Being a stay at home mom is probably seen as a noble undertaking as often as being a working mom is vilified–which isn’t at all fair when often women are just doing whatever they have to for the well being of their family.
For me, I never saw myself as a housewife. I thought I’d have some career before I was married that I would ideally take a break from to raise small children, but where I’d earn enough to make it worthwhile to return to later. It didn’t work out that way, but we made it work. My husband and I were a good team and we made it work.
Then he had an affair and left me.
Now, most people seem to think that if your husband decides to run off with the hostess of their restaurant, essentially ripping the stability out from under his family, a judge would surely make sure that both you and your children will be covered for all the years needed- all the ones he signed up for. After all, marriage is legally binding and adultery is breaking that agreement in a pretty huge way so there have to be some sort of penalties for doing so, right?
It’s not just a dick move, it’s emotionally and psychologically damaging to the betrayed spouse, it destroys families, and it’s illegal. No really-it’s technically still illegal in half the country even if unfortunately those laws aren’t enforced. Yet when it comes to divorce, generally adultery means surprisingly little. Except when it comes to alimony.
Sort of.
We both put the time and effort into building up our lives together, but as a SAHM, my contributions were primarily based in the home which meant my ability to ensure the quality of life for my children as well as myself had been severely undercut. In other words, when he decided to break his vows and those legally binding promises we both made to honor, love and support each other, he was also setting me back so far financially that I could never catch up to where we had been together.
Every major decision I made in the decade of my marriage was based on that commitment to each other, on the assurance that he was in this for the long haul with me, not just until he found someone he liked better. Things like deciding to have another child and the huge emotional investment and financial responsibility there, and staying home to raise those children were things I didn’t think would turn out to be damning me to destitution later because my husband just changed his mind about wanting this life.
One of the first realities of new parenthood was how unbelievably expensive childcare was, so one of us would have to be the primary parent and I was just the better fit there for a lot of reasons. I loved being a mom, but it was hard and so, so lonely sometimes.
A lot of times, actually.
But I’d wanted this family all my life so I put everything into it. I never quite got pintrest level with the momming, but I prided myself on taking good care of everyone, making those memories and holding down the fort through our financial ups and downs to make sure our children had a stable constant in their lives and that my husband didn’t have to worry about things at home.
That was the very traditional balance in our family, not that we were very traditional people, but it ended up falling that way when it came to how the household was run. He was the breadwinner and I was the homemaker, though those things did used to have more overlap. In recent years, he had to put in a ton of hours at his job and between that and our toddler, my work availability was nonexistent. It was okay though, because that led to his being promoted and the paycheck that went along with it.
At long last, we were officially middle class.
He never really made me feel like I wasn’t doing my part, but that SAHM guilt is REAL. I’d always had at least two jobs to support myself when I was alone. Even though managing the entire household and doing the parenting mostly on my own was emotionally exhausting at times, I still took the odd, under the table gigs two or three days a week when I could and when I couldn’t, I would try to tighten our budget. I sold what I could on Ebay and bought what I could secondhand- anything to feel like I was contributing financially.
We knew eventually I would get back to doing some sort of work, but I suspected that I would also still be managing the bulk of the house and childcare because he had the more demanding job. I didn’t worry about the fact that I would have to re-enter the workforce as a middle aged woman at some low earning , entry level position which wouldn’t support myself, much less two children, because my income would be only supplemental to his. A financial boost. I didn’t worry about my retirement or social security. The deal in any marriage is: I take care of you and you take care of me.
If I took on all of the childcare we couldn’t afford to pay for, he could build his career now and later we would all benefit. It was there on the horizon- our financial security. Ours. Our family’s. I didn’t have any kind of contingency plan for what he decided to do instead.
*****
The shock never really went away from my husband walking out on me. Totally blindsided, my mind locked itself in a state of pain and confusion, panic and dread. And of fear. While the rest was all rooted in my heart, in the absolute heartbreak that he could do this at all, the fear also came from a rational place. He wasn’t even thinking of divorce, he’d said, but that rational part of me was looking up my legal rights and worst-case scenarios while I was doing all of that not sleeping.
