In the Moment

I have been working on writing more frequently, and while I have shared my story here, this is my effort to concentrate on what the moment meant for me. If you have been through something similar, what did the moment mean for you?

***

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to what I was reading.

“I am running out of interviews to prepare for.  Maybe we could go get a room in the city.”

My stomach flipped and my heart sank. I tried to convince myself it wasn’t real, but a few minutes later, I was running through various scenarios in my mind. I thought I was going to vomit. I sobered up quickly as I tried to rouse him from his drunken stupor. I told him to get out. He was black out drunk and had no idea what was going on.  I had a house full of people coming the next morning and I would not be able to get any sleep if he was here. I pushed him out the back door. I did not care what happened to him, I just wanted him gone. I moved away from the locked door and it burst open again, the frame cracking and splitting. He was enraged, and I called his father for the first time in our near six years of marriage. I asked him to come and pick up his son.

Once he was gone, I trudged up the stairs. I tried to lay down in bed, but his phone was in our room and I could not be near it. I went and sat in the glider in our child's room, listening to the breathing. Sighs and movements made the tears flow. “So what happens now? You leave him, right? Now you have proof he was cheating on you. With her, while you were busting your ass to keep your family together and to keep him from falling into an unemployed back hole. So now you leave. You pack your shit and take your child and you go home. You spend the rest of your life alone, but you prefer that, right? You go, because you don’t put up with that shit and he lost you.” I dialogued with myself the rest of the night. Both selves were right: I should go and I should stay. Ultimately, he will be the one to choose.

When the sun started to come up, I stood up and peered into the crib. My baby's soft cheeks were rosy, and it was a good dream. My baby would be one in a few days, and in a few hours our family would be downstairs to celebrate. I got in the shower so that my mom would not be able to hear my tears or my thoughts. “My child loves him. Can I really break that up? It isn’t your fault though: you were faithful. I fixed my hair and caked on the make-up to hide the bags under my eyes.  I could hear mom downstairs with my baby, making breakfast. I stood in front of my closet trying to find something to wear that would be forgiving. I still was not used to my body after giving birth. I heard a vehicle door slam, then a few moments later, our front door opened and closed.

He walked up the stairs and the vomit started to rise, but I managed to keep it down.

“Sorry about last night. I didn’t know I was so drunk. I’ll fix the door.”

“That isn’t why I had your dad come get you.”

“Then why?” He sounded annoyed.

I took a deep breath, mustered all my courage and looked him in the eyes. “I am only going to ask this once. If you lie to me, I will pack my things tonight and this marriage is over.”

Silence.

“Did you sleep with Her last year when you were out of work?”

As the tears started to well up in his eyes, he looked to the floor. “Yes.”

He tried to pull me close, and begged me to hug him. He pleaded with me to say something, anything. I looked down at the top of his head. He could not bear to look at me. All I could think was how unfair this all was. I married the love of my life. I married my best friend and my entire life as I know it changes at the glance of a text message, because he could not keep it in his pants? In that moment, I decided to stay. Not for him. Not because I am a faithful Catholic. Not because I took my vows seriously, and not for our child. I chose to stay because I deserved the life I wanted. I had spent the last five years and change bending over backwards to make our marriage work. I did in the face of insults and fear. I did it during happy times and awful times while he left it up to me to pick up the pieces. After pleading for his honesty throughout the course of our entire relationship, if I bailed the moment he was finally honest, what would that prove?

“Do not ask me to comfort you right now. That is unfair. You need to take a shower and go get the birthday cake. I will talk to you later. If you can continue to stay honest, I will stay. Lie to me and this is over.”

I bit my lip to keep myself from crying and I walked away. 

Two Years

This past week marked quite the milestone in my family's life. My oldest child turned three, and we passed the two year mark in rebuilding our marriage.

In a way, I am surprised at how it passed so quietly. This time last year, I was anxious and untrusting. I checked all our accounts for suspicious charges and felt queasy. I had dreams about finding out new horrors, and I felt cold and detached. I was considering individual counseling because every morning I would wake up and steal a few moments to myself in the shower or getting ready for the day and the time alone would bring new questions and new things that I wanted answers to. In a way, I think I wanted to hold on to the anger I felt because I was scared of what would happen if he sensed I was not angry anymore. The anger was comforting to me and destructive to us.

