The Replacement

This week my oldest daughter told me that she met the girlfriend. When she came into my room, I wasn’t expecting her to drop that news. She came in and told Alexa to pause the TV show I was engrossed in. She flicked on the light and dropped the bomb. I was caught off guard and didn’t know how to feel. My first thought was a bunch of jumbled mess. If I wrote it down at that moment, it would look something like !@#$%^&*, followed by _______???? I had so many thoughts and none at all, all at the same time. I expected something to happen like this at some point, so the situation itself wasn’t devastating. I just didn’t calculate what it was going to feel like. My nervous system was all of a sudden on alert, doing trigonometry. Do I feel sad, angry, jealous, happy? I couldn’t figure it out in that split second.

For the sake of processing, I think I’ve settled on the feelings of sad and anxious. Sad because I can’t believe someone who is capable of causing so much pain, someone so full of themselves, someone so manipulative and cruel, could have another long-term relationship so quickly. It’s been 2.5 years, and it feels like ages ago that we were married. But it’s also only been 2.5 years, and I don’t think it’s safe to commit to someone so quickly. The differences in our journey are unworthy of comparison. Not because one is better than the other, but because they are just different. I’ve been spending time healing from all the pain I trapped in my body during our marriage and learning to love myself after that abusive relationship. Him, being the abuser, may not be interested in finding himself, but instead may choose to focus on finding a replacement to love so he can feel in control again. Think about it, he didn’t let me go, I walked away. I scraped open all of his wounds with a palette knife and painted the words “YOU LOSE” across his face when I left. He was so devastated one night he called me in desperation because he’d shat himself. He was literally losing control of…everything. So it makes sense that he has found someone to fill the gap so quickly. And if I’m truthful with myself, it stings a little because I am still alone.

However, my solitude is a choice. When I’m ready to look again, I’ll be looking for a partner. I don’t need a stopgap. I want someone who will add to my life as it is — not take away from it or make it any more complicated than it already is. There is no timeline. It could be 5 years or 5 days from now. I’m not closed off to the idea of a relationship, but I am cautious about who I let into my life. I don’t need to love for the sake of love. If I had to pass judgment on his current situation, I’d say that is exactly what he is doing — loving just to feel love again.

But beyond my feelings and judgments about his relationship, I have the feeling of anxiousness because I don’t know who she is and how she plans to interact with my kids. My integrity and ego are irritated by the thought of him sharing negative opinions about me and the way I parent our children. If I were her, I would probably believe anything he regurgitated, because I don’t have a baseline to compare it to. I would probably feel like their mom is controlling and overbearing. I know because I know that is how he would repurpose that palette knife to open my old wounds. He is still the person I’ve known for almost two decades, and the person I know is vindictive. So if she doesn’t agree with the way I do things, will she start insisting things need to be done differently?

We decided several years ago that we wouldn’t whip our children anymore. My thought was this: we aren’t slaves, and neither are our children. This is one tradition we don’t need to keep passing down. Do I want to hit them sometimes? Hell yes, but that comes from a place of anger. Hitting doesn’t come from love; it comes from frustration, pain, and anger. We can get our children to behave using our words because we are intelligent human beings that don’t need archaic traditions to enforce obedience.

Anyway, I know that most black people, moms and dads alike, don’t agree. And I don’t know if she is a believer of that or not. And even though we agreed, I was the person who wanted to change it. I don’t know if he could be persuaded to whip them again. Especially if he is trying to impress her by showing her he respects her ideas. Well, why do you think that would change his mind, you ask? Let me share a recollection with you.

At one point in time, he became very close with a woman much older than us. They worked together and were spending a lot of time together. They knew I was getting suspicious so they planned an introduction for me. She invited us to her house. The night she invited us, one of my co-workers who had become a friend — someone he didn’t approve of — was having a baby shower. The shower was in Highland Park. Even though he had agreed a few weeks prior, he now didn’t want to go. So, I drove myself from Fort Worth to Highland Park in Dallas, about a 45-minute to one-hour drive. I was about 7-8 months pregnant and swollen all over with our middle baby. At the shower I got a lot of questions about my choice to drive such a long way in my condition…alone. Because I needed to be in two places at once I was only at the shower for about an hour or so, and then I drove myself from Highland Park to Mansfield — about an hour’s drive — around 9 p.m.