My pragmatic friend told me that what my husband was doing was unacceptable, leaving me powerless and in an unhealthy mental state while giving me nothing, no direction or timeline on how to get us out of this. He said I needed to demand that he start couples counseling immediately or else I would file for divorce. My fear spiked.
Divorce wasn’t an option, it was the worst case scenario.
If my loving him didn’t matter in whatever he was going through, surely our children did. He had to realize what his tearing our family apart would do to our young girls. He just needed time, he told me he needed time and space, and we would work all of this out somehow. We had to.
He was staying with a friend rent- free and, in what would turn out to be a part of an amazingly fucked up deal, still eating here at home every day, so at least his mid-life crisis wasn’t expensive, but what would happen if he decided to never come home? We lived paycheck to paycheck for years and had no savings, if he left it would not only be psychologically devastating, but financially too.
Well, I should have listened to my friend from the start, because eventually I found out about the other woman. I am still not sure what his long term plan was in this massive and increasingly brutal betrayal, but he had said at one point before everything came out that the financial support wouldn’t change. No matter what.
Affairs are all about fantasy. I’ve read a nauseating amount on them since I became the victim of one, and maybe it was part of that fantasy that suddenly the childcare we had never been able to afford would manifest itself, and that despite my being out of the real work force for a decade, I would be able to make an income comparable to his and the girls and I would not have to slide into poverty because he decided to be free man and all of the separate living expenses that went with it.
Girlfriends are expensive. So is divorce.
Unlike when you commit a crime, you are not given a court ordered attorney for your divorce. If your spouse can afford one and you cannot… tough. Thankfully friends were able to fundraise for a lawyer for me. He had already done so many things I never thought him capable of, absolutely nothing was beneath him at that point, including ceasing to adequately provide for our children Having a lawyer I thought would ease the fear, there was precisely Fuck All to be done for the rest of the devastation, but if I could at least get the girls and I to someplace financially stable, it was one less worry.
Only after I got the lawyer, I learned that the law wasn’t really set up to do much for people like me after all.
Louisiana is an at- fault divorce state. In a fault- based divorce, you do not have to wait the 365 days normally required for your divorce to be granted and in the case of adultery, you can also be awarded a higher amount of alimony for a much longer term. The only two at- fault grounds for divorce here are felony and adultery.
I would have preferred he committed a felony, but this was the hand I was dealt.
This sounded like it would work in my favor, but the lawyer explained that the adultery has to be proven.. No problem- because oh boy did I have proof. I have so much proof of his affair, including a recording of him admitting to it, so imagine my surprise when I was told that it wasn’t enough. There had to be a third party verification.
I was told we could subpoena a few people that witnessed their behavior, as well as his “affair partner” who would potentially have to stand up in court and either purger herself or admit that she’s a lowlife piece of garbage who decided to go after someone’s husband, which…I mean SOLD. I was very solidly in favor of making that happen.
But not so fast- they like to have solid proof, like photographs to make the case airtight. So, I would also have to hire a private investigator like I was in some goddamn noir film to go follow around my husband and this homewrecker in order to prove my case. I started calling around and the estimates I got for how much that would cost were around fifteen hundred dollars.
And then there are the court costs, which I would be reimbursed for when I won, but would need to pay up front. I would even have to pay for subpoenas for the people and hotel records. And while all this was going on, he wouldn’t have to pay me a thing. Not until months and months later when I won. Oh- when I “won”, I would get a years long settlement, but I literally couldn’t afford to win. That was okay though, because it turned out that even if I did, it wouldn’t matter.
In Louisiana, the guilty spouse would not be ordered to pay any more than one- third of his income to the innocent spouse- total. Which meant that after child support, there wouldn’t be much more left for alimony. He, living alone, would keep two- thirds of his earnings, making out like a philandering bandit while the girls and I struggled on one- third of the income we had all relied on in full.
What I would be left with then was the more or less standard, almost negligible amount of spousal support for a duration of no more than six months after the divorce was final. Six months. After eleven years of marriage. That’s what my contribution to our family would be worth as far as the courts were concerned.
*****
Pretend there was no pandemic, no crashing economy.
Pretend there was no housing crisis.
Pretend I was able to get that entry-level. minimum wage, 40 hour a week job while the girls get half raised by strangers paid for by child support because my husband decided that he would rather this be how our family works now.
