Time.

I tell him, over and over and over, what I need in a man.

He refuses to do the simple things I need a partner to do, and is incapable of others.

I have a plan now. The plan is to stick it out until I have enough money. If this means faking it so he thinks everything is fine, so be it. I will stay here and fawn over him, even make love to him if I have to. I will play his game the way he wants me to play it, and then one day, when I have the money, I will file for divorce.

This is not lying, it is self preservation.

It is the only way I can see this going well. I cannot continue to talk to him, begging him to be a man he cannot be.

I cannot just up and leave - I have five kids and no resources.

But in time, I will have resources. The kids will be older and perhaps all the little ones will be in school.

In time, I will be free. Free to be me, free to love and be loved, free to do as I please when I please.

First day.

I can't do it.

I am not a strong enough woman to forgive something as devastating as an 18 month affair, especially when I am being blamed for that affair.

I am not perfect. I made mistakes in our marriage. But none of those mistake warranted being cheated on, lied to, betrayed. I deserve better. Not because I'm someone special, but because I am a human being with feelings and a heart and I deserve to be cherished, like everyone else.

I cannot love my husband. But he deserves to be loved. I am at a point where I think it would be best for us to divorce and go our separate ways. He will be free of the responsibilities that drove him to fuck her for a year and half, and perhaps he will find someone who can love him despite his faults.

I have no plans of ever having another relationship. I know myself and I know my heart, and I am at a place right now, in this moment, where the thought of a relationship makes me sick. I suppose that could change. But it's not something I plan to ever pursue.

I feel like I need to focus on healing my heart so I can care for my children. I can't care for them very well when I'm grieving something that can't be brought back. I need to take steps to care for myself so I can care for others, and I need to make my own life.

It will be a very different life. It won't be the life I thought I had for nearly eight years. The dreams and goals I had need to be put on hold for now. Someday my children will be raised, and I can focus on those dreams at that time.

New goals need to be made. Here they are. This is just the order I'm thinking of them, not the order in which I plan to accomplish them.

1. Heal.
2. Forgive.
3. Divorce.
4. Get a job.
5. Learn to juggle five kids and a job and a home.
6. Be able to care for my children emotionally as well as physically while all of the above is happening.

I don't know how I'm going to do it. It doesn't matter at this point. I can't worry about what the journey looks like three miles from here; I need to concentrate on this first step.

The problem is, I don't know how to take the first step. What direction do I go? What do I do first?

I guess I need to take a gamble and just jump in where ever. I guess it can't hurt. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work, and then I take a different step. Nothing terrible will come from failure. I'm not trying to diffuse a bomb, I'm trying to fix what's been broken.

If you break a vase, you glue it back together. If the glue doesn't work, all you have is a broken vase. You haven't lost anything, you're just back at square one.

I am a broken vase. I need to fix me, and I have to take those steps.

Today is day one.

Tsunami.

I remember in the late 90's, my friend Mary and I went to a festival where a couple bands were playing in concert. One was a group called Splender, and they had a song with a lyric that I can't get out of my mind.

"There's a lot of things I understand, and there's a lot of things that I don't want to know."

I'm having trouble today.

It seems like the pain and hurt just engulf me and swallow me up, slowly and insidiously, until all of a sudden I'm lost in an ocean of feelings that are bigger than me.

One time I saw a video of a tsunami, not a big one, where the water just gradually came in, not like a wave - it just crept in and before you knew it the water was everywhere and little beach huts and seashell stands were just floating, and then snapping apart, and you didn't want to see but you couldn't pull your eyes away.

And then, the water slowly crept back out again, out to the open sea, leaving a beach full of crustaceans and fishes and broken pieces of buildings and kelp. Lots and lots of kelp.

Just as it came, so it went.

That's how I am. The hurt - my god, how it hurts - warmly, gently, almost kindly, washes over me, but it's so insidious that I can't tell I'm drowning until the very end.

Sometimes I have to tread water there, in the acrid pain-ocean. It's so big that I lose who I am and what I stand for. I don't know what to do. I lie there on the couch and I can't even cry, I just lie there with a big dry lump in my throat and think strange thoughts that have nothing to do with anything.

Sometimes it takes days and days before that tsunami waves pulls back out into the deep. Sometimes it's just a few hours or on really lucky days, a few minutes.

