16. A Year Later

"Steps Forward and Steps Back"

I knew after a year I was beginning to heal a little when I felt like I was now taking 1 step forward toward happiness and then 1 step back toward depression. Before this it was all backward steps. Everything hurt. Every memory from our past, every picture I looked at...Tore me apart. I seriously didn’t want to live in that world any more. And I hated that the only one that would be able to help me through it was the same person who created it--Ben.

But after a year, I finally I felt I could actually "live" again. Don’t get me wrong…I was just in survival mode, but sometimes I actually felt happy. It was no longer complete numbness all the time. I call this my "1 step forward 1 step back" time. I never really went any where and was still not healing, but I was beginning to feel hopeful sometimes….not often... sometimes.

Finally the healing began…so very slowly. It was the time I call "2 steps forward 1 step back." It was long and slow and painful. I often wondered if it would be better to stop trying. To just divorce and move on. The 2 steps forward were still pretty shaky and the one step backwards was devastating. The backwards step caused me to go through the pain all over again. It hurt so much and came so often. I wondered how could I continue to put myself through this?

Usually Ben was really hard on me when I began to fall again or step backward. He thought I should be continuing on my steady pace of healing. He could accept the slow progress but he had a hard time when I would go backwards. This made my step backwards turn into 2 steps backwards or 3 or 4 steps. If Ben wasn’t understanding my backwards progress, I found myself unable to get out of bed or I felt so down I doubted I could ever step forward again. But eventually Ben would help me step forward again. Unfortunately he was not as capable of knowing when to do this as I would have liked.

Ben just couldn’t understand how I would keep falling.... keep stepping back. He wondered why with all my healing I would "want to go back there" (as he would put it.) I had to convince him that my reasons for falling were justified. I hated him for this. I hated him for not understanding. For assuming it would be all forward progress, for not coming to my aid immediately when I had a backward step. When I needed Ben the most, he was really letting me down.

Eventually we got to "3 steps forward 1 step back." Yes the 1 step back was always devastating, but the 3 steps forward gave us both hope. Now Ben was more of an advocate for me. He now was better at helping me when I fell backward. It had taken over a year to get to this point. But it got easier much faster and 4 steps forward came even faster.

Maybe Ben finally got it, or maybe Ben started seeing that there was hope. He helped me, but not as well as he could have.