A Moment of Truth
“Maybe she won’t find out,” Greg said to Allen over the phone. “You really think I have to tell her?
”Greg knew what he was going to hear: yes.“You gotta bite the bullet on this one, buddy,” Allen said. “Don’t get angry at your wife. Get honest. Then apologize.”Greg hung up the cell phone and focused on driving. He flashed back to the night he’d met Serena at a restaurant. He and his wife were having some problems then, but now they’d started going to counseling. They were working things out. He had broken it off with Serena months ago. It didn’t mean much, their affair. But now Serena was going ballistic. She said she was going to tell Greg’s wife.Allen was right. It would be better if his wife, Marlyss, heard this from him.Greg drove home, put the car in the garage. His hands were sweating. What was he going to do? Just open his mouth and blurt this out?He walked into the kitchen. Marlyss kissed him on the cheek. He patted her tummy. She was five months pregnant.His daughter ran up and squeezed his leg. “Hi, Daddy. I’m glad you’re home.”He looked at his daughter, then his wife.What had he been thinking of, being willing to risk losing all this?“Honey,” he said, “we need to talk.”There’s a horrifying moment to go through when a consequence we’ve created becomes manifest. The air is filled with remorse and dread. It can be hard to open our mouths and talk. I’ve had those moments more than once. The hardest part is when I ask the question Who caused this? and realize the answer is I did.There are times when we genuinely regret the things we’ve done. Other times we regret we got caught.Some of us may use the game of cause and effect to get even with another person, to show them how we really feel. Sometimes we just make a mistake. Some people are out of control. If we’re creating too many moments of dread and remorse, drama addiction—or another issue or addiction—may be an underlying cause contributing to all the effects.We may have difficulty seeing the game of cause and effect taking place because of the temporal space between our choice and when the consequence occurs. But the moment we made that choice, we created the consequence, too. Don’t kid yourself.Those chickens are coming home to roost.It’s simple but not easy to say the hard stuff in life. Just open your mouth and, without doing any more damage, tell the truth.
Choosing to take responsibility for ourselves and for the consequences our choices create looks like hard work, but it really sets us free.
From the book: Choices: Taking Control of Your Life and Making It Matter
