Marriage to homosexual

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Local news outlet reports on a gay father finally getting his “rights” with his children.

I say, Three cheers for the former judge who was able to recognize that children are adversely affected by a parent’s homosexuality and by close exposure to the gay lifesyle.  How many more children will have to be damaged, wounded, scarred and warped before this society realizes that the romaticizing of homosexuality is damning all of us to misery?

And how long will it be before NARTH or some other organization has the ability and the stimulus to study the impact on spouses and children?

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Venturing forth…

Y’know, sometimes it’s just darned hard to be so talented and brilliant – so many choices, so many opportunities, so many things pulling in so many different directions…

I’ve talked to two professionals – one a clinical psychologist, the other a psychiatrist – who’ve been very positive and affirming about the writing I’m wanting to do about being the ex-wife of a homosexual. There’s precious little literature on the subject anywhere, and most of what I’m discovering via online search is very liberal –

as in “Let’s support gay marriage, because after all, we want this person we love(d) to be happy…”

uh, No. Not at all. No way, no how. I do NOT want my ex- to be superficially, artificially “happy.” I want him to be converted. I want him to be redeemed. I want him to be the good man I loved and wanted to spend my life with – energetic, cheerful, intelligent, and fervent in his beliefs – so that he can know bone-deep and abiding JOY, and peace.

No. None of this shellacking of worldly postmodern relativism that says whatever blows your skirt up is your entitlted path to some kind of saccharine emotive experience we call “happiness.”

There are rules to follow. When we violate the rules, the principles under which God created us, we forfeit happiness. When we follow the rules, we know great peace and genuine joy, regardless of our superficial circumstances.

Being married to a homosexual was hard. It was painful. It was bleak enough I used to go to bed at night, begging God not to make me wake up the next morning. Now I know why He kept making me wake up: so I could know what it’s like to pass through a Purgatorial fire and to come out the other side, soul not only intact but stronger and clearer-sighted than ever, heart capable of even more, and more fervent, love.

Discovering that the man you loved is homosexual is like finding yourself in the epicenter of an earthquake. The ground of your married life, and that is pretty much the whole of our life as women, just opens wide; something suddenly, violently shakes and threatens to swallow you up whole. You knew something was badly wrong, but you never expected – !

But there is joy to be found. I thought I stood at the brink of Hell; it turned out to be Purgatory.

I’ve discovered that there is a lot of common ground shared by women formerly married to homosexuals.

So I’m going to tell the story.

If you, or anyone you know, has shared this experience, I’d like to talk to you/her. You can email me at the address at the top of the right-hand column bar, or leave me a message in the message box, below my info.

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In Joyful celebration

Coming to the end of the one-year anniversary of the Declaration of Nullity from my first husband, which has been an amazing year of self-discovery, and I feel as if I’m still just beginning.

For a long time I described myself as a mule – a strange hybrid animal, steady and heardworking, but nevertheless a mule – a cross between a donkey and a horse, a sterile hybrid, unable to reproduce and given to rather eccentric temperament – and completely inelegant!

Then I decided, maybe I’m not a mule, but the best I can hope for is some broken-down scrub of a plow horse… still inelegant, a bit rough around the edges, lacking breeding and social graces…

In short, I was re-entering “polite society” after a very unpleasant and unwilling detour, and I felt unworthy of the companionship of the extraordinary people I was meeting and, surprisingly, making friends with. I felt backwards and ignorant and clumsy and wholly out of place with these educated, cultured, intelligent men and women.

Since the granting of the Declaration of Nullity, however, the way I see myself has been changing at lightening speed. For years, I had felt I deserved the derision, the scorn, the ridicule, the dismissals – after all, I’m hardly a Domestic Goddess! – and then I’d put on all this weight – and I was not just fat, I was clumsy and graceless and just downright awful.

During this year – to make a very complex story very short – I have discovered that I am neither mule nor broken-down plow horse, but a far more graceful breed. More to the point, I am not some androgynous thing of a beast, but – not merely physiologically, but emotionally, spiritually, ontologically – a woman. A woman, with all the grace and beauty and dignity and strength of character, and purity of vision and heart, and capacity for love and self-donation…

I am more wholly myself, my real self! – and more capable of love and devotion than I was at the age of 18, when I married DH.

The immediate difference is that I no longer feel embarrassed about being a woman – about inconveniencing someone who is holding a door for me, or asking the boys at school to remove their hats in my presence, or being embarrassed when a man slips with a bit of profanity in my presence…

I’m still working on the domestic stuff. I still doubt myself in this sphere, but it is getting easier as I’ve been working to declutter the house, and to rid myself of items that have unhappy or unpleasant associations (like the love seat with R’s cigarette burns) – and of course, the very discipline of homekeeping is getting easier as I have less to fight against…

The past eleven months have been absolutely full of wonderful discovery. I’ve come to feel that – while I’m not THE “pearl of great price,” I certainly am more valuable than I ever knew myself to be, before – certainly “priced far above rubies.”

