Living Happily Ever After
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Blog Articles

Be True No Matter What

Date: December 13, 2012  Author: Andrea Merriman

“I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false and to incur my own abhorrence.” (Frederick Douglass)

Step 5: Hold your head up and be true to who you are no matter what.

Boy, for me in the wake of the destruction of 2009, this proved to be a hard one. It was NOT fun!

I remember the first Sunday after our life ended, my children looked at me and said, “We don’t have to go to church today, do we?” (None of us wanted to face our congregation for the first time after such a disaster.) And I had to be the one to say, “Yes, we are going.” Honestly, it wasn’t fun. In truth, it was awful. Not just the uncomfortable and awkward, but having my oldest sit on the pew and cry during the meeting while my middle son sat and drew on a piece of paper, “There’s a hole where my heart used to be” was terrible. I was grief stricken and disgraced, but we went to church because it was who we were. In life, you have to do that.

What I didn’t expect was an even greater challenge. A moment of temptation to be someone I was not and never had been.

Stay tuned.

Learn the Lesson

Date: September 25, 2012  Author: Andrea Merriman

“There is a lesson there about greed and it is a lesson I am willing to learn as well. Has it made me a distrustful person? I don’t think so. But we probably look a bit more carefully at our financial situation now.” (Kevin Bacon)

Also taking place on June 20, 2012 (the day my oldest left home, and the United States, not to return until approximately June 2014) was the airing of the MSNBC show, “American Greed.” It’s a show about greed and the destruction greed leaves in its wake. That particular day’s episode hit very close to home when it featured the crimes of my former husband.

I could write several blog posts on that particular episode and the things I learned from it (yes, three years later, I’m still learning new things!) but it also showed me how much I’ve healed and moved on from the whole thing. I realized I’d healed a lot when most of the show’s content felt like it hadn’t happened to me, but to another person living another life.

Little by little. Day by day. Month by month. Year by year. I’ve learned for myself that is how healing takes place.

But I also believe it’s a choice.

Like everything else in life, it’s a choice. You can choose to let it go, to heal from the trauma, drama and betrayals, to carry on despite the hard stuff and to seek to triumph over all of your challenges…or you can hang on to them, wallow in their misery, stagnate or let them ruin you and your potential to live a good and happy life. Ugh! I choose healing and progress any day over the alternative.

“What wound did ever heal but by degrees?” (William Shakespeare)

 

The Price of Crime? Don’t Ask!

Date: March 29, 2010  Author: Andrea Merriman

Five days into the nightmare I had to ask:  How big was your initial mistake?

You see, if I understand it right, His ponzi scheme began when He did a stock trade that lost money.  He said He did a bigger stock trade to cover that loss and lost money again.  So he chose to omit those two trades from his statements that month to make the account balance sheet look better. And after that, He said it was too late.

The ponzi scheme was in place.

I remember, now, why you shouldn’t ask questions you don’t REALLY want to know the answer to.

$5,000.

My ENTIRE life, my marriage, my family, my dreams, my children’s dreams, our forever, our future, everything of mine and everyone else’s was destroyed…for $5,000.  It made me want to throw up.

Even back in 1994, $5,000 was not a life or death amount.  I was stunned that I had lost everything, and every other victim had suffered their own losses as well, for a measley $5,000.  I hope I recover from that revelation.  I don’t think I’ll ever look at $5,000 in quite the same light.

I remember thinking, “That’s all the mistake was–FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS?  And now ALL OF THIS?”

The answer to my next question was even more unsettling. (To me.)

I asked:  When did you do it?  When did you suffer the loss and hide it?

He didn’t know. The man who had never forgotten a birthday or an anniversary (had even thrown in an “extra” one one year–what can I say, He was a good, kind, thoughtful and patient husband in many ways–yet another reason I had loved and trusted Him and had no reason to suspect what He was doing while at “work” those many years) didn’t know the date His crimes began.

How can the date you stole, how can the date you broke the law, NOT be etched in your memory forever?

Note to self:  AGAIN, don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answer to!