By Opal Stacie
What was supposed to be one of the worst periods in my relationship turned out to be some sort of revival, and ironically, I owe it to my fiancé’s side chick.
He graduated from school that May and by October his double life came crashing down on the both of us via email. While I washed bottles, changed dirty diapers and awoke four times a night to tend to our newborn baby, my fiancé was falling in love with a Division I pole vaulting chick from his alma mater–had been falling in love for two years.
I assume he had a change of heart after graduation and the naïve TrackChick never saw the end of their “relationship” coming. If you ask the anonymous commenter (now identified as his out-of-the-dark side piece), it was ME who would eventually face the fate of losing my man. After the reality of her dispensable position had set in, she sought retribution for his deception in my email inbox. It felt as though time had stopped and I was transported into the twilight zone where nothing made sense. I was broken.
Under different circumstances I think I would have gone with my first mind and ended our relationship. Not only did he share himself sexually, but let the text messages and intimate photos she eagerly forwarded tell it, he was trying to feel more than a few good O’s, he seemed like he was in ‘love’. After putting a face to the anonymous social media attacks, it was apparent that it wasn’t just HIM she wanted to get revenge on. She intended to destroy ME, who had zero involvement in the manner in which he dismissed her.
In a perfect world, I would have kicked him out that night, busted the windows out his car, dissolved our relationship and shattered his heart the way he did mine, but a surprising chain of positive reactions occurred instead. He did not leave that night, in fact, he stayed and we enjoyed the best sex we’d had in a very long time. We fought, laughed, I cried, he cried, then we had sex again and again and again. This time, I was present, I wasn’t just counting the moments until he’d climax, get off me and allow me to sink back into my depression. I was invigorated, passionate, and submissive—I became everything I thought she had been to him.
I admit, I was not myself after giving birth to our firstborn son. I gained the equivalent of a pre-teen girl in weight, chopped off all of my hair because I didn’t want to be bothered with it and hid behind paint-stained sweatpants and oversized promotional T-shirts.
On the other hand, she was the exact replica of what I was pre-pregnancy and I was insanely inspired. I lost 20lbs that month, mostly due to stress, then another 25 in the gym. I stopped being lazy and made a real effort to re-grow my hair. I re-enrolled into school and started to take my entrepreneurial endeavors seriously. Getting myself back “right” had nothing to do with whether the changes would keep him from cheating. It was about me getting back to happy. It was the fact that my ego would not let me rest until I proved to both her and myself that I AM worthy of love, life and happiness, and I would not remain invariably broken, whether he stayed or left.
Neglecting myself and my fiancé is partially what made her existence in his life achievable. For him, the light that was shed on his cheating was like a weight lifted from his shoulders. His guilt kept us from connecting and my postpartum depression kept me from noticing. Her coming for me made the concept of life and love flourishing without me feel like life or death, fight or flight. Her presence was like shock therapy. Once it was all out in the open for us to examine, we worked on rebuilding our happiness. I came out of my shell and he and I became best friends again. It felt like the old us, before the babies. Our connection was stronger, the sex was out of this world and he excitedly made definitive plans for our future.
I could have possibly done just fine without him, but having his support through the most emotionally challenging period of my life as I battled postpartum depression was an added bonus. I stayed because my relationship was worth the two-year struggle it took to come out of postpartum depression, tend to myself and my man and get back to living and loving again. That email, on that day, during that period of our lives, was a true blessing in disguise.
Written By Opal Stacie, a freelance writer out of Atlanta, GA and a blogger at www.vexedinthecity.net. Follow on twitter @opalstacie
