“Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning.” (Thomas Alva Edison)

Although I’d love to look brilliant, organized and like I’m a woman who has it all together–including a special letter she needed–it wasn’t intentional. I didn’t know I was going to get engaged to remarry just one year after my world collapsed or that I’d need a letter from my former spouse to apply for permission to marry in a L.D.S. temple! It came about more as a result of my former husband.

When he revealed his crimes in March 2009, everything changed. Especially for me. I didn’t just lose my entire world, life, marriage, family and everything as I knew it. In one moment I went from loving, trusting and respecting my husband of 20 years to looking at him through completely different eyes. I didn’t know who he was or what he was. He became a stranger in a moment. I wondered if he was sociopathic. He even looked different, physically, to me. It was as if I didn’t know him, and never had known him, at all. But ironically, at that time, possibly for the first time, I actually knew everything about him. Finally.

Yet he didn’t get that.

I remember shortly after he had revealed everything he had done. When we were alone, he told me it was ironic to him that all he wanted to do was be with me, be alone with me, be close to me, hold me–yet that was the one thing I didn’t want! Soon after that, he told me he didn’t think a divorce was necessary. I was dumbfounded.

I asked, “No divorce?”

“No divorce,” he replied.

“So you think it’s completely realistic to expect that you did what you did for as long as you did it, you say you’re sorry, I forgive you, and we can remain married?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied.

“You think it’s realistic to expect that while you go to prison for who knows how long, that we remain married, I’m alone, I raise our children alone, I keep our children alive in your absence, you serve your time, you get out and then everything goes back to normal and goes on as before? And we’re married the whole time?” I clarifed.

“Yes,” he answered.

All I can say is that we sure didn’t see things the same way! I saw no other outcome or consequence to his crimes, lies and other betrayals, than divorce. Not to mention the fact that every attorney involved advised me to cut my ties to the criminal as fast as I possibly could, for my protection and for my children. Regardless of how I felt or what I may or may not have wanted to do, I didn’t have a choice. My former husband had made my choice for me and left me with no choice.

Divorce.

“When two people decide to get a divorce, it isn’t a sign that they ‘don’t understand’ one another, but a sign that they have, at last, begun to.” (Helen Rowland)

And although I didn’t know it at the time, some day, I’d need a letter.