It's been 186 weeks

 It's been 186 weeks since my husband disclosed his SSA. 

Y'all I don't know what I was thinking when I started this whole counting weeks thing! 😂 Here we are about three and half years in. Did I think it would last this long? Maybe not, but I'm glad it did.

To recap the last few years of my life:
2017-2018 my husband was losing his mind but I had no idea why
Sept 2018 we came to a breaking point and he confessed his SSA and some indiscretions, we call this D-day
late 2018 - mid 2019 we did a lot of therapy, I started this blog, there was some progress
Aug 2019 D-day part 2 where the whole story comes out, I'm devastated
late 2019 - early 2020 more therapy and whole lot of depression
April 2020 I moved away to start a new job, not sure if he would follow me or not (he was invited)
June 2020 he quit his job and moved in with me
mid - late 2020 still on a roller-coaster, not sure if we would make it
2021 - things were finally looking up!!
2022 - dare I say our life is normal if not even better than before??

Here I go with another analogy...

In 2018, we decided to replace the flooring in our home. I had wanted to do this since we bought it many years before but all of a sudden my husband agreed to it. I later found out he wanted to make me happy before he left me (insert crazy eye-roll here). Anyway, as we pulled up the old flooring we found black mold in one corner. It didn't look too bad and we are pretty handy so we decided to pull it all out and replace the subfloor ourselves. Easy. Done. Or was it? After the next rain I see some new water damage and realize that while we removed the mold, we never discovered the source of where it came from. Turns out, the entire exterior wall is rotten - like you can put your hand through it. It "looked" fine covered up with siding, but once you removed the siding there was basically no actual wall there anymore, it had rotted completely. This became a metaphor for our marriage. What looked fine on the outside was completely rotten on the inside. And it was no easy fix - it had to be torn down and rebuilt. Dealing with the symptoms wasn't enough. We had to tackle the problem at the root.

So, when we moved in 2020 the new house became a second metaphor. I chose the house without him ever seeing it. I thought it was cute and charming. To me it was a fresh start. He hated it. He called it bad names. To him it was me starting a new life without him. To be honest, it held no good memories for either of us. It was a landing place. A pit stop in life that served a purpose but nothing more. It felt cramped and kind of depressing. I cried in that house a lot. But it was MY house. It somehow felt safe. I was taking charge of my life and making decisions for myself. But it was never OUR house, never would be, and I don't think we would ever have been really happy there.

Late last year, almost on a whim, we looked at moving to another house nearby. When we walked in for the first time, we both fell in love with it. It was old and needed a lot of restoration work, but we felt it was worth it and we were up for the challenge. It is indeed another great metaphor for our marriage. As we work on this old house together and see it coming to life, it gives me great hope for our future life here together. The work on this house will probably never end, it will always need more work - just like us. But we are worth it and we are up for the challenge.