I am eagerly looking forward to more discovery and growth. I look forward to all that the future holds.

Thanks, All, for your prayers for me. I know they are helping.

The damage done to a woman’s soul when she is bound to a homosexual man is severe. I’m going to be doing a lot more writing about this topic on future – there aren’t enough resources for this need, and most of the ones I’ve seen are decidedly secular, and one or two are downright liberal and almost anti-Christian in their orientation (No! I do NOT want my ex- to have a happy and fulfilling gay “marriage!” I want him to be CONVERTED!!!)

Blessings to you all –

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but in the interest of fairness –

We were talking at the restaurant a couple weeks ago, and someone said something about raising kids, and I turned to the friend sitting to my left and said how grateful I am (especially since I didn’t get to have a second family) that I was able to be a stay-at-home mom with my daughters.

A fellow sitting across the table heard me and proceeded to turn the conversation into an argument that SAHMs don’t necessarily make all that much difference – while my point was that it had mattered to ME –

My daughers’ first words were spoken to me. When they took their first steps, it was into my waiting arms. There was no “Miss Judy” my children couldn’t wait to go see in the morning, or to give me a detached report of all that I had missed in my children’s lives when I picked them up ten hours later.

No! The essential milestones of my daughters’ lives were witnessed and celebrated by me – and often by their father.

Which brings me to a confession in the interest of fairness:

We were young when our daughters were born. Sarah, the younger, was born one week before my 24th birthday; Dan is just a couple months older than I. He was in school and holding down a full-time job to support us.

But he agreed that being a mom was the most important thing I could do, and he made those sacrifices and more and I never heard him complain about them. And, when our daughters were small, he was very involved with their little lives; it was his ritual to tuck them in at night, and it was with him, not me, that Christy explored metaphysical concepts (“Daddy, what is dead?”)

Since receiving the Declaration of Nullity from the Diocese of Charlotte and the Archdiocese of Atlanta, I’ve been able to remember, without sting or bitterness, that there were some very good moments in our life together. I couldn’t, before.

Does the authority of the Church go so far as this, even – to bring about this deep a healing?

You bet She does! and I’m ever more grateful for being part of Her.

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more thoughts on being the ex-wife of a homosexual

Talked on the phone with my friend Molly last night. Molly is also the ex-wife of a homosexual man. We talked about the risks and anxieties of re-entering the dating world after our experiences, which are so similar as to be uncanny: married young to sons of Protestant/evangelical pastors; the marital dynamic mirrors one another’s, and we both feel we were lucky to escape with our sanity more or less intact.

At the moment, for Molly, it feels decidedly less. She’s dating a man she met in Church, and as they spend more time together and she becomes better acquainted with him, sees more of his personality and his character, she suddenly doubts her ability to discern.

After such experiences as ours, which common sense tells us any normal or rational person would surely have seen through and avoided early on, we doubt ourselves to a sad degree. We don’t quite trust our own judgment, have to analyze data and experience to a molecular level.

The recurring theme in our conversation last night was what is normal masculine behavior, and where does it cross the line into trouble? Having spent so much time in such close, exclusive proximity to decidedly abnormal male behavior, we distrust our ability to recognize and to discern what is healthy and what is not.

Case in point: I married a seriously pathological drunk, second time around – was so blinded by the overwhelming relief that he was, at least, straight, that I didn’t have all my mental gears operating normally to be able to recognize that he was simply oozing with spiritual sickness, was a chronic and elaborate (and rather gifted) liar, that he was looking for someone to take care of him rather than a genuine life partner, that he was mean as a snake and about as trustworthy as one.

Both Molly and I were married to gay men who transferred the full responsibility for the failure of our marriages to us. We were too needy, we had unrealistic expectations, unreasonable and idiotic ideals… We couldn’t help internalizing the condemnation heaped on us, and so now we are afraid to love and to trust.

“He said so-and-so. Is that okay?” We’ve got our radar up for warning signs of misogyny, deceit, and more serious psychological disturbances. Where does his need for affirmation end and his egotistical disregard for our needs begin? Where does his anger at his former wife end and a more over-reaching contempt for women in general begin? Is he eager for me to know his mind, or is he demonstrating a chronic need always to be right? Am I expecting too much???” These are some of the questions that haunt our waking moments, and often even our dreams.

The really infuriating thing that I come across from time to time is the realization, the reminder, that our exhusbands do not care about the damage they have inflicted on us. Somehow, they rationalize and justify it so as to make us to blame even for the abuse. My ex-husband continues to insist to our daughters that our divorce had nothing whatsoever to do with his being gay, and that I was solely to blame for his decision to move out of the marital home.

Both Molly and I wonder whether we’ve been so damaged that we’ll never be able to enter into a truly spiritually healthy relationship with a good man.