But when I'm engulfed, I just don't know what to do. I don't know how to go on, and I don't know how to just feel it and observe it and let it go.

There's a lot of things I understand, and there's a lot of things that I don't want to know.

Lessons.

I read about and talk about and teach about pure love and forgiveness all the time, but I guess it never really clicked for me until recently.

The joy in my heart, having reached a place of pure, honest, golden forgiveness, is indescribable. I feel like my soul is bubbling, my heart is singing. I feel like everything is right in my world no matter what happened in the past or what may happen in the future.

Now to work on attachment. I need to meditate and cultivate non-attachment. This is a hard concept to explain, but I'll try my best.

Everything in this world is temporary. It is all fleeting - the good, the bad, everything. If we become too focused on any one thing (in my case, the good feeling I have right now), we remain caught up in the web of samsara. It is essential to become un-attached. We need to recognize all aspects of life as the impermanent illusions that they are, and accept them as such, or we will never find pure happiness. We will forever be grasping for that which cannot be reached and thus never attain a state of openness and understanding.

It feels better to be accepting, open, and receptive rather than struggling, reaching, seeking without finding. Not only that, but when we free ourselves from attachment and seeking, we can better give our love and compassion to the world and it's sentient beings. We begin to see the world as it really is, instead of stuck in our bubble of false ego. We see the connected nature of beings and can propagate unadulterated love.

When we begin to see our enemies as teachers, we have taken a step towards enlightenment. I never considered my husband my enemy, but his actions and my anger and pain were. But what an incredible lesson this pain and hurt has taught me - who would ever have thought I'd be grateful for it?

Forgiveness.

There comes a time where you come to a place in your heart of true forgiveness.

That time came for me last night.

For the first time in a long time, I feel true forgiveness and compassion for my husband. I see him for the imperfect, fallible, beautiful man that he is. I cannot continue holding my anger and hurt, and I can't just toss him out like a piece of trash. The fact is, we have a history together, a life that we've created, five amazing children that were conceived in love.

I look back at our relationship, the years we've had together, the struggles, the joys, the arguments, the laughter. And I realize that the good far outweighs the bad. This man that I married in haste - just six months after we met - is truly my soulmate. Is he perfect? Of course not, but neither am I.

I know it will come as a shock to many people when they learn that I've decided to give him another chance. I know my friends and acquaintances will think I've lost my mind, and they will try unsuccessfully to put themselves in my shoes.

They will think, "If my partner ever did that to me, I would be gone! I'd never stand for it!"

This is narrow-minded and prideful. I married him because he is the most amazing person I've ever known. A bad decision cannot and should not define him or our marriage. Love is bigger than that. True, selfless love is bigger than any negativity, no matter the situation.

A teacher that I respect very much, Lama Surya Das, said this, and I feel that it explains everything:

This is how we love, Buddha-style:
impartial to all, free from excessive attachment or false hope and expectation;
accepting, tolerant, and forgiving. Buddhist nonattachment doesn't imply complacence or indifference, or not having committed relationships or being passionately engaged with society, but rather has to do with our effort to defy change and resist the fact of impermanence and our mortality. By holding on to that which in any case is forever slipping through our fingers, we just get rope burn.

[Emphasis mine.]

It doesn't matter that others may not respect the decision I've made. They don't live my life; they don't know my heart. I love my husband. I love him tremendously, more than words could ever say. And I will stand by him and give him all I have to give until the day I die.

Work.

Work is therapeutic.

Instead of lying around grumbling and feeling sorry for myself and my situation, I prefer to work. I live in the upper midwest where spring means winter one day, summer the next, and back to winter again. So until yesterday I was doing a lot of busywork inside, sewing, mending, cleaning.

Yesterday was warm, and today too, so I spent all day raking, shoveling, weeding, burning, chopping, building, cleaning. I'm sunburned and tired. It feels good.

But as soon as I stop working, the pain comes back.


I am running out of things to do.

I don't want to live with hatred and pain. I want to feel better. I might feel better in a few minutes, or tomorrow. I do have moments where I feel better. I just wish there were more of the good and fewer of the bad.


It just goes to show the temporary nature of things.


I need a sign.

"Will work for peace of mind."

Swallows.

To me, the swallows represent perseverance. The swallow keeps going until it reaches its destination, sometimes flying for days, never giving up.

So now I am marked forever with swallows. I will never give up. I will never stop fighting, no matter what.