I woke in the middle of the night to find that Mark was not in bed. It wasn’t unusual for him to be up late playing computer games in his office, but something about this felt unusual. When I think back on it, I feel as if someone woke me up. As if something compelled me to check it out.
I walked into his office to hear him say, “I love you,” to someone else. On his computer screen, an e-mail with poetry he was writing to her.
The moment stood in stark contrast to my journal entry from the week before. “Thank you God, for Mark. Please take care of him….Thank you so much for my beautiful life.” There was nothing beautiful about that moment. I was done.
The odd thing is that I didn’t hurt. And for the next five hours I had total clarity. Our marriage was on a knife edge. My role wasn’t the normal one of encourager. Instead, it was that of brutal honesty. I cleaned house so to speak and addressed every area of disappointment. I told him I had no desire to put things back to “normal.” If I stayed to work through this I wanted something different. Something better.
I asked him to give me two weeks to figure it out. I asked him to promise me not to talk with her during that time. I needed two weeks.
I also got busy. I had a card in my purse for a marriage boot camp that had been given to me the week before. I had thought we didn’t need it. Ha! Mark told me we should go. I sent the man an e-mail. I e-mailed my boss asking him to call me.
Then I started reading. I still don’t know if this was the right thing to do. It was the thing that made recovery the hardest, but it also didn’t leave anywhere for my husband to hide.
I went through Mark’s e-mail and read as much of their correspondence as I could stomach. It was an ex-girlfriend. The one he had wanted to marry who had dumped him for another.
In this period of clarity, I read things he wrote that he had never said to me. He had definitely never written poetry. I wasn’t devastated, I was sick. Who was this guy? The anger would come later.
I showered, dressed, grabbed my keys and left. Then I realized I didn’t know where to go.
I wound up at Lisa’s house, sat at her kitchen table and told the story. I barely even cried. She hugged me and listened sympathetically. She had to go to work, but left me her keys. There was no one home. I could stay there as long as I wanted a place to stay.
The hours blurred. I met with my boss–who I was close enough to tell the story–and asked for the week off. I went shopping and bought clothes to make me feel pretty. I went back to Lisa’s house and tried to sleep. I held her dog who wasn’t sure what was wrong with me. I tried to pray.
In the afternoon, I fell to my knees and told God I would do whatever He asked me to do just so long as He made it clear to me. I picked up the Bible in Lisa’s guest room and flipped it open. The passage my eyes landed on couldn’t have been coincidence given the thousands of pages I was holding in my hand.
God told me to stay.
