Part 2

What was I searching for? What did my head want to know that my heart was protecting me from?

I had been on my knees begging with the lord

for the truth.

I had enough, I couldn’t take it anymore, the lying, the secrets and treating me like I was nothing. 

So I climbed onto his lap facing him, I looked into his eye. He looked back at me and placed his hand on my leg. 

I asked to see his phone, you know the locked password one.

I asked him if he would open it and let me see. 

He Immediately said NO, and withdrew his hand from off my leg and his whole demeanor changed. 

His words...

“I am not giving you my phone.”

I placed my trembling hands on both sides of  his face, I looked him in the eyes trying to find the courage to ask the question my heart already knew the answer, the truth that I begged the lord to give me.

Are you having an Affair?

He replied “NO!”

I said then who is A from Carbon County in your phone? 

Yes because I had online access and I could see his contact list.

He couldn’t even put her under her real name he was hiding her. 

He said just some girl that works for them! 

 I said really just some girl? Then I said it, I said her name out loud to him and to myself and I knew from that look in his eyes it was all I needed for my heart to feel the pain.

Looking into thoes eyes,  I said open your phone.  Let me see. 

The reply “I am not letting you see shit on my phone.”

I again asked are you having an affair with her?

His eyes darted and he said no, the lie my heart felt first before my mind could realize what he had just done, he looked me in the eye in my most venerable moment and he LIED!  

His words would slice open that wound that I though had healed from years before. It was now fresh as if it had just happened.  All the work I had done for years just vanished and I was crushed by thoes words that lie. All of it came flooding back in, the pain the trauma of having to pick through my wedding album to throw away photos because she was in my line, my maid of honor. I was now flooded with all the old memories and now these new ones, and the broken promises. The mistake that wasn’t a mistake it was a choice. 

Then he said the the words that would twist that knife deeper in my soul. 

  The only thing that are priorities to me are my job and the kids.

Just like that I felt like garbage, used thrown out. TRASH! 

Any self esteem I had left, gone. That wound that had healed the scar left on my heart, sliced open bleeding fresh.

Words were being said and the room was spinning and I felt as if I couldn’t breath, the truth that wasn’t said but that I felt with my whole heart.

I could see his mouth moving and I could hear the words but it was like slow motion bits and pieces I couldn’t quite fit altogether. I knew words were spewing from my lips. 

Thoes eyes looking at me dead and cold like I actually meant nothing,  and I ran to the bathroom sobbing and emptied the contents of my stomach. 

The truth had made me sick.

I wanted that truth so bad that I hadn’t even thought to pray that I would actually be prepared for the truth that I do desperetly wanted. 

He could’nt say it with his own mouth he couldn’t respect me enough to give me the truth. He didn’t admit it, he actually didn’t have to because I felt it... every piece of me felt it! 

I walked out of that bathroom and watched him frantically deleting everything from his phone. 

I turned and walked to the bedroom while the reality sank in. There I stood just stared out the window in the dark, the room still spinning and tears flowing down my cheeks.

There sat my husband in the living room deleting his cheating and lying the proof of the truth. Like It mattered because his eyes and my heart already confirmed it. 

The next thing I remember is lying on the bedroom floor him kneeling over me asking if I were okay. 

 The pain was too much the room spinning too fast and I had passed out. 

I could see his lips moving but I couldn’t understand a word he said my mind could’nt keep up? 

I was not okay and I was not prepared for that truth that would trickle out day after day week after week.  

I remember lying in bed that night asking the lord to take back the truth.

I didn’t want the truth anymore. 

I remember begging for him to let me fall asleep and wake up and it all be a very bad dream. 

The lord had answered my prayer, I had been praying for and I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready to know that again my husband was being unfaithful.

My friend and my husband had damaged me and I spent years working that all out. I spent years forgiving him I had moved on and we were doing so great.  We had been attending the temple together every month, for the first time he had stood up and bore his testimony and I had never been so proud and now this! 

How could it be?

What little I did sleep that night was awful, the next days I still couldn’t think straight and all I could do was go through the motions. I was a zombie, I would leave work early and go home to morn that truth. 

I remember not wanting to talk about it, I wanted to hide that truth from the world and I wanted to hide it from my heart. 

I did, I tried to forget it even happened and then he refused to cut contact with the A from Carbon County,  that very same day I could see on the phone record he had called her so I blocked her number, then I called her and asked her truth. 

You guessed it she also lied to me, we are just friends, and I wanted to see how his day was? 

