I was happy until Corona moved in.
People get married to have a companion. Someone to love unconditionally, someone to laugh and build with. Someone you could share your ideas and dreams with.
People usually hope to get married and never have to come across Mr. Divorce, but I almost did.
My husband David, and I both worked full time. Communication was the best thing that we had until one day it stopped. All of a sudden when the pandemic hit we slowly started pulling away and didn’t realize it at first, but who would’ve thought it was the beginning of the end. Our parenting all of a sudden was different. We fussed and argued over everything. Our four children were now remote . They attended school online ranging from elementary to high school. It was hectic. I had to stop working because my husband was the breadwinner. When David was home he tried his hardest to help out, but it wasn’t much due to being overly worked already.
We disagreed on everything. If I said “no” he said “yes” and vice versa. I was confused because we noticed the disagreements, and we really tried hard to fix it, but we just couldn’t. We went to therapy, but we both ended up pointing fingers and that got us nowhere. We tried talking, but we would start raising our voices when we didn’t agree with the other person. My husband and I even tried to include friends and family, but of course they were biased. My husbands’ best friend thought he couldn’t do no wrong, and my mother thought there wasn’t no way her baby was wrong about anything.
This went on for days, weeks, months, eventually it was now a little past a year.
Hate started to secretly creep into our hearts and regrets into our minds. It was growing and becoming stronger.
Every room David entered I felt his heavy spirit. A feeling would come over me. A feeling you only felt when you saw your worst enemy. For the love of me I felt myself wanting so bad not to feel like that, but I couldn’t help it.
I had a feeling David felt the same. I had this feeling that he hated me being around him. His actions spoke louder than his words. He would throw out his sarcastic slurs and would leave the room as I entered. I felt I was sleeping with the enemy, until the enemy stopped sleeping in our bed and moved into our son’s room.
I started hating our life. I know hate is a strong word, but being honest that’s how I felt. I felt stifled, and trapped. I started planning my escape route. I didn’t care that I had 4 kids to take care of wherever I went they would be with me. I just needed to get out of this relationship. All of a sudden I realized most of our friends and some of our family were going through separations and divorces. Even the ones we thought would grow old together. This was a shocker and also a red flag for us.The news even mentioned that divorced rates started increasing during Corona.
All of a sudden I was terrified. Something came over me. I didn’t know what it was, but I thank God it happened. I started missing my husband’s touch, his scent and his presence. I missed our conversations, or asking him to squish a spider that was always found on the ceiling over the bed. Little things that might have been irrelevant to others, but extremely important to us, made me miss him even more. Even though David moved upstairs into our son’s room, it felt as if I was seeing him for the first time every time. He looked so sexy. He had started working out and eating healthy. Muscles I hadn’t seen in the past five years suddenly were well defined. As if he was getting ready to move on with his life. He interacted with the kids at times, but would get quiet when I was around. We tried our best not to exchange words , due to fear of where it would lead us.
But one day it all changed.
My fact: The power of love and touch is the antidote for Corona, it’s what you need to help bypass a divorce.
One night, I approached David when the kids were all asleep and asked if he could give me a minute to speak with him. David and I met when we were 18 years old, and I was the one who approached him. So I tried to relive that moment to see if he would remember and he did. David responded with the same answer he did 13 years ago. We laughed and giggled as we did in our teenage years. He touched my face and reminisced on our journey being together. It puzzled us why we had let ourselves get to that point. After talking for hours into the morning ,it was as if we were meeting for the first time. We promised ourselves to never let anything get in the way of our love.
We knew we were stronger together rather than apart. We evicted Corona and took back our lives. We felt as if we passed a test which caused us to fall in love all over again.