Here in New Orleans, to afford a small two bedroom apartment, you need to make about 20 dollars an hour. Here in Louisiana, minimum wage is just over seven dollars an hour.
I never wanted to be a single mother, but if I were going to be one, I wouldn’t choose to do it in New Orleans. I’ve been mugged twice here, once in the French Quarter and once at gunpoint right outside my own front door. This was years ago , but I have two little girls now and I had hoped that the days of my single life where I slept with a knife under my pillow were behind me.
Being able to live someplace relatively safer is not some frivolous luxury, especially if I am meant to live there completely on my own with two young daughters. My husband’s schedule is basically a second shift job and I agreed with him when he said it just makes more sense for me to have the girls because he would be at work from before they finish school until after bedtime. But, that meant I would still be expected to do all of the parenting on my own, none of which I ever complained about before because that was my part, but now I would also somehow have to work full time as well, which still wouldn’t make me able to make rent. It was impossible.
Oh, and of course currently I’m homeschooling them because of Covid, so that mixes things up and keeps me, you know, home.
Child support only covers so much, so what happens to women in my approximate situation? Because it sounded an awful lot like the girls and I were going to end up beneath the poverty line- where the places we could afford to rent and those that were in good, relatively safer areas would likely not be the same.
The lawyer was blunt, a good quality in lawyers, and said unfortunately that’s what happens a lot of the time. Women who have families that can help out with the children and who they can stay with for an extended period of time until they can get on their feet do that, those that don’t end up on welfare.
The kicker here is that he’s the one who did all of this, the one who kicked our lives down, yet he still had so much control over how we continued to live. Any family or friends that could help us lived states away, and if staying with them was the only way to give us a better shot of safety and stability, we could not even move out of state without his permission.
Everything I did was for us. For our children. I thought everything he did was for our family too. It was terrifying to know that just because he changed his mind, suddenly my staying home and raising our daughters would end up being my downfall. Theirs as well. Not only was I heartbroken,but we would lose everything we’d worked for, our lives massively downgraded in every way while he rode his homewrecking hostess off into the sunset, money bulging from his pockets.
If it sounds like I am bitter, dear god are you right. I am also enraged.
I wasn’t trying to see him punished financially, but I also didn’t want to have to move out of state, even if he granted us that option. I wanted him to be their father. Really, I still want our family to be whole again, but since he obliterated that possibility, I wanted this to be fair to me and most importantly: I wanted what was best for my children.
Is there a word for disgust mixed with heartbreak? I feel like there is in maybe German or Japanese. Whatever it may be called, that is what I swallowed down to pick up the phone and call my husband for the first time since I discovered the depth of his betrayal and explained that unless he agreed to give us enough support so we could keep our heads above water and stay where we were, things would be pretty grim for us. And by “us” I really meant the girls as I’m sure he didn’t care if I went and lived and died in the swamps.
I started blogging about this whole experience partly as a cautionary tale. I didn’t think any aspect of this would have ever happened to me. I thought my husband was my best friend and our marriage was solid, that our family was the most important thing to us both. Now that I know better, I understand that this is probably a big part of why women who are financially dependent on their husbands because of their children stay in abusive marriages. It’s the devil you know when the alternative is poverty which puts their children at risk in a different way.
I can also see that this is why so many mothers in my situation dive into hasty, second marriages. I understand that urge to try and recapture a sense of financial and emotional stability as soon as possible, even if the match isn’t ideal.
I don’t know if it was out of a sense of duty, decency, or some last shred of the man I had known wanting to do what was right, but he seemed to get it. Honestly, I think he just wanted to get this done and over with. I was lucky that he decided to do the right thing by us, financially at least, and agreed to give us more than what the court would order as child support for a few years, which will allow us to live by the skin of our teeth until the girls are at least a little older.
I don’t think many stay at home mothers in similar positions are as lucky.
So while I’ll be spared having to turn to a career in Black Widowing anytime soon, if you’re a stay at home parent and don’t want to end up going through this, my advice is simple: have an escape plan. No matter how much you love your husband, no matter how happy you think your marriage is, or how good and kind you believe your him to be:
Have. An. Escape. Plan.
*****