Time after time I would pick an argument or blurt out honest yet insensitive things. I would talk about being happy overall, but still angry. Or how I was in love with him over all, but I was struggling to love him in the moment. After more instances of this behavior than I would care to admit, I began to see that he was staying true to his words and his promises. He truly had turned a corner and was rather patiently waiting for me to acknowledge it and be comfortable with it. He was rock solid while I was faltering.

While I was in the hospital having out first child, he was in and out: one night he did not come back at all and another night he was out until 4 am. I had called him, exhausted the second night, asking where he was as the baby was not cooperating and he told me he would be there soon and called the nurse from his cell to come and take the baby. Once I was aware of the affair that had been going on around this time, I confirmed that he was in fact where he had said he had been, but it shook my confidence in him as a husband and a father to know that there was even a chance that I was recovering from surgery and delivering a child and he was not there. After I had given birth to our second child, things were just amazingly different. We had family in town and it was difficult for him to be there the entire stay, but he was attentive and loving and just wanted to experience his newest child's first few days. In a way, the birth of our second child marked the birth of our new marriage more than the vow renewal. We started spending the nights talking about how amazing our children were rather than dwelling on the difficulties of our past. I began to see him as the devoted father that he truly is, and that he really truly did love me, but had never experienced unconditional love before.

On this two year mark, I look at him with loving eyes and a warm heart. I see an incredible man that needed the opportunity to make things right and to save his family. I also see in me a woman that needed the strength to grow patience and mercy.

I do not believe that the affairs were God's will. I believe that God's will was to allow us the free will to make the choice between good and bad time and time again. I believe that we all make poor choices from time to time. When I desperately needed God's love and strength to stay and work through the problems in our marriage, it was right there on the table. I needed only to embrace it, and it was mine. I would like to own the strength myself: to say I am a strong and brave woman, but really I just felt myself give it up. When my natural instincts were to cut and run, I stayed because I needed to, and my family needed me to.

I have never been more grateful for courage in my entire life.

Rediscovering Me

Even months before I had found out about the affairs, I was in a redefining period of my life. I was just discovering what life as a parent meant. I also had to add this new role to my life and sort of rearrange my life in a way so that everything still fit and I felt like me.

The initial six months After Knowing really envigorated this quest for me. I was getting used to my new body, and acknowledging old and new wants. I cannot say that every woman goes through this, I can only explain what it was like for me, and it was empowering.

We live in a sex-crazed world: I would bet money most women have thought about what they would do  and how they would react if they found out their husband cheated on them with multiple women. I had always expected to feel disgusted and distant. The truth is, I finally felt like we were approaching honesty. It felt as though, for the first time in a very long time that I had his full and undivided attention. Before finding out, I had all these creative plans to help me to feel less like a mom 24/7 and more like a woman. I wanted to feel sexy! These needs and wants did not fall away After Knowing, so I followed my instincts.

I did not want to fall apart. I did not want to take a single day off of work to mope; I just wanted to focus on me. So I did.

I bought new clothes, bras and underwear. I made plans to see friends I had not seen in a while. I focused on eating healthy and cooking more and being a better parent. I stopped feeling guilty for the occaisional pampering when I treated myself to something nice. For the first time in six years, I sort of went on auto pilot where our marriage was concerned and I let him lead. I stopped waiting on him and I just DID. It was so easy to be wrapped up in only making things work with him and trying not to push his buttons, that I just needed to change gears and focus on me and what I needed from our marriage.

I felt different. I felt as though he noticed me again, and like he wanted me. We were able to speak freely again with each other about what we wanted for our marriage and what we wanted out of life. It was almost as though we were meeting again for the first time in some ways. There were no secrets or lies. We spent hours talking to each other about how we wanted to raise our child, ways to feel closer, things we liked to do, our sex life... it brought me to tears on multiple occaisions when I thought about how bad things had been and how I had just accepted it for fear of rocking the boat. It was as though I had previously been swallowed up by the marriage, the pregnancy, and by him. I was slowing coming out of it when I found the text messages, and then suddenly what I needed was clear to me and he was either on board or he was not.

