Catharsis

Since I began blogging about all of this back in May, I have had a surprising number of women reach out to me to share their own stories of spousal betrayal. Sometimes the marriages survived, sometimes not, but in  most cases they said they  didn’t feel they could talk about it openly because it was too painful. Too difficult.  They said they were glad that I had put my own story out there because hearing about what I am struggling through still resonates with them, even many years later. This kind of damage lasts.

The reason I’m so open about this isn’t just because there’s probably something wrong with me now. I feel compelled to tell this story for reasons that vary by the day, but it’s a little bit because I just… don’t want it to be mine. So I’m giving it out. I’m giving it out for free. Please take a copy and pass it along until it stretches and fades away and I fade away with it.

Mostly though, I do it because I’ve found it to be incredibly  healing to share it. 

I was  in my kitchen chatting with this  realtor I see once or twice a week because unfortunately my landlord is selling my home. She remarked that she just didn’t know how I did it- with the girls and distance learning every day.  It just spilled out.

“ Yeah,” I said.”  It’s been especially hard considering that my husband walked out on me just as quarantine was starting, while my youngest was sick with what even he thought was likely Covid, knowing that I would have to deal with all of it on my own after being blindsided by what he was doing. But it turned out he had been banging his hostess for months though, so at least there was that. Scone?”

It’s like if a meteor landed on your house, cracked open and, I don’t know,  some sort of sentient jam came out and made off with your cats and silverware- you’d be in such a state of shock  that you’d tell everyone you could. You’d probably tell them for a long time, as though by telling it to others, you may be able to accept it more. The more people you tell, the more real it is until you can’t look away from the truth of it.

I’m in a perpetual state of shock that Mark  turned out to be this person. Part of me still struggles to believe it happened- that it is happening. I think that I still expect to wake up and tell him about this horrible nightmare I’d had so he can hold me and sooth away any notion that he would ever do something like this.

He often gave me the impression that he thinks I have reacted to his walking out on our family and to the affair he was having for months beforehand…unfavorably.  He might be right. There is no etiquette book on how to deal with this level of spousal treachery or on how to best navigate your days while bleeding out from the hole your husband  ripped through your heart when he stabbed you as hard as he could in the back. 

I chose to do what worked best for me. I chose to write about it.

Given the fact that I’ve had this blog for three years, I still don’t know why this surprised him. He likes to say that there’s two sides to every story- three if you count the truth,  but I also don’t understand why he thinks that there’s any version of this that would make his actions even remotely justifiable.

He “wore  a mask” he told me. Instead of letting me know he was unhappy, he “wore a mask” and pretended otherwise, even fooling himself apparently  because he also said that he just “didn’t know” he was unhappy.  It was quite an impressive mask.  I was right by his side the whole time and even I didn’t see through the facade.  Our relationship was always warm, loving and full of humor and everyone that knew us saw that;  anyone who didn’t could see it in his eyes whenever he talked about us.

But it was all a lie, years and years of a lie,  he said-  and that was why the woman he left me so he could be with had nothing to do with his leaving. (Remember-pay no attention to the affair behind the curtain!)

I’m not sure that anyone is buying that, but I guess I understand why he’s trying to sell it. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have people who respected you for who you had become now know that you did the worst thing you could do to the woman who had faithfully  loved you for twelve years- and to your kids too.  I can’t imagine it, because I don’t think I’ve ever so much as lied to him once in all our time together. 

I could never do any of this to someone I loved.  Or cared about. Or even just respected a little.

 I get that he would have preferred that I kept quiet about what he has put me and our daughters through because of his unbelievable selfishness. After all, it doesn’t make him some kind of monster , right? He was a devoted family man for years, isn’t that what I should focus on- on the man he was in our years together? He is still seeing his kids and providing for us financially, so how can I let  his fucking terrible actions that destroyed our marriage and our family along with my ability to ever really trust again, define what kind of man he is now?

Well, you fuck one goat.  And boy- did he fuck that goat.

He  is still fucking that goat.

