Your Heart Comes at Such a Great Price, Don’t Sacrifice It and Get Nothing in Return!

By: Shonda Pulliam

When I woke up to what I was doing to myself it was eight years later. I am a black single mother of two daughters and showing them a proper relationship was very important to me. I didn’t want them to see different men coming and going. I also didn’t want them to believe that a woman had to lower her standards in order to have a man.I entered into a wonderful relationship with a man and it was perfect. We blended our families, he had a two year old son, and everything was going in the right direction until his job forced him to move hundreds of miles away a year later.

Heartbreak does something abstract to your feelings. All you can think about is the hurt. You physically become the pain and mentally become its lonely shadow at least for some of us anyway. So when a new relationship presented itself I wasn’t wholly prepared to think it through clearly. So when the intensity of the attraction kicked in I was taken by storm. We were unbelievably drawn to each other.

His attentiveness shadowed how much I missed the one that got away. Mr. X as we can call him adored me. It was kind of refreshing and different. We spent hours talking to each other. Hours. I learned so much about him in such a short amount of time. I also ignored some important points that you will read about later. Mr. X was alluring.

He had a presence that captivated me. When we touched each other I could feel the spark that soon grew into a wildfire. So when a couple of months went by and I begin to pay attention to the fact that I would only receive text messages from him at night or only saw him during the day I didn’t ask or at this point want to know why?

Shadows are a funny thing. They are a representation of you minus the light. I was living out of my shadow perspective. Hiding a situation calling it a relationship (shadow), saying I love you when it was actually lust (shadow) experiencing a fairytale by day and the emptiness of loneliness at night.

I also was not showing my daughters how to be in a healthy relationship. As a matter of fact I wasn’t showing them a relationship at all. By now years have gone by and I was still sleeping with a man during the day and pretending not to care that he could not be around at night.

I was living a lie. So my girls are thinking that I am still healing from Mr. W. (since w comes before x) when I really hadn’t began. We as women take on way more heartache than we should. But now I don’t know how to get myself out of this. I was having the best sex I had ever had. Mr. X freed me from all the reservations I ever had about sex. I was his fantasy! Literally. He would look at me, say to me, and show me physically, that I was all he needed. We laughed together. We bonded. The problem was it was in the dark of day, in hotel rooms as often as we could.

How do I get myself out of this mess? How do I stop loving him? How do I tell myself the truth? How do I heal? These are the questions that started to rise up in me around my 39th birthday. My youngest daughter in now off to college and telling me that I need to find someone. She and her sister are not saying I have to move on from Mr. W and be happy and in love. They are now mourning me not being happy. Not know that all of this time happiness was attached to the physical satisfaction I was receiving.

I felt like I was failing to show them how to live out loud. I taught them everything but that; they were strong, intelligent, beautiful young women who didn’t know how to have a relationship with a man. I failed as their example and for that I am sorry. So my journey began. I had to let go of this so that I can heal my heart.

I went over the last 8+ years of my life and said I want more than this. It was hard and I cried a lot. I wrote a lot of poetry. I wrote a lot of songs. I even wrote a book and with all of these things (therapy) I was starting to become hole again. Just one more thing to do. Let HIM go. So now it’s my birthday and as always I am going to see him and I tell myself this is the day. I get to start over fresh and that is what I did. I said good bye and my heart finally broke. As Charles Dicken’s once wrote “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”