After dday I was immobilized in the wreckage of three decades of my life. Suddenly, there were huge gaps in time I tried desperately to close. I would shut my eyes and go inside myself—searching for the missing pieces, like remembering my boys as babies and little children—anything to confirm those thirty years weren’t a total fabrication. Time and time again nothing would come. Even though I was married for 32 years, there was nothing left to remember. It was disorienting and heartbreaking. My life as a mother with children was gone completely and I didn’t know if I would ever get it back.
Read MoreWhat was your dday?
For most women, there were many episodes of uncovering bits of evidence, stumbling over contradictions, and then questioning our husband or boyfriend. We had no notion of the massive bottom to the iceberg on which we stood. But those episodes weren’t ddays.
Dday is something else altogether. Dday is when you grasp you have been deliberately deceived by your life partner on core value ground. You may not know all the who, what, where, when or why’s—but you know there’s been a breach in your relationship that is a critical breach. It’s not about a crisis that reveals illness, a mental lapse of some kind, or a stress related behavioral problem. Dday is when you perceive for the first time that he is “okay” with hurting you. That, in my opinion, is dday. And for me, that meant I was suddenly alone.
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