Why did I stay

Over the last month I have been asked to share our story in an interview that someone is working on for a possible TV. I have to say it is not easy going back through and going through all the gory details. We are used to telling the condensed version of the story.

We let jobs, kids and depression and other people come between us in our marriage and it very nearly ended in divorce due to infidelity. While I hated the idea of being a divorced woman, I did not see a way out of it in light of all that had occurred. I was preparing for my future as a single woman. I had been offered a job in Nashville, we had the divorce papers drawn up, we just had to file them. Then in a last minute rescue mission our marriage was saved due to prayers, repentance and a changed heart for both of us. I had felt all along that it could be saved. I even told people that I felt like we would reconcile especially once the other woman was no longer in the picture. I trusted God to heal us, but at the same time I had to take steps to move forward in case we didn't get there due to hardened hearts.

When he came back and asked to work it out, I didn't trust him to mean it. I had heard that story before only to have him change his mind and tell me he didn't want to work it out anymore. He bruised my heart on more than one occasion and trust was no where to be found in me.

While being interviewed I was asked why I stayed after he cheated. I didn't know what the faith background of the people I was talking to so I wasn't sure how to explain it if they didn't understand the concept of forgiveness in Christ how did I tell them that if it were not for the fact that we are called to forgive I could not do it? The pain was very real and the lack of trust was overwhelming, but in the end it came down to love. I loved him, to this very day I still do. I may not be very good at showing it at times and I let myself get distracted very easily, but no matter what I love him. I knew that if he was willing to make this work then I could forgive and we would take steps to fix us.

We began praying together every night and I got a job that I was surrounded by fun people all day. That helped me a lot because after 6 years of being a Stay Home Mom, I had not had real adult interaction that did not involve a play date or at least a mom's night out. I was happy again and he was too.

Over the last 3 years we have been working on learning how to have a good marriage and we have been telling our story to help others not go down the road and make the bad choices that we did. Do we follow our own advice? I would love to say we do, but unfortunately we are human and we make mistakes. I'm a Stay home mom again and while I have more adult interaction than I did, it is still not enough. He works multiple jobs and is gone from us a lot and we don't have the family time that we need. We also don't pray together like we should. Why am I saying this now? Because I am saying that it is easy to screw up again and we do and we will, but when we realize that we are doing it, we have to stop and take a look at the choices we have made and look at ourselves and change ourselves. I can't force him to be faithful to me for the rest of my life, just like he can't force me to have a smile on my face all the time. The key is to work on yourself and pray for the other person and let God take care of it. We can only change ourselves and sometimes it takes being shaken to the core to realize you screwed up again. 3 years ago I was shaken to the core when he cheated, but out of that I looked within and changed me and drew closer to God.

I have to admit, I have not been doing my part lately and I just now realized it. So do I regret staying? No, I do not it was what was best for my family, do I think we will always stay together I hope so and pray that we will, but if we don't keep God in the center of our marriage I can guarantee we won't survive. So let me encourage you. Please! Please keep God in the center of your marriage. Pray for each other, pray together and grow in Christ, because without Him there is no chance.

bad choices

At some point in our lives we all make bad choices. Sometimes those choices hurt us and sometimes they hurt others, but someone always gets hurt. It is easy to look back after bad choice was made and see why it was a bad choice and how you could have avoided, but the hard truth is you change it once it happens. We can either choose to live in the past and hold onto past hurts resulting from bad choices or we can let it go. That is easier said than done of course, but in all comes down forgiveness.

Forgiveness is not saying that what someone did was ok, it is saying that you are going to let it go and let God handle it. The same goes for forgiving yourself. If you kick yourself for everything you have done, you just end up miserable. I have begun to learn that confessing it to God and to whomever you hurt is the best way to be free of the unforgiveness for yourself.

Forgiveness is actually not for the forgiven it is for the forgiver. Releasing the forgiven from the bondage of your hurt while it may good for them to know it also releases you. god tells us to forgive others as He has forgiven us. If we don't forgive others then how can we expect God to be forgiving when the things we have done that has hurt Him are so much worse.

I fight with myself quite often about letting go of past hurts that I have committed. Hind sight is 20/20. We can easily look back and see where we have hurt people, but at the time we either didn't realize it or just didn't care. I tend to fall into the I didn't realize it more times than not, but there are those occasional times where I want the other person to hurt because they hurt me.

The Bible tells us to be slow to speak and quick to listen. I know I screw that up, A LOT! I was raised to speak my mind and while there are times that is a good thing there are times it is not. I find myself trying to fix the situation and sometimes I just make it worse. I hate hurting people, especially people I love and yet I do it. I have baggage from my past that I have tried to carry around with me and it just keeps getting heavier making my back hurt and making me cranky.

