Estimated reading time: 10 minutes
A woman discovers forgiveness as a radical act of self-love…not making what was done acceptable, but allowing her to be okay and reclaim her freedom
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It took me a long time to forgive the women I once called enemies. Women I hated with a fiery fury that made my hands shake and my breathing shallow and my heart race. When my husband had his first affair, for some mysterious reason She was the primary target of my rage. What a strange phenomenon—that I held my husband somewhat accountable; that he got the burning embers of my anger, while She would be burned at the stake. I can’t quite explain why it was her fault more than his, the betrayal. But at the time, She was the enemy—the seductress, the temptress—and I had to save him from her clutches.
My husband and I had married young, at twenty-one. Just old enough to order a cocktail, but not rent a car. Absurd really, the arbitrary ages we assign certain meaning. There we were, children playing adults, making one of the biggest decisions of our lives without really knowing what “life” entailed. The daughter of high school sweethearts still happily married, I was optimistic, naïve, and desperately in love. My fiancée said all the right things, “forever and a day,” “till death do us part,” “forsaking all others.” I said “I do” with my whole heart to a future that seemed so bright, so clear, so promising.
We had been married for a year and a half when he was deployed for six months. Three months in, things unraveled faster than I could hold them together. He was lonely, far away, frustrated with his job, vulnerable. There was a girl he worked with that reminded him of his mother, he’d said. She was having a hard time too. She needed a friend. Despite my misgivings, my discomfort and objections, the two grew closer. My best attempts from the other side of the world to stop a train that had already left the station were futile. Control is one of life’s greatest illusions, I thought, as it slipped through my fingertips like sand. I’ll spare the intimate details of his confession over an early morning phone call. The way I crumpled to the floor in devastation, the way I wanted to die.
Despite the earth-shattering pain at his betrayal, She was the source of the problem and the target of my rage. I wanted to hurt her. Physically.
The violence in my head terrified me. I’d never had violent daydreams before. Was there something wrong with me? A scorned woman can swing like a pendulum. One minute she can be packing her things and the next she can’t imagine life without the other. One minute she feels strong, resolute and the next doubtful, weak. I swung like a metronome.
He came home a few weeks after the confession, but not really because he was still in love with another woman. I fought a hopeless fight while he continued his affair. She was in love with him. She thought he was going to leave me to be with her. And then the unimaginable happened.
He almost died in a helicopter crash. He survived, or rather, he came back. Back from near death, back from the affair, promising to be a better man, a better husband. Hope. Faith. Such fragile things. But I’d believed they were mine. I still hated her, but at least she was out of the picture. He ended the relationship, he said. Now I wonder, what had She felt? Heartbroken, betrayed? How ironic we felt the same. Did She start to have violent daydreams about hurting me? About saving my husband from my clutches?
Two months later, when I was my husband’s full-time care-giver after the accident, he had another affair with one of the widows from the crash. Her husband was still fresh in the ground. Another woman to hate, to burn at the stake. I was on fire with rage and I wanted everything to be reduced to ashes. Our marriage became kindling.
Despite the shock of the discovery, the truth became obvious. The problem wasn’t the women.
It had never really been the women. Both of the women had played a role, certainly, but all my misplaced blame finally found its proper target. Him. The lies he must have told the women, just as he withheld the truth from me. To some extent, we had all been deceived by him. We had all been hurt by his actions as were still responsible for our own. We had each hoped for something more and been left wanting. How strange to relate to the women you hated more than the man you loved. But the real question here was why.
Why was it so much easier to blame the women? Why had I made excuse after excuse for a man who was unwilling to change or take responsibility? Why had I tolerated so much pain in the name of love?
Perhaps because blaming my husband would have also implicated me. It was easy to be a victim. To be righteous. To point fingers and name names. It’s much harder to ask why I chose who I chose and to confront what that choice said about me. It’s much harder to acknowledge that what my husband had done spoke to his wounds, but what I had tolerated from him spoke to mine. It’s much harder to look at my own behavior in the dynamics of our relationship and take responsibility for my part. It’s much harder to realize that these women, as much as I loved to hate them, had their own wounds and along came someone who ministered to them. Once upon a time my husband had done the same for me. How could I hate these women when I was one of them? And where I once thought I had to save my husband, I realize that we can only ever save ourselves; that redemption is an inside job.
