Let the Healing Begin

She listened to the gentle thrumming outside her window as she replayed the conversation again.

---

“I think we need to see a marriage counselor.”

And all at once, her world crumbled. She could scarcely remember how to breathe. Each second ticking by added another stone to the expanding pit in her stomach and set off a flutter of tremors across her chest. At one point, she felt as if her entire body was frozen in time and she was merely a spectator unable to look away from the wreck happening in front of her. “Why can’t we just fix this ourselves?” She managed to croak.

“I’m tired of running into the same walls, the same issues, the same patterns. We have a problem, and I can’t keep doing this. I need more.”

---

The slow drizzle outside had now become a steady beating drum. She pulled the blanket around her a little tighter as the tears finally broke free. She let them fall and soon her whole body was wracked with grief and she began to wail. He doesn’t love me anymore. She thought it, but that wasn’t enough. She needed to understand the full weight of her new reality. “He doesn’t love me anymore!” As she said the words aloud, a new wave of grief consumed her. She allowed the numbness of the past year that had been begging for release to pour out of her. She was so scared. To succumb to her darkness meant that she might not find her way back, but just as this thought entered her mind so had another, you will not remain broken. She looked out the window again as the tears continued to flow.

---

“I haven’t been happy for so long, for years. You’ve been lying to yourself and to me. You’ve created a fantasy world where you claim to be happy with me, but how can you be happy when I’m so miserable? I can’t be a footnote in your life anymore. I feel like I was tricked, and now I’m part of something I didn’t really sign up for. I need us to be the way we were in the beginning. I want the girl I actually married back.”

---

She weighed these words more carefully now. He had said this so many times before, but she had never really understood the full meaning of his plea. The idea of going back and being like she was in the beginning really bothered her. That girl was broken. She was lost and searching for love, for life, for safety, and for a purpose. That girl didn’t even know her own mind. She had no confidence, no family, no roots. Who the hell would want that version of her when she had come so far? And then it clicked. The wake-up call. A new sense of awareness had finally crept in, and she needed to figure out what this could mean for her. Yes, that broken girl had helped her build an amazing life. Yes, that broken girl had saved her from a terrible fate that so many others in her situation had fallen victim to. In fifteen years’ time, she had built a career she loved, created two beautiful, healthy children, maintained a loving home, and she had found a partner to share her life with. But where had she gone wrong? What step had she missed along the way?

She pulled the blanket in a little closer as she started to feel the tension in her body melt away. Every tear, hiccup, wail of despair that had escaped seemed to release with it the weight she had been buried beneath for so long. The clouds that had been hanging over her were clearing and the light was finally starting to seep back into her.

---

“Therapy isn’t working. The problems we have are still there, and I can’t change what I need.”

---

Yes, she saw it clearly now. She knew as soon as he proposed it that the therapy would never work because she knew neither party would reveal the truths that had been buried deep inside each of them for so long. His truth was that he needed her to be something she just couldn’t be, and her truth was not one he had ever been willing to hear or accept. Therapy was a last-ditch effort before the admission of failure, and this truth was probably the hardest of them all to face. They had failed each other, they had failed the family they had built together, and they had failed themselves. She paused for a moment to let this new reality settle in around her, and she waited for more tears to come. But they didn’t. The burden she had felt before was still dissipating, and she realized she wasn’t adding any new burdens; she was simply acknowledging the ones that had been there all along.

She rose from the couch resolute. She would make one final attempt to reach out to him and to explain everything that was in her heart. There would be no holding back, no censoring or filtering of her feelings. The truth had to be shared even if it wasn’t acknowledged or accepted. After all, there really was nothing left to lose at this point. She would be honest with him; admit her flaws, acknowledge her shortcomings, and she would offer the only love she knew she was capable of giving. As she started typing the words, the ideas flowed effortlessly and the darkness she had been enveloped in shifted with each click of her keyboard. As she finished the last sentence of the email, she already knew in her heart what his response would be and she accepted it.

She knew that the love she had to offer would not be enough, but now the burden of this knowledge was something she found she could bear. I can only give the kind of love that I want in return. That is my truth. She hit the send button and closed her computer. She looked out the window again, and as the rain continued to fall she thought about the broken girl who had helped to shape her and who had carried her to this point in her life. She walked over to the window and opened it, breathing in the fresh air and exhaling all at once she made a promise to that girl, “It’s my turn to take care of you now.”