The Light Green Eye Brow Trimmer I Almost Slit My Wrist With

I want to be bitter.  
I want to be angry.  
I don't want to be nice. 
Or wifely. 
Nor do I want to take the high road.  
I want to curse like a sailor and slap my husband stupid. 

I want to go back in time and take that trip to Spain with my daughter instead of heeding my then boyfriends words to not go. 

I want to walk away 7 years ago when I read the words of my husbands unemployment claim no less, describing his indiscretions with his coworker. How his employees covered for them while they snuck off to the hotel.  How they lied to me when I would call up to his job just to speak to him to see how he was doing. 

I wanted to walk away from the memory of my bed and tear stained pillow, knowing that affair was bull.  It didn't mean anything to him.  Yet it meant that my husbands penis was inside another woman. More than once.  Someone that I personally asked if she was having an affair with.  

And she lied.  But then chose to tell the truth when the crap hit the fan.

I wanted to deliver my child I found myself pregnant with 1 week after the discovery of this said affair. I prayed so hard that the child would save my marriage.  

But children don't save marriages. 

I wanted everything to be his fault.  I wanted to ignore the fact that I talked down to him.  That I emasculated him every moment I could because of my ignorance and hard wiring to "the strong, black, independent woman that really didn't need a man". I wanted to stop demonizing him. I wanted to stop being flippant. I wanted to ignore the resentment that would well up inside me when my husband sat around for hours playing his video games. I wanted to not be jealous. 

I wanted to ignore my husbands arguments to move to my current home state. Because I knew the reasons all stemmed from his mothers selfish wants and desires.  

I wanted to say NO!  Please trust me baby, this is a bad idea.  We shouldn't leave.  But I wanted my husband to make the decision.  I wanted to step into my role as a Godly wife and submit to him.  I wanted to rail against God for this rule.  But I also wanted to show my husband that WE could do the impossible together and be alright.

I wanted to throw my cellphone the day after my birthday 2 years ago when the screen read "Harrison County Jail" and my husbands voice echoed in my ear on the line.  I wanted to not believe that he had been arrested.  I wanted that horrible cringing feeling to belong to someone else.   I wanted my husband to not be a statistic and stereotype.  I wanted my husband to be bonded out of jail so I could curse him out for his bad decision making.  I wanted to leave him right there. I wanted to ignore my promise to him that I would always have his back. I wanted to shield my children from the fact that their daddy was arrested. 

I wanted that entire ordeal to be over.  I wanted to not be pregnant again with the threat of jail time hanging over our heads.  I wanted to not be pregnant with a son because I knew how cruel this world can be to young black men. I wanted my husband to be there when my son first walked. When he first talked. I wanted his lawyer to do the impossible and make these charges false. I wanted God to be right there with the judge working on his heart to show favor to my husband. 

I wanted to cry out in that courtroom when my husband walked away free after seeing 5 other young men sentenced to lengthy jail sentences. 

I wanted everything to be ok at that point. I wanted my husband to take that experience and better himself. To prove to society that he wasn't a bad man but just made one, bad decision.

I wanted my husband to have the same hustle and motivation that my grandmother instilled in me.  I wanted him to get up off his butt and realize that he was given a second chance, that he could change our lives.  His life. I wanted to desperately believe that our marriage was just going through the motions. 

I wanted to believe that our son would change things. But again, children don't save marriages.

I wanted to believe that these issues and problems with our "daughter" would ease with time and therapy.  I wanted to believe that she would be ok. I wanted to believe that the reason for her anger was due to her guilt in how she treated her birth mother.  I wanted to knock some sense into her biological dad to make him see that what this little girl really needed, was a stable environment with parents that loved her and showed it.

I wanted to pray that my younger daughter did not turn out jaded from all the negative scenarios we have been saddled with. I wanted to make sure that my joy, my sunshine, my munchkin still remained the happiest little girl who woke up with a smile on her face every morning.  I wanted to wipe the haunted look off her face. I wanted my marriage issues to not be so transparent to her. I wanted to give her better than what I had which was no father and a drug addicted mother. I wanted her life to be influenced by a man who loved her so she wouldn't seek out from love men mistaking it for something else like I did. 

I wanted her innocence to remain intact. 
I wanted to not be pregnant again. I wanted to feel differently about my husband and the possibility that we could bring another baby into this world. I wanted to miscarry.  I didn't want to feel guilty about feeling that way. 

I wanted my baby's heartbeat to pop up on that screen. When it did not, I wanted to kill myself for wanting to miscarry. And for almost two months, that miscarriage that I wanted so bad wouldn't come.  I wanted to not be aware of the fact that I was carrying around a dead baby in my womb. I wanted my husband to not blame me for the miscarriage. Again. 

I wanted my job to understand. But jobs don't really care about miscarriages. I wanted my supervisor, who is a woman, to understand.  This hurt. This pain although experienced many times before, was so new. And fresh. I wanted my head to not be a jumble of wishes of death and destruction, visions of wrist cutting with my eyebrow trimmer. The light green one. 

I wanted the courage to take the damn pills and end it all. I wanted the stigma of mental illness and black women to not affect whether or not I took my medication. 

I desperately wanted this miscarriage to bring some love back into my marriage. 

But. Children. Don't. Save. Marriages.

I wanted to be a priority to my husband. I wanted him to care enough about me to call and see where I am when I am not home by a certain time of the night. I wanted him to be awake when I came home from work. I wanted to go to marriage counseling. I wanted to be around other couples so he could see that it's not just us that deal with these issues. 

In the midst of this, every month, I wanted to be pregnant again. 

I wanted to peel my face off and snip my tear ducts when my husband told me I wasn't a priority to him anymore. I wanted to believe, again, that it was all his fault.  I wanted to sleep in the bed for 3 years. I wanted to shave my head again. I wanted to stop crying at work as I swept mail into the bins.  I didn't want my coworker to see me. But on the flip side, I wanted to scream to my coworkers, "Something is broken inside me! Please someone fix it?!" 

I wanted my low self esteem to not be real. I wanted my desire for love to not be so achingly hard. 

I wanted God to miraculously fix my broken union. 

I wanted. 

I wanted him to look at me like he did 12 years ago when he told me he thought he loved me. 

I wanted to go back to when we were two peas in a pod.  When our dreams propelled us into each others arms and hoped bloomed like algae. 

I wanted to go back to that pier in San Pedro.
Back to that moment that I KNEW that I loved this man and I had barely met him in real life less than 1 hour ago.

I wanted Jesus to fix me. I want my husband. I want our marriage. I want someone reading this, who is going through what I am going through to not give up hope.  To not give in to the darkness that calls them. 

To not feel unwanted.  I know in my desert place right now, it doesn't matter what I want or wanted. Because this is not about me. This is about his glory. And how he is changing me from glory to glory. This is about the only child that ever saved a marriage, Jesus. I'm not going through this for nothing. I want to be out of this, but I know God is telling me to be still and rest in him. To give over my marriage to him. To give over my brokenness. 

To surrender EVERYTHING I have yet to release:  the self doubt, the bitterness, the overeating, the miscarriages, the bad decisions, the affair, the mistreatment, the missing respect, the missing love, the fact that my daddy was never around, my messed up teenage years, my abusive relationship with my daughters father, my broken relationship with my older sister, my destructive addiction to food, my mistreatment of my husband, my skewed view of the strong black woman, my misguided belief in what a strong black woman is........

All of those things, I wanted. But now I understand, I can only give those things to Jesus.