Interfaith Marriage: Stepping Beyond Just The Two of Us

Once more the uncertainty of my husband's spiritual journey is coming front and centre for me. It's that time of year when community groups and Bible studies and activities that we haven't had since he came out to me this summer resume. I want to support him. For him to know he has the freedom to choose what is right for where he is at and require him to hide his de-conversion.

Selfishly I hate that this is going to be one more thing that I do alone now. In reading some of the experiences of other spouses whose partners have de-converted, they often express that it gave them the freedom to explore their own faith in ways they hadn't previously. I love that for them. I'm the opposite. I was already exploring. I was the one who started, who gave him permission. While my journey has led me closer to my own spirituality, his has led him further away. I feel lonely in my faith. I'm still searching for what community could look like for me in my own walk and doing it alone is both liberating and terrifying.

As we walk out into this more public season of sharing what has changed over the summer, I'm afraid of the responses that we'll get. I'm afraid people will tell me that they are praying for him. Which, hey I'm all for prayer, but if that's the only support you are willing to give him or I, the only response that you have, then please keep it to yourself. Too often it feels like a dismissal of him as a person and my very real struggle. Ask how you can pray for us, listen to our feelings, or do non-religious things with us as couples.

I worry about the pressure, all the what if people say this or that. And yeah I'll deal with it, but I wish I could give people a primer on what not to say. Most Christians I know don't like to talk about what happens when someone's faith beliefs change. There's a lot of fear there. I get it. I grew up being terrified of hell with this angry Deity who killed people for making the wrong choices. There's much of this that I don't have answers for myself, so please don't feed my fear. Don't prey on it or pressure me to make him come back to church or God or faith. Don't ask me to explain his choices. Go talk to him. But when you do, please see him as a person, not a lost sheep that must be herded back into the fold. Or a child who's throwing a fit and needs to be tolerated, or punished depending on your parenting style.

In the same way, please don't be shocked when you hear that my prayer request is not for his salvation or his return to faith. I am not responsible to spend the next 20 years praying him back into the "family of God". I'm responsible to live my faith for myself. I need support and I need people willing to connect with my faith journey, because that's no longer built into my marriage. Sure we can talk about it, but he and I are reading from two completely different books these days, so common ground when it comes to faith is not something we have. I've said it before  and I'm going to keep saying it. This is lonely for me. It breaks my heart to show up by myself in faith circles where he used to attend with me. I have my own journey through this - and for right now, it doesn't involve re-converting him.

What it does involve is learning to be authentic with myself and with others. It means messy posts like this one and tears over coffee. It means ranting in my therapist's office. I have a tonne of questions. Don't we have enough challenges to overcome in this marriage without also navigating this? I don't expect people to have answers. I'm not even sure that I need answers as much as I need people who are willing to sit with me in the middle of the questions.

Up until now this has been easier. I've had time and space to begin to adjust to not sharing faith beliefs with my husband, to being on separate pages, to no longer assuming that we are approaching spirituality from the same relative starting point. Now it's time to wade out a little deeper, to share this journey with my community. I'm nervous. I'm counting down the weeks until we start up again. I figure knowing what I don't want is a stepping stone to being able to articulate what I do want.

I Showed Up

I showed up
Shaking in my brave
No masks
not even make up to hide behind

I showed up
Uncertain of acceptance
Arms barred
scars showing

I showed up
Trembling tearful words
Honest, authentic
me

I showed up
Heart in my eyes
Brokenness and wholeness
Walking together into that room

I showed up
Breathing through panic
Triggered by past baggage
Ready to bolt

I showed up
And it was okay
My heart was heard
My words accepted
My story not scorned

I showed up
to women shaking in their brave
to real spilling down cheeks
to shared journeys

Tonight I showed up
Tomorrow I will do it again.

Ugly Truths: A Rant and A Confession

I feel like the red-headed bastard child. The one that is tolerated, but no one actually bothers to converse with. The child being permitted just this once to sit at the table with the grown ups, the real women. 

I've chosen not to have children. It's not that we can't, we don't know, we've never even tried. I spent most of my relationship with my husband long-distance until 6 months before we got married. I wanted time for the two of us to live in the same country, the same time zone before we became responsible for a tiny human. Only now it's been 5 years and I'm still saying no - because of his addiction, because of mine. Because when I don't get enough sleep, I physically cannot function. Old mostly managed health problems flare to the surface under stress, sleep loss, poor eating habits - all the things that come with a newborn. Because I still can't see a doctor for a women's exam due to the flashbacks and triggers that set me back in my healing for weeks. Because I won't subject a child to his emotional neglect and abuse. Because of a million reasons all of which boil down to this - I can't be a responsible mother yet. 