I also understand how cliched everything he has done is, even if he does not. I understand how  common it is  for men like him to downplay their cheating and its impact, and when that for some reason doesn’t work, how common it is to blame their wife for his having the affair in the first place.  Based on what he has said to me, he seems to think that he was justified simply because  he decided he wasn’t getting what he wanted from me- nevermind that he never bothered to  tell me this so that we could address it together. No, his way was much  better. For him anyway. 

He has acknowledged that he hurt me, but never really apologized. And let’s be honest, he has no way of understanding this pain he has caused. Not really. And If he  could have comprehended it and did it all anyway, well then that would indeed have made him some kind of monster.

****

“I could have cheated on you anytime- I had plenty of opportunity !”  This  was one of the standouts in one of my own recorded chats with him. So  imagine my surprise when I found the same quote almost verbatim on another woman’s divorce blog!  How funny that  something he said that was so ridiculous  in relation to what he was doing wasn’t even unique! Where do we get the golden plaques to award to all the men who went almost their entire marriage without betraying and disrespecting their spouse through infidelity? Amazon? Probably Amazon.

He has also tried to downplay the divorce he instigated and the inarguably negative effect it has on children by telling them that divorce is  just like a sad fact of life, as though he had no control over the fact that he ended our marriage without even a discussion of trying to mend anything because he had already decided to be with someone new. As though divorce was always the expectation in getting married and not something that he should’ve worked hard, or at all, to have  avoided . 

He tells the girls that both of our parents got divorced- which I understand as an effort to normalize it for the sake of the kids so they can accept it easier, but I cannot believe he truly looks at the broken way  he or I grew up as positive. His behavior has been  that  of a very emotionally immature man  for sure, and at my sympathetic best, I can recognize that they are the deeply fucked up actions of someone with a deeply fucked up way of looking at love, loyalty and family that likely sprung from his childhood. Exactly the reason to be a better role model for his own children when it comes to these things, but that ship has sailed. 

It begs the question: why The Fuck did he bother getting married if he was just going to walk away when things got boring or difficult for him? I mean what was the point? Why commit to someone in this way and make the vows and promises to legally bind us together, why decide to grow our family at all if it wasn’t even worth attempting to work through any rough patches that inevitably come up in a long term relationship? What was the point?

People get divorced in most cases  because they get married for the wrong reasons: they are too young,  they rush into it, or there’s  a sense of obligation to marry because of a pregnancy or other family pressures. There are a lot of bad foundations that are doomed to crumble, but he and I had been friends for years. We were thirty when we got married. We talked at length through the years about our hopes and fears for our family and that we would always work to stay together for the sake of our children. Instead he just…. dropped out.

He said once, right after I discovered the brutal  depth of his lies, that this could be “a clean break”. This was just one of the many examples of complete cognitive dissonance this man has shown since he started all of this because he had already ensured the messiest, most painful break possible. Jesus-  clean breaks are for people who don’t do half the shit he had done. 

He knew so much about who I was and what our family meant to me. He knew what I had gone through before him.  He knew exactly where to stick the knife to cause the most pain and so he did. Maybe he thought my bleeding heart  would keep me weak and docile so he could continue to do what he liked because I would be desperate enough to take it.

At times it seemed as though he thought I should just accept what he was doing. Like he thought I was just being needlessly difficult by trying to get him to talk to me about this.  One of the first attempts to plead with him after he left , somehow pushing my words out over the aching lump in my throat, he stood there and told me that I was only “so desperate to cling” to him because he was all I knew -as though I loved him out of habit,  as though his breaking apart our marriage and potentially (I didn’t know about his co-wrecker yet, or that he never intended on actually coming back home at all) ripping up our young family , was just a change in the new  work schedule he’d posted and I’d adjust soon enough if I would just let it happen.

Cue the eerie high pitch string music from a horror movie. Who was this man and how was he wearing my husband’s skin?

That’s the other thing he downplays, dismisses, or outright denies: my love for him. It’s hard to pick a favorite for the cruelest of his actions, but this ranks pretty high. Take the truest thing in my heart, the thing that you’ve  twisted out like an old rag and before tossing it  in a corner to dessicate, and try to say it wasn’t there at all. All because that’s the narrative you’ve sold yourself to be able to do something awful,  and to do it with a glint of smug satisfaction in your eyes. Yeah. That takes some sort of prize.

