Love For Our Afflictions: Allowing Pain to Pave the Way to Peace

Prologue

It was supposed to have been a typical Monday, but before the morning sun greeted the afternoon, I found myself sitting against an entryway wall in a pool of blood, drenched, bargaining with the universe.

A towel between my legs, I instinctively looked up to the heavens, the only place left for answers. Fifteen minutes earlier I had been standing in amniotic fluid, facing a mirror, tears rushing down my face. My face. In it I saw only heartache and grief, age and exhaustion, gifts of the last few years.

911. I must call now. I forced myself to my feet. Though my eyes could barely focus on them now, I thought for an unlikely moment about the four inscribed stones resting in the decorative dish next to the phone. Feel. Faith. Dream. Strength. Once words to live by, found randomly one-by-one over the last four years, they were now dead stones, witnesses to yet another loss.

Despite the towels, new blood had reached the floor. This must be what they mean by survival mode: weak, terrified, confused, burning with internal heat. Find the phone, a comforting voice on the other end, a link to the world that makes sense. Do everything they say. Open front door. Wait there for them. Quiet. Don’t wake the children, they cannot see you like this, faint, half-naked and stained red.

This is where my story begins: in an entranceway, losing my baby, close to death, in danger of bleeding out. This was my entranceway in every sense. It’s here that I witnessed the death of an unchallenged old belief— that afflictions were only to be dreaded and feared.

In that bloody doorway that Monday morning I found love for my afflictions and was free.

Mine is a story first begun as so many are: as an ending. It’s the story of how a young woman, her life split open so early, repeatedly and even savagely, can not only recover, but discover a truly authentic way of being.

My story describes any woman’s most heartbreaking losses: threats to babies born and unborn, to a daughter’s health and longevity, and to a husband’s fidelity, laying bare the gifts that lay hidden within each.

In an age where so many secret stories are demanding to be told, I am answering that call. My very willingness to write unshrinkingly, in the hopes of buoying others in their afflictions, is proof of the freedom given to me by the afflictions themselves, my former enemies, whom today I respect and even love.

Chapter One

Am I Enough?

Four years earlier we had stood, naked and unmoving, in our bedroom. It was the start of a new calendar year, when fresh hope and optimism are normally on the table. I had had a miscarriage, but here I was, pregnant again, a cause for joy and relief.

We had been celebrating by making love in a rare child-free space, just big enough—our walk-in closet.

I had no conscious idea at the time why I said what I said at our love-making’s most dramatic moment, but out it came, the question that answers itself, every marriage’s moment of dread.

Are you…? Have you….?

Shocked at myself, I stood paralyzed, desperate to pull the question back into my mouth and completely out of my heart. The idea that he was having an affair was preposterous. What was I thinking? I was eight miraculous weeks pregnant, and without warning my hormones were raging and my inner bull was way out of the gates. But we were in love. Why would I suspect his fidelity now?

My voice trembled with Never mind…, but he was steadfast and unfazed as he spoke with no emotion, no expression. No.

Just, No. He didn’t ask me why I had asked. He didn’t seem offended. That was that. Only later would I spot his too-ready response as well rehearsed.

In getting the answer I wanted I had just ruined our day of exquisite happiness, I thought, as he hurried to his office and I to my ultrasound. The reason for my question lay so deep within me that I could not immediately reach it, and it could not comfort me.

Necessary or not, nothing at the time could ever have convinced me that this affliction could get any more painful. And no way in hell would I have believed that I would come to do anything but hate it.

Our story up until then had been a love story envied by others. We had fallen deeply and passionately in love almost immediately. Engaged four months after a late night in a college dorm room where we talked as if we had known one another for a lifetime, we had had seven very happy years together, six of them in marriage. He would say that he knew the night we met that we would marry, and my response to him, responding with a rare kind of abandon, told me that he would be in my life for a very long time.

Our chemistry was instantaneous, as if a great force drew us to one another. We were inseparable, joined not only by a physical love, but also by strong commonalities and shared interests. We were two lost souls become one, lighthouses to each other, unbreakably loyal. We fought rarely. Our only concern was that we were too much alike.

