Author Archives: tookmebysurprise05172615

Sometimes I wonder, will I ever laugh again? Will I ever feel that all encompassing joy and lightness of being more than just ok? We all have our ugly sides, the angry, the bitter, the jealous. In my case, all those feelings get stimulated by pain and past trauma. I’m not a bad person, but I sure am human – and that means that I feel a lot – too much as a matter of fact – on some days.

So laughter, joy, elation – how do those feelings resurface when sadness consumes you? When self doubt and pain are at the forefront of your mind. Maybe it’s the moment you focus on? The fact that you woke up – to live another day, your body and mind in tact, your family healthy and happy. Gratitude, maybe that is the key to joy.

My husband and I keep having difficult conversations. Sometimes they are about how other see us, sometimes it’s about how we see each other. I woke up this morning, my mind thinking and thinking and thinking again. A dangerous predisposition of mine that can cause me to spiral out. And so I focused, and kept my mind quiet. Is it enough to just exist? To move through life minute by minute, flow and breathe and arrive at the end of our journey without actually knowing where it will end? It’s a difficult concept to grasp – when lives are meant to be lived in a certain way and certain order.

So how do I laugh again? How do I feel joy… do I ignore my reality or just embrace it and love it? Hold it and look at this sphere of my life as something unique and precious. Something that is exclusively mine and special. Strong, not frail. I want that switch to flip in my mind so badly. To see the extraordinary in what it is that I am, that we are, trying to do.

I’ll laugh again. Maybe I’m not ready today, but maybe tomorrow, when the sun rises on another day.

And also nearly ten. On April 14th, 2012 my husband and I said our second set of ‘I do’s’ – second because three years prior we sort of eloped after knowing each other for only four months. Both times, we meant it, both times, the way he looked at me was honest and loving. And somehow, after everything that has happened, we made it … to a decade together. A decade. It was a year ago though, around this time, that my husband also started to realize that the life he was living was a lie. It’s funny, I remember last year’s anniversary so well. It was kind of the last day that I recall feeling really loved by him. He had come up to kiss me goodbye before work, something he didn’t really do back then, and I remember just feeling warm and loved and safe. Later that day he brought me flowers, and we got ready for our vacation.

He started acting strange while we were on spring break. There were small tells at first and then, during a date night out while I breached the topic of another baby – he breached the topic of ‘what if I am gay in ten years?’. I remember shrugging and laughing it off. I told him, ‘what if I’m dead in five?’. I even asked him – are you gay now? The answer was no. We started growing apart after that night out, things started to slowly crack and break, until about a month after our anniversary I found the telling text messages of his affair and all hell broke loose. He came out as gay soon after, and my journey began.

It’s amazing what a year can do, though I can’t say I’ve healed. I don’t think I am the same me as pre-disclosure. I can’t say I am stronger or better because of what has happened. Frankly, I am tired. I’ve waged a war not only with him but also with myself. The fear and anxiety are subsiding, the sadness too. But I am miles away from feeling warm and loved and safe in my marriage. This would break my husband’s heart, if he ever read it. He has been trying so hard to give me comfort and love. I miss being touched though, intimately. We had an encounter about a month ago after months of zero sex. It was nice to feel him again, close to me. It’s amazing how familiar it all felt – how normal.

I don’t know what’s next for us. What I want would be difficult to grasp for any normal woman. I want my husband to be himself, but to also be mine. I want intimacy with him, and I want him to be intimate with a man too – I think it’s what he needs. He is gay, but he still loves me – its just hard to define that love. He said that our relationship is not about gender the other day. This, in my mind, is a really big leap forward for him. The puzzle of our marriage is slowly coming together, I hope that the way we put the pieces together creates something beautiful … something that I can continue to write about.

No, not that one (I wish!)… I want to write a little bit about Olanzapine. The big O that saved, but also dominated my psychology for a solid five months. In case you’ve not read my blog, about six months ago I experienced mania and psychosis because of the stress and pressure I was putting on myself to solve the impossible problem of being in love with my very gay husband – who I deeply, deeply wanted to be straight (or bisexual at the very least). He is, in fact – gay – still my husband and things are … complicated, but stable.

