Imagine you’ve gone into business with your friend. Doesn’t have to be your best friend, but a good friend. After a few months, a few years, you find out they did something terrible. Illegal, even. Now you’re both out of a job, with no savings left and no new ideas.
Five years down the line, you’re doing better, and so is your friend. You’ve got your feet back on the ground. More importantly, you’ve forgiven each other and reconciled. In some ways, you’re closer now, having survived this catastrophe.
But then your friend wants to give the whole business-together thing another shot.
What would you do?
Hold that thought for a minute. What if, instead of your business, we were talking about your family?
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For a woman whose marriage survived a couple of affairs, blogger Jami Baker Nato is remarkably frank on the pitfalls of marriage. There’s no sugar-coating the pain her family went through, even during the reconciliation process.
Infidelity blogging is kind of a thing right now, and I don’t mind telling you that some of them leave me suspicious that the reconciled spouses might be in denial. But Jami’s story lets me see how it would be possible not only to forgive, but even to go on loving someone who betrayed you.
What I didn’t see was how you could go back to having a family with that person.
After all, co-parenting involves not only your own heart, but the hearts of your children. It’s putting your integrity as a parent on the line, by supporting this person who compromised it once before. Family is such an intuitive bond; once it’s broken, how do you ever feel the same again?
“Commitment trumps feeling…that’s what I was resting on,” Jami says. And she’s not talking about her commitment to her husband.
“You have to submit to God’s plan for a family.” For her, that meant being willing to move back in with her husband, once he repented and started seeking reconciliation. For several months, Jami says, she had heavily guarded his access to the kids — not out of spite, but out of caution for their well-being.
“I would look at him and know, ‘You probably don’t have the capacity to parent very well right now, because you can’t take care of yourself.’ It wasn’t an epiphany — you just look at the guy whose life is falling apart.”
The boundaries were just as hard on her as they were on her husband. She had to do everything herself: pay bills, run errands, and provide emotional stability and spiritual leadership for three children.
Before their separation, Jami says she had the expectation that her husband Nato was a kind of saviour, that he would always be there to fix things. “Because it’s very comfortable to have someone do everything for you. Then you’re not accountable when something bad happens.”
Similarly, she says, Nato had looked at her as someone who would fulfill all his needs. She lists off the expectations they brought into their marriage:
“‘You will make me not lonely anymore. You will provide for me. You will have my babies.’ When you actually get married, someone may not actually be able to have your baby. Someone will maybe not actually be able to provide for you. You do your best to pick someone you think is awesome, but when you look at each other as saviours, you’re going to fail.”
Jami says she’s realized her good parenting can’t save her children from their sin. “We don’t have a lot of parenting techniques,” she tells me. “We just say, ‘You have to ask God to change your heart.’ I’m not kidding — that is said 400 times a day, in our house.”
And it works, she says. At least, if her son’s reaction is anything to judge by: “Lane runs downstairs excited — ‘God changed my heart!’”
Being able to give grace to her children is a direct result, Jami says, of seeing God’s grace in her own life. And that’s an experience she shares with no one as closely as with her husband.
When her husband started seeking reconciliation, she says she was able to have patience while he rebuilt trust.
“He was so much more responsible, honest, not just saying he was sorry, but he changed. That made it easier for me to trust him with the kids.” She also began seeing how her own fears sometimes were a bigger problem than his past sin.
“Things come up all the time, money stuff, for example. But when I get really, really upset about something, I can easily trace it back to not trusting. Sometimes he’ll just call me out, in a gentle way, and say, ‘Hey, I’m not that guy anymore.'”
Though it’s a process, Jami says she has been able to transfer her saviour-expectations from her husband to God. “I’m not dysfunctionally dependent on my husband anymore.”
The result, she says, is everything about their family feels brand new.
“I’m more independent, now, in a healthy way. My husband is such a better father, because God has changed him. God knew exactly what we needed.”
flickr photo (cc) by late night movie
