It's summer: the season of kids around 24/7 and of subsequent blog neglect.  It's also the season of summer visitors, passing through in cars bulging with luggage, fast food wrappers and warm, disheveled smiles.  While some people like to do spring cleaning to prepare for those visitors, I (a hopeless procrastinator) prefer to do summer cleaning.  And with the kids out of school, not only do I tend to need to do it anyway, but really, what better way to keep two bored kids occupied than by sorting old toys and rearranging furniture?  So, we have been slowly working our way through the house and ridding ourselves of clothes, furniture and toys that are outgrown or just unused.

Most things go to charity and a few hopeless odds and ends find their way to the trash, but those things that are too nice to throw away but a little too worn or, um, scribbled upon in permanent marker end up being freecycled.  Now, as a good sex addict codie, I know I really ought to do my freecycling through some other source than the website so bound up in addiction that it cannot be named, but I've found that nowhere else can I post any kind of crazy old junk -- from broken electronics to a nest for spiders that was once a stroller to a table with a dinosaur drawn on it in Sharpie -- and have ten people lined up to cart it all away in as many minutes.  I've tried alternatives, believe me, but they just don't work. Left to choose between feeling unscrupulous for actually using The Site That Shall Not Be Named and distressed for having to take perfectly usable items to the dump (and guilty for not having maintained every part of every item in my home in pristine condition, with its original packaging and instruction manual), I've chosen unscrupulous.

And it honestly does make me feel unscrupulous.  Seven years of hanging out with people who have used The Site That Shall Not Be Named for the worst of purposes and those who have been harmed by it have given me a nagging underlying feeling that everyone on the site is at best a liar and at worst a serial killer.  And when I use the site, I feel like I'm trying to get away with something too, although it doesn't start out that way.

I start by posting a perfectly accurate description and picture like: "Small bookshelf. Unfinished wood. 36"x 36" x18". Decorated in blue Sharpie with a 3-year-old's depiction of PacMan eating dots, several smiley faces and the words 'i lik dinasors.'" Five minutes later, I have ten messages in my inbox each begging me to please, please bestow upon her (or him) the honor of carting away my bookcase.  Some of the messages just say something like, "I want this if still available." And I find those only mildly suspicious. After all, maybe some of those are from some crazy person who just likes to screw with people who post things for free on The Site That Shall Not Be Named. They say they are going to come pick it up but -- psych! -- they never do.  Instead, they sit giggling at home at the thought of that item sitting on the curb one extra day before someone else gets it.

But other messages try to convince me that they are more worthy of my esteemed stuff than the other people who might want it. These messages usually read something like, "My granddaughter would love this for her birthday next week!" or "I've always wanted one of these, but can't afford it!" These messages leave me wondering things like "Do you really have a granddaughter at all?" or "Maybe you are actually the CEO of AT&T but have some weird mental disease that makes you pretend you are poor while you go around collecting other people's old stuff."

So, with nothing else to go on, I always offer the item to the first person in my inbox and tell them so, but I always feel vaguely as if I'm lying, because I suspect that the liars I'm writing to will think I am.

Last week, I offered an old tricycle to a man who called himself Joe and said he wanted it for his kids. (Read: he doesn't have kids and was going to trade it to his dealer for crack.) When the trike hadn't been picked up a day after he said he was on his way right over, I called the number he sent.

"Hello?"

"Hi, is this Joe?"

"Um..." His bewilderment pulsed through the telephone line.

Just great, I think. Joe is one of his aliases. Ignoring his confusion, I plunge on, "My name is Mary. You responded to an ad about a trike on The Site That Shall Not Be Named."

I can hear "Joe" struggling to recall this. "Oh, yeah!" he said at last, "Is that still available?"

"Yes, I was calling to see what happened and if you were still interested."

"Oh, yeah. Sorry.  My girlfriend just had a kidney transplant last week and she's not doing so well."

A kidney transplant? Seriously? "So, you've obviously had other things on your mind. Totally understandable," I lied.

"Yeah. But I still do want it. I'm heading over right now!" said Joe.

"Ok."

That was one week ago. I never saw Joe, who (I assume) after finishing the bottle of whiskey he was drinking, got distracted by a prostitute, lost his car in a poker game and (once again) forgot all about the fact that he promised his drug dealer a trike. Or who went to visit his girlfriend in the hospital instead and happened to find another trike that would be just perfect for his kids.  Either way, the trike went to "Anna," who wanted it for her "grandson."  Or at least that's the story I'm telling.  Since I post things on The Site That Shall Not Be Named, you really shouldn't believe a word I say.  After all, how likely is it that I actually have kids or am doing any summer cleaning if I've actually managed to write this blog post?