Growing up, mental health and mental stability was not something that was particularly reinforced and taken into consideration. If there was a hardship, you pushed through it – you cried, you screamed, you slammed doors, but you pushed down that trauma and didn’t necessarily process it. My husband was brought up in a similar environment, we are both from an Eastern European upbringing and strength, a clean house, and God are all that really matters. When I lost my marbles a few months ago, my entire family was wild eyed and deeply concerned. It was probably the scariest thing that I ever put my loved ones through – the loss of my sanity. There was a real fear that my broken mind would not be mended back together, that I’d end up losing my family – my son, my entire life. Thankfully, put back together I was – through medicine, very potent antipsychotics that made the voices in my head go away and the fear in my heart subside.

It’s strange, the feeling that medication gives you. I was not delusional about my relationship, I was not in denial about what was – but at the same time, I was completely ok with all of it. The fact that my husband had cheated, the fact that he was gay, the fact that at one point he really wanted to divorce me… it was all terrible, but bearable under the cloak of medication. I would have likely stayed on this medicine longer than what I pushed for, but the weight gain was just devastating. As much as I controlled my food intake and rode the bike or worked out – the weight kept climbing, and with the weight gain my self image deteriorated and sadness was creeping in past the medicinal cloak. I could not be married to a gay man, sad, and overweight…no way.

Five weeks ago today, I sat in my psychiatrists office and told her I want to be done with the pills. She agreed – bid me farewell, good luck and told me we should check in in another six weeks. It has been a very, very difficult five weeks for me. I have never suffered anxiety in my life, I’ve been nervous before – had butterflies in my stomach and definitely struggled through some form of anxiety when my husband was coming out to me as gay. But what I have been going through the last few weeks has been debilitating. Waking up every day to a pain in my chest, if not a tightness then the weight of a baby elephant sitting on top of me. Sad thoughts have crept in on me first thing in the morning – thoughts of my husband hurting me again, thoughts of divorce, thoughts of life as I know it ending, pain – real, internal pain that medication was gently alleviating and masking so I could get better.

Now, without the pills, all I’m left with is my own management of the anxiety – which is difficult, painful, and mentally exhausting work. I feel like 70% of my mental capacity is preoccupied with just getting through the day – telling myself it will be ok. I’ve had this fear that maybe I am bipolar, but to be honest, I don’t think I am. My mania was very clearly caused by psychological trauma and pressure – I was trying to move through everything too fast – heal too fast, forgive and move on too fast. The speed with which I was trying to fix things in my marriage broke me. Real healing from trauma takes so much time, and thankfully – time is what I still have plenty of.

It’s the middle of January, the northeast – where I live – is cold, dreary, and depressing. Getting out of bed in the morning has been proving increasingly more difficult as the world goes into a mini COVID lockdown yet again. I am not sure if it is the weather, the lockdown, the lack of sex, or the fact that I am still on an antipsychotic medication that is making me so tired in the mornings. I think it is probably a healthy mix of all the things.

Somehow, every morning, I find myself marching across my room, turning off my alarm, and then stomping right back into bed where I sleep and oversleep for an additional hour till my son begrudgingly wakes me up and tells me it is time to get ready. I read a book too – to help motivate me away from this terrible habit. It’s called ‘The Miracle Morning’, and insists waking earlier and creating a routine will not only make you happier and healthier, but also much more successful. The only problem is, I can’t find the motivation to walk away from my bed and downstairs to start this amazing transformation! My dreams have been so delightful lately – adventures really – that I can’t wait to see the finale of, they beckon me to bed. It makes me wonder if my reality is so bleak that dreams are my savior.

