Last night Lily ran crying into my room, scared of the impressively loud storm I had already given up on sleeping through. She crawled into my bed and snuggled in just as a sudden crack of thunder broke and she started screaming. She’s always been sensitive to loud noises, especially at night. I calmed her down as much as I could and I lay there pressing my hands over her ears as the storm rolled on and did my best to suppress the sobs rising up from my chest.
He should be here.
When nightmares or sickness would keep either girl awake and he would come home after a long night of work and find us still on the couch, there was surprise and glint of happiness in his eyes. He didn’t get to see them often during the day for most of the year, he was not there for bedtimes, so on these rare nights, he would come over and rub her back and hug her and carry her to bed with what Violet used to call, “Daddy Arms”. I would never rush them back to bed if it were near the time he was due to come home. I loved these moments so much. And just like that they are gone forever.
Anyone who knows me well knows that I have always wanted a family. One more like the Addams then the average, but still far different than the one I grew up in. I didn’t want to have children for the sake of having children- I wanted a family. A whole family. A family that laughed a lot, a family filled with love and affection, a family where everyone felt safe and secure and no matter how sharply life sometimes might turn us onto rough paths, we would have each other. We would be okay.
We had that.
We had talked over the years as it came up, usually because of some show we were watching or something another family was going through, that we would do everything to stay together for the sake of our children if things ever got rocky between us. We were always on the same page there. This came up again just months before he would start his affair.
Neither of us could understand what would make anyone just leave their family, especially if they had young children, because of all of those little moments you miss.
It’s the knowing looks and secret smiles you flash to each other when your kid says something funny that you aren’t supposed to laugh at. It’s the feeling of camaraderie with each other when your kid is being a jerk. It’s sitting down as a family for dinner and having to haggle with the littlest to get her to eat. It’s family game night. It’s Christmas- god, my heart somehow breaks more when I look ahead to the holidays. It’s bedtime stories. It’s burrito towels after bath time. It’s making fun of each other through the stories we would tell the girls about our pasts.
For me, it was also going through an emotionally trying day because of something that’s happened at school with one child, while the other has been cranky because she is sick and she yelled that she didn’t like me anymore and I finally get everyone to bed and get to call my husband, my partner, my friend, and unload everything and he listens and tells me I’m a good mom. Even if he wasn’t physically there, I knew I had his love and support, and I could always draw strength from that.
Literally overnight, that touchstone went cold.
Our family wasn’t conventional because of our schedules. Since almost the beginning of our marriage we did not fall asleep together. We did not wake up together. I spent much of my time alone with our daughter. It was lonely, but I wasn’t sad. It was all worth it for those days off when we could be all be together, and for the times when it was he and I and we could be our most ridiculous selves. I had to learn early on to make our time together matter most.
And it did.
To me.
To the girls.
I would have fought with all that I was to protect our family. I never suspected the threat to it would come from within.
****
In the weeks right after he left, he tried to decree that we were now just friends. He put on what I call his ‘manager voice’ and said that I needed to start seeing him as just “a friend”. For the kids, we needed to be ‘friends’.
While our friendship had been the seed from which our whole marriage and family grew, he seemed to think he could smash the rest away and the friendship would be there just as before, unscathed as though it hadn’t been fused to all of what he was destroying. It was almost eerie the way he thought he could demote me believing I’d just… quietly accept it. In what world do you just drop back into into friendship after your husband just emotionally and physically abandons you out of nowhere? When he betrays you in the absolute worst way imaginable?
Well, in his world apparently.
Remember that at this point, all I knew was what he told me. He would still say “I love you” but it was distant. He was still telling me that he needed time before we could start working on the things he had discovered were so wrong in our marriage, but that divorce was not even on the table. Yet his heart had turned cold the second he walked out the door and I just could not understand why. I had no way of knowing he had gone ahead and moved on with someone else months before.
So for the kids, we needed to be friends, he’d said because in his mind it seemed the girls were like little shields. He could be as cruel and selfish as he wanted by what he was doing and I wouldn’t make some emotional scene while he was there because of them. I couldn’t make him actually talk to me about this while the girls were around and he always left before they were in bed. His boot was firmly on my throat. Only what he couldn’t understand was that it was for the girls that I would keep fighting for us, for him to listen to reason, for him to just fucking talk to me.
