In 2014 I gave birth to a baby girl, Roma, and by the end of that year her father and I had separated.
We had been struggling for a while with normal couple problems, and although the pregnancy was planned, the further I progressed along the more he checked out. By the time I gave birth he was high 24 hours a day and I was so tired from the pregnancy and having a new born that the implosion was inevitable.
To say I was sick and tired of being sick and tired would be an understatement. However despite all of our troubles I still loved my husband, and from the time we met I couldn’t imagine not being with him.
That “however” though was not enough. After the forth or fifth time that he had disappeared for the whole night I had had enough and told him I was moving out. Fast forward to about 1 month later, I moved to a place that I couldn’t afford, in a foreign country, with a newborn. It was hard and awful. I regretted the decision as soon as I had made it. Most nights were spent crying over Roma and fending off mosquitos. But the stoic part of me tried to be strong and prayed that it would get better.
My husband would occasionally come visit us and we would be civil and hang out. However by this point his addiction was in full swing and I couldn’t leave Roma alone with him, so I got no breaks, and was still dealing with the heartbreak at the same time.
By the end of 2014 it was all too much and I went back home to my parents to get some much needed support. The next few months were a blur. I was a complete zombie, and it took a significant amount of effort to stay present with Roma and attempt to parent her. My family literally saved me and her, to this day I could never repay them enough for the help they gave us.
Meanwhile my husband left Mexico City (where we had been living) and took off to go and live on the beach. We kept in touch by Skype, and text most days, but while I was angry at the whole situation, and feeling like an emotional blackhole had taken over me, now that we weren’t together I wanted him back even more than before. (I know, I know!).
This was also back in the days where we all used facebook and email significantly more; as I still had access to all of his passwords, I checked his account daily. In my former life I was probably a PI, but somehow just getting windows into what he was doing was an addictive fix that I found myself not being able to live without. At it’s worst I was checking his accounts every hour of the day. Things, were shit, I was shit, and felt totally out of control, pining and obsessing over a person that had chosen not to choose us.
One day, while doing my daily checking there was suddenly a lot of messages between him and “some girl”. In transpired that they had gotten involved and while I tried to keep my chill, I obviously was unable to hide the fact that he had started seeing someone. He did tell me about it, it was probably the most emotionally distraught I had been throughout this whole period of time, and not surprsiginly I spiralled into an even worse state of anxiety, obsessing over checking is messages, and a pretty extreme level of fatigue. Pushing through the worst of this, I was only really able to do my best to be grateful that I was still his wife, we had a kid together, and no girl was about to come a long and mess with that.
But then she did.
A couple of months later, I saw an email between him and a family member asking for a gyno recommendation. Immediately I knew what this meant. She was pregnant. I remember seeing this very late one night, and I almost threw up. I drove hastily to my brother’s house in the middle of the night, and he and his girlfriend watched me completely unravel.
I sat on his doorstep and chain smoked several cigarettes, before returning home and crashing.
What now?
I confronted him of course. First he denied it then eventually came clean. Perhaps one of the most hurtful things about the conversations that took place during those days was that 1. he didn’t seem to get why I was so upset and 2. I felt like he had totally forgotten about us already. He had contributed nothing to Roma’s life up until then anyway, but the chasm was about to get even bigger.
In the background of all of this I was using the little energy that I had to try and get a new business off the ground in Mexico City, meanwhile I was living with my parents in the UK. As “luck” would have it, right around the time that I was processing this news I needed to go out to Mexico City, where they were now consulting with gyno’s.
My dear parents agreed to look after Roma while I took a 1 week trip. This trip would turn out to be one of the most signiifcant make or break moments of my life. Before I went I was through the initial shock and had to really get my shit together. I suppose it was slightly montage-like in the sense that I found some emotional strength to empower myself enough to start acting like a human person. Or maybe it was just the though of getting a kid-free week to myself, I don’t know. But either way I found some strength.
Part of that strength is the subject of this post, accepting what is. Until this point I had fought with myself and him about accepting that he was about to have a baby with another woman. Everything about the situation felt as surreal as it possible could, and it was compounded by the fact that I knew she was young, and beautiful and they would both be living in the high of being newly in love. Ugh (it hurts just write that even after nearly 10 years).
Nevertheless, acceptance was the only hand I had left to play. Accept what is. Accept that he has moved on, accept that Roma may have a step brother or sister in less than a year, accept that I was going to have to meet this girl in person and see them together, accept that my dream life was being stolen by someone else.
I am not sure whether this process of acceptance was a conscious decision or involuntary surrender. There was no resistance left in me to these emotions that I was feeling. There was nothing more to do.
A couple of days after I arrived to Mexico City, he and I arranged to meet. He told me almost immediately that they had broken up and she had had an abortion. What? Like actually what? I couldn’t realy believe what I was hearing.
My disposition quickly shifted from broken doll to confidant (which feels like a unexplainable role I chose to play given all the hurt). But I suppose now that the bullet had been taken out of the chamber I just wanted to know all the details. We spent the whole day talking about all of his situation.
Relief? WTF? Who in the what now? It all felt pretty unreal to the point of almost laughing at the time.
The journey didn’t end well with us a few years on, in fact it got even worse. But needless to say this part of the story serves as one of the most potent examples in my life of when complete surrender to a situation allows the universe to step in on your behalf and orchestrate that shit for you.
It’s one of the most difficult balances to articulate when it comes to the law of attraction and manifesting; how does one give up the need to control (surrender) and yet be entirely deliberate about what we want to manifest (create)?
I am not entirely convinced anyone has found an exacting answer to mastering this equilibrium yet, but with more posts maybe we’ll stumble up on it together.