Running parallel was another of our rapidly shifting worlds. Shaken, with an unsettling feeling that my world was rocking slowly out of control, I went for my ultrasound after my husband, Yuval, left for his office.

I lay on my OB’s table in silence as I waited.

It had been twelve months of temperature-taking, charting, doctor visits, post-coital contortions and a growing addiction to peeing-on-a-stick. But, after a heartbreaking miscarriage, our efforts seemed to be finally working. This was our chance to complete our family.

This ultrasound would map our future, then. One tiny blinking light would be the go-ahead signal. This was an epic day.

Were we putting too much weight on the success of this pregnancy? Was my 24-hour morning sickness too much for my husband? Were there any telltale signs in his behavior over the weekend that I overlooked?

These were my thoughts as I lay on the cold medical table, palms damp and feet cold, itching in a paper gown.

Alone.

Well, no. There it was, the miraculous little light we had been looking for all these months.

There, on the ultrasound, a tiny blinking heartbeat. I sat up to get a closer look at the first sign of our child. A healthy child.

I should have been expecting to carry that ultrasound photo triumphantly into the house later that evening. But the winds of change that had been rattling our marriage had unsettled something inside me, and now my instinct had become impossible to deny. Yuval’s denial notwithstanding, I had spontaneously interrupted that loving moment in our closet for a reason—that question of mine wasn’t out of the blue.

Though there was no lipstick-on-the-collar moment, women know. We just know. The truth was in the air. I knew this man very, very well, but that day he was a stranger, full of guilt, wanting and needing to be caught. He wanted me to know, and he was right. His affair would offer revelations that would save him and our marriage.

But of course we didn’t know that yet. And I had simply awakened that morning sure of his infidelity and something else: that I was eight weeks pregnant with a healthy baby.

What I didn’t yet know is that I would need to go through soul-searing self-abandonment on the way to my wholeness and our peace. And so I did, starting from that evening, when I found myself hesitating to open the garage door. Despite the cries of our tired two-year-old daughter in the back seat, I sat, frozen and terrified behind the wheel in the driveway. I hadn’t been able to reach him by phone all day, and my instinct told me he was with her, somewhere.

I had seen her a year before, unceremoniously, in a local deli where I had gone to pick up lunch and we exchanged brief hellos. I had noticed her, in the past, being unnaturally preoccupied with my family and even my child. She was openly flirty with Yuval, as she often was with other men, and something just told me in a flash that they were about to connect. It was a premonition that seemed ridiculous at the time.

Meanwhile, my car was still idling in front of the garage. In my terror I wanted to flee from my unknowns and from this terrible affliction.

My mind raced. It was true that I had been ill for several days with morning sickness that lasted late into the night, and I had felt safe enough to be in that condition. Was that it? We had had sex on our minds for so long, but mainly for fertility reasons. Was that it? Was he leaving us? Was he gone already? Would I never see him again outside of a divorce court?

I was no longer in my own body. My soul was collapsing under the weight of each successive fear as I sat outside that garage.

It took a great deal of courage to push the button on the door opener, but as it creaked open, I sighed with relief. His car was gone. He wasn’t home. The garage and my home were empty. I knew he and his mistress were together, but not in my house and not in my bed. It was one moment of light in a dark time. I could breathe. I could collapse. My world was changing, but before it completely fell off its axis, I could savor a moment in my old reality.

So I tucked our daughter, Adira, into bed with a story, a kiss goodnight and with her own bitty baby wrapped tightly in her arms. Time stood still for a moment.

I walked down the long hallway, weeping my need for my husband, my hand protectively placed on my pregnant belly. I was grieving for the child who would never know her father as Adira had, and for our pain in trying to conceive while Yuval’s loving attention was secretly elsewhere. I grieved for Adira who would fall victim to her parents’ mistakes and to her mother’s pain.

I tried calling Yuval’s number one more time. This time he answered. But it wasn’t him. Even his Hello was different. This was a stranger speaking, not my best friend, my lover. I’m almost home, the stranger said. I know, I answered.

I know about her, I added. The phone clicked off.

