Diary Entry – Why Leave?

I have jotted notes on my thoughts for many years and so it was and is part of my coping strategy to write what comes into my head. It helps me make sense of things and when I look back over the years I can see where I have been and how far I have travelled.

This is one such notebook entry written shortly after the split.

A day in the summer of 2018 – THE conversation:  “Everything seemed normal during the morning, after the ‘talk’. Very matter of fact.  I had just been told my husband wanted to divorce me.  Then the afternoon arrived like a huge dark storm cloud.  Everything became real. A thousand swords ripped my heart apart. I felt like not only had I lost the person who had vowed to stand by me until death parted us, but I had lost my identity as wife, matriarch of the family, carer and provider of sustenance.  I wondered why he wanted to leave, surely he had just what he wanted. He had always had free reign to do as he pleased, sleep with whom he pleased, take drugs, get drunk – nothing was off the table.  What other wife would allow such behaviour and just suck it up?”

Of course I now look back and realised the more I closed my eyes to indiscretions and infidelities, the more I released the respect that I had for myself and that others had for me too.