Feb 12
21
From Betrayal to Forgiveness
What if you woke up one day and could change your habitual emotional response to a situation? A situation that would normally make you scream, break down in victimized sorrow or throw objects or fly into a frenzy of indignant self-righteousness?
Well one day I woke up and DID change my response. On a chilly January New York afternoon in 2010, Johan (my third husband of twelve years), a Dutchman and father of my only child, announced to me after much prodding on my part and denial on his, that he had been having an affair for many months. With a younger “sportier” woman as he put it. I gulped back a river of tears. I immediately left the house and went out to the florist. I bought two dozen of the most expensive white roses I could find and wrote a note which I attached to the bouquet.
Dearest,
I am so sorry it took this long to come this far apart on our path together. I wish you the best of luck and love for the rest of your life.
Love, Elise
A few hours later, after weeping uncontrollably in the car, I returned home and presented him with the flowers. My heart had intuited this event months earlier and yet my head pounded with this new truth. I felt I could receive anything my soon-to-be-ex would throw at me from here on in with grace and humility. He shriveled on the sofa crying in a semi-fetal position. I allowed, unabashedly, my tears to fall to the shiny wooden floor while dancing to music sung by a female vocalist with the saddest voice in the world.
I didn’t blame my husband for his folly. I embraced him, taking on the sorrow of his actions, for us both. I felt that his betrayal of our marriage vows was indicative of his betrayal to his marriage vows and not mine. He betrayed himself by acting in a way that belittled his statement, made over and over again throughout the years like a
mantra to convince himself of what wasn’t true.
“You can trust me. I am your stability.” His cowardly choice to lie about his unhappiness in our marriage and in his life reflected deeply on him.
It dawned on me that no, I couldn’t trust him any longer because his words and deeds were out of sync. I admitted that for years I felt a huge emotional disconnect within him. The main reason I stayed was because I didn’t want to be the woman in the film “Not Without My Daughter”. In the Netherlands, a paternalistic country, the foreign wife would never gain child custody and I would have been as good as prisoner, having to wait out the dreadful years until our son grew up.
And yet, I left the door open for him to return to me, us and our family unit. I wanted to believe that given time (but not too long a time!) he would mend his ways and see that our love was stronger than any sexual malfeasance on his part. That his actions were an anomaly. That this knee-jerk response to his touted mid-life crisis was very psychology 101. Ho hum!
Yet in retrospect it was not. About a year earlier, after only four months of living in the States, we had a heart to heart talk when Johan returned from one of his many unnecessary, in my opinion, business trips to Europe. Since settling into our new home in New York City, he was gone almost fifty percent of the time. We lived together in Holland for ten years and for more than half of that period, I had felt he was running away from himself and our family. He used any outlet to escape: travel, Buddhism, business club memberships, taking on non-profit projects that his company could not afford financially, adventurous risk-taking and the like. He always had an excuse or rational explanation to mask his unhappiness. I on the other hand was not ashamed to unleash any expression of discontent.
I come from the noble and dramatic tradition of Russian Jews on the one side and Germanic Ashkenasi Jews on the other. Translation: overly emotive in-your-face, gutsy and peripatetic. Johan came from the Catholic Dutch tradition. Translation: suppressed, rigid, 
moralistic and emotionally stifled. His marathon like race away from the marriage and family began around the time Florian was three years old in 2004.
Some days later after the initial shock settled in, we had a talk that went something like this.
In his blunt manner he laid out the landscape and I did not interrupt. “When I come back here I feel like I don’t really belong. I have two lives now. One in Europe and one in New York although I’m not really involved in the one here.”
“It just doesn’t feel as exciting to come home,” he added for dramatic effect.I felt relieved to finally be over with the relationship. I was happy to hand him over to a woman who was on his wavelength. I certainly grew beyond the confines of the small minded destructiveness. I thanked her in my heart.
The above is an excerpt from the book My Shift Happens, by Elise Krentzel.
Connect with Elise Krentzel:
http://www.lifegps.biz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTG_5nJlA-I http://www.facebook.com/lifegps Twitter@Elisekrentzel