The newborn daughter of a very dear friend of mine recently had heart surgery to correct a congenital defect. Fortunately, the surgery went smoothly, the defect was easy to correct and the baby is doing just fine. Still, it's been a few weeks of highly emotional extremes. (Yay! The baby is here. Oh no! The baby is having heart surgery. Yay! Everything went well. Oh no! My friend is even more exhausted and stressed than the typical first time parent of a newborn.) I've spent a good deal of time in recent weeks thinking about my friend, her husband and her baby, and I've spent some time noticing (oh, what a change that is from years past!) how I'm thinking about them and what my impulses are. And I've found my impulse is to shop. And research. But mostly research about what I could shop for.

I had a carefully picked out perfect gift before the baby was even conceived and I'd purchased it as soon as the news was out that my friend was pregnant. I spent more than I normally would, but this is more than a normal friend. Now that the baby was here and needed special care, I found myself wanting to shower my friend in still more gifts. I asked friends who had dealt with hospitalized babies what they might need. I asked friends who are pediatricians and nurses for suggestions. I googled and googled. And in the end I had a list of lots of helpful goods and services. And I wanted to buy everything on the list.

I wanted to purchase things in excess of what my family could afford, with no regard for what we could afford. In part, I wanted to let my friend know how much I care and how much I love her, but I realized that I also wanted to make sure that everything was done the "right" way, that she wanted for nothing, that every inch of her road was as smooth as it could be (as smooth as only my codependent superpowers could make it). I sat at the computer with items in three different online shopping carts (complete with extra fees for wrapping and express shipping) and my mouse hovering over the "Purchase" button when it struck me that my impulse was coming as much from lack of trust as from love.

My friend lives in the same small town where she grew up and is part of a tight knit community. She is surrounded by friends and family, both hers and her husband's. She has people who can (and are) helping with cooking, cleaning and shopping, who can (and will) take good care of her. I don't have to be everything to her. I don't have to do everything for her. I don't have to drain my bank account to show my love for her or take care of her every need singlehandedly. I can be there and be a good friend and still trust other people to be there for her too. I can trust her to ask for my help if she needs it and I can trust her Higher Power to take care of her. Wow. What a surprise to see that I had been carrying the weight of her world, and what a relief to empty those shopping carts and let it go.

Well, mostly. I still did buy just one more gift. But with a new baby in town, sometimes a little excessiveness feels just right.

With the story of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford's week-long disappearance to visit his mistress in Argentina buzzing about, we're faced yet again with a barrage of images of a public figure tearfully apologizing for his infidelity, while his job hangs in jeopardy.* And in the wake of this story, the same discussions will repeat themselves that have echoed down from all the scandals past. Why did he do it? What does it say about our society? Should he keep his job? And, my perennial favorite, was he justified in cheating?

Yes, rest assured, people will whisper about the cause being his bitchy wife (she must be or he wouldn't have done it, right?) and someone, somewhere out there, will use this as an opportunity to bemoan our culture's moralistic attitude toward sex. It's a charge that is sometimes leveled at partners of sex addicts (at times by the addict or even by ourselves): that the problem with infidelity lies in our own uptight attitudes about sex and if we'd just lighten up and not get so upset about sex outside of marriage, everything would be fine. Which completely misses what every partner of a sex addict knows: the pain of infidelity doesn't have nearly as much to do with the sex as it does with being lied to.

Ask nearly anyone in a relationship with a sex addict what the worst thing about active addiction is and they will almost universally tell you that it's not the sex, but the lying and the horrible breach of trust that comes with it.  Sure, the sex part of it matters; it's not like I would have fallen down on the bathroom floor sobbing and hugging the toilet in sickness if my husband had lied to me about his secret life helping poverty stricken orphans.  The lies hurt because they were about something as intimate and personal and hurtful as a breech of sexual trust. And yes, I wanted the sexual acting out gone, but I know wanted the lies gone still more.