My parents divorced when I was in high school. I had grown in my Catholic faith throughout colllege, and these two factors made me decidedly Anti-Divorce. Back when we were dating, he had told me he was against divorce as well. Amid all our talks about our marriage and how we needed to heal and fix things, it was clear that our marriage would not survive another affair. I was confident at the time that had roles been reversed and I had cheated on him, that I would not be given the opportunity to fix things. I was not ready to give up on our life together, but if he would have been unable commit and "pull his weight", I was confident that a separation would occur. Even if I had to live the rest of his life in a legal but Catholic separation, I was willing to do it if it meant my child would be in a better environment. I struggled greatly with responding mercifully yet firm to the truth about our marriage and the sex addiction. I felt as though my God was calling me to rediscover myself, and to show my husband what unconditional love was. It is my personal goal to answer this call daily. I do not always feel I have the strength to do so, but fortunately for me, I am reminded of the amazing things our love is capable of when I look at our children.

Nearly two years after I began to include myself in my focus, I feel completely renewed. I make myself a priority the same as I do my marriage and my children. We have a balance that our life was sorely missing. When I am important to me, I begin to see how I am important to my husband and my children as well.

The Trouble with Affairs...

The trouble with affairs, is that the more people that are in the know, the more it begins to define you. This ugly event in your life isn't something that is easily kept quiet: humans need affirmation and discussion and empathy at times, but if it becomes a public matter, you are the Woman that Stayed and he is the Man that Cheated.

We have messages in this world that are harmful to reconciliation when affairs are involved:

"Once a cheater, always a cheater."
"People don't change."
"She must have no self esteem."
"I'd cut it off..."

I submit that sexual dishonesty is more common than we want to admit. This does not make it right, but when we face a 50% divorce rate, that tells me we are slowly giving up on each other. When I asked myself if I still wanted to be married to him or if I still loved him, the answer was always a resounding "YES." I held on to this when things were really difficult.

For the first 18 months or so, cheating was seemingly everywhere to me. Every movie, TV show, magazine or book had the elements of an affair. It was difficult not to think about it every waking moment. My inner dialogue was on overdrive. "Why do people do this to each other?" "Why do we blame the spouse that did not cheat?" "Why is cheating sensationalized?" "Why do we not have respect for those that try to make things work?"

Outside of a few very close friends, I did not disclose our marital problems to others. I did not want to have the chorus of shame for staying, or the sympathetic looks that came with the standard "You are brave." responses. My closest friends were able to understand why our marriage was not over, and that my husband really needed me to stay as much as I needed for this never to happen again. I needed to talk to my closest friends about the fact that somehow my response to my husband sexually was foreign to me. I needed reality checks from people that loved us both but were not directly effected by my reactions. 85% of the Affair Chat was with my husband, but I needed the 15% Am I Crazy Chat with my friends. The fact that it was not public knowledge made it incredibly difficult to spend an extended period of time in a room with people that did not know we were struggling, and that loved him. All of this unfolded right before the holidays, and family get-togethers with his family were difficult. All "his people" love him and fancy him Superman, and I wanted to stand up at dinner and let them all know he was not perfect. I knew this was a selfish want and obviously I did not ever act on my impulses, but I really longed to be closer to "my people" during this time. I wanted to be around people that loved me and that would remind me that I am pretty amazing as well.

As I have mentioned, we have not gone to counseling. There were a few times I considered individual counseling for myself during the time of the Inner Monologue, but ultimately we were fortunate enough to create plenty of space and time in our marriage to speak honestly to one another and rebuild. A gigantic reason we have made so much progress is that the changes he decided on have stuck. I do not have to monitor him or remind him of past indiscretions: his entire attitude towards me has shifted to one of love, admiration and respect. My husband is truly no longer the person that hurt me.

I don't remember the title, but sometime in the first few months I watched a film where an adult daughter had discovered that her father had an affair and her mother did not leave. When she confronted her mother about the information, her mother said something to the tune of "I didn't want to let that one action define your father." That truly resonated with me. My husband was more that a cheater. He did not deserve to be defined by mistakes he had made anymore than  I want to be defined by the fact that I stayed. I would rather we were seen as strong and capable parents, a loving couple, and the numerous qualities that make us unique individuals.

If I would have chosen to leave, I would have missed "us" at our best and only known heartache. I am certain that we are only on the beginning slopes of marriage, but we will face it all together and there really is no one I would rather be facing it with.

How I Knew Things Would Be Different

Sometime in the first few weeks After Knowing, I called my closest friend. I asked her if she thought my husband was capable of change. She knew we had struggles, but I don't think she was expecting that phone call. It was a question that was in the back of my mind for a long time After Knowing.

