The days got longer and longer

I wasn’t sleeping much so the days were very long and when I did sleep, it didn’t last long. I would stay awake thinking, not being able to stop the thoughts running thru my head. I would wake from a dead sleep with thoughts that I could not escape. With little sleep the thoughts became a tangled mess in my mind. I would get up and write all my thoughts in my journal. Keeping track of what I was thinking gave me clarity and the chance to give each one more attention rather than just mindlessly spinning out of control.

I became more aware of what to search for, for help and what needed the most work. I would find some interesting articles and read each one, then I would save them on my computer labeled for the content like working on me, working on us, or what ever I felt it might fit in to my life. I needed to be able to reread them as needed. I have now read some of them more than three times. I found so much information that I could not read it all in a day and I could not process them all in a day either. Any more than I could process the things we talked about. I needed to ask the same questions of him over and over again. Some things sunk in some did not. I had to now write the questions out and when he answered them I wrote that as well. I still asked them over and over again because I was trying to deal with so much.

It amazed me how much I found on the Internet. I felt like it was just what I was thinking. How could anyone know what I felt or thought? Because the emotions that come from being cheated on are the same for everyone. It’s how you as an individual deal with this that is different. I realized that my whole life has contributed to the way I was dealing with this. I went back to my journal and started to write every event in my life I could remember that caused me pain. To focus on my life and how I dealt with it or didn’t deal with it, made me realize how much I needed to work on me just as much as I needed to work on us.

I wanted to work on me but who was I anyway? I have been a mom and a wife longer than anything. Some where along the way I put myself on the back burner and forgot I was there. I tried to focus on me and me alone but it lasted a very short time. I have always put myself last and changing this is not going to be easy either. My children are older and moved on with families of their own. But my role as a wife to me means I still have a husband to care for and a house that needs my touch. I now need to learn how to care for me and he needs to learn to put me first once and a while. Its a balance of the two of us rather than just one of us. I put him first and so did he.

He is helping around the house more and he is helping me see that I am just as important as he is, he is also working on being more aware of my needed and that they are met as well. I am trying to be patient with him and show him, he is safe here with me, that I will try to understand him in his way. We are working on talking to each other as well as listening to each other.