years, but she’s suffered the worst pain both “ages” could impose and still she keeps going and contributing and loving her children and all the people around her. Don’t you want that for yourself?
The thing I don’t get about your posts, and I’d really like it if you could respond to this because I’ve been wondering about it for years, is that you don’t even seem to LIKE your husband. Why would you want to be with someone you don’t even really LIKE? You seem to have different values, different interests, different tastes. So what’s with that? Why do you even want him back? He had an affair, he’s living with another woman, he’s engaging in activities and interests you don’t agree with.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned through my divorce, and subsequent dating, is that you can’t change someone. No matter how much you think you “love” them, you can’t and have no right to change them. We can only change ourselves. Love isn’t conditional. Love is about accepting our loved ones the way they are, not how we want them to be.
Rysmum, you can read all the self-help books and bulletin boards in the world, but until YOU make the decision to get better … it’s not going to happen.
Take care and sending you warm thoughts and prayers.
V
V
Never make someone a priority, who makes you an option.
I think one of the biggest blessings, and something that has helped me get through this terrible time, is that when I was 21 I went home with my BFF from college.
She was from India.
I was young and didn't realize how bad this was going to be. Starving people who literally died in the streets. Lepers who came up begging and quietly touched me with their stumps.
Women with half-dead babies in their arms. My friend was from the highest class and wouldn't allow me to give them any money--they were the lowest class and in her mind they needed to die to come back as something better. See, they had to have been bad people in one of their past lives to have come back in such a lowly class.
I had not yet formed my very STRONG opinion that this is utter nonsense. Those poor people. One in particular has haunted me, but I won't go into details. It's gruesome.
My husband filing for D and all the horrers that come with it???
Nothing compared to watching your children starve in front of your eyes.
I now volunteer for Hospice and hope some day I am left with enough to get by so that I can do mission work.
It's like a "silence of the lambs" kind of thing--I hope to stop the "screaming", or in my case, not be haunted by some of those images.
Most of the world has it worse off than anyone on these boards. There are so many positives to focus on. Food, assistance, friends--so, so, SO many!!
True, it helps to have perspective. While I was going through my divorce, my best friend was struggling with putting her husband into a nursing home (he has early-onset dementia as a long-term consequence of a brain injury he had many years ago). She also struggles financially to raise their young son alone on a very limited income.
Compared to her, I had NO problems. A fairly amicable divorce and reasonable financial stability. I would remind myself that loads of people go through divorces every day and this was not the end of the world.
I too am at a loss of words for helping you. It's clear to me that there's not a big chance of saving your m with your behavior and yes you do have something to lose b/c you refuse to do what we suggest. You lose the opportunity to do something helpful to your sitch.
You really have not truly done the DB work. You combine it with approaches that undermine it, like sending him a rejoice ministries article. What did you think would happen? He'd slap his forehead and say "NOW I GET IT!! OMG I HAVE TO RUN HOME!...??"
We KNOW your approach isn't working. He came back for 2 years and left again. You never said what you did in those two years
or how you changed. OR IF you changed.
And what Bond said about the tennis man, is spot on. It's ironic you feel like 2nd fiddle to him but with your h living with OW you are fine...b/c he's buying you a washer and dryer...I mean, this is nuts to me.
Your son is not simply taking "normal" anger out on you. I wasn't there but my guess is that he needs a strong mother and an advocate.
You come across as being in a state of internal paralysis. Weakness in a parent annoys and frightens children, especially at his age.
Have you tried medication? I say that as a woman who has, and who benefitted greatly.
To me it seems you are putting your despair onto the altar and thinking it makes you a martyr...
but it's helplessness you are choosing - OVER YOUR SON.
Be brave and get help Rys. You concern me.
M: 57 H: 60 M: 35 yrs S30,D28,D19 H off to Alaska 2006 Recon 7/07- 8/08 *2016* X = "ALASKA 2.0" GROUND HOG DAY I File D 10/16 OW DIV 2/26/2018 X marries OW 5/2016