I would learn that death is the toll for transformation, that ashes make for potent fertilizer. I would come to see that my marriage’s painful ending was actually the most sacred of beginnings.
It took leaving, slowly rebuilding, therapy, some mushrooms, falling in love again, and eventually, forgiveness. It took realizing that these women and that man were actually some of my greatest teachers. Teachers who made it possible to meet the depths of myself.
Carolyn Myss writes that “the strongest poison to the human spirit is the inability to forgive oneself or another person.” There is no freedom to be found in righteousness and there is no freedom without responsibility. I choose to forgive because the alternative—being shackled to the vindictive chains of the past—would be a slow drip of poison that would make me ill. And life is far too precious to dishonor it by refusing to see what kind of garden I could plant in the ashes of what was.
So instead of forever haranguing myself for choosing the man I chose, for the things I tolerated, for the ways I behaved—controlling, insecure, manipulative and codependent—the day came when I chose to forgive myself. I still get sad for the twenty-one-year-old girl at the wedding altar. But when I think about that girl, I can’t help but feel compassion for her. For the heartbreak she would endure, the darkness she would descend into to finally meet herself.
I confess, I forgave my ex-husband before I forgave the women. It was harder. They had never apologized and he had, was that part of it? They moved on with their lives after helping to obliterate mine, was that part of it? In the self-consumed story of my pain, I never thought about how their lives might have been obliterated too. Of course, I was jealous. I compared myself to them. What did they offer my ex-husband that I didn’t? Why wasn’t I enough for him? But there are truer questions to ask. Like why did I think his cheating meant somehow that I was deficient? Like why did I think that what those women and I offered him would be “enough” when he would never be satisfied because he was never “enough” for himself?
It became easier to forgive when I realized that withholding forgiveness wasn’t punishing them; it was only ever restraining me.
It became easier to forgive when I saw that we weren’t so different, those women and me. The desire to be loved is in our bones. The longing to be saved from our pain made us each vulnerable. Whether far away from home and lonely or grieving the death of a husband, it’s easy to judge until we find ourselves crossing a line we thought we would never cross and having to reconcile what it means.
Some people say that it’s okay not to forgive when something monstrous has been committed. I don’t know what’s true for others, but I do know what has been true for me. Forgiveness does not mean absolution. What happened wasn’t okay, will never be okay. It wounded so deeply that the scar will always be there. When I say I forgive, I’m not saying what was done was somehow acceptable; but I am saying I can be okay. Forgiveness serves as one of the most radical acts of self-love. I forgive because I deserve it. I forgive because the cost of my freedomwas forgiveness.
There is a Hawaiian prayer called Ho’oponpono. The idea is to call to mind someone or something you’re trying to heal or release. You do this by repeating four mantras: I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you, I love you. I made an addition: I forgive you too. I began saying this in my head to my ex-husband. Eventually, to the women I once called enemies. The shift was radical. It went something like this:
I’m sorry for all the anger and hatred I projected towards you
Please forgive me
Thank you for helping me become the woman I was meant to become
I love you because I see myself in you, in our shared humanity, in the wounds and the imperfections, in the ways we do not what is right, but what feels good, simply because we are hurting and we all want to be ministered too.
I forgive you.
The scorned wife of many years ago would have found this unfathomable. Her anger was too great, her hatred too consuming. How unimaginable it would have been for her to take it a step further. To not only forgive; but to pray those women be blessed. And I do. I hope those women have healed from the pain that made them cross lines that deserved to be honored. I hope they have found peace and love and happiness. I hope they have forgiven themselves just as I found it necessary to forgive myself. I hope that when they think of the past, they see how all of it led them to the women they were also meant to become. Becoming is messy work. But God is it worthwhile. And we all could use some grace along the way.
Forgiveness is not a one-time event. How I wish it was. I forgive again and again whenever the chains of the past rattle. I forgive for them, for me, and for all the people in between that our lives touch. Forgiveness is a bridge, the one that leads us home.
You may also enjoy reading 4 Spiritual Lessons for Surviving Infidelity, by David James Di Pardo.