I previously mentioned that he had written me a note soon after that detailed how he would begin to start over. Here are some of the ways that he began to change, and are still different to this day:

1. He did pretty extensive research on Sex Addiction, and within the first few days had deleted all pornography from the computer, and set about ceasing masturbation.

2. He began coming to Mass with his family. Raising our child Catholic was important to me, and if I had to do it alone, I was determined to do so. He came to the realization that he was not acting as though he was fully a part of our family if he was not attending Mass with us. It was the answer to a very long held prayer for me.

3. He began to let me know when he would be late coming home from work, and would send me short emails from time to time.

4. He let me be angry.

5. He accepted responsibility when he was in the wrong or if he helped contribute to a problem: it was no longer a battle of wills when we had an argument because there was some honesty again in our marriage.

6. He asked if I could arrange for us to renew our vows on our anniversary. We needed a restart button, and this was better. We renewed our vows with the priest that was at our wedding, with our child and our close friends present.

Though I still reserve the right to change my mind, we have not ever participated in or sought out marriage counseling. We agreed that if it ever became more than we could handle, if I felt we were no longer speaking honestly with each other, or if I felt as though there was any back sliding, that we would find a counselor. To date, there has not been a need.

The night of our sixth wedding anniversary was when we renewed our vows. We ate dinner with our closest friends, and had a rare evening to ourselves after attending Mass and the renewal. About a month and a half later,  it was time for the appointment my doctor had requested, and he asked that my husband come with me. It was there that God answered another prayer. It was confirmed that  we had conceived our second child the night we had renewed our vows.

Life After Knowing is not always easy, but as the two year mark draws near, I can honestly say I do not think about it every waking moment. Most days it does not enter my thoughts. For me, staying was the easy part: the difficult thing was allowing him to change and take the lead. I stayed for many reasons, but none of them would have mattered if he had not been able to make changes and accept responsibility for his actions. It may seem as though staying was a push-over move, but I assure you that nothing about it is weak. I fought for my marriage and so did my husband. We fought together for the marriage that we wanted, and the life we live now is nothing like the life we lived Before. We are in a loving and committed relationship. Our children have parents that love them dearly and that love each other.

The reason I wanted to tell my story, is because affairs are things that no one wants to talk about. They are humiliating and demeaning, and no one wants to feel as though they are a fool. I assure you that you are not alone. Sexual dishonesty such as affairs, masturbation or sex addictions is unfortunately more common than most of us want to let on. Dishonesty in marriage happens. If you have experienced marital dishonesty and would like to tell your story anonymously, please email me at fromtheashes2012@gmail.com.

Sexually Transmitted Disease Testing

Once I was relatively certain there were no more surprises coming my way, I set about letting him fix it. The truth was, I had given my all to our marriage since day one, and I was exhausted. It was time for him to do some leg work. A raw honesty entered our marriage. It is not in me to be dishonest; I have an incredibly difficult time with it, but I felt as though I was a new person. I did not try to save his feelings when he asked me questions. I answered with brutal honesty. Before I Knew, I had been thinking about more children, and I was furious that my entire life was now thrown into this blender. Everything felt so uncertain and in a way I hated him a little for ruining things. When it was time for my yearly doctor's appointment, I asked for an STD test. My husband had planned on going anonymously into a clinic so that his work would never find out, but I needed an answer and I wanted to go to someone I trusted.

It was humiliating. My doctor was well versed in NFP and very Catholic, so he did all he could to comfort me while asking ridiculously hard questions so he could determine what kinds of tests I needed. He asked me if I was staying. I immediately responded yes without a thought. He asked if I wanted the numbers to a few NFP instructors for a refresher, and I realized that I didn't know if I could have any more children with him.

I came home in a foul mood. It was a difficult day. He was very upset that I had testing done, and I told him there was no way I was going to go to a clinic by myself, and that he had a month since I had brought it up to do something about it. he didn't, so I did. What followed was one of the most difficult conversations of the entire ordeal.