When my husband disclosed his activities to me, I laid into him, "If you wanted to have sex with other people, why didn't you tell me? If you want an open marriage, I need to know that. Hiding your actions and covering things up and lying shows a total lack of respect for me. I didn't have what I needed to make an informed decision about this relationship. You didn't give me the option to decide for myself, like an adult, you decided for me based on what you wanted. If multiple partners is what you want, let's talk about it. If that's what you're going to do, then tell me. I can deal with the sex, but I can't deal with the lying and the hiding and the deception." (See, it was early in recovery, I still "youed" at him a lot then. Also I bargained and tried to control him. Please do not try this at home.)

And in my husband's most major relapse since starting recovery for sex addiction, it wasn't the details of his acting out that hurt me (I wasn't even interested in them), but the fact that he would lie about going to a 12 Step meeting (a sacred meeting) and then cover it up for a year before coming clean.  I know he's an addict, I knew chances were slim that he would enter recovery and go the rest of his life without another slip ever, but I didn't care what he had done with this other woman so much as I cared that he had deceived me about it.  Even knowing that lying goes with the territory in addiction, the lying undid me.

What are my attitudes toward and beliefs about sex and relationships? To be honest, I'm still working that out; they're ever changing as I grow. But I do know that I didn't (and couldn't) begin to explore them until my husband and I both started talking honestly and openly about our wants and needs, our hopes and fears, our goals and values.

A version of this post was originally published at The Second Road. Additional comments can be found there.

When Mark and I were at the very beginning of our relationship, moving from a flirtatious friendship into love, he signed off some early little love note "a thousand ships for my beautiful." Now who was I to resist a suave Helen of Troy reference to my powerful, intoxicating, doomed and dangerous, mythical beauty? (If I were that woman, I would have married a different kind of man.) But the name stuck and for years that was what he called me: "Beautiful... My Beautiful..."

It meant so much to me that he saw me that way: that whatever I saw myself as, or other people saw me as, I was his Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman who ever lived. So, at some still early stage in our relationship, when we were making silly promises to one another (we seem so young when I think of this), I asked him, if he ever were to be with someone else, to find her some different pet name and keep mine sacred. Of course, he promised (so seriously and sincerely), I would always be his one and only Beautiful.

The years went by, we got married, and I assumed "Beautiful" was safe, mine forever. And more than that, I thought other words were safe: words like "you're so special" and "I love you." But five years after our wedding, knowing something was wrong but not knowing what, and desperate to track down the source of my discomfort, I installed keystroke tracking software on our computer and saw some of those sacred words (along with our credit card numbers) given easily and freely to women who were known only by their suggestive screen names. And when the precarious towers of addict lies came tumbling down, I learned of other words, left casually for other women.

That old life of mine, in the fantasy of the Matrix, had been consumed with the quest for knowledge, for proof, of some objective factual truth. I sought to know by installing tracking software, by checking phone records, by holding an ear to Mark's lips to catch the words he mumbled in his sleep. But the answers I found only left me wondering all the more what was real. How could I know "I love you" was real if he could say it to a woman he met on the street as easily as his partner of over a decade and the mother of his children? How could I know "special" was real if the barista at Starbucks was hearing the same? How could I know "beautiful" was real if it applied equally to me and a tiny, pixelated video image in a chat box? If the man I trusted more than anyone I'd ever met could deceive me, how could I know anything that anyone says is real?

The truth is I don't. I can't. Not really. I can't see into Mark's mind and heart (or anyone else's but my own). I can't ever really know that his current words (or anyone else's) aren't another vast charade about to come crashing down on me. So my journey now plumbs the next question, the one that came when the answer to that old question broke me: How do I live with not knowing?

I know I can try to take back the words, like so many roses, petal by petal, over time. I can learn to look at Mark's actions — at the fact that, nearly six years after disclosing his sex addiction, he has grown and changed dramatically and that he's still here working — and I can take a leap of faith from there. I can trust in his commitment to his recovery program and through my own I can learn to see myself as beautiful, special, loved and wanted, always, and regardless of what happens. All those things I have done and am doing, but it only takes me so far. Not all the way to a new Beautiful.

But sometimes I glimpse it. Sometimes I can see it resting serenely in the unknowable: in a deeper, grander reality, something that goes beyond facts. Sometimes, when I'm able to see every individual moment of my life — the joyous and the painful ones — as just the way they ought to be, rather than as good or bad, sometimes then I see how my life can become my own Helen of Troy. My own Beautiful.

