Breaking the Power of Lies Over Me

David has been having a hard day. Actually, he’s been having a hard year. And at the height of his frustration today, a careless error on my part pushed him over the edge.

I was legitimately busy, juggling dinner preparations with facilitating our sons’ homework. I was relieved to see our little girl calmly looking through a colorful book her brother had brought back from the school library. I hoped and hoped she wouldn’t rip it (she didn’t, thank goodness!), since we are responsible to take care of it, but trusted her genuine interest in each page. Next to the book was our labeler, which I had left on the table after using it to label yet another school item with our son’s name.

I checked in on her every few minutes, and as I am wont to do when stretched with multitasking, interpreted her calmness and interest in whatever she was doing (looking at the book and innocently pushing buttons on the labeler) as acceptable.

An hour or two later, after both dinner and homework were done for the day, David needed the labeler and was not impressed to find that not only had random letters been printed out, but lengths of ribbon were all tangled up deep inside the machine. A simple labeling task had turned into a fix-it project, and it was not welcome.

He held it together in front of the kids, but the tension in the air was palpable.

And it was my fault.

He had already spent days dealing with technical problems with mobile phones and computers on multiple levels, spending inordinate amounts of time that already felt ‘wasted’ to him when there were many more truly important things he needed to be working on. His own wife’s preventable mistake was like rubbing salt onto an open wound.

After awhile, he left the house discreetly. A wise move I understood. I hoped he was getting his anger out constructively somehow.

But then they came to me. The lies. The accusations. Deceptions. Familiar ‘friends’ that have been with me my whole life.

In my younger years they told me I wasn’t lovable, that I wasn’t worthy to be loved unconditionally, that I wasn’t fit for a lifetime of a loving marriage.

After marriage to David, they changed their voices a little, and it got uglier, even as we walked a healing journey together. Look at what you just did. See??? You are a bad wife. You’re lucky God brought you together, because if he didn’t, no one would have ever married you. If you were a better wife, David would be doing better in his career/ healing journey/ etc.

And here we are, almost a decade married. My fantasies that marriage to me would wipe out all same-sex attractions in my husband have come to an end. Not a disappointing end, mind you, just a much-sobered one.

And so at times like this, the uglies come at me again. When incident after incident, stress after stress piles up (and trust me, a tangled up labeler is the LEAST of the problems David is actually reacting against) and David needs to leave the house to cool off and let off some steam, my fears take on a new turn.

Will he go to a gay bar? Is he going to a gay bar or other local gay hangout I don’t know about right now? Is he checking out guys on the street without guarding himself as he usually does so faithfully? Is he going to come back and tell me it’s over? That he needs to go find himself and start over without us?

He’s already told me when he was doing much worse than this that he had no desire to leave me or our children. He loves us and is committed to us. He feels incomplete without us. I see him make choices every day that show he values us and loves us.

And yet my mind has been going there many times over the last several months. And I see now that it’s a lie I do NOT have to fall for.

Even building up today’s story to write out these fears of mine for the first time I felt a measure of oppression over me, as if someone was trying to stop me from writing it out.

Because writing it out, putting it out there, into the light, exposes it for the lie it really is. And its power over me is broken.

What lies are YOU believing? Are you ready to get them into the light?