I wasn’t polite to her and I wasn’t kind and I asked her to stay away from my husband. She was also married and I am sure her husband wouldn’t appreciate it either. 

I had been praying to know the truth and now that I did, I wanted to lord to help me forget.  I regretted asking the lord to help me find the truth so I wouldn’t feel crazy and now I was asking the lord to just let me be crazy to take it all back!

 The lord was giving me what I had asked for and now I wanted him to take it all back so I could go back to pretending, it was easier than lying to everyone around me. The one person who I had always relied on, that I always took all my troubles and worries was the one person That had just done the damage and he just kept lying. 

The battle began. I was just hoping the lord would help me. 

 

INTUITION

I can only describe it as a gut feeling,  intuition of something that your body picks up before your brain has a chance to figure it out! 

YES this feeling had been there for a long time and felt like a lunatic because I couldn’t make sense of it. I didn’t understand what the heck was going on the words and the actions were just not matching up no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t ignore that feeling. Intuition that was making me doubt myself, think I was imagining things I could see, convincing myself I actually hadn’t! 

You know CRAZY MAKING.
I actually hope and pray that you don’t know, that you will never have to feel that in life.

 I can say that when you suspect something going on outside your relationship you become a paranoid mess.
 I stooped so low as to hacking all of his accounts, looking, searching for anything to confirm these feeling. Trying to prove that gut feeling, that intuition wrong.
 Honestly this time around I thought it was the job, not a girl. I had asked him a million times, I questioned him, I asked for him to talk to me about what was going on. I got nothing, like I didn’t matter, didn’t exist. 
The crazy took over when he cut communication. I asked him please no secrets, no lies, I begged him to talk to me, pleaded for him to open up. 
I did it, I couldn’t feel parinoid or crazy anymore.
I snooped his phone list, his facebook, email, anything and everything I could think of trying to get rid of that gut feeling.
The sad truth, it wasn't even me that discovered.
That boys weekend. 
He obviously did not try and hide it from them, He must have thought they would just think he was talking to at the wee hours of the morning.
Heartbreaking that he had little to no contact with me while on this trip. 
Why was I less important? 
Was I not exciting enough?

Things had been tense for awhile between us. I had been whining he was always gone working. 

 I just wanted a small portion of his time.

Had I been asking too much? 
I just wanted him to find a balance between the work he loved and us.  

How stupid could I be?

How trusting after last time?

I had been her before.

I knew the signs.

The wife of our mutual friend asked me if I thought there were someone else? 

I quickly replied NO, he is just working way to much he would never do that again.

He would never he knew what he and my best friend at the time had done. He knew it had broken me and I had fought long and hard to come back from it.

 NO

WAY 

how would anyone do that to someone again? 

How wrong I would be!

I just didn’t know it at the time my heart only wanted to see the good, my head on the other had was screaming at my heart! The night my head and my heart would start to come together. Tuesday night, softball night in our little county. I had always gone up and watched, sometimes played when they didn’t have enough. I knew most of the guys on the team, some of these men were the same that had accompanied my husband 2 days prior to LA.

On any other night they would say hello, chit chat, acknowledge my existence. 

Not this night, not a one of them would even make eye contact with me much less  talk to me, a few wives were weird as well.

I ended up leaving that night feeling more crazy than ever.

 

 I sent a text out to one of them the next day and asked?

 Do I have the plague? 

Response: NO, why you say that? 

I said not a single person would even make eye contact with me last night.

So I must have something wrong with me or something happened in LA nobody wants to tell me. 

This is how my head and my heart would come together, how I would come to learn what my intuition had been telling me. This was the answer to the constant prayer I had carried with me everyday... HELP! 

This was the night I knew it was more than my gut telling me something was wrong, what I had been feeling wasn’t crazy, I wasn’t crazy. 

After this night I would be treated poorly, the coldness, the disrespect. 

I just wanted answers. 

This was it, the moment that I knew that others knew something.

 What? I had no idea,  but I knew they knew and they weren’t willing to share with me the truth. 

Something had happened in LA and it was being kept from me. By all of them.

I was about to get the answer nobody wants, the answer to a prayer that was going to hurt. I was about to find out that sometimes we are not going to like the answers to the prayers we had been praying about for months. 

I was about to find out about HER! 

VISITING THE PAST

I have written a lot about the infidelity in my marriage.

2012 I wrote it all.

The problem was I wrote it in my family blog. I never published any of it, I was ashamed of my story and ashamed of myself. 