I'm angry. I'm angry because I know I'm making the right choice for me, for my marriage. I know it deep in my bones that this is a not now. I'm angry because there only seems to be room for SAHMs in the church. Career moms feel excluded. Single friends feel excluded. I feel excluded, looked down on - because in the very needed push to affirm those women who have made the choice to stay home with their children there has been another message sent. One that says we will only see you when you produce a child. That declares that motherhood is the highest calling of a woman and what God has designed us to do. For those of us who either by choice or by circumstances outside of our control do not have children  - not only do we have to deal with the social and societal ramifications of that choice, we're told that you will never truly understand God's love for you, that your calling and life choices are second best, and that you can't love anyone unconditionally. 

People tell me it must be nice to have so much free time. The bold ones when they find out that I'm not a mother and I don't work ask "so what do you do all day?" I'm usually so taken aback by the accusation that I mumble something incoherent to justify why I'm not working, not parenting, not doing something with my life that you can deem as valuable before escaping the conversation. 

Here's the real answer: I invest in me and the people around me. I fight to deprogram my brain from all the lies and false teachings and brainwashing that I endured for 22 years. I fight to stay sober, to live my life un-medicated and to not just feel my feelings, but to honour them even when I've thrown up yet again from crying the tears that couldn't be cried then.

 Everybody loves to point out that I'm free now, that I've made so much progress in my healing, that I'm so strong. It takes a hell of a lot of work day in and day out to be me. To show up in a world that I do not understand. I've had to learn new cultures - first when I left home and discovered a whole new world that was radically different than what I'd be taught to fear about it. Then when I moved from Canada to the USA - and to a very conservative side of the state. I don't understand this world I find myself in. It makes no sense. I fight to hold onto who I am, when I'm constantly swimming against the current. 

I spend my days working, wrestling with trauma. Mine, others. My phone rings, chirps, beeps with messages of pain and panic from women who feel unseen, unheard. Women who are fighting to live, fighting the lies of their pasts, fighting to not medicate, to live one day at a time. 

I get it. I'm fat. I'm socially awkward. I don't have the right clothes. I loathe small talk and getting to know you ice breakers. I no longer cover my scarred arms and that makes you uncomfortable. My story of being abused in the Church, by the Church makes you look at how you parent, raising ugly hidden questions you'd rather not see. 

I go to these events that are supposedly for all women. I watch you fawn over each other's perfect outfits, make-up and hair dos. I listen through speakers that assume that we are all wives and mothers, all white conservatives. I hear about events and opportunities - none of which fit my schedule, all of which require extra money that I do not have. You spread a little Jesus over the top, to go with your matching napkins and table centrepieces. I walk away feeling unseen, unheard, and unwelcome. 

And yet, I'm showing up again, protecting that small ember of hope that this time will be different. This time it's something I'm passionate about. This time, maybe there will be women there who are willing to be real, authentic and look past all the things I'm not to see who I am. To see my heart and my passion for women to heal and no longer be bound by the chains that have been wrapped so tightly that they are choking to death. I'm summoning every last scrap of brave that I have and putting all the tools I've learned in the last 8 years into my bag to take with me because I believe that one day, one of these times I will look around that room and see you. 

I will see your heart trying not to spill out of your eyes because your husband is addicted to porn and you have done everything you can to make yourself be enough for him. All the perfect clothes, and make up, are you trying to fill that ache inside of not being enough for the man who vowed to love, honour and cherish you. I will see you, the frazzled nerves from it being a miracle that you made it there and didn't forget a child at home because your husband is deployed yet again and the only way you have to cope with the loneliness and the fear is to form your life around your children. I will see that behind all your stories about your daughter is the remembered years of interviews and inspections, invasive questions and dashed hopes as you struggled through the adoption process. I will see the loneliness that hides behind your too cheerful chattering words. Your voice begging to be heard; your heart begging to be nurtured.

I show up hoping that today is the day I can see you and realize that none of us feel enough at these events but we show up, holding onto hope that we will be seen. 

Resurrection

It rarely looks like I expect it to look. It never comes in the timing I anticipate. It usually shows up still wrapped in grave cloths. It always sends ripples through my life that I didn't foresee.

This unearthing of my voice has brought some unexpected, unanticipated friends with it. Lies that kept it buried have been fighting furiously this week to reclaim their stolen prize. Because I'm seeing, no matter what those lies say that yes, my voice, my words, they are a prize.  They have value. {oh that's a scary sentence to write.} It's true though. If I have value, then so does my deepest expression of myself.

