Anger

I’d venture to bet that most women think they know how they would react if they found their man cheating.  Thoughts of bodily harm and property damage.  Castration, clothes thrown out in the yard or set on fire, keyed vehicles, slashed tires, revenge plans.  We see it in movies and hear it in songs.  We imagine there is no way we would stand for such betrayal and mistreatment.  I imagined there was no way I would stand for such betrayal and mistreatment.  And maybe if I’d walked in on him with his mistress, caught completely off-guard, I would have reacted more like Carrie Underwood in “Before He Cheats,” but that’s not how it happened for me.  I had months and months of this soul-deep unrelenting gut feeling that my husband was having an affair.  I even knew in my gut who the affair partner was.  But 1) I didn’t want to believe it, and 2) I couldn’t prove it.  

I thought I was crazy and just about drove myself crazy because no matter how much I wanted to be wrong, I just knew I wasn’t, so then I was scheming and sneaking, trying to find the evidence or at the very least follow my gut to some sort of explanation.  I was begging God to let truth come to light and to keep me from psychosis.  I genuinely thought I was losing my mind, and it was terrifying.  As such, when the proof finally came about, my initial feeling – beyond hurt and betrayal because those weren’t new, just finally validated by the evidence – was relief.  Tremendous relief that my mind was intact even if my heart was torn apart.  

I kept quiet for hours, mulling over what I had learned that confirmed all my suspicions, waiting till the kids were sound asleep, then waiting for him to come to bed.  I have no idea where my calm came from.  Maybe the relief from earlier.  Maybe the relief that I would finally hear some truth.  Maybe hope that things had not gone too far yet.  Maybe hope that we could fix this and get back on track before the baby came.  Whatever the source, I was calm as I presented him the facts and an opportunity to confess the extent of his infidelity.  

I can’t say I remained calm as he disclosed the details of the affair.  I can’t say exactly how I reacted because I genuinely don’t remember much more than shock.  While I had known in my gut that things weren’t good, my gut had not prepared me for how very bad things actually were.  I had demanded the whole truth, thinking that I would need to know in order to forgive and work through healing from it.  Maybe I did, but I was completely unprepared for hearing things I would later wish I could unhear and for mental images I would later wish to scour from my brain.  I was overwhelmed, and it manifested in pre-term contractions.  For the hours between that midnight conversation and daylight, while my husband lay asleep on his side of our bed, I distracted myself from the devastation by timing contractions – how long each lasted and how long between…until they finally eased.  

I was so worried for my baby.  Needing to feel her move, I lay on my left side and waited, praying that God would protect her and help me through the remaining almost three months of the pregnancy without any further loss.  And I suppose it was in those moments and due – at least in part – to that prayer, that God helped me react in denial and hurt more so than anger.  Maybe the denial wasn’t just self-protection but also for the protection of my unborn daughter.  Maybe God helped me muster and try to move forward with strength, grace, and a bit of dignity so that the pregnancy would not be cut short by elevated blood pressure or an early delivery from anger out of control.  

Oh, I was angry.  I’m not going to lie and say I wasn’t.  There were times when I acted or spoke from anger.  I wanted vengeance as much as any woman scorned.  I just believed Romans 12:19 even if the verse was not intended for this context.  “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay,’ saith the Lord.”  I truly believed that God and His name had been hurt as much in our situation as I had been, and I trusted that He would not allow the evil to go undisciplined forever and that whatever came from His hand would be so much more fitting than anything I could inflict.  

I prayed for His vengeance probably more than I should have – to see justice played out and mockery ended.  I wanted it more than almost anything back then.  I saw what happened to my husband as a scheme of the devil, and I was mad at Satan and the one I felt he used as his pawn.  I was mad at my husband for falling to temptation, mad at myself for not seeing it sooner and even worse for inviting it into my house, and mad at God for allowing it at all.  When the anger would rise up in me, I would use the Psalms or other passages about vengeance and wrath to keep myself in check.   I related to the psalmist’s words in so many of the Psalms, where he begged God to discipline or destroy his enemies.  I prayed Psalm 37 numerous times a day, like a mantra, believing God would intervene.  

When He didn’t do that in the time table I hoped, I got mad about that too.  I felt like Jonah, just sure that God was going to be gracious instead of wrathful and completely irritated and defiant about it.  I wrestled my way through the book of Jonah, Habakkuk, Hosea, and others, trying to balance the God of Old Testament judgment with God of endless grace and mercy who not only forgave those who sinned against Him but pursued them when they turned away from Him.  I knew that no matter how much I longed to be like Him, I could not emulate His example in this.  And honestly, I didn’t want to.  

I just wanted to be mad.  I felt justified.  I had been wronged, rejected, hurt, disrespected, betrayed.  Worse than that, my children had been wronged, hurt, disrespected, betrayed.  Even when I reached the point when I accepted what happened and no longer lived angry about it, I could easily be – can easily be – angered on behalf of the children.  Momma Bear roars to life in me, and I roar to life on their behalf.  Then once expressed, I can usually return to some sort of calm co-parenting existence.  

Anger, for me, has come in waves – usually short-lived rather than a lingering stage – and manageable once I express it.  I read somewhere and wholeheartedly agree that anger is a masking emotion.  It is the expression of some underlying hurt, fear, or other vulnerability.  It rages because it is fueled by something deep in us.  So to calm it, we have to go below the surface to what keeps it burning.  And if we are able to address the underlying source, we can better manage how we express our anger.  God never said not to be angry.  Ephesians 4:26 says, “Be angry and sin not.”  Feeling anger, maybe even expressing it in a safe way, is not the problem.  The problem is when we allow the underlying issue to fester until it has destroyed us from the inside so much that what we then externalize is destructive to others and ourselves.  

In this way, sometimes I think, “Good for the ladies who burn the clothes” and get the anger out, who express outwardly the hurt and devastation underlying the anger and then move on.  That wasn’t me.  Sometimes I wish it had been like that — a single cathartic action that allowed me to move along, rather than bouts of anger over time as a new layer of hurt made its way from deep inside me.  But these stages of grief are different for everyone.  Anger is no different.  What’s important is not how we work through..so much as that we do.