There is one more reason I love sleeping in, and it is silly and selfish… but wonderful. Every morning, before he leaves for work, my husband makes his way upstairs and kisses first our son, and then me, goodbye for the day. It isn’t a hugely romantic kiss, but it is bonding, loving, and incredibly satisfying to my sleeping self. I love it, and it’s just not the same as a kiss given to me while I’m awake in the middle of my morning transformation routine – which I have completed once – mind you. So I suppose the sleeping in isn’t really the result of all the bad things, but maybe the one good thing that comes out of it.

It’s been a while since I decided to sit down and write something. Home has been blissfully quiet and calm. Calm. The operative word and the one that has kept me in something much better than the limbo we were in for several months. There is a lot more clarity now in our path – our goal seems to be set – stay together, raise a family, play each day by ear, but imagine a future where we are not apart. So abstract but actually so very tangible too.

Sometimes I slip into the bad old habit of comparing our relationship to others around us. I know that privately, everyone has their own set of struggles and ours just happens to be really heavy. It’s not impossible though – to stay together. I count how much time has passed since the disclosure and we are coming up on eight months. Even though I could look at it as eight months since we have been intimate, since he broke my heart, and since my reality crumbled – I am choosing to flip it all and say – look at how far we’ve come, despite all the possible odds being against us. We have made it back together. Maybe not as the traditional husband and wife, but certainly as more than just co-parents and more than just friends.

In a way, my marriage makes me question all those people who give up and call it quits. I love my husband unconditionally, and he loves me enough to stay – but that sparkle, the spark of ‘in-love’, it’s gone, and has been for a very long time. People divorce over less than that, pursuing the next best thing – constantly on a journey to find a newer, better, more interesting counterpart. Somehow, despite our incongruence, my husband and I still align on all the things that matter so much – our common family, financial, and future goals. To me, that seems more valuable than the spark and sparkle of shiny new love. There are days that I need to remind myself of this, but I imagine that even those in happy, heterosexual marriages do too.

We are all a little bit broken and even though the fissure in my relationship is one that will take a great deal of effort to repair, I am not interested in trading in my life for a new one. I titled this entry ‘New Beginning’ – I suppose it is appropriate with this New Year start.

It’s been quiet at home. My husband went to visit family last week and the lack of turbulent emotion brought a peace that both scared and surprised me. In the past, his absence was so loud, the lack of his body in bed with me made me sad and listless – this time around – I felt nothing. He has managed to condition me to his lack of presence, a gift and a curse really.

We keep moving in our relationship, we keep making steps forward and back – like a dance. This past weekend we went to a wedding and my husband said to me “It’s hard to dance with you because I don’t know where your feet are.” Funny how much of a metaphor that is for our life – neither really knows where the other is going. My husband though, he is a phenomenal dancer – and so I follow him, or at least try to. The ladies in my support group call MoMs roller coasters – ours has reached that sweet spot where the ride slows down and you can take in the setting. But I don’t want our momentum to stop. So, I ask myself, do I open my end up or not?

The lover, he keeps bobbing in and out of the picture – like that ridiculous game of wack-a-mole – but I’m no longer the one striking him out. My husband confessed to me that he has asked lover to step back – that lover’s situation is too muddy and complicated, as though ours is so crystal clear. Then again, perhaps our position is crystal clear. We have this mantra [we have many mantras] but this one means most to me. We say ‘I still like you, I still love you.’ I believe this to be true, my husband, despite crushing my heart – is still my favorite person.

Momentum. We have plateaued and now I just wait for the next hill to climb, then the next drop – that gasp you feel when the ground drops out from under you.

It’s been around five weeks since my manic episode. The glorious dopamine reserves that flooded my mind and made me feel like a god are now officially clearing up – rebalancing. I lost myself, I found another version that was completely free… at my most manic, I was impossible, but when the mania had just started – wow, the wash of strength and self love and self worth, it was incredible. I felt beautiful, I felt brilliant, and I even felt like I could tap into people and heal them, emotionally that is.

