Pick Me, Choose Me, Love Me

My family and friends will kill me for saying this, but there is still a part of me that keeps wishing that my husband will recognize that the life he is throwing away is nothing like the one he will be getting in return and that this alone will be enough to make him realize the mistake he is making. One of my best friends posed a question to me yesterday via email, “If your husband were to come home today and say that he’d changed his mind; he’ll cut off ALL ties with her, he’ll go to counseling and work through this… would you take him back?” My response to her was, “Sadly, yes I probably would. How sick is that!?” I feel like Meredith from seasons past of Grey’s Anatomy where she is pleading with Derek, “pick me, choose me, love me.” And then, as we avid fans know, Derek did choose Meredith. Why can’t real life be this way? The realistic part of me knows that the chances of this happening are slim to none, yet the romantic in me can’t stop hoping for it, wishing for it, praying for it. I’m wondering if there will always be a part of me that hopes for him to return to me, kind of like how there is always a special place in your heart for your first love.

This Is My Life

I am amazed as I write these words… I have not shed a tear in roughly 72 hours. Yep, you read it correctly – I’ve been tear free for three days! I feel as though this is some sort of monumental accomplishment. I wouldn’t exactly say that I have moved toward acceptance, but I am definitely working toward a level of understanding. As crazy as it may sound, in part I think some of this came from the acquisition of her pictures. Until I saw the pictures of the two of them together, there was honestly a part of me that still believed it wasn’t true. I realize this sounds odd considering I had seen instant messages between the two of them and he had confessed. However, there was just something so concrete about seeing the two of them, photographed together for all eternity with their faces cheek to cheek, which made me realize this is not a dream. I am not going to wake up from this. My husband and I, along with our friends and family aren’t going to be laughing about this later. Although this is not at all what I had planned, this is real; this is my life.

How Do I Move On?

Nine years ago yesterday my husband and I went on our first date. I can tell you vivid details of that night – from what we each wore to what we ate at the restaurant to the hockey game we attended to the movie we watched in his dorm room afterwards. It was the longest date either of us had ever been on, because neither of us wanted it to end. After the movie we talked for hours about everything and nothing all at the same time. That night is burned into my brain; it is the night I began falling in love with him, the night I knew I would someday marry him.

How do I move on with all these memories of the last nine years rolling around in my head? How do I move on when I have no understanding of how things got to this point – when I had no idea things were at this point until my husband revealed his affair. How do I move on without any answers (because I have tried, he can give me none – all he says to everything I ask is “I don’t know” or “I don’t have an answer for that”)? How do I move on as if this life never existed? My husband has moved on, acting as though everything is normal. Please, someone, tell me how to move on!

I couldn’t resist… meet Her

She is the one on the right in all of these pictures...

Her

Through the friend of a friend of a friend sort of thing I was have acquired some pictures of her. I can’t tell you how fixated I have become on these photos (I look at them several times a day); it’s like a car accident – you don’t want to look but you can’t look away. She is nothing like me, which I suppose is good, but yet it’s also quite insulting to me as well. Mind you, I have no idea what she is like as a person other than what people have told me about her. (Although considering she has no qualms about sleeping with a married man, I can speculate on the type of person she is.) From everything I know she is like my polar opposite…

Me
• I have a masters degree; I work in a highly respected profession - teaching first grade
• I am very girly
• I am petite (5ft. 3in.)
• I have small hands
• I do not smoke
• I am pretty clean-cut and “preppy”; I do not like bars, I never have
• I have no children

Her
• I have no idea what her level of education is; however, she works on the line in a factory
• She is very “manly” (several people have described her this way to me)
• She is a tall Amazon woman
• She has giant man hands
• She smokes (which blows my mind because my husband HATES cigarette smoke)
• She appears to be very “rough” and “trashy”; she looks like someone who hangs out in dive bars a lot (hard to explain, but if you saw the pictures you would understand)
• She is a single mother to a three-year-old son (she was never married)


None of this makes any sense to me. I don’t understand how he could go from someone like me to someone like her. What was wrong with me? Why didn’t I make him happy? What does she have that I don’t?

The Power of Girlfriends (and Margaritas)

I had a great time tonight having dinner with two of my best friends. We had a blast laughing and talking (and drinking… although not as much as the table next to us – those girls got sombreros and what we think were free shots – no fair!!!!). We decided that I should STOP wearing my wedding ring and that it really isn’t that pretty anyway! The three of us, along with some other friends, are going to all go out and I’m going to look SUPER HOT! We are going to make t-shirts… mine will say, “If you’re gonna have an affair, at least wear a condom” (that will be a good conversation starter) and their’s will all say, “Team ‘Bewildered’” Yay, I can’t wait!!!

Sangry

It’s amazing how much your life can change in the span of a month. One month ago today my life as I knew it began spiraling out of control. It’s hard to believe it’s only been a month, it truly feels like years have come and gone. For some reason an indescribable feeling of sadness has come over me. Here’s the weird thing, I’m still really angry too. How is it possible for a person to be sad and angry all at once? Sangry, that’s what I am. (Yes, I just invented a new word: "sangry” – an interwoven combination of sadness and anger.)

I am sangry because this is not the life I had planned. On the verge of thirty my husband and I were to be starting a family; I wasn’t to be starting over. I don’t want to be starting over – I don’t want to be at this place in life, even if it is for the better. That makes me very sangry! I am sangry that he is living out my dream with her and her child! I am sangry that my husband is not the man that I thought he was. Where is the man I fell in love with – what happened to him? Am I really that poor a judge of character or did he have all of us fooled? I truly do realize that I deserve so much better than the man he pretended to be, yet that doesn’t make me any less sangry. I feel like I’m grieving over a life that never truly existed and that makes me sangry too because I cannot make sense of it.