The last year and a half has been a time of great change in my life – the type of changes that not only upset your physical circumstances but which can also shake your spiritual foundations. There are many aspects of the life changes that God has brought me through which I do not fully understand, but I am hoping that the process of writing out my thoughts and feelings will be therapeutic for me, and I pray that perhaps my experiences will be of some encouragement to others who may find themselves in a similar situation.

If you have read my updated “About” page you will have noticed that I have recently divorced. I have not spoken openly about this until now; in fact, only a handful of people know what has happened from my perspective. Part of me needs to set the record straight, and the rest of me simply needs to move on, this being a means to that end.

I was married to my ex-husband for just shy of 21 years. By all outward appearances we had an ideal relationship and our family was one which our friends and neighbors envied. However, behind closed doors I lived in a fear that’s difficult to name – fear of making him angry, fear of not being good enough or not doing enough, fear that he would leave me if I said or did the wrong thing, fear that I would not be able to make it, financially or emotionally, if I were alone, and fear of being considered a failure if I didn’t make my marriage work. Over the years I became a shell of the person I used to be, to the point that I didn’t even know that person anymore.

I tried to lose the pain I felt inside in many ways, mostly in caring for my children. I made them the center of my life, staying in the marriage so that they would have a loving home and (what I thought to be) a good example of stability. I tried to pretend everything was as it should be by making my home an idyllic place, as if by mastering the lost arts of homemaking I could also capture the peace I felt portrayed in images of bygone times – and in the blogs of so many of the wonderful ladies whom I follow.

I strove to do everything right –  to be the Proverbs 31 woman, but my husband never “rose up and called me blessed;” in fact, it seems that the more I did, the more he expected of me.

Sometimes I would forget things I was supposed to do, either phone calls I needed to make or things I was supposed to go pick up – little extra things outside of my normal responsibilities – and I would always be accused of only doing things that were important to me and of never remembering anything he asked of me. I came to the point where I lost all confidence in my abilities, feeling worthless at every turn.

Our relationship didn’t start out that way. I feel confident that he loved me when we married. Looking back now, I can see where things began to change when I graduated from college and got a job that more than doubled our income. In time, I got a better job in a management position, with more responsibility and demands on my time. The situation at home became more difficult, to what should have been a breaking point, but our children were young, and he gave me the choice to give up the job or save my family, and I chose keeping our marriage together for my children.

As time went on things got steadily worse, but at the time I didn’t realize how bad things were getting – like cooking a frog by putting him in cool water and slowly heating the pot to boiling. “Normal” changed gradually by degrees, until what I perceived as normal would have been absurd in anyone else’s eyes. Yet in the back of my mind I was aware that my situation needed to be hidden, that what I had become was shameful. I wasn’t even able to have hobbies or interests outside of what my husband wanted to do, as I would always be told that those things took away from me being a good wife and mother.

When you are in the situation I was in, you don’t want anyone to know what your life is really like or the depths to which you feel you have fallen, so you put on the happy face, play the role of how you wish things really were, and shut out anyone who could get close enough to see that things are not what they seem. You become isolated, lonely, and hopeless.

The church teaches us that there is never, ever a reason to leave a marriage except for marital unfaithfulness, as these are the words of Jesus (Matthew 19:3-12), although Paul says that it is okay for a believer to leave an unbelieving spouse in I Corinthians 7:12-16. So, I stayed. I was prideful – I was afraid of what people would think of me, afraid of admitting that I was a failure, afraid that I would destine my children to be more likely to divorce, afraid of being alone, afraid that I would never recapture all I had lost of me.

So I prayed. I prayed daily for my husband, that he would be the man Christ created him to be, that he would be the husband I needed him to be, that my love for him would increase, that God would change him. I prayed for years and years for my husband, but nothing changed, and my helplessness and hopelessness continued to grow. Anytime we had any type of disagreement, somehow it would always turn around into being my fault for something I had said or done (or not done), and I would end up apologizing, so that even my husband’s failures were my responsibility. I’m not saying I was always right – God knows all relationships are have two sides, and each of us tend to be the hero in our own stories, but I’m talking here about an extreme, out of the norm. My husband’s drinking increased, and he would no longer listen to me when I tried to talk to him about it or my concern about the history of alcoholism in his immediate family or about how much and how often he had been drinking. I would later learn that he had been a functioning alcoholic for years, very effectively hiding it even from me.

About this same time, in early 2011, a new “yard kid” came into our family, a friend of my children’s whose home life was unstable at best and who needed a substitute family he could call his own. He treated me in the same way my husband treated me, yet my husband was resentful that I would accept that behavior from this young man. I didn’t see any difference in how the two treated me, so I was quite confused. This led me to begin to examine my situation, and it began to dawn on me what had become of me. More and more I found myself saying and doing things that I explained with, “I just want peace. I don’t want to be yelled at. Whatever it takes, I just want peace.” My husband started to complain about the time I was dedicating to this blog, so I gave it up.

Our children had become teenagers by this point, and I began to see my son acting more and more like his father acted toward me to other people, especially his girlfriends. And I saw my daughter seeking guys that treated her like my husband treated me. Thinking about it made me sick sometimes, so I would just shove those thoughts into the dark recesses of my mind where I held the thoughts that what I had become was a shameful thing. But during this time my prayers began to change. I no longer prayed for my husband to change. I began to pray for peace, and for happiness, that somehow I would have hope in my life again, that I would have a way out of the despair that had become my existence. I spoke my heart to God about my life, and I began to see clearly that each day with my husband was better than any days to come would be. Each today was a better day than any day I would have in the future. I began to pray that He would give me a way out of the despair I felt everyday. And with a deep breath and a sigh, I kept my life going.

I no longer trusted my own perceptions of my reality. From years of walking on eggshells around my husband, filtering everything I said to make try to make sure nothing could be taken out of context, trying to check any sort of emotion in my words that might portray or suggest sarcasm or innuendo, yet still constantly accused of “taking everything out on” him, I didn’t know at any time how anything I said would be taken. It causes you to constantly second-guess yourself. I had become overly cautious, timid, weak, broken, apologizing constantly.

This is when my God began to act in my life – in ways I could have never imagined or dreamed.

There is joy on this journey, on my way home to my Father’s house,
Cindy <><