You know when you are truly going through something; a real emotional upheaval and the Universe/God sends help? It could be a television show, a conversation with a good friend, anything that taps into your emotions in a profound way and sends you into...well, yourself? I am having one of those profound moments right now. Okay, before I get into the meat of my post, I have a confession to make. I have a slight aversion to the publicness of blogging and sometimes think it a bit self indulgent. There, I said it. But I've been reading through some of the posts onYMIB and I appreciate 1)the openness of expression and emotion I've found and 2)the honest support and love that pours out from responders. So, during my moment of deep reflection, I started thinking of safe places to vent and YMIB came to mind.

Here goes...In the August 08 issue of Essence, there is an article called Ghost of Relationships Past by Tara Roberts. The article discusses how childhood and past relationship pain often impacts our current relationships, sometimes in ways we don't even understand. Now, I realize this is not new information, but sometimes it is good to hear certain things again. Anyway, this article comes to me at a very interesting time in my life. I am 35 and last month I "celebrated" my 11th year of marriage. Why do I put the word celebrate in quotation marks? Well, as most of you might guess, 11 years come with their fair share of ups and downs.

When I "met" my husband 12 years ago (we knew each other from high school; we dated a year before we got married), I was deeply depressed about having to come home after graduating college. I had fought hard to move away from home because it wasn't a happy place (my father was an addict; my mother was extremely critical) so needless to say, I felt like a big time failure. Although my husband and I were in our early 20s, we were both teenagers in terms of life experiences. I really didn't know myself, and he really didn't know himself, but we felt and instant connection. The selling point for me? He was so different from my dad. Now my dad loved me, but he had a lot of problems and wasn't a reliable husband. Although she didn't have to, my mom stayed with him and ended up taking care of everybody and everything. I didn't want that for my adult life, and I knew that I wouldn't by marrying my husband.

A week after we got married, we moved to NYC (from GA), and I had a nervous breakdown that lasted for about 2yrs. My husband had gotten into a Chemistry PH. D. program and was gone most days. I thought getting married would help me put things in order, but it just made things worse. Not only did I have to find my way in a city where I had NO other family but my young husband, I had to figure out how to be somebody's wife. I was anxious, depressed, angry, and everything else. Needless to say, a lot of negative emotions were geared toward my husband who was ill equipped to help me. Before him, I had one really serious relationship and was quite disrespected and I brought a lot of resistance from this relationship into my marriage. My husband did not stand a chance.

7 years into things, I decided to go to therapy to make myself better so that I could be a better wife to my husband. Over a year or so, I dealt with a lot and felt that I was ready to be a woman to my husband. By this time, he was tired. We lasted for two more years until he physically left me (he was already gone emotionally). I was devastated. For real. Then, a year after that, he came back. Yes, I thought. Now we can begin to live the life I imagined because I WAS READY. We had planned to go to couples therapy to deal with residual resentment on both our parts, etc, etc. I was happy, deep down, smiling every day, happiness. Really. This was in the fall of 2006. By winter, he decided HE WASN'T READY (turns out there was another woman involved but this post is long enough already). That coupled with some other disappointments at the time, sent me to a place I did not want to go back to. I think I cried everyday for a week. I decided to start really thinking about what I wanted from my INDIVIDUAL life. How do I want my life to look if my husband is not here, because I still have to live it? That has lead me to quit my current job as a teacher to pursue Jewelry Design at FIT.

Then, I met "my friend." It's the same ol story...we start off as friends, then someone (him) brings up problems in their current relationship, we bond over our shared experiences, we start flirting, someone (me) asks the "what if" question, our friendship gets closer (we start to text and see each other in secret). Although, our relationship never became physical, there was a lot of innuendo and declarations of love if only. I felt my marriage was over and liked my friend enough to want to move forward with him, but he didn't fell the same way. He wanted me around but didn't want his wife to know.

Regardless of how I felt about my own relationship, I am not a home wrecker or the kind of woman who chases other women's husbands. But I was hurting and looking for love, acceptance, whatever and saw my friend as an new opportunity to find that. The first few times my husband caught wind of things, I was indignant and quite frankly surprised at his anger. After all, he had decided he didn't want to be married anymore and had gone so far as to draw up separation papers (he had a stint in law school as well). This last time, I was looking for a way out of the emotional mess I had gotten myself into. Basically, in my "search" for all those good things, I ended up moving further away from those things.

Although my husband and I are currently together, I'm not sure how things will be moving forward. It's almost like our relationship has stood still and there is so much work for us to do as a couple. I'm not even sure where to begin. But I know God is there to help.