It has been awhile since last I posted here and with good reason so please do not think that I have forgotten about you. I am always in constant movement and growth and I want my writing to reflect these changes. I also do not want to squander this opportunity to share and reason with others over a very difficult subject by injecting too many of my personal emotions and not enough of the applications and methods that have helped or hindered me in this situation.
I am feeling very positive about life in general at this point and I wanted to share this with you because sometimes in the midst of the storm it is very hard to remain seated and calm without being anxious, fearful that the boat will overturn altogether and everything precious will be lost. I have not mastered the are of letting go myself, however I am learning that increasing my faith in God and laying my burdens at His feet creates a place of empowerment rather than helplessness. No matter what it looks like to others and indeed to myself I can acknowledge that I do not have the vision and the perspective to know the end from the beginning and I can trust in the One who does know and who has provided grace sufficient for each and every circumstance I find myself in. God is never surprised by someone's betrayal of me or my betrayals of myself. He knew these things and He has a plan for me to bring me to His good will not to hurl me into a dark abyss of never ending pain and misery. Yes we all face at some point I our lives the choice of trusting God or trusting man (an other human) and we have to be willing to trust Him that we will be okay even if we can not trust another person's intentions, behavior or words.
I want to encourage you this morning that we should not be afraid to step out in faith into places where we see nothing to hold us up IF that is where God has led us. On the other hand do not risk yourself and salvation by running past and through the protections that God as our loving father has positioned to ensure our safety and well being.

SO I have been thinking hard about what to share with you all and what has been on my heart and a constant struggle for myself , is dealing with family/friend relationship dynamics during and after an adulterous affair. I think that so many times in these difficult situations we as bystanders or participants often feel the need to either offer advice, choose sides or bash the person who committed the infidelity. This is not helpful, in my experience, and only leads to further problems and risks alienating potential supporters from the spouse and children if any exist, and driving an even larger wedge between the couple. One important thing that people looking in from outside often fail to recognize is that although this person has committed a horrible betrayal there is the possibility that the offended party may wish to salvage and restore their marital relationship.
There is also the possibility that the offending party is not interested in restoration at this point and while they may be in need of correction, guidance and indeed some time away from their family it is not helpful to bash them to their spouse. On the flip side if you are a friend or family member of the offending party it is foolish to join with them in perpetrating lies, deception, aiding them in their adultery. After all what position can you then take when/if they do reconcile and their spouse is only too aware that you played such an enthusiastic role in the potential destruction of their family, contributing to the hurt and pain that they and their children have felt. There can come no good from upholding someone that you claim to love in foolish destructive behavior, and in not encouraging them with the truth that adultery is always the wrong choice.
I say this because I have witnessed in my own situation how family and friends have helped along the adulterous relationship and how it added to the feelings of betrayal. I personally felt that if sides had to be chosen than we all should have ended up on the same side that of my kids. Now that we are trying to restore our family and marital relationships I no longer see these people with the same eyes. They have permanently lost their position of intimacy within our family circle. It has strained some already thin ties and broken others completely.
I would suggest that the best way to be supportive in these circumstances is to be there to listen and encourage your family and friends in seeking professional and pastoral counseling and guidance.

