Ivy Tied Up |

I promised….Finally I can get into my email account so here you go….

Hi Ivy,
Thank you for allowing me to share my secrets with everyone. I can’t share my name because of the seriousness of my letter, but I do read your blog even though I haven’t commented.

Being married isn’t easy. Its one of the toughest things I’ve ever done in my life. I married at 17. After 20 years together I’m ready to get off of the roller coaster. I feel like the theme park closed years ago and they forgot to let me off and close down the ride. As the cart inches slowly upward in its crawl to the highest point my stomach clinches and my heart stops because it knows what’s to come.
The first few years were filled with laughs and good times. He’d bring home flowers for any occasion, help me with the dishes, wash clothes, on the weekends we’d cook dinner together and spend what the experts call “quality family time”. Over the years his coming home on time faded. He would spend nights working. Gone until two or three in the morning. The kids started getting older and I started to get lonely. I tried for years to talk to him about it. To tell him how I felt. Being a stay at home mom. I had everything I could possibly want. Everything that money could by that is.
He always felt that it was my duty to stay home. He could provide for our family and provide for us he did. When the kids stopped needing me to tend to their every need, I felt the need to get back into the real world. Expand my horizons and start to live again. Loving my kids was easy, living my life with out them to take care of wasn’t. For years they were my responsibility. They were everything I had. They were me, or was it that I was them?

After 10 years together things started to mesh together. I stopped being able to tell where the highs and lows were in our relationship. Things seemed to stop completely. I yearned for the days we would fight and argue, anything to get a rise out of him, anything to make him notice me. I changed my hairstyle, lost 30 lbs, and started trying to get his attention. The kids took notice but he never did. I felt hopeless, drained, and empty.
He never understood why I felt the way I did. He gave me everything I could want. One night he didn’t come home. I waited up sick to my stomach over it. That night we had the monster of all fights and even then he never got upset. He never cared. I packed a few bags and headed to my parents house for a week. I left the kids with him and decided to take a week for me. I ran into people I hadn’t seen in years and an old flame.
That week lifted me up. It awaked something inside me that I didn’t think existed. Something I had never felt before. I had a few sexual experiences before my husband but nothing like this. I loved my husband we share 2 kids together but I was so hurt and angry with him. At that point I figured an eye for an eye. The man I was with that week was exciting and he made me feel again. It was like we were meant to be together.
I’ve never felt that way about anyone else. Not even my husband. I went back to my family after that week and back to my old life. I haven’t seen my flame again. There isn’t a night that goes by that I don’t long to be in his arms again, to be with him physically as I am with him emotionally already. It’s been 5 and a half years since that week with him and I still think about him. I miss him, want him, and crave him.
My husband will always be a part of me. Cheating on him was wrong. Two wrongs don’t make a right I know. I’ve stopped seeing this man, this man that I truly love and feel owns my soul, my husband continues to cheat on me. He doesn’t know that I know. I walk around in a daze doing my daily duties, pretending to be the perfect wife. My kids are basically grown now and I’m ready to move on. I’ve spent my last 20 years raising them. Tending to them, caring for them and loving them. They are old enough to go their own way and understand why I must go my own.
Thank you for this. I know no one close to me would understand my feelings and why I must do what I must do. No one can know the turmoil that builds inside of me every time I look at my husband and the hurt I feel for my kids living in this cold, lonely house. I am not leaving my husband for this man. This man has moved on, he has tried to contact me several times but I couldn’t respond, it hurt too much. I am leaving my husband for me years of hurt and emptiness it’s time to live for me.

Lonely Inside