All of my dreams and visions for the future of my life have been crushed. It is difficult to portray the complexity of my emotions. I am so conflicted. I never thought that I would be faced with a decision of whether to stay married or not. I am such a fiercely loyal person. Never in my wildest dreams would I have ever thought I would be faced with this reality.
One thing I can say is that I have felt the strength of the Lord in all of this. He is so aware of our individual needs. I have so much faith in the healing power of the Atonement. I have so much hope for my future amidst my devastation and despair.
There have been so many layers of emotion this week. There have also been layers and layers of issues to think about and try to resolve in my head. I feel exhausted and sick. Through all the difficulties, I have learned so much about myself as a person. I am encouraged by this because I have recognized my own strength. The Lord will always bless us so much when we desire righteousness. I feel so grateful for my wonderful parents and their support in this and I hurt so much for their pain.
Sometimes I want to talk about my feelings so much, and sometimes I am just quiet and reflective. It is always helpful to take my thoughts to my parents, but it is especially difficult now that they know because they are now going through their own grieving process.
It is very hard to sit down and process the feelings of this week on-paper all at once. Its truly just a lot to deal with. My hope is that I can write daily so that I will only have to try to synthesize the feelings for one day at a time. I know that it is likely that I won't have the strength to do this on some days, but I hope to do it as much as I can.
I guess to start I could just re-count the events of the week and try to document the feelings in my heart and mind. Last week, I had the flu and I was very sick. On Sunday, I was still very sick and I wasn't able to make it to church. My husband admitted that he used this as an excuse not to go go church either. I had recognized for several months that the spiritual part of my husband was absent, in fact, quite dead. At the time I didn't recognize the full degree of this or why it was, but it was a frustration and a concern to me. We stopped holding Family Home Evening together, I knew he was not reading the scriptures, and he prayed only when I asked him to pray. Even then, I could tell he was just saying words. When we went to church, he seemed to have mentally "checked-out" and he never wanted to talk about his thoughts about the gospel. When he did, it seemed very superficial.
This has been incredibly hard for me because the gospel is such an important thing to me and I have always loved to discuss and live it. Although I can see that all of these things were manifestations of my husband's choices, at the time I didn't see clearly how sinful his life was. He did a very good job of hiding it from me-which completely scares me. During this time I had determined that maybe he was just not as spiritually mature as I had hoped he was and thought that was just one areas of our marriage that we would have to work on. I craved spiritual intimacy though and I felt a void in our otherwise very happy marriage.
I regret that I too became more casual in my own spiritual life. I wished that we would hold Family Home Evening, but I did not fight my husband about it. I could tell that it wasn't a priority for him and I just submitted to that. I found myself so busy and stressed that I sometimes wasn't taking time for meaningful prayer and scripture study. In fact, when 2009 came, my New Years Resolution was to have more meaningful prayer and to devote a time to read the scriptures or a talk each day. I certainly remained virtuous in my life and did not let any major sin into my life, but I recognize now that for awhile I became too casual with such important things. I know better and I am grateful for the reminder of how important these commandments are.
Anyway, on Sunday, my husband stayed home from church, but still went to our dinner group (we have it with a few of our close friends each week) without me. When I opened my computer, I was caught off-guard when I saw a file on my desktop that was obviously pornographic in nature. I then opened the "trash" on my computer and found numerous other files. They had been opened Friday night around ten p.m. On Friday night, I was very sick. I had wanted to get better so that I could focus my time Saturday on school. I had taken a warm bath, medicine, and my husband tucked me in bed. It kills me to think that while I was so sick, my husband left me alone and stayed in the front room to look at pornography. It upsets me because any time that my husband has ever been sick, I have done everything to make him feel better. I have nurtured him and stayed with him constantly. He did not come to bed until the early hours of the morning, which was upsetting to me. He told me he had fallen asleep on the couch.
I was very upset when I found so much pornography on my computer all from that night. And those were just the files that he downloaded and forgot to delete. Of course, I wanted to give my husband the benefit of the doubt and I did not jump to any conclusions. I called him and told him to come home. After all, I was sick and he had been gone for hours. When I called him, he had been playing games with our friends. Unfortunately, I could not immediately confront him because when he came home, two of our friends came over to check on me and visit me since I had been sick. As soon as they left, I turned off the show we had been watching and told my husband that I needed to talk to him.
At this point in my journal, I decided that I would need to write more later because there was a CES Fireside that I wanted to listen to.
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