Jennifer Sanders

Learning to love me

it all began in 2019 I was eleven years into my marriage and from what I thought, I was happy. I was living everyday like my life was where it should be and things were going ok. My husband always had this “my way highway” attitude towards how the house was ran. I didn’t agree with him but I didn’t express my perspective for the sake of not arguing about it. In November I became really ill with a partial lung collapse and I was miserable for the most part. Doctors suggested I rest for a week, I said “I have three children, I don’t know what you’re talking about doc”. So I had to carry on my days with no help from my husband as he watched me take on my daily routine of getting the kids up and ready for school,making dinner , etc … So of course I was sad he didn’t lend a hand and allowed me to rest. I put my my emotions on the back burner and acted as if nothing was wrong. Then comes December that same year, all the kids came down with a very bad influenza virus and I was taking temperature and pushing fluids, Tylenol, Motrin you name it. It got to be more than I could handle so I said to my husband “ need to get the kids to the er ASAP” he wouldn’t give me the keys to the car, he actually cussed me out saying I was going to use all the gas up so we had to take an ambulance and he didn’t go with us. After the er visit he wouldn’t come get us either so I had to take my sick children to the medical van and we didn’t get home until 2am. Again, I put my emotions on the back burner. So that next year right before the pandemic comes I felt like something just wasn’t right, like I was empty inside. So I had an affair with a random guy I met online. I was so ashamed I went back and told my husband what I had done. He was so angry but he said he forgive me. No , boy was I wrong. Everyday after the affair happened he slowly punished me on a daily basis, he would take my phone, not allow me access to the car, wake me up in the middle of the night to fight, it was getting too violent and he did threaten to hurt me so I had to make the choice to leave. Looking back at the situation, I feel like I did the right thing because deep down inside, I was not happy as I thought I was. So it has been a year since my leaving and I fight with myself daily and I over analyze my feelings and I also tend to justify his lack of assistance as my husband and father to my children to him not knowing much about family. I have learned that we are human and we all make mistakes and it’s when we learn from them that makes us better people. Am I better?? I am actually, emotionally it can be challenging but each day I use positive affirmation to ensure to give myself the love that I do craved from this other individual. Let the take away be this; Someone who truly cares for you will always be there. Now that it has been a year since my life changing event, I use my time daily to ensure that I give an abundance of love to myself as well as my family because they deserve to be shown to what it means to be loved by someone unconditionally. I definitely understand that everything happens for a reason and we cannot control the way things in our lives change, but the one value that I take away from this experience is that we are in control of our own happiness and no one else is going to make us happy but ourselves.