I've learned over the past several years to accept that I have value and worth. Others that I trust serve as my mirror showing me a person that is otherwise hidden from my view. Three years ago this looked like an impossible journey. Yet this past year for the first time I celebrated my birthday because I wanted to be celebrated.  I didn't apologize for being born or make plans to end my life. I didn't tell people who wished me a happy birthday to go thank my Mother because I had nothing to do with my birth and if anyone had asked me, I wouldn't have wanted to be born.

I fought. For three years I fought. Every excavation of myself brought pain and lies with it. Every time I didn't run, didn't medicate, I felt like my world had collapsed on me. I built muscle. I learned how to fight back effectively, I learned to not let my fear or my doubt make my choices for me. I learned how to hush, to allow myself to be comforted and supported. And now, now I'm learning to become. I'm coming alive in ways that I never dreamed possible.

So this battle, the battle that I've fought all week to write, to push past the resistance, the lies, the messages that come from my pain and from the pit of hell - this battle has been utterly worth it. It's a battle that I knew how to fight. I have those tools. I have people to walk with me, to encourage me on the days when I felt ready to give up and give in. I have a knowing deep inside that this is me becoming who I am called to be.

This upcoming week, Holy Week, I'm looking to see what lies about my voice and my value need to be put to death. I'm looking for the shame, the judgements, the self-loathing, the anxiety that need to go. This culminating week of Lent, my heart is more ready than it has ever been for those things that hold me back, that tie me down to die so that the woman I am called to be, created to be, destined {eep} to be can be resurrected.

Addiction and Recovery

Addiction sucks.  Whether it's my own, or my husband's, or in the life of my friends...it sucks.  There's nothing pretty about it.  It's ugly and nasty and sucks the life out of everyone that it touches.

I hate:
my own addictions - self-harm, nicotine, food, codependency
my husband's addiction - intimacy anorexia (IA)
addictions in the lives of my friends - food, drugs, alcohol, food, sex, nicotine, codependency, IA

I love:
the wholeness of recovery
the miracles I get to witness
that beauty is made out of ashes in front of my eyes every day

I struggle:
with the process
the setbacks and relapses
with the pain inflicted

Here's what I'm learning though.  There is beauty in the authenticity of living my recovery.  There is freedom in living a life without secrets.  There is an aliveness, a rawness in living without medicating my feelings.

It's hard work.  It's living with an openness of my heart towards others that is not easy, especially when those others are in pain or causing me pain.  It also means learning boundaries and self-respect.

I am amazed at how far I have come.  I was the girl who said that there was no way, no how that a 12 step program would help me.  I was too different and besides, my issues stemmed from the spiritual, emotional, verbal, psychological, physical and sexual abuses that were inflicted on me for most of my life.  Oh how wrong I was - and I'm so glad that I was wrong.  Recovery allows me to see my healing as a process, a journey, one which requires me, my Higher Power and my community.

I'm grateful for the people that have come into my life because of my recovery.  I'm currently leading a group for partners and spouses of addicts. They are beautiful women that I am so amazed by each and every week. It's holy, humbling work. It's stretching and growing me in ways that I didn't know I could be stretched.

Recovery has shaped me into the woman that I am today. I wouldn't be alive without it.  I wouldn't have a marriage without it.  Living out the steps has given me back my life.  I am profoundly grateful that God has used recovery to bring in pieces that I was missing in my healing journey.

The Girl In the Corner

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or...thoughts on self-perception.  also a further excavation into self-judgement.

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I've been turning this over and over for the last three weeks.  I've started to write this and walked away.  I've considered whether I needed to share it privately with my course-mates, or only with select individuals.  In the end I settled for writing it here.  Doing anything else is only fuelling the very feelings that I need to talk about.

I no longer believe that I'm intrinsically evil simply because I'm female.  I'm still wrestling with all of the repercussions of how that belief has defined me.  In the wake of that shifting and changing, another core belief surfaced.  I have this perception of myself as "other".  It has historical trauma roots like most things that I continually face.  It's not just one root.  This is almost as strong of a core belief as being evil used to be.  They are tied together.

I was other the very first time I went to public school because I lived in the cult up the street.  I was other because I already knew how to read.  I was other because there were crafts that I wasn't allowed to do.