The mania started on a Friday afternoon, I am not sure how all my psychological walls collapsed but they did. Something triggered me to believe my gay husband was in fact straight and just struggling with an attraction to men. It meant that he could control it, adjust through therapy to be fully mine – at least for ten years or so. This idea, it had been fueled by stories I’ve read of other women who find their husband with this problem, it’s still a struggle, but they face it together – their husbands still love them fully. My husband, his love, it’s more complicated – or maybe it has just faded because of how broken it has made me.

Do you know about King Henry VIII? He had many wives – most of who lost their heads – except for the first one. I believe her name was Queen Catherine, she denied King Henry a divorce and upheld her position as his only true wife for the duration of her life – she also kept her head, though lived out her days alone in a castle far away from Henry. Sometimes, I feel like her, I feel like this queen who will just sit up on my pedestal, tapping my foot waiting for my husband to acknowledge who I really am to him – how special I am for allowing this journey to happen.

I wrote in one of my previous posts that were it not for my husband, I would not have a story. This was an erroneous statement and a lie. I believe that with or without him I have a tremendous story, I have a life I can tap into and write about – however boring it may be if it becomes ordinary. I will always have a story, because for the first time in my life I feel awake and it’s time to start living with eyes wide open.

I already have. Let me take you back a week, to the day I realized that blogging about my life needs to be a little more raw, a little less polished, and a little more… imperfect.

“This sounds like a personal statement.” he says, sitting across from me in our dimly lit living room. We are both spent from a regular day at work, lounging in our pajamas – discussing a pretty heavy topic the same way you may ponder eating another potato chip. “You need to write with more heart,” he adds as I scratch my head and wonder how I can possibly spill any more of myself onto paper. “You need a story, dig deeper and don’t sound so excited about our situation.”

Our situation. Our marriage. Our soon to be redefined relationship – our own version of wonderland, an upside down version of the world as we know it.

When I was 22 years old, I met the man who I was certain was going to become my husband. [He] was charming, easy going, and incredibly illusive. The first time we went out on a date we talked for hours, shared an entire bottle of wine and devoured pasta dishes that I still remember thoroughly enjoying to this day. Without planning it – [he] and I were falling in love, not with the stories of what our past held or the future that we may bestow on each other, we simply found our counterpart- it was beautiful. I remember one of our dates so clearly, (maybe the first?) like it was a film. Dinner and the MET where we looked at sculptures and talked about everything yet nothing at the same time. What I recall and hold most dear from that date was the moment he grabbed my hand – so softly – as if to test the waters to see whether it fit… and finding that it did so he did not let go..

I’ll say it again… falling in love with [him] was beautiful, and it was perfect, and it was very real. Every moment of our life, from our wedding, to our son, to our beater of a home… it has been just as tangible and just as real as the moment he first took hold of my hand. So why then… as I write this do I cry? [He] sits in front of me even now, looking at his phone, laughing at our ridiculous cat, our son playing piano in the background – so normal, so perfect, so tangible and real… But don’t forget we are in wonderland, the upside down, where the man I fell so deeply in love with decided to come home one day and tell me he is gay.

Despite the pain of it all, we are still here, still building on top of rubble that we are packing down tightly to create a sturdy foundation, hanging on and connected by a weak tether that can snap at any moment. Perhaps it already even has, and we are just trying to knot it back together any way we can. Any way that I can. I love my husband still… I teeter between simply loving him to being in love with him – it’s a dedicated, true love that is somehow carrying us through this bizarre time. I believe he does love me too, but there is no teetering in him.

We live with this beautiful quote by Eleanor Roosevelt – ‘Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift.’ So tomorrow we reset to kind and hopefully choose the gift of love again.

… but we both know that that is not my real name.

I was walking home today pondering my role in this MoM. It’s so simple, really, but also so complex. It is simple because if you don’t know us, he and I, look ‘normal’ [heterosexual]. It is complex because if you do know us, but don’t know the full story, we still look ‘normal’ [heterosexual]. The notion of appearing like a heterosexual couple torments my husband, it sets back the development of his authentic self, it diminishes his true identity. Or so he says. But what of mine? Am I really Alice [she/her/hers] or am I Alice [they/them/theirs]? Does the pronoun make any difference? Does being married to, and loving a gay man, negate my identity as a heterosexual woman? It’s a wonderfully difficult notion to wrap my mind around.

