Lies, another look

I remember when I was in college I had friends who would tell their professors that they didn't finish an assignment because their grandmother had died or was in the hospital or some other big story like that. I would never tell those lies because I was always afraid that whatever I lied about might come true.

Also while I was in college, a few of my friends and I were sitting around, it was quiet and I decided to be "funny." I started acting as if something terrible was happening to me, like I was having a seizure. Who would have ever dreamed that 11 years later, I'd find myself on a stretcher being taken to the hospital after having a seizure at work?

That seizure reaffirmed my belief that playing around with the truth can affect your karma.

Over the past couple of days though I've had a different way of looking at it. I was listening to Joe and Charlie talk about the AA Big Book on my Thanksgiving trip and one of the many things they said that struck me was that alcoholics will let people see them falling down drunk, hugging the porcelain throne and puking their guts out, but when they get into recovery they are often afraid to let other people see them pray. This related to my current situation, as I was thinking of what it was I was going to tell these men with whom I needed to sever ties. Somehow I always seem to feel the need to be comletely honest with the men I act out with, despite all the lies I've told my husband and every other person around me.

So, keeping in mind that there's a chance that telling a lie can make the thing we lie about happen ... I told these men in my letters today that my husband had expressed his concern about the state of our relationship and his heartfelt interest in making things right with us again. I said that he acknowledged the pain he had caused and that he had sensed our distance. My husband and I never had such a conversation, but I'm hoping that maybe one day this is one of those lies that will come back to me. And in the meantime, I'm going to live today as if that conversation really did happen, that we are both equal partners in working on this relationship of ours and that as old wounds are healing, new feelings are developing.