I have to work on me right now and deal with all of that baggage. While a few years ago I did deal with some of it, I think I left some of it behind. I feel as tho past hurts have caused me to be angry with myself for letting them happen. I think of all the things I could have done to keep them from happening and I hate myself for it, even tho most of the hurts that I have held onto could not have been stopped. I was young and not very strong. Now I am strong and older, but those same insecurities keep coming back to haunt me.

Oh if there were only some magic pill that would make me forget all the pain in my life. I've called it depression and to a point it is, and I have been trying my hardest to deal with that, but I think also there is that young girl in me that is screaming and doesn't want to let go of what hurt me.

I don't have answers to any of this. I try to forgive and I confess, but somehow I always fall short. I can't believe it is all my fault. I have to believe that there are outside forces at work. They put those seeds of doubt in our mind and cause us to withdraw to keep from being hurt again. When we withdraw from one thing we look for something else to fill that void. For me it was reading and being on my computer. For others it might be someone else or drugs or alcohol. We all desire to feel important, we just don't always go about attaining that desire in the best way.

So there is no revelation here there is only regret. Regret at mistakes and regret at words. May we all find a way to forgive each other and ourselves.

Watching the film

In football, teams will watch films of their previous games to see what they did and did not do well. They take that information to make adjustments to hopefully play better the next week. What do you think would happen though, if they never watched film and lost game after game, year after year? They would have a lot of bad habits to break that they had created over the years.

In marriage, we tend to never look at film and then we act surprised when our marriages fail or hit a major season slump.

What if we looked at our "films" on a regular basis? It could be a weekly thing if you are in a slump or a monthly thing if you think things are going great. Or it could be whatever works best for your marriage. I can see times in my own marriage where if we had only been watching film on a regular basis we never would have gone through a slump because we would have caught our mistakes before they became a habit. Around the time the girls came along I (Bethany) made the mistake of putting the girls before Ace. I thought Ace was a grown man who could take care of himself, but the girls being just babies and toddlers needed me to take care of them all the time. We got away from dates, we never talked and he was working WAY too much. If we had been watching out for those mistakes they might not have become bad habits that were hard to break and unlearn.

So what does looking at film in your marriage look like. My suggestion is a date where you just honestly take the time to talk and listen to each other. Knowing what your film session is, you can come prepared to bring things up that you would like to work on or reinforce something you think you did well on. Let me caution you not to make this a gripe session, but to come with only one or two things that you really would like to work on and two or three things that are good habits that you would like to continue. Even the Detroit Lions do something good once in awhile and need to be encouraged to keep that up.

When you first start watching your films there may be a lot of bad habits you need to break and it can be tempting to try to correct all of them at once. That's really not a good idea though. It can be overwhelming and you will be trying so hard to fix everything that you won't work hard on any one of them. Pick the most important ones first or pick the ones you know you can fix quickly so you can move onto the next one. Before you know it your team will be winning and it will get easier to find those good habits to reinforce and harder to find the bad habits to fix. Now that does not mean you can stop watching film, it just means it will be a little more fun when you do.

Now go watch those films!

The Twilight myth

I finally broke down and read the Twilight series. I wasn't planning on reading them, but I got sick and a friend loaned them all to me and over the coarse of about a week, I read all four books. I have to say the books are addicting. I finally understood what all the talk was about.

When talking to Ace about them he made a comment about something he does not like about the movies. He has seen both movies, but has not read the books. He said that they give girls a false idea of what love is like. After thinking about that for a day I began to see what he meant. The love that Bella and Edward have for each other is extremely intense. They fall in love over a short period of time and their love is is impossibly resilient. Their love survives, rouge vampire attacks, werewolves and the fact that he finds her blood and smell like a drug. That kind of love just is not real.

Early on in a relationship we all have been known to be on that adrenaline high. It feels great, but we can't function on that kind of high for extended periods of time. Eventually our bodies build a tolerance to the adrenaline and that new ooey gooey love feeling fades into a more manageable love. It can still be intense, but the way the love between Edward and Bella is what little and big girls dream about. The thought of a guy willing to do anything for you, the guy that will vow to protect you and wants to spend forever with you is every girls dream. Throw in the forbidden part that makes it all dangerous and these girls are setting themselves up to fail when it comes to love.

I'll admit, I love the story and the movies now, but I also know that I can't hold onto the dream of a man that would rather die than live his life without me. Its no wonder so many marriages and relationships fail when Hollywood and novels put such unreal expectations into our minds. Things become comfortable and mundane and we long for that rush of love that we either once new early in our relationship or that we have seen and read. We think if we leave and or cheat that we can find that kind of love and maybe this time it will last. We are all adrenaline junkies, hoping for that high again, rarely realizing that it is only temporary. But it is when that high fades that real love can really shine. Being strong enough to get past that desire for the temporary high and live for the comfortable feeling of lasting love is what true love is all about. Sure there will be times where you want there to be more or things won't be great, but we can't doubt our love. Doubt will only make us crazy and doubt will only cause pain for us and the one we love.