My husband [he/him/his] insists that this is all about him, and in many ways, it is. I would not have a story to tell were it not for his homosexuality. And yet, daily, we seem to argue about the fact that I am homophobic for loving him, for wanting to hold him close, for wanting to call him my husband. I often wonder, is my black and white love for him really as much of a burden as he makes it out to be? He calls my affection toward him self-validation, and I could not disagree more. I try so hard not to sound bitter, angry, or upset – but on days where he turns me away, makes me feel like the villain of the story, it is hard not to feel the ugly words. Though now, as I write this, I feel numb, tired, and just slightly buzzed from a few sips of wine I probably should not have had.

My husband and I, we have an eight year old son. He is our world and he is the reason we wake up every day and reset ourselves to being kind toward one another. Sometimes I worry that this is a heavy burden to bestow on a small child – to make him the glue of our relationship – but he is none the wiser. He only experiences the good bits of our life. The good bits are all laughter and kindness, breakfast as a family on a Saturday morning, and a hiking trip on Sunday. Don’t get me wrong, we still all have our fights, but Aiden – he is safe, he is happy, and he is, above all, loved.

I want to tell you that tonight was back to school night and it was difficult for me. Sitting in a room full of women with ordinary lives, I just felt… alone. When I say ordinary I mean it with both regard and disdain. Regard because ordinary is so beautiful, simple, and pure. Disdain because ordinary is also boring, average, and plain. Is that cruel? When the PTA photos of these perfect, well rounded families and the women who run the show at the schools came up on the PowerPoint, I teared up – not out of envy – but out of sadness. Am I just pretending? Is that beautiful family photo on my phone just a lie? Am I really holding my husband back? This churning, ambiguous loss I experience, it is indescribable. It is definitely not ordinary.

How do you end a blog post? Maybe goodnight is enough?

So goodnight.

Four months ago my husband [he/him/his] broke my heart by cheating on me a second time. Four weeks ago I spiraled out into mania and believed I was close to being a god who can read minds. Four days ago I wrote a [text message] letter to my husband’s ex-lover and it went something like this:

Hi, I am sure you are not expecting any more words from me…perhaps you even blocked my number, who knows? I just wanted to let you know that the day I asked you get out of [his] head I had hit rock bottom. The fact is, I became irrational and completely delusional with mania, a very real, very serious form of mental illness. My true feelings of anger toward you [and him] have laid dormant for some time – hidden beneath layers of old scars from [his] first betrayal.

When we met for coffee on that perfectly sunny day, you said some things that were very hard to hear. I can only process them now, while the medicine I’m taking for my new found condition courses through my veins. I don’t expect you to understand my sadness and frustration – this is nothing like your run of the mill infidelity, where a husband falls in love and leaves his family. [He] has chosen to stay and explore our infinitely complex situation, a situation that I would not wish on anyone in this world of black and white… anyone except maybe for you, lover.

With every day and every night that passes – I am trying to forget you, I am trying very hard to forget what you and [he] did. The lies, deceit, and indecency of a secret and illicit affair still lay fresh in my mind. Can’t you see I need closure from you? I found it after that coffee meeting. Sweet silence in my mind, a quiet, a closure – it was beautiful to feel so strong and free sitting in front of you. You insist on staying in [his] life and so are inevitably linked to mine. I hope one day I will have it in me to forgive you and [him] for what you have done. The damage of your actions is irreparable, cruel, and completely unacceptable.

So hello and goodbye ex-current-future lover [he/him/his]. I am sorry if I’ve hurt you with these words but I just can’t continue suffering in silence on my own.

I [she/her/hers] am choosing to stay in a mixed orientation marriage because despite the pain my husband [he/him/his] has caused me, I still love him deeply – albeit in a different way. This MoM allows me to explore a unique brand of love, freedom and understanding. I hope you return to read more.