Encouraging Love for the Invisble Parent

I know I have been there, heck Im still here....You are a single parent struggling to raise however many children in this world, and their other parent is not present. Makes you wanna cut throats and pull tongues through right??? right?? No? okay well maybe not that angry but you know somewhere between hitman angry and cuss you out angry at least...
So how do you encourage your child(ren) to love and respect a parent they have either never met or who is the pop up parent?  Well very carefully if you ask me , and no you didn't but I sharing anyway. In my household growing up it was a very tricky situation feeling like I couldn't express to my mother that I loved my father dearly. I knew she hated him and she constantly disparaged him, which to be honest made me not like her rather than him. I always thought that if she hated him that much she clearly wasn't able to love me, considering he was half of me. I desperately wanted to feel free to express my love and longing for my Dad, but it wasn't safe to do so. When I had my daughter I knew I would do everything to foster their relationship and never seek to a negative influence on it. I believe that a child's relationship with their father and mother or lack thereof can be a defining piece of how they view themselves and others. Our parents relationship with each other can be even more important. How we treat each other, how our children see and hear us treat each other shapes their self image. I have chosen that my children's ability to respect, desire, love their father is a priority for me. It is non negotiable especially in an age of rampant family dysfunction. I made the connection that encouraging my daughter to love her father and likewise would be one of the greatest gifts I could give her. I explained to her that we all make mistakes and that even she in her all knowing teenage arrogance will make them, has made them, and she has to have a compassionate heart for her parents and their struggles. No matter what the issue it is never about her or her siblings and while the choices we make as parents always affect her, they are not about her.
Getting her to understand this has become much harder the older she has gets. She sees her fathers' recent abandonment of his marriage and family as a personal attack. She is finding it nigh impossible to dredge up any respect for her father and her ability to cloak him in her neverending supply of childhood love is dwindling quickly. I refill her tank as often as I can I share memories of when her father behaved out the feelings I hope are still buried in his heart for her. I remind her of how her father always slept with her on his chest, and the funny stories he would make up about her activites at night as a baby gallivanting off on wild baby adventures. I slip a story of how "we" began in at least once a week and I answer all of her questions of how Daddy used to be in the present tense. I have told her that while I don't like or enjoy our current situation I still love her father, that no matter what else ever happens that will never change because of my children, they are a gift beyond measure. I remember all the good qualities I can think of and I share them with her. Is it painful for me ? at times yes, but it is worth it. I chose him to be their father and I love him, to demean him is to demean them and that I can not do.
Will we as parents who struggle daily slip up and say a bad thing of course we will but we must be fast to correct it and acknowledge the hurt we cause our children.
Speak well and often of your child's invisible parent, it is not saying that their absence is okay only that their presence was  Once upon a Time......

The spiral

Needless to say the pieces of the puzzle I had been trying to solve for several months were falling into place for me. My husband's usual conservative spending had gotten out of control, and he never had a justification for where the money was going. His dissatisfaction with his job had gotten exponentially worse, and here I must admit that I was less than supportive when he came to me sharing his feelings of inadequacy, frustration and hurt.  I thought that I was giving good advice, and supporting his dreams when I agreed with him in anger against these people at the job, however I have since learned I was shooting myself in the foot. He was locked in a circle of abuse that was patterned much like the typical abusive relationship ( they hurt him, he get mad and tell me, I get angry hate them, they make up they both hate me) and to top it off any suggestion that he leave was met with extreme resistance. To be honest I always felt that he had taken a position beneath his abilities but I wanted to be supportive of his re entry into the food service industry. Food was on of his passions in life and I felt that it was more important for him to work at something he felt passionately about than he have a job that paid more money. Sure it was a sacrifice , but when you love someone you make sacrifices. Still we had a growing family and the time he was spending away from home wasn't balancing well with our financial needs. This became a big topic of argument between us, and I deeply regret that. In my aggressive communication style I tend to have a take no prisoners attitude and let's just say a happy marriage this does not make. It does however lead to miscommunication, and feelings of resentment as well as a frustrating silence from the other party. It progressed to the point that my husband felt as though he was always wrong and should never try to express himself to me. I on the other hand felt like he had shut me out and was punishing me with his silence on issues only to express his dislike for my decisions after I made them. Things were not going well to say the least but there remained our personal circle of intimacy where we retreated when all else failed and ministered to one another in love and kindness. We never stayed angry for long, I have never been able to maintain a good long mad with him. He smiles at me and I swear I forget he had ever in my mind been wrong. In fact in the midst of all this we were planning on renewing our vows, and buying a house, not things that I thought we would be doing especially as he was directing this flow of events, if he was cheating on me. Ironically in the fall of 2012 I attended a Women of Faith event where I heard the testimony of  Kurt Warner's wife and hearing how poorly he husband had treated her I returned home with more love respect and gratefulness for the man I had married. And thus we made baby number five, I was scared, angry and disappointed to be pregnant and my husband was unusually, I thought, happy and reassuring. By November, things were looking up for us we were not arguing, in fact were happy, more content than we had been as he excitedly awaited his long promised promotion. The promotion didn't happen they gave it the man he trained to replace him and things in our home spiraled downward rather quickly. My reaction was quit the job you can get another, in fact take some time go back to school etcc. he ran through money, our savings, Christmas money, bill money, stayed out late, came home angry.  I now know this is when he became engaged in the affair....
We have to be vigilant people, be aware that the signs of discontent aren't noticeable only to you. Protect your marriages and guard your hearts and minds diligently lest a thief steals in.

