The Peace That Wasn’t Peace

When I first learned of my husband’s affair, I was not able to fully process the enormity of the consequences of his betrayal. Only after a few years of living through the fallout did I realize how nearly every facet of my life had been impacted. My challenge was not only to survive it, but to come out the other side without descending into bitterness and anger. It was not easy.

In the first few months of betrayal, I longed to return to the past, the days when we were happy and harmonious. I lied to myself, believing that counseling and ceaseless striving on my part could repair the damage to my self-image, my family, and the peace that had been stolen from me and my children.

Even before the divorce, I found that my ex was still adamant about being a part of my life. He would call and text and come over unannounced even after we had argued and officially separated. Sometimes it was difficult to get him to leave. He tried to maintain the same banter with me, almost like he too wished we could turn back the dials of the clock and return to that simpler time. I had tried to set up boundaries, but wavered. I wanted to make everything all right again too, more than anything.

But it felt dishonest. A grenade had detonated our lives; we couldn’t pretend it never happened. As a Christian who had been taught to seek forgiveness when wronged and to see mercy as ultimate righteousness before God, I saw his attempts at emotional closeness as a sign of repentance. I wanted him to be sorry for what he had done, to believe that he wanted to make what he destroyed whole again, but I had mistaken repentance for normalization.