When I found out about my husband's sex addiction, I spent weeks ripping every last Who and Where and What and How Often out of him. While he was at work, I'd make lists of questions and then keep him up late into the night interrogating him like a CIA agent would a terrorism suspect during the Bush administration. (And if I had known about water boarding, believe me, I would have used it.) We didn't have the support of a therapist or a group during this process. I discovered the sex addiction and attacked like a wild animal. I was either going to savage out what I needed or I was going to leave. So, we looked for support as I held onto his neck by my teeth, growling.

Mark was a wily subject, and I spent hours in frustration trying to determine precisely the right wording for my questions. I found that he was more skilled at finding loopholes than the most highly paid lawyer. I couldn't ask a question like, "Did you kiss Sue?" I would have to say, "The questions I am about to ask you refer to Susan Benson who worked at Widget Co. with you from 1998-2000 in the role of company receptionist and who will be referred to for the remainder of this session as 'Sue.' Did either your upper or lower lip, your tongue, teeth or any adjoining part of your face touch any part of Sue's body including, but not limited to her hair, teeth, toenails, fingernails, skin, lips, etc... Please note that the answer will still be yes if your lips touched any item or substance placed over Sue's body, again including but not limited to paper, food items, cloth, bed sheets, the salad stuck in your teeth, scarves, shirts, blouses, bras, panties or other items of clothing belonging to either of you."

I kept at it (for a time) because I believed that somehow, if I had The Facts, I would know The Truth. I'd be able to pin it down like a butterfly and spend my life examining it under a microscope. I'd be able to see what it was I had missed and how I missed it. And I'd be able to break the chain of secrets that kept him intimately linked to the women he'd acted out with. In the end, I collapsed in exhaustion, with enough to satisfy me that more was not going to help. I could see that from here, I had to find a way to a truth that went beyond the details a journey I expect to continue for the rest of my life.

I later found out there is a name for this sharing of information early in recovery: disclosure. It can be an important and beneficial part of rebuilding trust within the relationship, although I've also learned that the method by which I attained went about it is, ahem, not recommended. (Therapists say, "Kids, don't try this at home." Oh, and they don't endorse torture either. Go figure.)

1. It was a free book.
2. The title had both Momma and Zen in it, which sounded good.
3. I liked Shawn and Shawn liked the book.
4. Did I mention it was free? I could win it! Yay, free books!

So, I threw my name in and... I won!

I was immediately sorry I had. What was I going to do now? For the most part, I guard my anonymity jealously -- even more so then than now -- but the book had to be sent somewhere.  And I wasn't about to just throw my real name and address out there to a total stranger. Sure, she said she was a mother and Zen priest, which all sounds very peaceful and safe, but how did I know she wasn't a serial killer? See, you get burned by the person you trust most in life -- you find out one day your husband has been living a double life -- and you fear to trust anyone.  I was playing then the same "what if" game I still play today, but it hadn't yet become a useful tool for me; it kept me mired at the point where fear and suspicion turn to paranoia and paralysis, rather than gently guiding me to appropriate leaps of faith.

Yet I still did want a free book. (If a serial killer were going to lure me, it would be with free books.) So, I sent Shawn the name and address of a friend of mine who knows about my blog and had agreed to forward the book on to me. Then I crossed my fingers and hoped Karen wasn't the second coming of the Unibomber, and that I wouldn't spend the rest of my days kicking myself when my friend died because the explosive device meant for me was delivered to her home. As a result of my (ahem) "extreme caution," I have a very nice note from Karen and a lovely autographed copy of Momma Zen, both with my friend's name inscribed on them.

But the story doesn't end there.  After I received the book, it sat on my shelf for a year and a half, because I was afraid to read it. As a writer, I know that each book is a piece of someone's soul.  But as a reader, I've always been a harsh critic: viewing them with the detached eye of a connoisseur and focusing on what's lacking rather than what's there.  By the time I received Momma Zen I'd started reading Karen's blog and she was reading mine.  So, here I was, holding a piece of the soul of this person I was just getting to know, and knowing that I might hate it.  What was I going to say: "Thanks for graciously sending me the work of your heart. I regret to inform you that I find your heart sucky."?

But for a number of reasons, I finally decided to pick up the book this weekend.  I read just two chapters before I put it down and walked away.  Then I went straight to my computer and ordered a copy for a pregnant friend.  Sometimes leaps of faith pay off, and sometimes dragging yourself through a year and a half of dread just to find the edge of the cliff does.

