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Posted by Kate on 12/18/2008, 9:32 pm, in reply to "the discovery of the internet"
Message modified by board administrator 12/19/2008, 11:59 am
This next part is really fuzzy for me, and hard for me to remember the order in which things happened. Not a cop out, but I had chronic insomnia and was stoned on painkillers much of the time, so it's hard to figure out a timeline.
I found some chat boards about religion and Christianity. I met some interesting characters: an acerbic, wry, edgy atheist who called himself Geezus; a very aggressive pro-choice woman who typed all in caps so it felt like she was yelling at you; another staunch atheist who was pro-life; a woman whose son was on death row and she felt that Christians treated her like garbage and God had abandoned her; a former street minister who had reportedly had some kind of mysterious altercation with a semi-famous evangelist and was disillusioned with the Christian faith and Christians in general; a Mennonite pacifist and a gentle Catholic man who made me feel like God didn't hate me for questioning things...so many voices, so many people, with so many different views.
Everything was unraveling. Without giving too many personal details about my ex, he was profoundly clinically depressed, a lot of horrible things happened in succession, including the death of his father and finding a murder victim. He was on a downward spiral, and I couldn't do anything to help him. The church, well-meaning as they may have been, kept insisting that he didn't need a secular psychiatrist, he just needed prayer. His regular doctor prescribed some medication that not only didn't work, but caused more problems, like panic attacks.
I finally gave in to the pain and had the hysterectomy. And now it was my turn for a personal crisis, and my husband wasn't done with his, and I'm sorry, but only one crisis allowed at a time per married couple. There's a rule written about that somewhere.
People at the church started noticing my strange behavior -- I didn't go along with the program anymore, and I said what I thought. I was spending too much time on the computer and not enough time in church. They told my ex nicely that maybe I might be demon possessed, and they could bring by oil to annoint me and pray. He said, "She's not demon possessed, she's acting like the girl I met and married, having an opinion and saying what's on her mind."
Then I discovered chat rooms, and since I was up all night anyway, I talked to people from all walks of life all over the globe. About all kinds of things.
And I made a terrible, awful mistake. I was depressed about my surgery, my husband's struggles, my isolation...it is no excuse at all, merely an explanation of how it came to be. No nice way to say it -- I developed an inappropriate relationship with a man on the internet. He didn't care about me in the slightest; I found out later that he was very predatory, and in fact I was one of many, many women he pursued in cyberspace. But it felt like he cared, if only for a little while. It never went beyond the computer, thank God. But it was bad enough, and my ex found out, and it hurt him terribly. And it was the last nail in the coffin for our marriage.
We tried to work it out, tried counseling, but it seemed only one of us was trying at any given time, and the other had given up. My ex did not want a divorce, but I was drowning, and desperately wanted out. He refused to move out of our home or give up custody of the kids. I had a place to go, he didn't. I agreed to joint custody, every weekend with the boys, and I moved in with my sister and her husband. My ex is a wonderful father, and I feel we did the best thing for the boys, but it was so, so, hard.
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