The man who arrived home was even more of a stranger than the cold and unapologetic one on the phone. This is when I began to withdraw from myself spiritually. What a great lesson, I would realize later. But this night there were no pleasant revelations. Not only did I fail to recognize the man in the house, the woman in the mirror became a stranger to me as well. I had not only lost my best friend, I had lost myself.

Backed into a corner, the man who had once been loyal, loving Yuval was now shouting in anger, spitting venom with deadly aim. I was to blame, he said. I was pregnant. I was not as much fun anymore, since some of our favorite lovemaking practices were off the table for a time. We had been too busy trying to make a baby instead of making love.

And I bought it all, wondering why we would have been given a baby amid such betrayal.

There was little sleep to be had that first night as I questioned my own part in the failure of our marriage.

Maybe sex had truly become just about making a baby. Maybe I had stopped giving what was needed to make a marriage work. Yuval had stood before me with no other answers and with no regret, blaming me exclusively and pitting me against his mistress, a single woman with no children. How could I compete?

I felt completely and utterly rejected, vulnerable and desperate. In twenty-four hours I had gone from being a confident, strong woman, wife, and mother to a teenage girl desperate for a boy’s attention. I was willing to abandon all self-respect, forfeiting my principles in order to keep him. Any ability I would normally have had to see that perhaps he wasn’t worth winning, that I was worth more, that my children were worth more, was gone. I was in a desperate competition.

My one source of power was a twisted one: suddenly I had to know every detail of his relationship with the other woman, every detail of what she meant to him. I wanted to become her. I became obsessed with pleasing him so he would stay with me. And he stayed. I had won the night.

He stayed as I begged for his forgiveness.

With the morning came another kind of break in the darkness. We had, understandably, slept apart, and I awoke exhausted from insomnia, my body aching with grief and rejection. What I hoped was a bad dream, was my new life, after all. Was Yuval still in our house? Surely he’d changed his mind, leaving in the darkness to be with her. I wondered if he had called her, seen her, emailed her. Did she know that I knew? Did she think she had won?

None of that had happened. I found him, sitting in silence in our child’s playroom, his face bruised and scratched from where I had hit him the night before in a moment of rage. To my surprise, he was regretful.

To my surprise, I responded with ultimatums. He would have to end things with the other woman immediately, and I would need proof. We would have to find a therapist. He said yes to everything. We sat together on the sofa with the laptop. My eyes were full of tears and his were full of exhaustion and guilt as he wrote an email to her.

It was over.

That day is mostly a blur. Shaky, still shattered, I phoned in help for our daughter. We would need someone to be her rock and her normalcy as we cratered. Next on the agenda was finding a savior. Randomly chosen from an online list of providers given by our insurance company, I selected a name. Hope was on the way. I phoned, and scheduled our first therapy session for the following day.

Feeling lost and broken, I slept between fits of crying, grief, rage, and conversations with my husband. He had stayed, and I felt so grateful for that, but there was a painful recovery ahead, if a recovery was even truly possible. As a protective measure, I began to shift to thoughts of divorce. But a divorce would mean she had won, bringing up my original fear, that he would choose her, and that she would raise my children. Distraught and desperate, I decided that my best option, my only option, was to hold on at any cost.

We talked ad nauseam about our sex life that day. Masochistically, I needed to know all the details and exactly how I had supposedly failed him. I was distraught with confusion. Just two days ago, I had been happy. In trying to conceive, the entire last year had been about sex. Our relationship, our love, our connection was born from sex. So I feared it wasn’t about sex after all, but about falling in love with someone else. Had he fallen as deeply and as quickly for someone else as he had for me seven years earlier? Had there been a seven-year expiration date on our relationship? I went to him with those fears to ask the biggest, most important question of all.

Was he in love with her?

I was giving him a free pass to walk out on our family and me so he could love another. I begged him for the truth and practically packed his bags for him, so he could be happy.

In return, it was Yuval’s turn to shatter, embracing me as he wept. He loved me. He wanted me. She, he promised, was nothing to him but a horrible mistake. He needed me, and he needed my attention.

The day turned into night, and we had survived together. Now the real work was beginning.

The morning would bring our first therapy session, and it was a memorable beginning. We walked in, fresh from the rubble of our life, and there she was, a stubborn, blunt, middle-aged woman with fiery