I am many things. Innocent is not one of them. Then again, I haven’t claimed to be.
haters
originally posted to drafts folder 3 July 2014 (in a moment of my own snarkiness)
for the anonymous and not so anonymous people that have messaged me in order to call me slut, cunt, whore, skank et al. if you insist. but to be clear, only his
at the start of this month, Rougedmount had posted about the silencing of Unloving You. the post was well written, spot on and made me unbelievably sad for many reasons. yesterday, for the first time in weeks, i had the chance to start to catch up on reading the blogs i follow the most, maybe even comment here and there, and after reading said post i decided to go through the “blogs i follow” list to clean it up so to speak. granted, there were a few i knew had signed-off for good, and i needed to remove them from the list, as well as a few that have gone dark but the blog was still “alive” and not deleted by the blogger. if it’s a blogger that i’ve taken an interest in and or hope they find their voice again, i’ll keep them on the list until the next review.
so i was saddened to find that another blogger seems to have fallen prey to the same fate as Unloving You. Grey Matters Tales of a Proper Villain. His blog no longer exists. and we have lost yet another talented writer, with a depth for capturing the complexities of every day real life and the very human emotions and feelings of love, lust, longing, anger, heartbreak. all of it. he also displayed a wicked sense of humor and the arrogance to know what he was good at and the all too human frailty of falling in love with the right person at the wrong time. he too has had blogging haters, trolls continually post in his comments or even attempt to engage attack and vilify him when he’s left a comment on one of my posts.
i don’t know if he’s gone completely as i hope he’s lurking in the interwebs, cultivating his next alter-ego/pseudonym in order to launch his new and improved venue for his musings. and if you are out there, i hope to stumble upon your gifts again.
by the grace of god. i remember being a young student at st. pious x school and the then principal, was speaking to the entire school and she used the term by the grace of god. i didn’t know what that meant, i was only in the 2nd grade but something about grace and god stood out. later that night i asked my dad about it and he took the time to explain it in a way a curious 7-year old could understand.
as i got older i found that “by the grace of god” and “in the end, only kindness matters” have been quotes (mantras if you will) that i find myself falling back to time and time again. another is “kindness is possible even when fondness is not”.
the last 48-hours, as i have had some freedom to try to catch up on the bloggers and tumblrs that i follow, it struck me how many are having moments of doubt, self-recrimination, anger and every other visceral emotion that at times, can overwhelm and challenge even the strongest individual. one in particular, struck me as she was having a good old rage in her post and yet she ended it with asking the hater’s and the self-righteous judger’s that tend to leave her hate mail to give her a break. she’s having a rough go of it. it was clear from her writing that she’s in a lot of pain. and has been. she just needed to vent in the anonymity that the blogosphere offers.
it made me pause. have i been as kind as i can be even as my own world seems to be pushing towards an implosion? we all have our own stories, our own issues and we are all human with feelings and the capacity to love greatly and hurt deeply. and then i remember, that by the grace of god i go and truly, in the end, only kindness matters.
“where have you been?” “is everything okay?” “thinking of you” are just a few examples of the unexpected and thoughtful messages that started hitting my inbox the other day. fellow bloggers, yes, most ow, that I’ve been following, commenting on their posts, liking their posts etc.
what can i say other than i have indeed been absent. not intentionally but deliberately. last friday my darling husband, the man i have been tethered to for the past 25-years, asked me if i was involved with someone outside of our marriage. to say that i was shocked and scared is not quite adequate. shocked because i have long maintained, in my weekly sessions with my therapist, that if anything, should said husband discover my affair, he would either: not care, not notice and or be relieved. scared because as much as it may be hard to believe, i cannot lie when asked a question outright. of course i admitted that yes, i was (am?) indeed involved in a long distance, primarily “virtual” relationship. i wasn’t scared about the status of our relationship, no, i was afraid of the end of my relationship with “him”. while my dh is not a punitive or vengeful person, i am afraid that he may reach out to him and or his bride to confront him. that cannot happen. while my absence from all things social, was not intentional, the step back and silence has been deliberate. the separation from my blogging has been the most painful of all as i receive so much solace and education from the blogs i follow.