I told him that I was tired. I explained that a part of me truly needed to be able to be secure in believing I could support myself and my child if the changes did not stick. A part of me needed a back up plan, because I could not go through it all again as I was barely making it through it the first time. I told him that I did not know if I was willing to have more children with him. He asked me if I wanted to stay, and I said yes. I told him my answer is yes, but that it would take some time for me to trust him again. I asked if he could do it again, if he would have still asked me to marry him, and he said yes. He looked me in the eyes and told me that even if I couldn't trust him yet, he knows things are different and that he can change and that he would spend the rest of his life convincing me of it.

After some thought, I think I really just gave in. It had been a difficult month to say the least. I went to Eucharistic Adoration that week and I just repeated over and over "I can't do this. If it is Your will for us to have more children, then You decide. I can't do this..." I let go of that control because it was more than I could handle.

After the results of the testing came back negative, I was able to breathe a bit easier. My doctor asked that I come in again in a few months, so I set the appointment. Then my husband and I just focused on rebuilding.

After the Initial Shock

After our guests had left and our child put to bed, my husband and I were face to face with all the chaos. I had spent the entire day sick to my stomach. I felt defeated, angry, disgusted and slightly validated.  While I truly had believed that things were on solid ground between us when I discovered the affair, There had been times in our marriage where I was incredibly insecure, and my gut was telling me there were things he was not telling me. I had always felt especially queasy around this woman that would go as far as calling me names in the grocery store if she saw me. Knowing that I was right in my instincts about her was both validating and sickening. I asked if it had happened before while we had been together and he said no. After this initial question, I suddenly felt a surge of empowerment. The things that I wanted for our life together and the things that I wanted for me were crystal clear in that moment. We had married each other with the understanding that divorce was not an option. If we were going to be married it was for our entire lives. As I considered what I called My Life After Knowing, everything felt miserable, but what I wanted and expected was very clear.

I told him that the only steps in fixing the mess that I would lay out for him, were that he cut off all contact with her, that he must tell his friend the truth, and that he answers any question that I have honestly. Sometime in the next few days I sent him an email telling him he needed to figure out the answers to the questions he wasn't answering. I wanted to know details, because my version of our time together while this was happening was not real. I unleashed nearly seven years of being made to feel paranoid and like I was not enough for him.

Our marriage was good, and we had many good times, but in the difficult times I was made to feel as though it was my fault: that I was not meeting the expectations he had for me. I bent over backwards to make our lives better in the hard times, and he was simply never at fault for our problems. Pornography and masturbation had always been a problem in our marriage. No matter how many different ways I tried to explain how it hurt me and effected us, it fell on deaf ears. I felt unwanted and unneccesary, which made me try all the more harder to be what he wanted. In the first year we were married, I had finally received some answers concerning a health matter. I was learning to manage it, and dealing with the symptoms when he told me that he no longer loved me the same way that he did before we were married. Sex was about him when we had sex. He was taking night classes after work and would be gone until nearly mignight most nights. The events of this first year strongly influenced my view of myself within our marriage. His words haunted me, even though things did get better.

After my email, he wrote out a response and read it to me. It outlined his regrets and his plans to make it right for us. He was crying so hard that he could barely get through the letter. It was the first time in seven years that he apologized sincerely.

Nearly a month After Knowing, another serious discussion culminated in him not only revealing two other affairs, but that he believed he had an addiction to sex. One of the affairs was before we were married, and one occured during our first year of marriage. He had been lying to me about how late his classes went, and instead was trolling around bars looking for casual sex opportunities. The sick feeling returned.

To pretend it was anything less than nauseatingly difficult would be a falsehood. I had flashes in my head of how much easier it would be to slap him and walk away. How I wanted to hurt him as much as he hurt me. I replayed our entire life together and nothing seemed true. I looked at photos and I hated what I saw. It was all a lie. I felt stupid, even though I had long ago convinced myself that he probably had cheated on me during the first year we were married. I felt angry.

Something interesting came with that anger: it was a kind of selfishness. I was no longer apologetic for not understanding how to make him happy; rather I was determined to give him the chance to make me happy and to treat me the way I deserved to be treated. I felt as though I had vowed to be his wife and that I was going to hold up my end of the bargain despite the fact he had failed to hold up his. I wanted a chance at happiness, and I wanted our child to have both parents in a loving marriage. I was not staying in the marriage for his sake or for our child's sake: I was staying because I deserved to be happy, and I deserved happiness with the love of my life.

I Was Happy.

