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Fourteen years after my husband’s infidelity…
We were getting testy with each other through the open window of my car in our driveway.
We live in the woods, so there was no audience for this particular disagreement. I was in the driver’s seat. My husband was standing outside my window. Our two oldest boys were sitting to my right, waiting for us to finish talking.
Then my husband made a gesture I know well.
He was stuck in his head.
My husband is autistic, and I could see that somewhere in the middle of our disagreement, we’d reached the point where he was caught inside his own thoughts about the conversation.
So I did something completely unexpected.
I discreetly flashed him on my left side.
Fourteen years of nursing babies has apparently given me a very particular set of skills.
Nobody saw me except my husband.
My husband just stood there…Buffering. He couldn’t speak.
Then he turned around, walked away, and started laughing.
Our boys had no idea what had just happened. From where they were sitting, they’d only witnessed their dad suddenly lose his ability to speak and then walk away laughing.
“Did it work?!” I called after him, laughing.
“Yep.“, He says.
Naturally, the boys wanted to know what had just happened.
“It’s no of ya business…,” I told them in my silly-mom voice—the one my fourth child says “makes things weird.”
They giggled.
They didn’t press.
They knew they didn’t need all the details.
And maybe that’s part of the story too.
We believe in telling our children the truth. We don’t insult their intelligence. When something affects their safety, their understanding, or their ability to make sense of what they’ve encountered, we answer hard questions.
But honesty doesn’t mean our children need every detail of their parents’ marriage.
Sometimes the truth is, You can ask us anything.
And sometimes the truth is, It’s no of ya business.
They’ve learned to recognize the difference.
It isn’t even really about the fact that I flashed my husband through the open window of our car.
It’s about the fact that, until this past year, I couldn’t have.
Not like that.
Not spontaneously.
Not playfully.
Not in the middle of tension with the confidence that we could interrupt our irritation, find each other again, laugh—and still return to whatever needed to be said.
I wasn’t using my body to get my way. I wasn’t trying to manipulate him into agreeing with me, avoid accountability, or escape a conversation we needed to have.
We just needed a reset on the moment.
And somehow, my instinct was to play.
For years, I couldn’t play with my husband this way.
And then, sometime around August 2025, play came home.
We still can’t entirely explain why.
But when I trace the story backward, I always find myself thinking about a pizza.
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The Pizza
In August 2025, my husband was in Florida for three weeks training with his new service dog.
I was home.
And home, for me, is not a quiet place.
We have eight children. We homeschool. There are animals to care for, meals to make, household systems to keep moving, children who need parenting, and people who need me for things I sometimes don’t even know they’ll need until the moment arrives.
And one evening, after a particularly challenging parenting moment, I was overwhelmed.
Really overwhelmed.
My husband was thousands of miles away.
He couldn’t come home and take over.
He couldn’t undo what had happened.
He couldn’t physically carry any of what I was carrying.
But he saw me. Really saw me. In a moment when other people didn’t.
And he ordered me a pizza.
It was a time of day when, because of his narcolepsy and the time difference, he should have been sleeping.
But he stayed awake.
He kept texting me.
And when more than an hour had passed and the pizza still hadn’t arrived, he called the restaurant himself.
He didn’t simply place the order and assume everything had worked out. He stayed with it until he knew the pizza was there and I was settled in for the evening.
It was just a pizza.
Except it wasn’t.
Because I didn’t have to identify my own need, figure out how to meet it, make the phone call, track down the missing food, or manage one more thing.
He saw that I was overwhelmed.
And then he took one thing from beginning to end.
He couldn’t carry everything.
So he carried what he could.
And I didn’t have to make myself more visible first.
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Something Shifted
I can’t tell you that a pizza changed our marriage.
It didn’t erase fourteen years of history.
It didn’t undo infidelity.
It didn’t resolve every hurt we’d ever carried or every pattern we’d ever struggled to change.
It was a pizza.
But when my husband and I try to trace backward and figure out when something changed between us, we keep arriving somewhere around August 2025.
Neither of us can fully explain it.
There wasn’t one grand breakthrough.
There wasn’t one perfectly worded conversation where we finally unlocked the secret to marriage.
