Journal Entry: August 18, 2014
This week we are in a high desert resort town a few hours from our house. We are gathered for a family reunion of my Dad’s kids, there are nine of us total. All with our own families. Everyone is here except my BPD sister. She doesn’t do well with big crowds.
We were lucky enough to entice both our kids to spend some time with us. Not a lot of time… but some. Of the week long vacation, our boys are here for three of the days. They have busy lives, lots of friends, places to be. They are a great distraction for me. I will take what I can get. I love cooking for them, and sitting out on the deck of our beautiful rental house watching the golfers and talking with our older son, who hasn’t lived at home for over four years. He’s a great conversationalist. We also watched movies and the kids played chess. Our older son is here with his girlfriend, and the younger is here with a buddy. Tonight we decided to go out to dinner, the six of us. It has been a gorgeous summer afternoon, 82 degrees, clear blue sky. Due to crazy kid circumstances, we actually have three cars here at this summer rental. We send the kids off in my husband’s new convertible. They are going to get a table at the local pub restaurant, while we take the dogs for a quick walk. We watch the kids drive away in the sunshine, their hair blowing in the wind. We take the dogs for their walk and then get them settled in before we head out to my car. As I open the passenger side door, I feel something cold and hard hit my arm. I thought someone threw something at me. Then I look down and it looks like hail. I look up at the summer sky and see one little cloud, but I feel more hail. The house next door has a metal roof and I can hear the hail hitting it. It is starting to come down. Crazy, it is still 80+ degrees. We get in the car figuring this will be a really short, fluke hail event. As we drive the 4 or 5 miles to the village, the hail is coming down harder and harder. Pretty soon there is at least an inch of hail on the ground, everywhere. The size of the hail pellets seems to be growing. I stop to take a picture. Where there are no clouds, the sky is kind of an eery orange color. As we slowly approach the village, we can see the storm is not lightening up, it is getting worse. The hail pellets are quite large now. The parking lot is flooded. My car is a sturdy SUV, so we are not worried. But I have summer shorts and sandals on. The hail is cold and I cannot see anywhere in the parking lot that is not holding at least 3 inches of water, and with hail floating on top of it to boot. We decide to wait out the storm from inside the car. The kids call to tell us it is going to be a while for a table for six as everyone ducked in out of the storm into this restaurant and it is overflowing. We wait, and wait, and wait. The storm is not stopping, and the kids are not calling to let us know the table is ready. I think we should just go back to the house. The kids do call eventually to let us know a table opened up. We wait another five minutes or so, and decide to weather the conditions and run into the restaurant. It is a bit of a run as we are parked at the outer, and least flooded part of the lot. We go for it, and man oh man is that hail cold. I am wading through five inches of solid ice cold water with hail swirling around my calves. My leather sandals are ruined. We run all the way into the restaurant because the cold is unbearable and it is still hailing. Inside the restaurant is not warm, because it is the middle of summer in a warm climate. The AC is on. I am shivering horribly and cannot get warm. I have to take my shoes off. My son offers me his sweatshirt. I do not even stop to question what my crazy son is doing wearing a sweatshirt in the middle of August. There wasn’t a cloud in sight when they left for the restaurant. I don’t worry about it, just bask in the warmth of the inner fleece lining. I am shivering, uncontrollably. I order hot tea. Everyone is staring at me, and I burst out laughing with my teeth chattering. How incredibly strange is this whole experience? But there I am sitting at a table with my little family, and loving it, hail storm and all. I wouldn’t have traded that feeling for anything. We had a wonderful dinner, talking and sharing, and being happy, together. Everything else is just not important in this moment.
try not to cry on my rainbow 
I don’t know if you’re like me, in that I lived moment to moment at that time in the process. The silver lining I found in living this way was how each positive moment seemed almost magical. I not only was thankful for the nice break in dealing with the pain my life had become, I was suspended in time in that one moment and thoroughly loved being there. I wish I could keep that aspect. As time moves forward I seem to have gotten back to more of a big picture view… still not entirely, though… but I don’t have that same capture of a single moment in time kind of feeling, if that makes any sense at all. I loved reading this. For you to have that experience, and for your experience to take me back there for myself. Thanks for sharing!!
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Thank you so much for commenting. It’s funny how the posts that I think are so insignificant seem to hit a chord with a lot of people. I do know exactly what you mean about living in that one moment in time. I think maybe it is our mind’s way of protecting us from the dangers that lurk in the recesses, if we open it up to all the pain over and over, it’s too difficult. I feel like this experience was a way for my body to protect me without sending me into a dissociative state. Maybe because so many other areas of my body were firing on all cylinders because of the hail and the cold and my kids being around. I wasn’t really cognizant of what was going on at the time. I just knew I was in a good place. In the past few months, the big picture has been so overwhelming to me. At first, I would try and live in small moments, but the pain and trauma were too powerful. Then I was able to do it more frequently. Now, 11 months in, I can live in the moment, but most of the time I can also live with a bigger picture, and be mostly okay. For me, living in the past was so painful because I thought of all the time our life was partly a lie. The future is scary. Living in the moment works best.
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Sometimes what seems insignificant offers the most hope to those of us living this nightmare. We’re glad for anything that reminds us all of life doesn’t have to be centered around the pain.
I hope you come to realize at some point that your past wasn’t a lie, as much as you just didn’t have the whole story at that time. It gets easier to reconcile when you get to that stage. The part I struggle with as I look at the future is wrapping my head around “if I didn’t know who he was at that time, how will I ever really know who he is at any point in time?”. Hopefully I’ll gain some nugget of wisdom that helps me see past that in the near future. This is the thing that makes it so hard to firmly commit, without doubt, to my future in this marriage. I’m sure you can relate. One step at a time… we’ll get there.
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Yes, one step at a time. For me, learning to live for now and not be SO afraid of the future (I am still afraid of the future) was realizing I am strong enough to move forward without my husband as my life partner, if I need to. I hope the day does not arrive when I feel like moving on is ultimately healthier than staying, but at least now I know I can. That was only through therapy. Some days I still get mired in what he was willing to say and do to keep this secret life going, ultimately at my expense, although I didn’t know it at the time. At least I now know it wasn’t because he didn’t “love” me, it was because he didn’t love himself enough to get help. It is just unfair and painful to realize someone I devoted my life to was willing to use me as a scapegoat, and was able to compartmentalize me out of a big part of his life. But we gotta keep moving forward…
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One of my survival tactics has been to really be mindful of moments. It’s way too easy to wallow in self pity.. I seem to do the wallowing way to often these days. And I can’t look beyond a few days into the future. Today I am taking my daughter to lunch. Im dismissing her early from school. I’m going to be mindful and enjoy her company today.
The trauma from the affair is overwhelming these days.
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Yes, the little things that make you happy and feel good. It does get better. You are still early in the healing. We can’t change what others did to us in the past, but we can get stronger and realize we are worth every minute of happiness in the present. I am sure your daughter will notice if you are happy, if you smile a lot, smile at her. No one can speed up the process, but have faith that if we really want it to, things get better. I think we also realize that we have to be independently happy, regardless of what our husbands did, or do. Big hugs to you Rac. I hope you are having a glorious day!
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rac, I know what you mean about wallowing in self pity… I still spend way too much time doing it. Just yesterday morning my husband asked what my plans for the day were and my answer to him was “wallow in self pity, go to the post office, wallow in self pity, go to the office, wallow in self pity…” At least I’m able to laugh about it these days… but still, too much time spent doing it.
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