As my husband has been known to say, the grass is greener where you water it. Where are you watering?

Who am I?

I have been married for 13 years and I will admit it has not been
easy. I love my husband and I love our two girls, but for years I let
them be my world and I was just there to serve them. I had no identity
other than Ace's wife or Lennon and McCartney's mother. My husband is
in radio and I would go help him at events before we had the girls and
I actually had a name tag made that read "Ace's Wife" I didn't bother to
ask for one that said Bethany because no one knew who that was, not
even me.

I'm a Christian and early in our marriage as we moved around a lot and
found churches, I would see the other Christian women and think I was
supposed to look, talk and dress like them. I rarely bought myself new
clothes, but when I did, I didn't know what I liked so I had to take
someone with me to help pick out the "right" clothes. Sweater sets and
capri pants if I was with friends and big t-shirt and jeans with I was
with my husband. I was hiding who I was behind all the supposed to's
and should be's.

It took a big hit to my marriage for me to even see that this was
happening. My husband and I nearly divorced about three years ago. I
had been a stay home mom for 6 years. We had moved so much with my
husbands job and I had been home so long that my teaching license had
expired. As I thought about my life as a divorced woman, I was
terrified, first because I didn't want to be a divorced woman and
second because I didn't know how to be anyone besides Ace's wife and
Lennon and McCartney's mom. What could I do besides take care of the
house and children? I ended up getting a job at a Day care because it
was all I knew, no one else would hire me because I didn't have
experience as anything else.

We ended up reconciling, but I still didn't know who I was. I knew
that I enjoyed photography, but all I did was take pictures of my
kids. I knew I liked to write, but all I did was blog about my family.
It is three years later and I still ask myself who Bethany is. I have
changed to dressing like I want to instead of how I think everyone
thinks I should, but I have not picked up my camera except to
photograph my kids. My husband and I wrote a workbook on marriage. Can
you guess what I wrote about? It was about being a wife :)

I do want to have an identity and I will admit that I am closer to
being Bethany than I was three years ago, but I still wonder what
people see when they look at me. Do they see Bethany or do they see
Ace's wife and Lennon and McCartney's mom? And if they do see Bethany,
who do they think she is? Who do I think she is?

Your box of snakes

When you have been hurt by your spouse, how do you you get past the feelings of hurt? It is easy to sulk and become withdrawn if you are the one who has been hurt, but is that best for your marriage? I think Not! And yet thats what some many of us do. We sit around and play the poor me role and by doing so we are not making things better, we are actually making things worse.

If this is what we are doing then it is time to STOP! Yeah it stinks when you have been hurt, but holding onto a grudge or withdrawing from your spouse is hurting you both. I have said it before and I will say it again, FORGIVENESS IS NOT JUST FOR THE PERSON WHO DID THE HURT, IT IS FOR THE PERSON HURT TOO!

Physical and emotional intimacy with your spouse is a must, but when you are holding something between you, it is like you have a box between you filled with snakes so you can't even reach over the box without feeling like you will get bitten. Have you been there? I know I have. I've been hurt many times. Sometimes getting over it is no problem, but other times I start filling that box with snakes. The longer I do that the bigger the box gets and the harder is is going to be to get them out of there.

It has taken me a long time and yeah I will admit it I am still known to do it, to learn how to get past the hurt. I've even been known to be hurt by my husband's hurt. That really doesn't help, it is like having two boxes of snakes between us, it is possible to get them out of there, but sooner or later one of us is going to get hurt more. That hurt is really just going to hurt us more. It is literally a venom to our marriage. It can be sucked out, but there will always be a scar there because we never should have put the box there in the first place.

So what's the first step of getting past it? Well, first you have to acknowledge that you are hurt by what was done. Sometimes it is obvious, but sometimes not only does our spouse not know we are hurting, but we don't even realize it ourselves. We have put that box of snakes there without even knowing it. So we have to acknowledge to ourselves and our spouses that we are hurt.

Next we have to ask ourselves if we have a legitimate reason for being hurt. Did our spouse do something that they knew would hurt you or did they accidentally do it? These two scenarios have different action points. If they did something they knew would hurt you then you have to talk to them about why they did it. Open communication between the both of you is a must if you ever expect to have a good marriage. Sometimes their answer may hurt more than what they did, but it needs to be out there. Hopefully, they won't try to put it all on you and what you have done, but sometimes that does happen. If that does happen then you need to acknowledge your role in what happened, but they need to take responsibility for what they did as well.