I was happy. My husband and I fell in love in college, we married, and a few years later, we had our first child. We certainly had our share of problems in life, but by the time our child was one, I was convinced the bad times were behind us.

Things had not always been perfect. We struggled at times. I was a good little Catholic girl: I saved myself for marriage, instisted on NFP classes, and did not want to live together until after we were married in the church. My husband was not Catholic, nor was he really raised in any kind of faith, but he respected my convictions and Catholicism a great deal. He loved me more than anyone ever had loved me, and I truly loved him as well. Our first year of marriage was trying, to say the least. I was in a bit of depression for a myriad of reasons, and we were learning how to be married. It was also when I discovered he had lied to me about some things that had happened before we had ever met. I knew that he was not a virgin, and I told him that I did not really need to know the details unless I specifically asked about something. I had suspicisions that a few women he was still in contact with were former flings, but he denied it for a long time, and did not confirm it until the evidence presented itself. One of the women had been dating his friend at the time of the fling, and was now married to him. Though I had never directly met her, she caused problems for me in a few circles of friends and family because she suspected I knew, and did not want her husband to find out. As far as I was concerned, I did not need to be the one to to tell him and had no intention of involving myself in the issue.

Slowly, the next few years of marriage became easier. We bought a house, were finishing graduate school, and finally were pregnant! When we discovered that my husband's plant was going to close in the middle of the pregnancy, we set about making a plan. We talked about our budget, how we would fix up the house and that nothing mattered as much as the fact that our family was together. I felt as though our life was making sense and that all the struggles of the past 4 years were worth it to get to this happy place.

My husband was unemployed for eight months. I had a newborn and was able to take the baby to work with me to my part-time job so he could focus on applying for jobs. When he finally found work, I put in my notice so that I could be at home. I remember feeling incredibly grateful for the timing.

About the time the baby turned one, a chain of events left every corner of my life in pieces.

I left my email account open one evening, and my husband changed the name that I had attached to his email address. One evening a few weeks later, we had a girl's night/boy's night. When the boys returned home, everyone was a little tipsy. My husband handed me his phone before he passed out, and my drunken self thought it would be funny to change my name in his phone. I was considerably technically challenged, however, and after about 20 minutes of trying to figure out how to change the entry, his text messages folder opened, and I found myself face to face with messages between my husband and his friend's wife during the time that he was unemployed.

To say that my heart was broken is an understatement. I cried all night. I kept sneaking into my child's room just to hear the breathing so that I knew something was real. The next morning, I confronted him and gave him the chance to be honest. I informed him that if he was honest with me, then I would stay. If he lied, then I had no choice but to go be with my family while I sorted things out in my head. We had company over that day, so there was little time to discuss anything. He told me immediately that he had an affair with her. He cried, I was cold, and I told him I needed to go get things ready and that we would talk later.

****
Over the next few posts, I will talk about how things progressed during the worst of times, and how we got to where we are now. For those of you that are just beginning to experience the pain of an affair, I want to let you know that if both people are truly committed to the marriage, there is hope. It might feel as though everything is in flames right now, but you can overcome it together if both parties commit to rebuilding.

An Introduction

I am creating this blog anonymously. No, my name is not really Sally Ash. Under pretty much any other circumstances, I would have held no reservations in talking openly about my life. Let me tell you why I chose to stay anonymous.

Nearly two years ago, I discovered that my husband was having an affair. We have spent a great deal of time rebuilding "from the ashes". It came close to destroying our marriage. When I began looking for support, I had several trusted friends, and the priest the performed our marriage ceremony to fall back on, but no one that been through what we had been through, and certainly no one that chose to stay in the marriage. I turned to the vast resources online. I specifically wanted Catholic resources on the subject and found very little. I found Catholic forums and posted questions that sat unanswered. It was a subject no one seemed to want to talk about.

Fast forward to now. Things are finally healing, and I do not think about it daily. I do, however, think about how desparately I needed to hear/see/read about someone that faced it head on and came out the other end with their marriage intact and their faith renewed.

This blog is not an excuse to relive sordid details. I want to provide a place for those that face life's rather hideous trials to vent, but also create a community so that those that have experienced can show those for whom it is fresh that it does get better.

I do not wish to do harm to those involved with my experience. Therefore, I create this space anonymously.

If you have a story you would like to share, comments, or suggestions, please feel free to email me at fromtheashes2012@gmail.com

I look forward to building this community!