When you are diagnosed with an incurable illness, well, what can you do? I sort of took the drama high road and freaked out. That's what I did when I found out in 2005 that I had Multiple Sclerosis. I will forever remember what the doctor said to me on the phone, and then my immediate phone call placed to my then husband after hearing from the Dr. My first words to Mr. Not So Wonderful were, "It looks pretty positive that I have MS. Please tell me you won't leave me." He took a moment and promised he wouldn't leave me, that he would fight this with me, and we finally started to 'try' to adapt to life with an illness.
Since that time I've had a few more diagnosis, one being Sjogren's Syndrome and Arnold Chiari Malformation, to name the other, but probably even a bigger surprise to me was the husband part of this illness stuff...I learned that 'for better or for worse' doesn't mean chit.
I must say that the past three years were very traumatic to me....to the point that I'm surprised that I'm still alive. This man that I was married to for 28 years became an alien to me....someone I didn't even recognize and still don't. And for the kids, it was probably even worse. My daughter was planning her wedding when he left, and my son spent hours and hours begging his father not to leave. It was brutal for all of us. And then there is the fact that this man that I was married to for 28 years is STILL unrecognizable. Weird, isn't it?
Now that I'm okay with sleeping with the lights off in my bedroom (that took me a year to conquer)....now that I can sleep through the night without feeling next to me in bed to see if he's come back, (which he hasn't), and now that I can actually talk to my ex-mother in law, whom payed for his part of the divorce....I'm learning to survive. Yes, I still have issue's with all the women he slept with when he first left....and yes, I still have issue's with the woman he moved in with after being gone 6 months (she was my friend). Lets not even talk about the three year divorce process, the actual court trial process, and the cost of all of it. Three years, yes, and within two weeks of the divorce being over, he remarried. lol I honestly can't even tell you how it feels to learn to walk again without carrying that 300lb weight around on my shoulders!
All that being said though, I don't want to play a victim anymore. I don't want to feel sorry for myself. I don't want to hate him. So....the next chapter I guess it to try to forgive him. Ugh.....can someone tell me how to do that?
