Right then! Time to start. When we’re at the end of the story we’ll know more than we do now, for it has to do with an evil ogre! one of the very worst – it was ‘the devil’! One day he was in a really good mood, for he had made a mirror that had the property of reducing everything good and beautiful that was reflected in it into practically nothing, but whatever was fit for nothing and looked bad grew more pronounced and became even worse. The loveliest landscapes looked like boiled spinach in it, and the best of people turned ugly or stood on their heads with no stomach, their faces became so distorted that they were unrecognisable.... It was most amusing, ‘the devil’ said...
Everyone who went to an ogre school – for he ran such a place – said far and wide that a miracle had taken place; now for the first time one could really see, they felt, what the world and people really looked like. They ran around with the mirror, and finally there wasn’t a country or a single person that had not been distorted in it. Now they wanted to fly up to Heaven itself to make fun of the angels and the ‘Good Lord’. The higher they flew with the mirror, the louder it laughed, they could hardly hold onto it; higher and higher they flew, closer to God and the angels; then the mirror shook so violently as it grinned that it shot out of their hands and crashed down onto the ground, where it shattered into hundreds of millions, billions and even more pieces, and that was precisely what caused even more misfortune than before, for some of the pieces were scarcely as big as a grain of sand, and these flew all over the world, and wherever they got into people’s eyes, they stayed put and then those people saw everything wrong, or only had eyes for what was bad about something, for every speck of the mirror had retained the same power as the whole mirror had possessed; some people even got a tiny mirror- shard in their heart, and that was quite horrible – the heart became like a lump of ice. ...
When I became Gerda, I thought I would be walking barefoot through the snow all the way to the Snow Queen so that I could rescue H from his prison, and his tears would wash the devil's shard of glass from his eyes and his heart and he would be able to see again.
I couldn't see this story any other way. This story was so true, so beautiful and so clearly the story of my own life that the story of my marriage would have to have the same ending. It couldn't be written any other way. And I thought that God wanted me to do that, and that he had to restore my marriage because marriage was sacred and restoration was obviously God's plan for all marriages.
I felt this way even after my H filed.
And it was only once the D got underway that I had to begin questioning it. Because all that my H had done before that seemed misguided, MLCish, but ultimately something that I could get past once he was "himself" again. But everything he did for the D went far beyond adultery or lying or abandoning us. It was clear that he wanted to destroy me and humiliate me and leave me on the side of the road, hopefully dead. And I began to realize that H had changed, but that maybe, just maybe, the 2x4's that chased me off these boards in the first year were true. Maybe this side of H had always been there too. Maybe there was a reason that I had never felt that he loved me as I had heard/seen a man can love a woman. Maybe my own childhood traumas had made it impossible for me to see that I ended up with exactly what had been so familiar to me since I was little, growing up in a house full of mental illness and even MLC.
I'm in year three of this never-ending D now, and maybe I had to go through it in order to see my life before H (long before), during H, and one day, after H, clearly. Maybe it had to become this clear that H would do anything to destroy me to see that there were other ways to stand for your marriage. One is just, standing for your kids. Realizing, for example, that letting them witness an abuser abusing you over and over and over is not "holding the family together."
For a long time I thought that something was wrong with me that I couldn't detach or, once I could see that I actually had detached, that I couldn't stop my heart from racing all the time.
Stander, many of us have bona fide PTSD. I think I only started understanding that recently. My brain has been changed, and I am not going to fix that by reading lots of posts about how to detach. Neither are you. It's not all in your head. Some of it is in your brain and your body. You have survived a trauma. And if you had a live-in MLCer, that trauma went on day after day after day.
We are trying to heal from a trauma while taking care of kids alone -- or, perhaps worse, with the MLCer -- while starting a new life while finding the self we had forgotten while trying to broker a deal with a crazy person while spending the last money we have on legal fees while trying to hold on to our vision of truth that had been gaslighted while trying to help our kids heal while going to court again and again and again while battling cancer or various other stress-related illnesses while hatching chicks or baking or looking at the trees in the moonlight or seeing friends or bike riding or seizing any joy we can in between the waves of terror or anguish while our in-laws throw us away like a worn out sneaker while the business we shared with the MLCer goes under or gets sold or we try to hold on to it or the house we loved gets foreclosed or we try to hold on to it while our kids ask us why or don't ask us anything but suffer silently or eat too much or shoplift or run away or refuse to go to school while we are beating ourselves up for not being able to keep a clear head when doing one or some or all of these things to stay afloat and live authentic lives and the only place we feel understood is an on-line forum where we can't even know each other's names let alone ever have a coffee together.
Every year I give up the boards for Lent, as well as some other things. And the first days are painful and disorienting. And then I learn to trust the silence and face my fears and sink to the bottom and look up at the light -- or as Sage said, Look up at where you want to go..... And I pray a lot -- and I pray for all of you. XO
Last edited by Gerda; 02/16/2102:16 AM.
I believe I will see the bounty of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord with courage. Be stouthearted, and wait for the Lord.