He seemed to think that what he was doing, just swinging by for some dinner and hang out time with the children everyday, was a fine long- term situation. Never mind that I was bleeding out while I tried to make awkward small talk with my own husband about his day. Never mind that suddenly there was not enough fucking air in the house and I’d have to go outside to breathe while he ate the food I’d made him. It worked out for him because he got to feel like a great dad for an hour or so and, bonus, his girlfriend was right on the way back to his new place!
Meanwhile, I wasn’t eating and I could feel myself pulling in tighter. I would take long walks while he was at the house- one nice thing about the pandemic is that the streets of New Orleans now seemed safe at night. I would walk until I got lost and found my way again. Most nights it helped clear my head. It helped me breathe.
Then there were nights that I couldn’t get away from what was folding in around me.
One night I passed a family in their driveway; a mom and dad, two little girls on scooters with lights in the wheels. And I spent the rest of my walk fighting down a panic attack. Every house I walked passed became a home with a happy family inside of it and I walked like a long shadow down the middle of the street, suddenly closed off forever from that world.
I came home and shut myself in the bedroom and could not stop sobbing . Mark had get the girls ready for bed. He did not ask me what was wrong.
****
I’ve thought a lot about love since he told me he was no longer in it with me. I did not think his feeling that way right then was worth ending our whole marriage over. Love evolves. Over a long time, it settles. It covers everything like a fine dust, it covers every aspect of our lives together and you can see it in everything, certainly in our children and in all of the little things we do for each other. It settles and you can always stir it up again.
New love, that spark you feel when you first connect with someone, that chemistry, that rush- it’s an overwhelming thing. It’s wonderful. It’s terrifying. It fades. I don’t think I’ll ever crave that kind of love.
The love I’m mourning is the kind that only comes from being with someone for a long, long time. It’s the kind that lets you be yourself with each other, to laugh easily and to be settled and content and safe together. It’s being at each other’s side as you watch your children grow up. It’s planning your next adventure. It’s a rare and precious thing.
And he just fucking sold it. For what? What was I worth? What was our whole family worth to him?
Advice I’ve always carried with me came from a young widow who told me that in every relationship, there’s always someone who loves more. Sometimes a little more. Sometimes a lot. And who that person is in the relationship changes back and forth over time.
Love evolves.
When it is abused it can even evolve into hate, you never hate anyone like someone you used to love. And that is a lesson I did not need to relearn.
When saying that he loved me became the only lie he wouldn’t tell, he switched to telling me that he “cared for me very deeply” though his every action was contrary to that. After all our years together and all I’ve been through and done for him, he treated me with utter disregard, disrespect, and contempt. That’s not how you treat someone you care even the slightest bit for. That is not how you treat a friend.
The person who shattered the thing that mattered most to me in my life, in my whole world, is not my friend.
The person who ripped the heart out of my family, is not my friend.
The person who stole our future away, is not my fucking friend.
For the children, we will be civil, but my husband lost the opportunity to be my friend when he betrayed that friendship. When he betrayed my love. When started treating me like a doormat. Like an employee. Like so much Less Than.
Yet…..he’s still the person I go to text when the kids do something cute. When I take a picture of something weird, I want to send it to him. For so many years, he was who I wanted to share my life with. Now I have to stop remind myself that the person on the other end of that number isn’t the man I knew anymore.
And that he’s with the person he left me for.
“Is that your wife again?” She’d say when his phone gave a text alert. And he’d show her the text because he probably shares everything with her now and it’s important that he’s transparent about his correspondence with all the lesser women in his life. Trust is so very important in relationships, you see.
My brain is fun.
This pain cuts so deeply it feels like a death. It almost feels like he died. If it weren’t for the girls, I’d rather he had. If he had died before all of this at least I’d have the memory of his being a good man.
What he has done to me and our children hasn’t even arrived fully, the fallout will happen in layers, over time, over years. That is how deep his betrayal runs. I will be feeling the grief and anger over this for years. Maybe for the rest of them.
This is trauma. This is a nightmare. This is my life now.
I am never going to get over what he’s done to me and our family and I will ever be able to forgive him for it.
It really speaks to either how little he grasped the gravity of what he had done or how long he intended to keep me in the dark if, after all of it, he honestly expected that we would ever be friends again.