He had arrived at her place, where he wanted to be, around 7:30. He got very comfortable, playing games with her and her children (they were the same age, if not a tad younger than us). Her husband was in another country — I feel like that is an important note. I arrived around 10 p.m. He answered the door in his socks like it was his house and he wasn’t a guest. Almost like he had been there several times before. There was food displayed on the counters and the table. Mexican. His favorite. They had already eaten. I was embarrassed. It was like he was flaunting his affair in my face.

We argued about that, and I demanded he not speak with her anymore. He told her about our spat, and that prompted her to invite me on a girls’ outing — nails and food. The first thing she said on our outing, to I’m still healing, and I’ve come too far to allow this little bump in the road to throw me off my path of joy.

I’m going to keep healing and holding my gaze forward.

I can handle hard things because I’ve done it many, many times before.

You are stronger than you think — that is what I often tell my inner child when she wants nothing more than to take up residence in the darkest corner of my mind.

But shrinking is not an option. Healing after hurt means you have to take up space in your own life.

That is loving yourself without a replacement.set the mood and intention, was, “I’m not trying to take your man.” I thought, well if you feel like you need to say it…the shoe must fit. I used her money to get my nails done and eat (a pregnant woman doesn’t turn down food). When I got home, I told him she will never be a friend to me and that I didn’t appreciate him pushing her on me. But that didn’t stop his involvement with her. In their mind, I should be convinced nothing was going on and shouldn’t be worried. They kept talking on the phone when I wasn’t around – sometimes at 1 or 2 in the morning. Going to lunch together. Her name was on his lips daily. But I didn’t make a fuss because he could debunk every suspicion I had. I didn’t talk to anyone else about what was going on, because he said we weren’t supposed to share our personal business with people (hypocritical). And honestly, I was ultimately afraid to do anything about it. I was pregnant, could barely walk, what could I do? I know now that I could have done a lot.

One day we were arguing — well, several days, because our arguments never lasted just one day — about tithing. I wanted us to adopt the practice, and he, of course, was opposed. He didn’t want to give money to the church when so many others were suffering in the church. I actually agree with that concept now, but at the time I was convinced the action would bless our home and family and bring us prosperity. He took our conversation and reported back to his “friend,” and she shared her thoughts on tithing with him. After that conversation the strangest thing happened…he was all of a sudden on board. The fact of the matter is, he respected her more than me.

I know who he is, and I know he loves our kids deeply, but I don’t know how much he will allow this new woman to come between the love he has for them and his impulse to ensure his own needs are met.

All of this triggers my momma bear instincts, and I begin borrowing worry from the future. That’s like eating air pudding and wind sauce — the scenarios I can create in my mind just don’t exist, no matter the evidence from the past.

You can’t prepare well enough for these types of dilemmas after divorce or after the end of a long-term relationship. There is a hot pot of emotions that cook from the deepest depths of you. Those emotions, if you let them, will boil over if you don’t watch them carefully.

That is why caring for yourself is important. Caring for yourself looks like paying attention to what your body needs — sleep, exercise, and in some cases help from a doctor. It also looks like feeling all of the feels as they arise and admitting the things about those feelings that you don’t want to admit. For example, I fear that I love solitude so much that I might actually miss an opportunity to share life with someone really great. That is a hard truth to admit, but it’s necessary to address it — that’s called processing your emotions. You can’t trap those feelings inside without sorting them out. They will rot you from the inside out.

I’m still healing, and I’ve come too far to allow this little bump in the road to throw me off my path of joy.

I’m going to keep healing and holding my gaze forward.

I can handle hard things because I’ve done it many, many times before.

You are stronger than you think – that is what I often tell my inner child when she wants nothing more than to take up residence in the darkest corner of my mind.

But shrinking is not an option. Healing after hurt means you have to take up space in your own life.

That is loving yourself without a replacement.