Finding out ....

As much as possible I want to pour into this blog as much of my feelings and thoughts as possible without injecting negativity or poisoning anyone else's situation. I want this to be an avenue that leads others and myself down a path of healing and progress, not into bitterness and despair. I also want to maintain the integrity of what it is like when we experience this level of betrayal, not sugarcoating the truth, standing in solidarity with everyone else who has had these wounds inflicted on them. It is a disservice, I believe, to present anything other than the truth. To make any attempt at minimizing the pain, anger, powerlessness, disappointment, mistrust, and sorrow that often accompany these grave offenses is a violation and adds to the injury.
So here in the United States of America, and  in many other places I am sure, it has become a common place occurrence to hear of couples who are experiencing infidelity in their relationships. Far too often I have heard others share their experiences of infidelity within marriage and for the most part the story doesn't end well. You can imagine my feelings of loneliness exploding as I took in the cavalier way people seem to excuse this behavior as normal and as something to be expected, acknowledged and then used as a weapon in divorce court. I was angry, of course, however what I wanted then and even now, was an opportunity for restoration. I did not want to see my best friend suffer through negative consequences, I wanted to see him healed and return to the loving fun kind man I had known for more than half of our lives. I grieved the loss of my husband the same way I grieved the loss of my father just a year and a half earlier, in a strong silence, with punctuations of carefully controlled rage that seethed beneath the surface, ready to devour myself and everyone else if given half a chance. I worked furiously to maintain a somewhat normal life for our children and maintain some semblance of health for my unborn child who was wreaking all kinds of internal havoc. I was a few days after Christmas and my husband of almost ten years was telling me he was "interested" in another woman. I sat in shock, looking at this man whom I had loved since I was a teenager, my very best friend in the entire world, the only person who knew me inside and out, the one who I slept every night next to and I screamed. Long guttural cries burst from my lips and then I stopped as suddenly as I started I stopped, and I asked if he was divorcing me. He said and I will never forget this, "I think I love her, and I don't love you anymore. I feel more for her than I ever felt for you". I looked him dead in the eye and told him he was a liar and we would be getting counseling because something had been wrong for a long time and this woman wasn't it, but whatever it was we were going to fight it together and save our family. He laughed and said he would continue to be a good father and we would meet with our pastor but he was tired of trying.
....I have known this man since we were 14/15 years old , I am talking twenty years of holding his dreams in my heart, comforting him in his pains, and sharing our deepest secrets with each other. This was the same man who held me when I watched my father take his last breath, who had come everyday and helped me take care of him , did his laundry and loved him as I did, feeling his passing intensely. This was the same man who had asked me to renew our wedding vows and with whom I was expecting our fifth child. I knew him inside and out and I had been expecting something but not this, never this. As I look back now I see I probably should have put him out right away but I was determined to give everything. I am not the most humble of folks and I knew that this grated with him, I never realized he believed I thought him unworthy and incapable of being the husband I wanted and needed. My arrogance and pride had driven a wedge between us, and his insecurities had allowed room for someone else to creep in and plant seeds of discontent. I had no idea how bad it was, and no one could convince me that this marriage was not worth saving,or that it would not be restored.  I trusted in the love we had to hold us together while we worked on whatever we needed to fix things. I was very naïve, and foolish to say the least. In the coming months I would be subject to numerous instances of disrespect, lies, theft, and astounding levels of indifference in regards to our children. I still have a hard time with accepting that he is no longer that great dad who loved his children above everything, and would have died for them, no question. Everyday I pray that my husband will find peace and turn to God for his salvation and healing, I still desire my family to be whole however I am learning to live my life as it stands now.   
In the coming days and weeks I will be sharing more of my story and answering questions that are emailed to me. I want to use the situations I have been through as teaching tools so that no one else has to suffer like I have if possible.