A few months ago, a friend of mine, who is a single mom, asked me if I'd be willing to help her out while she worked late, because she'd missed a few days taking care of her son when he was sick and now needed to put in extra hours to maintain her health insurance eligibility. Now, helping out a friend in that situation is the kind of thing one is usually willing to do without a second thought. But what if she asked me to help so that she could free up some time go out and steal car stereos to get drug money? Or assassinate the President? Or just go out clubbing? Now it may sound ridiculous (at least if you've never been burned by addiction), but in spite of the fact that she has never (as far as I know) deceived me, I did actually wonder about this. It's a little thought experiment I like to do these days called: "What if this person is lying?"

Lying is part and parcel of the disease of addiction, and it was the hardest thing for me to deal with about my husband's sex addiction. The lies hurt so much that I told my husband years ago (as I tried to bargain away my grief) that I could learn to deal with the things he did (the porn and the sex chats and the encounters with other women), if only he would not lie about them. The lies, the deception, the denial, the projected fantasy had been the reality of my world, and when I saw them for what they were — when I knew that Mark hadn't been doing the things he said he had and that life didn't work the way I thought it did — everything crumbled. If my husband, my best friend, the guy who wouldn't call in sick to work if he weren't really sick because he didn't want to lie — if em he/em could lie to me, and in many cases lie so well that I never suspected a thing — then how could I know what was real? Maybe everyone was lying. Maybe my life was some big joke everyone in the world was in on but me.

So, I've been bamboozled big time with the result that I trust no one to be entirely what and who they say they are or seem to be. I learned that, unless I witness something myself (and maybe not even then), I can't really know what is happening at any given moment. My husband is out of the house right now. Is he at his 12 Step meeting or out having sex with someone else? I know where he says he is, but I can't know where he really is. (And if your mind is spinning on how to build a tamper-proof spycam right now, then I have a 12 Step meeting for codependency I can take you to.) My daughter is out of the house right now. Is she having a ball playing with her best friend or being abducted by space aliens? I don't have any way of knowing right at this moment.

I can intuit what's likely. I can evaluate the evidence I do have. I can do my best to judge the possibilities and probabilities based on what I know. I can learn about things after the fact. But I can't know The Truth about everything right now.

So, when my friend asked me to help her out, I played out those "what if" scenarios to help me feel out my boundaries and intentions, to remind myself of what I can't know and to help me let go of the outcome. In the end, I did help because it felt right, in this scenario, to take that leap of faith, even if there was a risk I was wrong, that she was deceiving me, that she was out to hurt me or others, that she was taking advantage of me, that her intentions weren't pure. I can't know or control her intentions, but wondering about them can be a useful tool to help keep me in touch with mine.

Yesterday, I was reading a piece in which Anne bought a $50 carpet for her Sunday school class from a rundown little store. When the carpet was unrolled, it was moldy, so a friend from the church returned it and called Anne to tell her she'd have to drop by the store later to pick up her $50 refund. She never did get her $50. The carpet guy said someone else had picked up the money. The friend from church said no one else had.

It seemed clear to Anne Lamott that the carpet guy was trying to swindle her, and I think most people would read the situation that way. After all, really, who are you going to believe? A guy who runs a shady little carpet store or a friend of Anne Lamott's who volunteers to teach children about Jesus? But I found I was reading it as a mystery. Who had the money? Who did it? Maybe the carpet guy was a swindler, but maybe sweet church volunteer lied about not getting the $50 (or lied about the carpet being moldy entirely) and ran off to spend it on crack.

There were many times in my marriage in which I heard two conflicting stories: one coming from someone I didn't know personally (often seemingly shady) and the other coming from a good and loving man who (to all appearances) loathed lying and liars. I knew the stories didn't fit. I knew someone was lying. And I would invariably target the likely suspect with my wrath or disdain: the shady carpet guy, the clumsy waiter, the neurotic acquaintance. It was never the dedicated volunteer or the caring husband who did it.

Yet, fourteen years into our relationship and six years into our marriage, Mark admitted he was a sex addict, and I found out I had been wrong. My husband wasn't a fellow victim of the world's dark forces, but in collusion with them. He was going to the world's carpet stores, picking up the cash and siccing me on the carpet guy who had dutifully paid out the refund. This knowledge fractured my view of the world. If I couldn't believe Mark — the most seemingly honest and trustworthy person I've ever met — who can I believe? I live my life now in a state of conscious, temporary suspension of disbelief, basing my decisions on what seems to be, always knowing that most of life is a mystery and that narrators are unreliable.

