The Mother of His Children

Late February, I just asked.  I couldn’t take wondering and fighting the battle in my mind any longer.  It was a Sunday afternoon. We had hosted our middle son’s end of the year basketball party.  Everyone had gone home. I was cleaning up the basement, and I have no idea what prompted it, but I just asked, “If it weren’t for your job or the kids, would you even still be married to me?”

I’d love to say this was the moment when he realized he had been distant or the moment when I found out my hormones had me overthinking and overreacting, but it wasn’t that moment at all.  In fact, it was over a week before he could tell me more than, “I’m in a weird place.” 

It was in this time that the phrase midlife crisis was first tossed around, so that became the bit of hope I was clinging to with every ounce of everything in me.  During any spare moment of my life, I was either researching midlife crisis or contemplating what he would say and how I would respond. I prayed earnestly for him, us, our kids, our unborn baby, his ministry.  I prayed that whatever it was was internal or just between us and would never hurt anyone but me. I prayed he could understand whatever it was enough to tell me something soon before the dread engulfed me.  

On the eighth day, on the drive back from an OB appointment, the answer came.  “I only love you as the mother of my children.” The world around me blurred for a bit, and almost 20 years of memories flashed through my mind as I heard those words and sat there trying to process whether they could be true.  

Him calling my name across campus 
my Freshman year, his head asleep in 
my lap watching movies in college, 
him driving to my hometown during 
Summer break to see me at work, 
our first date picnic, sweet notes left 
here and there, my favorite candy 
hidden for me to find while doing 
housework, filling the car with gas 
because I hated to pump in the cold, 
getting up with the baby in the 
night so I could rest.  

Would you do these things if you didn’t actually love someone?  

Years of blessing.  
God’s grace abounding to us.  
God using and calling us to serve Him.  
God advancing my husband’s ministry.  

And that thought was what made me decide right then in the van on I-59 North that those words could not be true.  Surely, there was no way God would have blessed and advanced my husband’s ministry if we’d been living a lie. This had to be the lie.  Satan had somehow in three months warped my husband’s mind into seeing 14 and a half years of marriage as a lie and this – whatever this was – as the truth.  

There was no way this was truth. 

I absolutely could not and would not accept it.  If what he said was true, if he only loved me as the mother of his children, then every memory I had was tainted.  Every “I love you” was garbage. Every intimate moment was trash. Three children, 2 miscarriages, and a baby on the way.  I was little more than a concubine or a broodmare.  

There had been highs and lows, of course, but we had over 14 years of what I thought had been an overall happy marriage.  He had to see that. Why could he not see that?  

My line of thinking went on like this for a very long time.  It was probably at least a year before I could even replay this sentence in my mind without hot tears filling up my eyes.  See, one of the most hurtful parts of an affair is that it doesn’t just affect the moments that the adultery overlaps the marriage, and it doesn’t just affect the future you thought you’d have.  It affects every moment of your marriage going back to the day you said, “I do,” because eventually, as their behavior changes and you stop justifying it, you start to see things differently. Every single moment and memory is forever altered because you no longer know if it held the meaning you gave it at the time.  You start thinking maybe he was right. Because how, if he ever even for a moment, loved you the way you thought, could he have done this or said that or forgot this or seemed not to even care about that?  You start wondering if anything in your marriage was ever real.  You look back and have no idea what was true, what was yours. Was he ever really yours?  Or were you just the mother to his children?

This stuff is wrecking.  It is hell. It is grief.  

But THANK GOD you are the mother to his children.  

Nothing saved me more from this pain-worse-than-death than being the mother to our children.  They are life. They are purpose. They are the arrows I’ll shoot out into the world. They are beauty and all that’s right, and this world is a better place because they’re in it.  It is my honor and privilege to be their momma, and I have come to realize that I would absolutely walk through this hell all over again if that was the only way for me to be the mother to these children.   

“Children are a heritage from the Lord,
offspring a reward from him.
Like arrows in the hands of a warrior
are children born in one’s youth.
Blessed is the man
whose quiver is full of them.”
Psalm 127:3-5