There wasn’t a weekend retreat or a new relationship strategy or a moment when we declared that everything would be different from now on.
Something just shifted.
And when I look for the beginning, I find myself back in that overwhelming evening.
He was in Florida.
I was at home in Montana.
And he saw me.
Maybe it wasn’t the pizza.
Maybe it was being seen without having to make myself more visible.
Maybe it was being cared for without having to orchestrate the care.
Maybe it was knowing that even from thousands of miles away, he had noticed I was struggling and thought:
I’ve got this one.
I don’t know.
I only know that somewhere around then, something began to change.
And eventually, play came home.
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“I’m Gonna Bite You”
We still disagree.
We still get irritated.
We still have moments when one of us is stuck in our head or the other one is frustrated or both of us are getting a little too testy.
But I honestly can’t remember the last time we had a good argument that didn’t eventually end in giggles.
Usually, at some point, I’ll look at him and say:
“I’m gonna bite you.“
And he presents his arm.
That’s it.
That’s the whole joke.
I threaten to bite my husband.
My husband offers himself as tribute.
And we laugh.
The issue doesn’t necessarily disappear.
Nobody has to surrender their position.
I don’t win because I threatened cannibalism.
We can still return to whatever needs to be discussed.
But somewhere along the way, we remember that we’re still us.
We can disagree without becoming enemies.
We can be frustrated without becoming cruel.
We can interrupt a pattern before it carries us somewhere we don’t want to go.
We can find each other again in the middle of the moment.
And I don’t think I understood how much that mattered until my therapist said something about play.
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The Thing My Therapist Rarely Recommends
My therapist once told me that, in all her years of counseling people who were hurting in their marriages, one of the things she had seen change relationships most profoundly was play.
Not just sexual play.
Silliness.
Teasing.
Laughter.
Fun.
The ability to be ridiculous together.
But she also told me that she doesn’t usually suggest it.
Because when people are deeply hurting in their marriages, telling them to play more can sound almost absurd.
How could silliness possibly touch betrayal?
How could laughter change resentment?
How could teasing matter when there are years of hurt between two people?
And perhaps that’s why it had to happen naturally for us.
If someone had told me years ago that we just needed to play more, I don’t know that I could have heard it.
Maybe I would have resented it.
Because play isn’t something you can grit your teeth hard enough to manufacture.
Spontaneity needs room.
Silliness needs room.
Vulnerability needs room.
Play needs somewhere to land.
And for years, perhaps there simply wasn’t enough room.
We were doing the work of surviving.
Of telling the truth.
Of facing what had happened.
Of answering hard questions.
Of living with consequences.
Of raising children.
Of navigating trauma.
Of learning boundaries.
Of rebuilding trust.
Of continuing to choose honesty even when honesty was uncomfortable.
Play didn’t save our marriage.
It came home when our marriage finally had enough room to hold it again.
And once it arrived, it changed the way we found each other—even in the middle of disagreement.
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Fourteen Years Later
This week, one of my twin sister’s children unexpectedly learned about my husband’s infidelity.
They hadn’t known.
They heard a comment, became confused, and eventually the truth reached them.
So I told them, because they were old enough and mature enough.
They’re response was, “WHAT?!” while looking at my husband with confusion.
One of my children immediately responded, because they had already been in this exact moment when I told them. They told this child that they could ask my husband anything they wanted and he would answer their questions.
Then came the sentence I don’t think I could have scripted if I’d tried:
“We don’t be mean to him because he made a mistake a long time ago.“
And that’s where we are, fourteen years later.
The truth is still true.
My husband was unfaithful.
People are still allowed to have questions, especially these children who do life alongside us.
He is still willing to answer them.
New people can encounter an old truth and need time to understand what it means to them.
Restoration hasn’t required us to pretend the past never happened.
It hasn’t required me to protect my husband from the truth of what he did.
It hasn’t required our children to participate in secrecy to preserve an image of our family that was never real.
But neither has restoration required the worst thing my husband did to remain the only true thing about him forever.
Both things are true.
The seriousness doesn’t invalidate the play.
The play doesn’t minimize the seriousness.
