Our daughter attended massage school with her father and Tracy. She saw the progressive manipulation Tracy used to ingratiate herself with Stephen. She saw it and was enormously frustrated by it. We have realized through the exploration of this story that our daughter shared that life with us, also. She was a man in the 1500s in France and was Henri’s Caporal (Corporal) in his guard unit and a trusted friend. It is no surprise that she had his back then, just as much as she did in this situation.
During the past life, she had been distrustful of Nicole and had warned Henri about her. She (he, then) stood by Henri’s side until the very end. Her frustration with Stephen’s unwillingness to recognize Tracy as a threat was a mirror of their experience in the 1500s. At school, she kept a watchful eye on him, always making sure to stay close to him. She did not talk specifically about her concerns with either of us but intuitively she felt like she needed to have his back. In fact, she has since confessed to agreeing to massage school in order to keep her suspicions about Tracy from being realized. Shortly after my confrontation with Stephen after the party, she challenged Tracy at school. She allowed herself to both confront her and warn her about any continued interference in our marriage. She has my back, also.
My daughter has asked me on numerous occasions, why I never said anything. Despite my many misgivings, I chose not to confront Stephen for a very long time. I have given this much thought. I believe that understanding why I didn’t is a huge part of my lesson.
Over the time frame in which the relationship between Stephen and Tracy got stronger, I was in complete denial. That is not to say I did not have moments of discomfort or misgivings, but I pushed them aside. I think denial is just another way of trying to control a situation. Avoiding honest and open conversation is essentially controlling the outcome. If you never deal with it, you can convince yourself of anything. In my heart, I felt that if I confronted Stephen about his feelings, he would have made me feel like I was foolish for even considering such a thing. I knew that he would justify and excuse any behavior that was questionable, both on his part and Tracy’s, because he was not ready to deal with it. He made excuses as to why he needed to pay for things for her, or go and help her with a situation or give her shelter so she could hide from her visiting ex-husband. I tried on most of those occasions to insinuate myself giving him no opportunity to be alone, again trying to control the outcome, but I never confronted him.
Understanding Dominique’s reaction to the letter she read and believing that Henri would never take her side in the argument felt very real to me. I connected with Dominique. She knew that Henri loved her but he was (and is in this lifetime) stubborn. It requires an epiphany of sorts to get Stephen to see things from a different perspective. The release from his “fantasy” was the epiphany he needed and he would never have believed Tracy to be manipulative before his perspective changed.
I found that my healing seemed to be centered on understanding the entire lifetime we shared in the 1500s. I was still feeling the uncertainty about the inevitability of their connection. Despite knowing fairly early in our discovery of the story that Henri had been Nicole’s step-father, I did not know how the story ended. There was the vision of the end of Nicole’s life—Henri riding like a knight to the rescue of his fiancé. We knew Dominique’s death happened in 1544 and date calculation placed Nicole at 16 when she was in the oubliette, almost two years after her mother’s death. I still felt compelled to understand the full extent of the relationship they shared.
I was trying to control outcomes. It is a problem that both Dominique and I share. Unfortunately, when you believe you can affect any situation by controlling, you have effectively cut God out of the process. I do not believe you can be controlling and faithful at the same time. Not to mention how ridiculous it is to believe that we can have any control over another. The only thing, I realize now, that I have any control over is how I choose to react to situations which I face in my life. Controlling outcomes is a fearful pursuit. It lacks trust in the Universe.
The bottom line for me, it seems, was fear. And perhaps, therein lies my greatest lesson. I was afraid that I would lose Stephen. I was afraid that he would choose her over me if confronted. I was afraid that I would end up alone with no means to support myself. I was afraid that I was not enough for my husband. Perhaps it was the same fear that Dominique felt in the garden after her fight with Nicole.
It is hard to give voice to all those fears and risk judgment. But I need to own it and to move forward to the recognition that I am enough. I am loved. I am beautiful. I am a child of God. No situation presented to me here on Earth can take that away.