Tag: Divorce

Bouncing with Style: Aren’t You Embarrassed?

"Aren’t you embarrassed? You are embarrassing yourself and your family." Anonymous Gmail and Baseball Mom. I’m going to be brutally honest: the email in my inbox knocked me on my tush as did the comments from the mom at my son’s baseball game’s. For 5 years, I have spoken frankly on the air what it’s like to be cheated on, suffer through a traumatic divorce and foreclosure, and bury my mother after a long term battle with breast cancer. Additionally, my words written and spoken reached over 1 million people – quantified by Google, iTunes and the Texas based radio…

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Doing the Right Thing When the Wrong Thing Happens

We have all heard the phrase Life isn’t fair. Some of us who have read the Bible are familiar with the story of Job. In the Book of Job, Job is presented as a family man who lives a good and prosperous life, but is eventually beset with horrendous disasters that take away all he has, including his family, his health, and his property. Job struggles to understand his situation and begins a long search for the right path that will get him out of his extremely difficult situation. Against all odds, with God’s help, Job is restored to a…

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Bouncing with Style: After the Affair

I have been asked a number of times in women's groups, women's recovery groups and group counseling to share my story. I was listening in one of these groups the other night where I was a speaker and I hear the same things over and over and I want to share them here. I am doing this because when we share the same feelings in a similar experience we no longer feel alone, isolated, or well… just plain crazy.  When your spouse cheats on you, many of the following can happen to you: You might feel dizzy, disoriented, and the…

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Bouncing with Style: From Pain to Productivity

One of the things that happens when you divorce, when your spouse has an affair and you are left to pick up the pieces, raise your children alone or pay off massive debt is that you get a whole bucket of pain that seems to refresh on a daily basis. It's hard sometimes to figure out the source of the pain: anger, frustration, disappointment, sadness, disbelief, worry, fear, jealousy... well, you get the point. The end result is you hurt. And you hurt in a way that for many of us after a long marriage is only familiar in a…

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Bouncing with Style: Reverse Forgiveness

One of the things that strikes me on a weekly basis is how I can in one week forgive my ex-husband for his cheating and abandonment of me and then the next week I'm back to hating his guts and those of Bozo his mistress. Am I bitter? You bet. Angry? Totally. Able to let it go and move on... not so much. What I have found with forgiveness is that it's not really a one-shot deal. Now sometimes it's because the original sin is aggravated. When my ex gave my child's mother's day card, made in his kindergarten class,…

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Bouncing with Style: Old Sayings Prove True

It is said that old sayings prove true. When I was writing the title to this blog post, I was thinking to myself, "Could it get any more cheese ball than this? I’m starting to sound like my mother." But I realized today that she was right and most of those hokey-dokey sayings have a lot of truth to them. You are what you think about all day long. Recently I have gone through separation, divorce, death, foreclosure, custody battles and a financial upheaval in my personal life. Most of these things were out of my control and I had…

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Bouncing with Style: Taking a Risk

By Sandra Beck. I pushed my stroller into the law office dragging a grape juice-stained three year old boy as his little brother pounded on the tray complete with all those little plastic jangling things that were supposed to keep him busy. Clearly they irritated him as he let out a wail and now they also irritated me. An impossibly groomed receptionist looked alarmed at the rag tag crew that just rolled into her fancy office. This was a law firm specializing in divorce. This can’t be the first time someone flung cheerios under the fancy leather couches. They should…

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Bouncing with Style: Have You Seen My Self Esteem?

By Sandra Beck. When people hear my story of heroically leaving a cheating husband while my mother dies of cancer with two small babies while building a solid business and creating two popular radio shows, it sounds really glamorous. Even to me and I lived it, but I’m here to tell you the truth. It was pretty ugly. My husband moved out and he had been living in a spare bedroom for a year, so you would think it wouldn’t be a shock to my system, but it was. I cried every day for 43 straight days. I noted it…

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Love is the Answer (Always!) : The Secret to Surviving Divorce

Divorce is one of the most difficult transition periods in life. Not only is it losing the dream of something that once was, it's also dealing with anger, rejection, failure and an incredible fear of the unknown. That uncertainty can cause our inner defense mechanism to kick into high gear and have us think thoughts of revenge and destruction that we wouldn't normally think. Yesterday I talked with my friend Rob (not his real name), whose parents are going through a very nasty divorce. I felt somewhat qualified to listen and help him, for ten years ago I too went…

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