Fourteen years after infidelity, my husband is still willing to answer hard questions about what he did.
And fourteen years later, I can also flash him through the open window of my car and make his brain completely stop working.
Both are part of our story now.
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The Past Is Not the Only Story We Can Live
I used to think restoration would mean getting something back.
Maybe the marriage we had before.
Maybe the people we used to be.
Maybe some version of innocence that existed before I knew what I knew.
But I don’t think that anymore.
We can’t go backward.
And I’m not sure I would want to.
We aren’t the people we were before infidelity.
We aren’t the people we were in the worst years after it.
We aren’t even the people we were five years ago.
We have changed.
We have told hard truths.
We have answered questions.
We have hurt each other.
We have repaired.
We have failed.
We have tried again.
We have raised children who know they can bring hard things to us.
We have learned that privacy and secrecy aren’t the same thing.
We have learned that accountability and grace can exist in the same room.
We have learned that disagreement doesn’t have to mean disconnection.
And somewhere in all of that, something I didn’t realize I was waiting for found its way back to us.
Play came home.
Not because the past disappeared.
Not because everything was fixed.
Not because we discovered a formula that I could package into five easy steps and promise would work for someone else’s marriage.
It just came home.
Maybe restoration didn’t happen in one grand moment.
Maybe play found its way back because, one ordinary act of care at a time, I began to feel seen again.
Maybe the pizza mattered.
Maybe the staying awake mattered.
Maybe calling the restaurant when the food didn’t come mattered.
Maybe being seen from thousands of miles away in a moment when no one else saw me mattered.
Maybe all those small moments made room for something new.
Or maybe we’ll never be able to fully explain it.
I only know that something has changed.
But the past no longer takes up all the room.
There is laughter here now.
There is teasing.
There is ridiculousness.
There is an offered arm when I threaten to bite.
There is the growing confidence that a disagreement doesn’t mean we’ve lost each other.
There is room to be annoyed and still be affectionate. To tell the truth and still laugh. To remember what happened without being required to live there forever.
And perhaps that’s what has surprised me most about restoration.
For so long, I thought healing would be measured by how little the past hurt.
Now I wonder if sometimes it’s measured by how much life has grown around it.
Not over it.
Not in denial of it.
Around it.
The past still has a place in our story. It always will.
But it isn’t the whole story anymore.
There are things growing here now that I couldn’t have forced into existence years ago. Things I couldn’t have scheduled, prescribed, or manufactured by trying harder.
Play is one of them.
One day, we simply looked around and realized it was here.
And maybe that’s why I keep saying it came home.
Because home is where something belongs.
Home is where something can settle in, take up space, and become part of the ordinary rhythm of a life.
Play came home.
And when it did, we did not become the people we were before everything happened.
We discovered who we could be after.
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If You Want to Read What Came Before
If you’ve found yourself wondering what came before this—what it looked like to live through betrayal, tell the truth about what happened, and continue building a life after the marriage you thought you had changed forever—I have written more of that story too.
If Wedding Rings Could Protect continues the story that began in If Wedding Rings Could Talk—what happened after the truth was known, what our family carried, what we confronted, and what it meant to keep living honestly through everything that followed.
Because Play Came Home is not a story about pretending the past didn’t happen.
It’s a story that could only be written because it did.
Read If Wedding Rings Could Protect and continue with the part of our story that came before this one.
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Nicole Burch,.llllllllllllllkgqw v ?zecpceb[ ]
‘nis a Trim Healthy Lifestyle Coach, author, and holistic family life mentor helping women and families rebuild through rooted rhythms, personal governance, and sustainable living. Blending nourishment, discernment, and restoration, she guides others toward resilience, peace, and healing—creating lives that are grounded, aligned, and nurtured at home.
Wellness That Withstands.
Rooted. Resilient. Restored.
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Trim Healthy Coach Disclaimer
Nicole Burch is a Certified Trim Healthy Mama Lifestyle Coach, independently offering services based on the THM plan. This coach is not an employee or agent of Trim Healthy Mama, LLC. Coaching services are independently managed, and THM is not responsible for results, business practices, or claims made by this coach.
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