If they accidentally hurt you or they didn't even know they did, then that takes more of a look at yourself. Why are you hurt? Is it an ego thing? Is it a selfish thing? Is it some childhood trauma that it reminded of? Why are you hurt? Getting to the root of why it hurt you will help you work through the process and you can work on yourself here and hopefully fix improve whatever brought you to that point. Depending on the reason you are hurt, you may need counselling to get through it or you may just need to grow up and get over yourself.

After you get to the why of the hurt, the best thing to do is to pray about it. You should actually pray about it as you go through each step, but here specifically you need to pray to ask God to help you through the hurt. God is great at taking that box of snakes and getting rid of them if you will only ask. He can throw it far away from you and make it easier to get close to each other again. The important thing here though is we can go back looking for that box to pick it up again. During an especially hard point in my marriage I would pray daily for God to get me past the hurt and each day he would say "Let me take it from you Bethany.", but by each evening I had gone back in search of my box of snakes. It was like I enjoyed having that pain there. I wanted my husband, but I had rather reach toward him over that box of snakes rather than getting rid of it all together and getting as close to him as possible.

Finally, we need to strive for that intimacy with our spouse again. Intimacy is not just about sex, although that is an important part of it. It is about the closeness between you and your spouse. Do you ever touch your spouse and not feel like they are there? I know I do. We can talk or hold hands and it is like he is not really there. Now I can ignore it and do my best to get past it or I can acknowledge it and do something about it. Maybe we have not had quality time in awhile. Maybe we need a date that is not just watching a movie where all we do is sit in a theater and focus on something else besides each other. Or maybe one or both of us is trying to put that box of snakes back between us.

If you can't keep the box of snakes from between you, eventually one or both of you is going to get filled with so much venom that there is nothing that can get it out. Don't let that happen. Trust me there is much more pain there than you will ever feel from a hurt in your marriage.

Forgive them, get rid of the box and don't pick it back up.

Life after an affair

My husband had an affair. There I said it. That is not the easiest thing to say, but the thing is, it is true. Something even more hard to say is that it happened more than once and that he and I are still married. Many people can't believe that I would even consider staying married to him after an affair and before we went through it I would have been right there with them. Then it happened and while we did originally intend to divorce, (we even drew up the papers), things changed and we worked it out. So how did the affair happen and how did we manage to make our marriage work? The long in short of it is we got lazy and then we stopped being lazy.

When we first started dating our worlds pretty much revolved around each other. We were students with part time jobs, but our free time was pretty much spent with each other. Even after we got married and had jobs with opposite schedules we valued our time together so much that we would squeeze it in whenever we could. Even if we were watching football my feet were in his lap. Then kids came along and we were so busy with them that our free time was spent resting or just vegging on the the couch. He was working way too many hours and neither of us thought about the importance of making that time for each other. Eventually he found someone who would give him the attention he needed and I fell into a pit of depression due partly from the lack of attention I was getting and partly because we lived in a brand new city and I had two kids under 4. This pattern continued for a few years until we realized that we were in fact our own worst enemies when it came to our marriage.

Everyone thinks affairs are never going to happen to them, or they think that who ever has the affair is the only one in the wrong. After going through my husbands affairs, we both realized that neither of us had invested into our marriage like we should have. We also realized that boundaries had to be set. The boundaries were not because my husband was likely to have another affair, but because all marriages need them. These boundaries include never being alone with someone of the opposite sex. This goes for both of us. It is not ok for me to be alone with a man who is not my husband and it is not ok for him to be alone with a woman who is not his wife. It protects not only us, but the others as well. Another boundary we had to have was counseling someone of the opposite sex. Because we have a marriage resource and have been through our own junk, there are quite a few couples that have come to us for advice. We truly believe that because we have been through our junk we can help others with theirs, but we also have a rule though that the women need to talk to me and the men need to talk to my husband. By that same token we agreed not to share personal information or problems in our marriage with someone of the opposite sex. Basically these boundaries keep us from being in any situation with someone of the opposite sex that could ever lead to something it shouldn't or that even looks like it could. I know that there are people who think it is crazy to have those kinds of boundaries, but if you look at the people who have had affairs most did not have these boundaries in place. The thing about affairs is usually people don't set out to have them, they just fall into them by crossing lines and slowly fading away from their spouse and toward the other person.

So once we figured that out we lived happily ever after right?...Wrong, we are still learning even to this day how to have a happy marriage. We found we need to fight. Both of us have the bad habit of avoiding conflict, but after not being honest with each other to protect feelings we recently learned that we have to be honest even if it leads to a conflict. Overall, we are still learning how to have a good marriage. Really thats good though because if you think you can't still learn new things to make your marriage better, then your marriage will never be as good as it can and should be.