Betrayal

My mother calls me early Monday morning. “Are you sitting down?”

“Why?” I ask.

“Just sit down.”

I sit.

My ex-husband has gotten remarried. I feel flat, empty. It’s been five years already – why should I care so much? But I do care. I might pretend that I don’t, but I do.

Didn’t you marry me ten years ago? Did you love me? Didn’t you promise me you’d never divorce me, back in the early days of our marriage when things were still hunky-dory? How could you have turned your back on all things sacred, on me and the kids, to start a new life thousands of miles away? How could you?

I feel like screaming, like crying. But of course I don’t. I’m already divorced five years. I haven’t seen my ex in nearly four. The kids haven’t seen him, either. Except for sporadic e-mails about child support (which he does pay regularly, thank G‑d), our contact has ended completely with his move to a new community. A new start for him – far from the religiouslifestyle he lived when I knew him. A new city, a new life. Less rules. More “fun.”

Fine, so do it. Go ahead, run away, if that’s what makes you happy. Forget us. See if I care.

That’s what I want to say. But of course, I do care. I care because I thought our marriage would last forever, and it didn’t. And it hurts.

Years ago I wrote an essay called “Divorce Hurts.” It hurts. It hurts for me, for my kids, for my parents, for my grandparents. It hurts for my ex, for his parents, for his siblings, for his grandparents.

Today I can see that divorce also heals. I can see that the marriage I was trapped in was not a healthy one for either of us, that it was stunting our growth rather than encouraging it. I can see that we were going in opposite directions and hurting each other along the way.

But the betrayal still hurts. I trusted him, and I thought our relationship would last forever. I didn’t think he was going to run away, turn his back on it all. How could I have known?

That’s why today, almost five years to the day after I got my divorce, I’m feeling hurt.

Relieved, in a way. Sad, in a way. But mostly hurt. Why did you have to do it? Why couldn’t you have stayed the sweet, dedicated man you were when we married?

There are no answers to the whys, no more than I can answer why a young wife and mother is stricken with cancer or a middle-aged husband and father is killed in a car accident. All I can say is it’s for the best, and it’s how G‑d wanted it to be.

And so I tell myself that life goes on, and that just like he remarried, I will too one day, this time to an emotionally stable and strong person who can truly care for me for the rest of my life.

Folding laundry late that night, I hear myself saying, “Goodbye, my ex-husband. Good luck with the future. I hope you find the happiness you’re seeking.

“Hello, my own future. I hope I find the happiness I’m seeking, too.”