As I read the last sentence and climbed into the shower, I found that my mind was still clamoring for the answer. Who did it? Where was the money? Who really had it? But I've learned this lesson before. And as the water rolled over me, it washed away the questions to reveal the same old answer: I only have my truth. What's outside of that, I can never really know. And the details of what "really" happened aren't important anyway. All I need to know is that the person who has taken from me is usually hurting more than I am in the loss and that in letting go of my need to know, I'm free.

Image credit: Photo by Torbein on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

Many years ago, when I was in college, I had a conversation about God (no trust me, Misery Marketing, I'm going somewhere with this) with a friend who was an evangelical Christian. I was delighted to get a chance to ask him my big question: Why? Why did he believe in God?

I think I was expecting some great revelation, some light shining out of the sky, some secret proof that no one else had yet been able to give me. Instead I got an answer along the lines of, "Because I just do. During my years growing up and going to church, I have come to feel Him in my life."

And for years I carried that around with me, puzzling evidence that religion made no sense and there was no good reason to believe in God. Years later, I shared my confusion around this with someone else, who told me, "Your friend has faith. That's what faith is." Oh. I had heard about faith every Sunday of my childhood, yet took me nearly 30 years on this planet to see that belief in God isn't about some secret certainty, some hidden fact, it's a belief. It's faith.

I had another conversation about God a few years ago with a friend, a scientist who identifies herself as atheist. I identified myself as agnostic, and I had to admit to her that I didn't understand atheism. One of the reasons I identified as agnostic was because the existence of God cannot be scientifically disproven. How could she definitively embrace atheism when proof of God's non-existence was impossible?

And she gave me an answer very similar to that of my evangelical Christian friend: "I may not be able to disprove God's existence, but I just don't believe that's the way the universe actually works. I believe there is no God as strongly as someone who believes in God believes."

In fact, I had to admit that my agnosticism wasn't completely the product of scientific rationality either, because agreed with her: I couldn't believe that the God of my childhood was how the universe worked either.

All of us -- Christian, atheist, agnostic -- were taking our life experiences and all the data we'd gathered about the universe, and we were crunching those numbers in our heads. We were getting as close as we could to an answer, making the most sense we could based on the evidence we had, and then we were, each and every one of us, taking a leap of faith.

And that's what my husband's addiction is to me. It's a belief. I've taken all the evidence from all the experiences I've had in my life -- from everything I know of myself and my husband, from every interaction I've ever had with anyone on this planet, from all the research and learning I've done, from all my spiritual searchings -- and I've drawn the best conclusion from all of the forty years of experience and knowledge that I possibly can. I found that compulsive behavior is what makes the most sense to me in explaining the most data. And then I take a leap of faith. It's in that leap of faith that doubt lies.

When it comes to God I have to admit that there is a possibility that God is actually a man up in the sky with a flowing white beard who does things like prohibit the eating of meat on Fridays. That vision of the universe doesn't make a lot of sense to me personally, it doesn't feel quite right to me, it doesn't work as well for me and with my life experiences as my vision of my God does, but it could be true. Some part of me always wonders if I'm wrong and am going to end up hanging with Satan having my flesh burned by fire for the rest of eternity because I've had an abortion or engaged in pre-marital sex or eaten shellfish. But I can't live my life in that nebulous region of "what if." I have to live my life with my God and my understanding of the universe, on this side of that leap of faith.

It's the same thing for addiction. There is no certainty and no way to attain certainty either way. Maybe my husband is making choices about what he's doing. I have to admit that that's possible. I have to admit that the way I used to see the universe didn't fit, that I've had to change, that I've been wrong before. I have to admit that sometimes I wonder if my husband is an evil person or doesn't love me, just as I wonder if there is a Hell and if I'm going there. But it doesn't fit the data I have nearly as well. It doesn't fit well with what I know. It feels wrong to me.

At some point, whether I'm going to believe that he (and others) are acting compulsively or believe that he (and others) are choosing to act hurtfully, I'm going to have to make a leap of faith in order to live my life. I can't be (no one can) one hundred percent certain, but where I am now is working for me better than where I used to be five or ten years ago. So, I'm going to keep on believing with (oh, let's say) somewhere between 95 and 99% of me, and trust that if my leap of faith was ill advised, I'll find out when I hit the eternal rocks beneath.