Updates, and New Directions

Okay so I guess you could tell that I have been quite busy since the last time we visited so I will attempt to catch you all up on what we have been doing in our lives and in doing so introduce you to some possible new directions the content of this blog will be taking. I am hoping that you will find the content to be as down to earth  as it is informative, becoming one of your go to sites for wisdom and laughter in equal measure.
So let's see here I am now the proud momma of five little people who range in ages from 10months to 14years old , four girls and one very active little boy. I have since become a single parent and am now estranged from my husband of 11years and partner for the last 20something years. It has been an eye-opening experience to say the least and I intend to use it as a ministry of encouragement for people who are or have gone through a serious attack on their marriage and family. My testimony is that while I have bent I am not broken. Sometimes we will have to face the harsh reality that we must accept consequences for the choices of others, and these are not always, indeed usually are not to our liking. As you may have guessed (or not) my husband has been unfaithful and chosen to live outside of our home, unwilling to participate in raising our five children at this time. While this is extremely painful I am yet trusting God to show Himself mighty in this circumstance, and bring my family where we need to be.
That being said , I found it increasingly difficult to find adequate support for myself as well as my children as we struggle to cope with the new life we have to live. Many sites offer the common affirmations as well as exhortations to get divorced and move on, however few were truly invested in providing Biblical principles to guide me as I walk this path of forgiveness and restoration, desiring to remain open and available to my husband as a source of comfort and friendship in Christ. I found that most people were eminently ready and willing to counsel me to divorce but few were able to suggest let alone teach me how to maintain a God centered home. I have sought help from pastors and elders as well as some very useful books and resources that I will be posting later, and people who have been through similar situations. One common theme kept repeating itself, and that was the lack of credibility these authors had amongst people like myself who are impacted most by being able to watch how an idea is executed. My desire is to provide examples of proper applications of these principles alongside of great resources and a word of encouragement, occasionally interrupted by lighter fare.
Please feel to comment and share your experiences, wisdom as we reason together , we also welcome questions and suggestions for topics.

Ain't life funny?

Well folks it is officially Black History Month and true to form I am finding myself confronted with some not so nice examples of who we have become as people individually and collectively, which is disheartening and altogether not an encouraging sign of what is to come. I struggle most days to find positive people who are truly committed to developing themselves and their families or communities into places where they can pour out the blessing of the time, energy and resources. It seems hopeless sometimes, and I understand why black people are moving away from the ghettoes and inner city instead of trying to rectify the situations that they find themselves surrounded by. After all who wants to raise their children in a morass of drugs, gangs, violence and all around bad company? certainly I don't and that is why I am determined to find ways to empower my children to step outside of what their peers are into and follow the path that leads to their own success. I refuse to let them be the next casualty, just some random statistic of black youth gone wrong in this country.
What amazes me even more is the apathy among black people. I understand that sometimes poverty and other disadvantages can encourage an attitude of helplessness, but at some point we have to become responsible for ourselves, start holding ourselves accountable for the condition of our youth and cultural heritage as well as our legacy collectively as a people and as individual family units.
I hope that as we go forward we can all find ways to help each other attain some part of our dreams and goals. Everyone needs help and encouragement!