I wrote before that deep love evolves, sometimes into hate when it is abused, but it is always there. But do you know what I’ve discovered is stronger than love? Disgust. 

I’ve read articles that describe a sudden, unwanted divorce as a living death. In some ways, it’s worse than losing a spouse to actual death because you also get the deep emotional pain of betrayal and rejection. It’s being  haunted by the person who looks and sounds so much like the man you loved, but there is an air of rot around him. He has his laugh and his eyes, but they are colder now. His hands move the same way, yet you know those hands touch someone else now, they had for months before he left you and the voice that told you “I love you”  all that time had been telling her the same thing.

So you don’t want to have to see that man or hear that voice for a very long time, yet because of your children and your visitation arrangement, you are gifted with being obligated  to twice a week. You get to force a smile that breaks as soon as the door closes. You get to sit on the floor and weep.

It feels like a punishment each time. 

****

As I said, I’d  had this blog for years before he did this to us. It was about my family, and at parts, the silly and loving relationship he and I had. The blog had no point but to share my weird little musings about my kids because I was dropping out of social media otherwise. But sometimes, I’ve heard, it  connected with other moms like myself who were sort of isolated and who maybe related to the parenting trials I was going through. That’s the thing I liked best about it.

I also just wanted to write more.  I thought if I forced myself to get things done and written on a semi-regular basis and forced myself to publish them, I’d get used to having a wider audience and  be more comfortable writing what I really wanted to write and putting that out there too. That was always my goal. It may be backward that I was always self-conscious about having people read the  stories I made up, but not the ones about my personal life, but here I am.

And Mark was so supportive of all of it. I had always supported his artistic endeavors, though he pushed them to the side over the years, so of course he did the same for me. He would be the first person to give these entries a read through, and I’d judge their worthiness by how many laughs they would get out of him. 

God. It still really hurts now to remember how much I loved making him laugh after a long day.

When I decided to finally write a book it was a big deal to me. It was months of planning and story building and drafting and research. I buckled down this year and set myself on a schedule. I had goals of when I wanted to be in editing mode, when to start looking for beta-readers, when to send out query letters….And my husband, my dear husband, was very patient and kind to hear me out when I would get excited about some aspect of the story or some new writing world thing I had discovered. Or so I thought.

Sometimes, in this last year, if he didn’t want to do anything on his nights off and would just be half falling asleep on the couch midway through a movie, I would ask if he minded if I wrote instead. In fact, there were nights where he would be running  late and he’d call to make sure I was just writing before bed so he didn’t have to worry about rushing home. So loving and considerate and supportive!  I would mostly tell him  that it was fine and we’d say we loved each other and goodnight and oh dear god can you imagine how I felt while constructing this post and  realized that he was actually checking to make sure the coast was essentially clear  so  he could run around with that workplace bimbo after closing!? 

Fuck.

If you’re thinking that seems like a bitter leap consider this close competition for the cruelest aspect of who he is now: when asked why he didn’t try saying anything about being unhappy instead of just fucking leaving, he told someone dear to me that oh,  I was just always writing. I imagine his tragic sigh as he spoke those words and it fills me with rage. He was no neglected spouse and he knows it. How dare he try to use the one thing I had decided to do for myself  in years against me when he was right there encouraging me to do it the whole time.

I was so happy to share all of this writing stuff with him when he would get home from work, to talk about  books and stories and authors we loved. It was nice to be able to break up his venting about endless repetitive work issues with something a bit lighter that wasn’t just about the kids. It was nice to connect in a different way. But he was just faking it, he was all beyond caring about my interests or who I was. Work was his world now. Work was where the girl he wanted to sleep with was, so why would anything about me or our family really  interest him?

So I write.

I haven’t been able to touch my book since he left because my head’s been a mess, so I’ll keep writing this story instead in the meantime. I’ll keep telling it too, because back in my kitchen the realtor’s eyes teared up at what I’d told her. She said her husband had done the exact same thing to her years before. and  put her hand on my arm as she told me that if she made it through, then I could too.

“You’re going to be fine.” She said. “You are going to be just fine.”