 I decided to open another blog so I could keep my family blog upbeat and happy. 

I converted a lot of what I had written in 2012 and moved it over in 2014, to the new blog which I had named.

 HalfemptE.

 This blog was about the hard truths of life and what they had taught me. 

This is how I viewed myself at the time.

I remember even changing my signature on my phone to 🦇$hit€r@zy...

 I truly thought I was.

Visiting the past hasn’t been easy!

 I have had to go back through the blogs my family blog  elisecurtis.blogspot.com 

Then I went back through the HalfemptE blog. As I had been pushed to write my story, I wondered what to rename this blog? I decided on Unshatteredpieces.

I knew somewhere inside me there had to be some pieces left that weren’t damaged and broken and I desperately prayed to find them. Visiting the past hasn’t been easy.

I was being told over and over many times to share my story. This had come in many forms as early as July and I had tried to push it away. There was a reason I had all these unpublished posts. There it was my past staring back at me  on a screen.

The past I thought about every waking day.

The past that haunts my dreams and clouds my reality.

Visiting the past and seeing my life as I knew it, the life that I now question.

 Was it really even real?

Did it actually happen? 

I can see it with my own eyes, feels it with my own heart.

Proof, words and photos staring back at me that it did exsist! 

The work that I have done on these simple words.

“I faked it”

As I went back looking for the posts written from the past, Praying to know what to write, what was it I am to share?

 I came across my life! The pictures the moments, 25 years spent building a life.

 I look at that life and I question.

How did someone else fake that? 

How could I just live a fake happy life?

Truth, I don’t know.

Reality has been altered.

Damage that may never be repaired in this lifetime. 

I work really hard on these simple words...

“IT WAS REAL TO ME.” 

This visiting the past, seeing the old post and the good and the bad, reading them is proof of that.

So many truths and knowing that this was just an option, not worth the fight. 

That torment, that truth along with that statement. That statement haunts me to my very core. 

FAKE! 

Trying to believe any of it was real and knowing     what I felt. My head and my heart battle this out, wage war against each other. 

Pieces of me scattered all over thoes past posts.

Searching for the unshattered pieces of myself. The empty shell of a person who once was. Where did she go?

Why did she leave?

What happened to her?

Where is that joy? 

Was it real?

This past life that was real to me. 

loving any of those pieces that are left has been a daily battle.

That struggle of reading the past chapters of my life. 

The next chapters of the past are about to get really dark.

For whatever reason these words were written by me, for me in 2012. 

They were again revisited and transferred in 2014.

2019 the past being brought to life and it was real!

I know the lord has a hand in my life.  I know he is guiding this path, I know there are angel on the other side who have and are holding my hand in times of need. My darkest hours they are with me and wrapping  arms around me.

As painful as it is, and as damaging as it feels, he is pushing me to share my story.

This story isn’t only for me but for you who have felt this same way.

The many others who have been told part of their past is fake, part of who they are doesn’t exist.

Parts of there story has been ripped away by another’s choices.

Parts of them are missing because they have lost more then they could ever imagine.

This part of my story isn’t going to be easy to tell.

I have been asking the lord how to heal. 

How to feel whole and I know there is no other way. I have put it off long enough.

Share that’s the answer I contuine to get and this chapter is about to get dark.

Distance

 I had been noticing the distance since April, I had been fighting with myself as to why, I blamed myself mostly.

I was over reacting.

I was struggling.

I was doing what I did best, I was shutting down because of FEAR.

I thought of everything I could to make things better and they seemed to get worse. 

After the cruise things seemed great for a week, a little bit of balance between work and home. Because at this point I still thought it was work. 

I started despising, work and every time that cell phone would ring, pulling him away again and I also started to despise the person on the other end.

Memorial weekend and again he had to go  for work, the friendship cruise. No service, No contact with me for days. I would question why others had returned home and he hadn’t. 

I bought the excuse hook, line and sinker. He was left to put it all away. I would find out later that it was actually because he had made time to meet someone. After returning from the memorial weekend, He went right back to the same old routine working all day and all night seeing him maybe an hour a day and never talking... Neither is good or healthy for any relationship. 

Then came the weekend spent on a trip, with the guys. A weekend in LA.

The wives would all go to the spa for a day and I would hear about the trip from all of them.

I guess the his phone didn’t work or was it because he was choosing to not find any time for me.

I have this tendency to shut down and pull away when I let fear of a situation take hold of me. 

FEAR that something else was going on, the distance I felt wasn’t just work. 

