Drip // Chapter 4
Over the next several weeks, everything began to unravel. I had survived the initial shock of my husband’s affair coming to light. Those first moments and days were marked by nausea, puffy red eyes, horrific headaches, spinning rooms, the feeling of being under water and unable to breathe. My appetite was zero. My emotions had numbed. There were people around 24 hours a day to support me. Imagine a critical care team in a hospital emergency room. I was in trauma.
As the dust began to clear and my brain, heart, and emotions started to awaken to my new normal, I surveyed my new landscape.
Everything was different.
Everything had changed.
What had been steady was dislodged. What had been hopeful was now etched with despair. What had been routine was now chaos.
Everything was shattered.
But some things remained the same. I still had to cook breakfast and clean my bathroom. I hugged my kids, ironed their school uniforms and brushed my teeth. I had to grocery shop and make it to the bus stop on time. I was living in this alternate reality. Everything was normal. And everything was broken.
My daughters, friends, family, and fellow church members were spinning and grieving too. With each new person I shared the painful details of my newly shattered life, it felt like the bandage was being ripped from the open wound again and again. My heart was breaking as I watched them grieve and survey the damage. It was consuming and I felt like I was drowning under the weight of their disbelief, their sorrow, their own trauma and ache. While I didn’t feel responsible to carry their grief as my own, their despair and brokenness weighed me down so heavily. These people I loved also loved him. They needed to process and weep with me. And the heaviness of that nearly crushed me. It wasn’t their fault. They were incredibly gracious and careful with me. But when the people you love are grieving it causes an ache that consumes everyone around. And so in one hand I carried my grief and in the other I carried their’s. And it all felt impossibly heavy.
But with strangers—people who had no idea who I was or what I was carrying—I was a shell of a human. I walked the aisles of the grocery store, adding things to my cart, carrying out my tasks while being utterly empty. I felt like a ghost—like people could look straight through me. I was there. But I was not there. I was still laying on my bed, sobbing; my bloody heart booming in my chest. But in the weirdest way, I felt safer amongst strangers. I didn’t have to bear the weight of ALL THE GRIEF around people who didn’t know, didn’t care. I could be neutral, normal, numb. I could just exist.
I was breathing, yet not breathing.
I was thinking, yet not thinking.
I was grieving, yet in denial that this was MY life.
And then came what might have been, the very worst part of all. When I look back on those days, my skin crawls and I feel physical ache.
I entered a season my counselor labeled: THE SLOW DRIBBLE.
The initial story of unfaithfulness I heard was being tweaked. Expanded.
What had originally been exposed was only the beginning. It was simply the Truth Door being cracked.
What came next was months of dribble. Slow, excruciating, drips of information coming to light. What seemed to be was only the surface.
As details came into the light, as more of the story was unearthed, as evidence was exposed, dribble by miserable dribble, my already shattered heart was ground to dust.
The depths, the length, the span, the ashes.
Deeper, longer, wider.
It haunted me. Day and night it invaded my mind, my heart, my soul.
I was dust. Ash and dust.
The fact that the full story didn’t come to light all in one moment was the biggest curse of it all. It was torture to learn worse news at every turn. I was in a constant state of bracing myself for MORE. And it just kept coming.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
It still makes me physically ache if I think about it too long. I can still hear echoes of my sobs, my wailing, my complete and utter despair. I can see myself in the fetal position in my bed, covers pulled over my head to hide from my own life.
Bad news changes us. Bad news that drags along and gets more acutely painful? Well, that kills something inside us. It kills trust and leaves suspicion. It kills safety and leaves exposure. It kills hope and leaves dread in its wake.
And that’s where I found myself: full of dread, always bracing myself for MORE. I carried that braced position in my body, in my heart, in my mind. At each new turn…
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
That slow dribble of information began to poison every remaining shred of hope inside of me.
TO BE CONTINUED…
**Maybe you are also in a place where you feel completely hopeless? While the writing of my story is going chapter by chapter, I would like to fast forward you today to the most glorious ending. Hopelessness doesn’t have the final say when Jesus steps in to the story…
