The Night I Knew It Would Never Be

I left my house at 11:00 pm on a 25-degree night in November. I did not even bring the dog. The door closed, and I can still see her sweet face through the porch window, head tilted and pondering where mom would be going at this time of night. Truthfully, I did not know. I was still in pajamas with my knee-length coat halfway zippered as I trailed up the driveway walking with a mission. A mission to leave the ruminating thoughts behind. I made it halfway down the main road that lines our neighborhood. This road gives way to a large field and I could only see pieces, fiercely hit by the moonlight. The wind was forcing leaves at me from all directions. No street lights, and oddly, I felt calm. I stood very still, facing the field I once smiled in as my sweet girl would chase her ball before dinner. I stood waiting for something. Anything. A sign of life in the field and in my soul. And then it all came over me. The awakening I did not anticipate receiving. Straight from God and straight from the moonlight, as I now found it fiercely hitting me. My marriage, the marriage I thought it was, would never be.

 I was four months in to the shock, anger, and now early grieving of my first disclosure. Our marital home had remained cold and empty.  Not just from the transition of fall to winter and the earth dying around me, but my marital home truly felt like a cold death inside.  We had started working with a couple’s therapist. While my then husband continued to travel extensively for work and occasionally returned to our home, I was deep into books on sex addiction and childhood trauma. I was in church on Sunday’s. I was journaling. And still, the world around me and within me continued to slowly die as if it only needed someone to just pull the plug. 

I remembered reading somewhere among the pages I combed through daily, the strongly advised suggestion of not to make any permanent decisions in those first six-months post disclosure; an insinuation that the emotions and brain are too raw to comprehend decisions of any magnitude beyond basic survival and the daily need to function.  And yet, when I returned from my walk on that frigid night, I laid on my bedroom floor with my sweet girl cuddled at the top of my head, and cried out, loudly to God.  I asked God to please get me out.   

The marriage I thought I had; the one I foreshadowed when I first opened the door to that home. The children I imagined in the family room while I cooked dinner.  The noise and the smells of hosting holidays. The late night snacks and movies beside the fireplace. I would first need to grieve the loss of the life I thought was, and would never be, before I could even imagine a rebuild.  A reconciliation. 

In the days and weeks to come, I would plan for my space to grieve.  I would secure my safety and my sanity with the love of my inner circle and the trusted faithfulness of a God whom I knew would lead me.  I would move out to begin what I deemed a therapeutic separation, six months, and four days post disclosure.  I would accept that the version of the life I had once imagined, would never be.