Vulnerability is the susceptibility to physical or emotional harm. It is the risk you take when you let others in, when you share, when you love, when you dream, when those walls come down, you expose yourself to the dangers of taking on friendly fire. Risky right?! Oh but what is a life without loving and dreaming, and honesty? Relationships are usually a risk worth taking for most, and I am no exception.
Today, I am three weeks post "D-day", which my infidelity's support group calls "discovery day," the day you find out your partner was cheating. Some days it feels like it is day one. The pain isn't linear. Navigating a break up, and trying to learn every heart breaking lesson is emotionally exhausting but if I have to go through the pain, I am going make sure I make the most of it. The therapy I am receiving is a great accompaniment to self-reflection although sometimes the most unwelcome ideas present from our sessions. She didn't push week one, when I told her I wasn't ready to let go of the false comfort, and I preferred to put off the pain. Week two she told me outright he was telling me with his actions and I was not listening. She said it gently, as she always does, she asks me to set a time limit, to stop letting him back in my heart and home whenever he misses me but I fear I will wait forever for him.
She asked me why he was so valuable, great, and deserving of love. I could list pages, in fact, I have, notebooks, cards, and love notes, lifting him to his full potential. I have spent sessions justifying his actions, and trying to convince my therapist of the greatness of this man. There isn't a place I can look without reminding myself of how much I adored him. Then she asked me, aren't you deserving of that same love? The tears are a natural response that tells my answer. Of course not, I know what is in my head and heart, I know my sins. I know my dishonesty, my motivations, my shortcomings, my failures, all the things I never want anyone to know exist in me. I know the parts of me that believe I am not enough to be a wife, a mother, a friend, a good person, and while I know they aren't TRUE, there are days I believe I am flawed in an unfixable way.
In the midst of having eyes for another woman, he let me believe I was worthy enough to be a mother. He shared that I am the only woman he would want to have his child, I found my value in these statements, maybe he does see my heart, maybe I do have a worth to him. Infertility alone is a blow to self esteem, and the fact that he believed in me enough to carry his baby was something I needed to hear. Our first round of treatment was short lived as I had a chemical pregnancy miscarriage on week 5. It is a pain I didn't know could hurt so badly. Guilt and shame, what if I had done something different? What if I was better, healthier, prayed more, was kinder, was less stressed? I feel hollow inside, and I want to mourn this loss with him, but his eyes are fixed on her, more painfully her children, and the new family they have together.
The pain of enduring a break up is hard, but enduring a break up while healing from a surgery, sharing a home, being cheated on, watching him fall in love, and suffering a miscarriage after fertility treatments, is not just hard, it is unbearable. When I say this out loud to myself, I am impressed by my ability to endure and overcome. I feel like I am a warrior, sadly I went to battle for someone who wasn't even willing to lace his boots.