FEAR of what if?

They would return a day early because he decided once again work was more important. 

I remember praying really hard that what ever was going on I would be lead to the truth, I was going crazy, I felt crazy and I started acting crazy, trying to figure out why I had all these feeling and what was going on. 

I not sure how to explain this crazy to someone who hasn’t been there. It’s like you obsess, you over analyze every move, every conversation, searching for clues, anything that may lead you to answer all the unexplained behavior. 

Early Monday morning I remember wondering why I wasn’t told they were on there way home and I was woken up surprised and excited  to hear him come in. 

I cuddled up next to him as he laid in bed and I prayed.

I placed my hand on his chest and I remember asking the lord to help me soften his heart, to help me reach him, I remember begging to protect him from the grasp of Satan. 

I slept with my hand on his chest, and a prayer in my heart. 

The prayer that I would be able to figure out what was going on and for a way to help him with whatever it was he was struggling with. The prayer for him to guide me to what I needed, to best help him and whatever was going on with him that he would let me in, not to close me off and talk to me... 

I WAS ABOUT TO GET WHAT I HAD PRAYED FOR!

Password Protected

Look at me the stupid wife who believes everything her husband says, wanting to give him the benefits of the doubt when everything in me was screaming something is wrong.

I would continue to ignore what my heart felt that prompting from the spirit that was telling me something was wrong. I would believe all his lies, his gaslighting, his manipulation. I would ask over and over why he was acting this way, what was going on? Asking him to stop working so many hours of the day and night to spend some time with us. He was missing everything, work was all that was important to him.  He blamed me told me I was depressed, so I would go on medication because if he said it had to be true right? He knew me better than anyone. He convinced me something was wrong with me and I believed it. He would convince me I was crazy, over reacting, that I needed to relax. I actually believed something was wrong with me and I was this awful mom and awful wife and I tried my very best to do it all because he was never around to do any of it, help out at all! I flipped out one day about never getting help. I would find out years later he pulled my kids out of school that day.
Lectured them on what they needed to help. 
I wasn’t asking for the kids help I was asking for him to notice. 

We had booked that trip with our friends and I couldn’t wait because no phones, no competing with work. I could not wait for the day in May to come. 

Finally he had to look at me, talk to me, be with me, no outside world pulling us in a million different directions. 

It was going to be just what we needed to get back to us. 

After that trip things were good for a few week then it went right back to never seeing him. Work work work that’s all he cared about and hanging with the guys. Didn’t want to go anywhere with me our weekly date night gone had been for weeks. 

Let me just say if your husband puts a pass code on his phone and is not willing to share it with you then start asking more questions. I don’t care what he had on his phone I didn’t even want to look till he started treating it like it was his prized possession. What an idiot I was for believing his reasoning, at this time he had his personal phone and his work phone.  

The excuse was that he walked out of his office and upon returning someone was at his desk looking at his phone so he put a pass code on it so that people at work would not try and look at it.

Yep I bought it hook, line and sinker...

Why you ask?
Because I loved and trusted him. 

Earlier in our marriage after 1st D-day I would have called him on it. I wouldn’t have believed and trusted so easily it had been 7 years since that once friend and him stole my trust from me. 
7 years of working on trusting again. 

Looking back I can see the red flags.
I have re-lived them over and over in my head. All the times doubting if I wasn’t just crazy, wondering if I had said something earlier, noticed something sooner, told him how it made me feel. Would it had mattered? 
 Would things have been different?
What if I didn’t shut down and go into protection mode. 
Ultimately we are all faced with temptations, none of us get to go through life not having Satan waiting and watching, placing enticing things in our way. Wanting us to follow him and laughing when we finally do. 
Will we step over them?
 Turn and run the other way?
Pick it up and hold it for awhile?  
We can't control someone free agency.
Free to choose!
Right from wrong.
Good from evil!
Try it and hope we won’t get caught? 
The choice is yours to make when faced with the temptation. 

You see the choice to password protect the phone that day and the story told was because there was a girl(temptation) chatting and the conversation wasn’t something he wanted discovered, things started getting more serious beyond a friendship so the password went up to protect this new relationship from being discovered, not by that office worker but from me! 
Me the wife the person who loved him and wanted nothing more then for him to pick me. 
This would be the 2nd time I would perform this dance, the pathetic pick me dance. Maybe I had been doing the dance my whole marriage, maybe I never stopped doing the dance hoping and praying that my husband loved me enough to actually pick me!