dh’s reaction has run the spectrum of anger, sadness and shock. anger and shock i expected. sadness i did not. this has never been about me leaving him for another. nor has it been about wielding a “you’ve had two affairs in the past and this is my turn” stick. the sadness, the hurt is hard for me to swallow (wait for it, yes i expect the haters to come out in full force now) because i question whether or not it’s genuine. is he genuinely sad that we might be ending? or is it his ego that can’t believe that the woman who he has always known and said “mckenzie will love me forever. she has always loved me more than i have ever loved her. she’s lucky a man like me remains married to an overweight and unattractive woman like her” etc.
he asked if i loved him. of course i lied and said no. no good can come of revealing that i am emotionally attached to him and that the physical side of our affair, as rare as those moments are, are the most emotionally satisfying and fulfilling of my life.
why is it that after all of these years, specifically the last four in which i begged, asked, pleaded with him to “say something” , to meet me in the middle, to consider counseling or seeing a doctor, why now? when i am so emotionally divorced that he suddenly has an epiphany and says that i should have known that he loves me, deep down and all of those hurtful words, his past affairs and his lack of interest in me sexually, is “just his way” and that my feelings and my desires should take a back seat to the last 25 years we have shared.
now, now he is willing to see a counselor. not to fix “us” but to support me in my quest to fix myself so we can go back to the way it was. the way it should be. the way he wants it to be again. my heart broke as i avoided “him” most of friday until i was safely away in my office and could log on and let him know what happened. i held my breath as i waited for him to say “goodbye” his self preservation kicking into high gear. and i cried, for the first time on friday when he asked what could he do and said “i can’t just walk away mckenzie. maybe before. and maybe i should. it’s always been my rule. but you have forced me to rethink those rules from the moment we met. this is no exception.”
darling husband and i have been talking. spending time trying to find common ground in what it is we want out of a marriage/relationship whether with or without one another. i know i want and need more. it isn’t about him. it is about me. and so we journey forward. i am not trusting his demeanor or his assertions that his way is the way it needs to be. i am giving the counseling a chance since i have wanted it for years. only now, i want to be able to take this next step either with dh or without him in a better space. dh has asked me to end it with my internet friend by the end of the month. i asked him “or what?” and he merely shook his head and replied “well since you yourself have said it’s not a mean to be relationship. eventually you will realize i am the best you will ever have”
rambling on and sad. missing him. our communications limited to a few minutes online over the last few days. but i know this is a leg of the journey i am taking on my own.
while I am not surprised, I will admit that I expected the “hater’s” to be most vocal over on Tumblr. In hindsight, what I failed to recognize is that the audience on Tumblr is varied from very young in terms of maturity (and even age at some point) to those only seeking the salacious and then those in mid-life that see it as a creative outlet with some anonymity to express desires etc. And everything in-between.
When I decided to start blogging over here on WordPress, with the intent to be able to ramble on about him, my feelings, the emotional upheaval and awakenings as well as the conflicts, ache etc. I decided that in order to be genuine and authentic to what I was trying to achieve, I would not make this anonymous or private. I’d put this out on the inter-webs for anyone to stumble upon. Knowing full well, that as folks found this, they would have an opinion. One way or another. I expected it. This topic, of a relationship outside of marriage that isn’t an open marriage, a swinging marriage, or a polyamorous one is definitely a polarizing topic. Especially for those that have not lived in either of the other’s shoes (the Wife and or the Other Woman and quite frankly the Cheater) or those that have an opinion because it touched some aspect of their lives or perhaps they were like the me that was so righteous and judgmental whereas a betrayal is a betrayal regardless of circumstances or context.
I get it. I really do. In the last three days I have had more comments come through all starting with my original posting about saying “i love you”. I am only surprised because of all of the posts, though admittedly not that many of them, it was the “i love you” that’s brought out the lurking haters if you will. I don’t hide from the comments or the opinions, but I can decide what I will publish and who I will respond to privately or on this blog. I will not allow you to vilify those that read this blog in search of answers, whether they are The Wife, the Other Woman, someone looking for some salacious retellings (visit my Tumblr or the Nocturnal Notions link) or someone that stumbled upon here by accident. Lest you think I am flaunting my cheating, you are wrong. Am I venting, talking out loud about a place I didn’t expect to be, a love, in whatever context it may be that is very real to me and my own journey to what will be a conclusion that isn’t predicated on a dream of he and I being together in a marriage? yes.
Everyone sins, and everyone sins differently. I look in the mirror everyday and point my finger at the person looking back at me. I suggest that those of you who’ve sent some of the most hateful and ignorant messages I’ve received to date, do the same.
is me is really me 