I’m checking in after a long absence because I’m celebrating 🥳  —11 years ago I started recovery from alcoholism (1.29.2010); 2.75years later (10.30.2012), literally on a dark and stormy night, I discovered my then-husband’s stash of women’s lingerie, wigs,  jewelry, nail polish and makeup  in a suitcase he hid in his car, under his golf clubs. So much clarity came to me. Swoosh. Almost too much reality. I would swear, though,  I was led to that discovery by a LOVING energy in the Universe. I guess I was ready to handle what came from his omissions to tell me about who he was and what he was doing. Omissions about how he was getting sexual satisfaction = lies, no matter how he spun it. With the help of this public forum among the support I sought out,  I began a second recovery from 1) the devastation of learning my husband of decades had been deceiving me AND 2) from whatever darkness was within me that allowed, permitted so much deprivation in our marriage, half of which I was celibate. No more, no more, no more. Day by day, inch by inch, I got “out”, working at points along the way with a marriage counselor, a financial planner and a mediator. I just couldn’t get beyond his betrayal of my trust and stay in the marriage. He moved out about two years later ( 9.4.2014) and we were divorced almost two years after that (7.5.2016) while our three 20-something sons were home visiting and still asleep upstairs. Did I ever imagine I’d be divorced at 56, just after all our sons had launched? I think not. As I look back, I guess what I see is that I wouldn’t have gotten through the discovery and it’s impact, like a boxer’s gut-punch, unless I’d first begun to realize I deserved better. I deserved abundance, not deprivation. And with time, distance, and the hard work of loving myself, so much abundance has arrived: my sons still come home to visit, I have a job I love, good friends, I met a kind, communicative, romantic man in AA who has been a true partner. No, he’s not perfect and neither am I but for the first time in my life I feel like he’s on my team, a team supporting how I try to live my best life. I see my ex occasionally because he still lives in town. Yes, there’s still some faint grief, mostly that I wasn’t able to give my kids the intact family any kids want. I also can’t help but think about how imprisoned my ex is—remembering how he begged me “not to tell”, and I’ve kept my word. He’s been with another woman now for over a year and I want to beg him to tell her, to spare putting her through what I did. But then I get myself back on “my side of the street” where I’m FREE!