That first year of my son's life is something we each seem to have merely survived. For all the love we had for each other and that baby boy, we existed in our separate dark places that year. Although Mark made a silent promise on the day of our baby boy's birth that all the intrigue, flirting and cheating would end, without the tools of recovery, each new stress was driving him to the only means of coping he knew: sex. And I was wrapped in a boa constrictor of anxiety that would squeeze tighter with each movement, crushing me with migraines and chest pains that would wake me in the middle of the night.

As the months crept on, I'd find that when I woke, from anxiety or the baby, it would be to an empty bed with Mark on the computer in the other room. I'd doze and wake every hour, only to find Mark still gone. It would be two or three in the morning before he would come to bed, and he'd be up again at five for work. I'd hear him in the shower, muttering and cursing to himself, as if he were talking in his sleep. I'd lie in bed, straining to listen, thinking those words held the answer to his secret.

What secret? I really couldn't tell. None of it made any sense. When I tried to talk about what he was doing on the computer or ask why he was talking to himself, I hit that soft barrier again: I was fighting to swim through sand, with only the illusion of mobility. I knew he was looking at pornography on the computer (whether because he told me or because I sensed it I don't recall any longer), but I couldn't understand why that should be a secret, nor why it would be reason enough to lose hours of already scarce and precious sleep. Why hide porn? I'd never had a problem with it: I viewed porn individually (as did he) and we'd view it as a couple. And why stay up for hours viewing porn night after night? I was there: a real live available partner. And sleep was there with me.

Something was wrong, really wrong. Something was being hidden from me, and I had to see that something. If Mark wouldn't pull aside the curtain, I decided I would rip it down. I sat down one day at our iMac (grandchild of our first computer, Abby) and installed software that would track each keystroke. Then in the morning, when Mark left for work after a night on the computer, I sat down to trace his footsteps.

I found he had an e-mail account I didn't know about (one of several, it turned out). I found that he had been frequenting a pornographic web site that allowed users to pay for access to adult chat rooms and pay still more for private video chats. I found that he had spent hundreds of dollars in a matter of days paying a woman to masturbate for him on camera and that he had been e-mailing her privately as well. I found that he had been attempting to set up our web cam to send video of himself back to her, but had been unable to overcome some technical difficulties.

I thought briefly about waiting until he got home from work to talk to him, but I knew I couldn't make it through the day with the blood pounding in my ears and my stomach churning in rage and pain and confusion. I picked up the phone with shaking hands and called him on his cell phone on his way to work. He heard the tremors in my voice, turned the car around and rushed back home.

The question I spat out over and over in my fury and bewilderment was, "What were you thinking? Why? Why? Why?" His answer, which seemed crazy, but which was delivered with utter sincerity was, "I didn't know I was doing anything wrong." I could see genuine bewilderment in his face. He didn't see the difference between his actions (which hurt and infuriated me) and viewing pornography (which he knew I was fine with). He told me that he was so worried about me and how exhausted I was with the baby that he wanted me to get as much rest as possible; he decided to use pornography and be as quiet as he could about it so he wouldn't disturb me. He said he had gotten bored with pictures years ago; they didn't do it for him anymore. So, he moved on to video, but recently that wasn't exciting enough either. He really wanted something more, so he sought out the video chats, which was just live, interactive pornography, right?

He was baffled that I was ok with porn, but not with this, that I considered this infidelity, betrayal, cheating. After all, no actual physical contact had been made. He looked like a soap opera amnesiac struggling to remember his true identity: furrowing his brow and saying, "Well, if you say I'm Dirk and I'm a surgeon, I think I might be able to see how that could be true..." There was something he was almost understanding, but not quite. And what he wasn't understanding was so. frightfully. OBVIOUS. It terrified me that he really couldn't see the difference between a Playboy centerfold and a live, online interaction. How could he not grasp the distinction? How could I trust him not to cross some other line in the future, something I understood to be there but he couldn't see?

Still, by the end of the conversation, he'd made it very clear that he was terribly sorry, that he never wanted to hurt me, that he loved and adored me, that he'd learned the difference between right and wrong, and that he was absolutely never going to do this again. He canceled his account with the porn site. He agreed to let me make decisions about the amount of rest and sex I needed instead of making that decision for me. He swore he knew right from wrong now and would never do wrong again. (And he never did do anything on the home computer again.) I was still hurt and uneasy, but we seemed to be back on the right track. Glad we talked about that. Problem solved, right?