I switched schools two years later - and I was other from day one.  It wasn't anything that I did or didn't do.  I lived in a different city and I hadn't started in kindergarten with the rest of the class.  The next fall the family moved out of the cult building into a house - and the friends that I had had there, well once again I became other.

When my self-harming behaviours escalated out of control in high school, I was the other that every one was terrified would succeed in killing herself.  Even before that I was the other not allowed to see my peers outside of school hours, not allowed to go to parties and I had long ago learned that it wasn't safe to bring friends home.

It happened again when I went to college.  It happened when physical health problems kicked in.  It happened when I moved to a new country.  It happens every time someone asks me "so what do you do all day?"

It's been a pattern in my life - a pattern of reinforcement.  I have a mountain of evidence that says I'm other, different.  I feel like the girl in the corner.  She learned to hide there and watch people.  Occasionally she will dart out to share a crumb of herself before running back to safety, to watch and see what these people do with the crumb. I hate this.  I get it.  I see where it comes from.  I want to be open with people, and not in my defiant - here's who I am, you can take it or leave it, see if I care - way.  I still believe that if people really knew me, they'd run away or try to "fix" me.  That's usually what happens.

I don't trust that people are generally good or have good intentions.  "Good" intentions are what shattered my personality.  "Good" intentions kept people from calling CPS and allowed them to believe the deflections from my mother.

I'm rambling.  Yes I'm learning slowly that there are places where I don't have to be the girl in the corner.  The lies still surface, even in those belonging places.  All week I've felt like the girl in the corner who can't stop crying.  The one who's so broken, too broken.  I want to stand up and scream that my heart feels shredded and I can't even tell you why.  I'm using every self-care tool that I have - it's the only thing that's keeping me from disappearing into the madness.

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Part of my self-care is that I've begun learning how to belly dance.  It never fails that I walk out after a class feeling grounded and connected to my body in a way that I've never been before.  I walk out sore, of course, but centred in myself and my emotions.  I can step back, look back at the part of this entry that I wrote this morning when all of the emotions were all up in my face and recognize that I don't always see myself as other.  I have kindness for myself.  I can see that yes I am broken and that brokenness doesn't define me, doesn't have to define me.  There is a me that is bigger than the brokenness of my identity, a me beyond the horrors inflicted upon me by others, and a me that is becoming this kick-ass woman that I truly love fiercely and passionately.

Socially Awkward

Part of the repercussions of being raised closed off from most of society is that I am still very awkward socially.  I do okay once I get to know people and they know me.  Yet the process of building those bridges - oiy it's full of self-doubt and difficulties.  I can't connect with people over children or work or school.  I don't have any of those pieces in my life right now.  My life is very much focused around healing from trauma and addiction, my own and others.  It's my full-time job and I love that this is where I am right now.  I love that I am discovering myself for the first time ever in my life.  It's such a cool process.  Yet where I'm at right now makes small talk even more painful for me - I just don't do small talk.  I'm a "lets-get-coffee-for-four-hours-and-trade-life-stories" kind of a girl.  It makes new places and new people feel itchy and uncomfortable for me.

There's a community group through church that my husband and I have belonged to for the last 2 years.  It truly has been a belonging, not just an attending.  We started out attending and on paper we "shouldn't" fit with this group.  We're the only ones without children and around 10 years younger than the average age.  But there's something about the dynamic that just works.  It really does feel like belonging and it's amazing.

It's not the sitting-on-the-outside-please-let-me-play-with-you that we've experienced in the past.  It's healthy and vibrant.  There is life there.  There is a place where I fit, where I don't have to hide or fade into the background or bite my tongue.  There is room for my rough edges and my tears.  There is also room for my sense of humour and for my becoming.

It's times like tonight that I can look back and say that God knows what He's doing.  He's got places for me where I don't have to hide in the corner.  We had a group before this one, a group that we loved and where I was really comfortable.  It was uncomfortable starting over two years ago.  It felt awkward and strange.  I didn't know other's stories and they didn't know mine.  Yet as those stories have been shared, there's been a growing sense of belonging.

I'm writing to remind myself that once upon a time, this didn't feel like I fit.  I currently have a couple new groups of people in my life.  People that I don't know their stories and they don't know mine.  It's new and different and I feel that awkward there.  I'm over-analysing everything that I say and do in these new e-Course groups.  "did I share too much?  Did I not give enough background? Oh crap I totally put my foot in my mouth..."  I've been here before and sometimes it takes time to find the place that's mine in a group.

I'm grateful for the places I have now that I know where my fit is.  I'm trying to practice patience as I remind myself that I will find the place that is mine in these new groups as well.