Great , even hurricanes get to have a life partner now.
This is what I think as Marco and Laura were brewing over the Atlantic and I was battening down the hatches here alone. I’ll be riding the rest of the storms out with my daughters by myself from now on.
And that makes everything so much heavier.
All the same, I would be unbelievably worried if I were not with my children through a threatening situation. Hurricanes or housefires, a random late-night attempt by a stranger to kick in the front door (a Thing That Has Actually Happened), or fever spiking, broken bone hospital runs; I want to be there. Even for the small stuff, the nightmares and bullies and skinned knees. I want to be there. I would want them to know I was there.
But he won’t be.
And honestly, if he were the one there in any crisis situation instead of me, I would not feel comforted. That’s what happens when someone shatters your trust in the way that he has.
Nothing was more important to me than being with my family, making them feel safe and loved, and I thought my husband felt the same. Yet when my daughters’ dad decided that he would rather be with someone else than be with his family, he did that instead. I guess the heart wants what it wants.
It’s not just all of the shitty things about the way he left, or the fact that he could just leave at all, that negated all the things I loved about the man I thought he was, it was also the fact that on the way out he told me he was faking years of happiness with me. He betrayed me in the worst possible way, and then went the extra mile to tell me that our life had just been a big lie because he says wasn’t really there.
I suppose that’s why it was so disposable to him.
Formerly if someone in our extended social circle had done the same things to their family and my Ex heard of it, he wouldn’t hold back on voicing his disdain for that person, so strong was his integrity when it came to these things. Of course in the end, it would turn out to be a case of him protesting too much.
So now I’m left to ask myself how much of him was performative? Was he ever really here for us at all? Was I just imagining the warm sense of love and security he brought to us?
Since he did all of this, a lot of families have opened their doors to us. Maybe what happened struck a deeper cord with the couples who have children – after all, infidelity and abandonment both encapsulate the deepest of marital fears. Many of the people reaching out and supporting us through this are people whose own dads or husbands, or both, did the same thing to them, but it’s the families that we spend time with that affect me most.
He sees his daughters twice a week. He provides for us financially.
Yet I find myself paying more attention to my friends that are fathers and how they interact with their partners. Sometimes the relationships are more affectionate, some are more aloof, some are all quickly resolved bickering and some remind me of my own marriage in how they playfully and warmly tease each other. The constant in all of these men, is that they are there for their families in the way that matters.
I will forever remember the tone of his voice and shrug of his shoulder as he reduced our years together to ‘some moments” and”some good memories” . I will try to keep that image around my heart whenever I want to reach for him because when he left to be with someone else, he dismissed all of those memories and moments and killed any chance of us making anymore together.
I’ve been trying to move forward by keeping the girls and I busy making some new fun memories for ourselves to cover up the horrible ones. Thanks to the generosity of amazing friends, we’ve travelled more in the last two months than we have in the last five years. For the girls, they have been wonderful experiences . Kids are so easily distracted.
Lily’s first plane ride, her first time at a beach- and he wasn’t there. I couldn’t even just enjoy these moments because I couldn’t see around the glaring hole of his absence. Before, because he worked all the time, these are the sorts of experiences I would save for him to be able to do with us. It was important that he be a part of these memories, that he be a part of us. We were a family and I thought he had that same instinct I now notice so much more in other fathers: to be there, involved, and to love and protect it at all costs.
He sees his daughters twice a week. He provides for us financially.
He should have been there to hold his daughter’s hand on the plane when she was anxious. Instead it was me- someone who generally needed to take a valium and a bottle of wine to keep the intense Plane Fear at bay. I kept it together so that she could be calm. He should have been there to carry Lily into the water when she was too scared to leave the shore, instead another dad did.
Because he wasn’t there.
He’s not going to be for most of it from now on.
Marriages end. It happens. But ours did not die a natural death. If I had seen it coming, if there had been fighting, or a mountain of unresolved issues we had been struggling to work through, this would have been easier to accept- still difficult, but not impossible. No, this was just a bombing. Now there’s the part of me trying to swallow my heartbreak over this a woman and as a wife, and then there’s the part trying to heal as a mother. The pain is different for each self and the mother in me has to come first because my daughters need me.
As a mother, this what I’ll never understand, never forgive. He had this family; me and two little girls that were going to be negatively impacted in a deep and lasting way by his walking out. He was going to miss out on huge chunks of their childhood if he chose to just leave, and he didn’t care enough to even try- to even try to stay. After all, why would he when he had already moved on with someone else? The monstrous amount of selfishness involved to do the things he did was staggering and I still can’t believe it.
My husband was the only person that had made me feel truly safe in my life. That is one of the most basic things one needs from their partner, right? He was home to me. I believed in the good man I knew he could be. I trusted him. I trusted that he would be there for me and for our children because that is what good men do.
Instead he walked out on us at the start of the pandemic lockdown, coming by to visit every day, full of lies, like everything was fine and when I would try and talk to him about what he was doing, he looked at me like I was a mysterious stain that had appeared on one of his nice new shirts and spoke to me as though I was a customer complaining about a bad plate of food.
The man who was my shelter became my storm.
I am still haunted by what he did, every step of it. I probably always will be. I am trying to finish dismantling who I had built him up to be over the years and I am always going to feel astonished at how quickly he turned into this hollow fucking creature. I will probably always feel grief when I think of the man I used to know. Who our daughters used to know.
That man who wasn’t there.
We were staying with my best friends in Buffalo, a family of five, for most of July. The night before we left, Violet was sad because she said that being there with everyone made her feel like she was a part of a real family again. That knife twisted, but I am trying to keep everything here from wilting while he is onto his greener grass.
I told her there were all kinds of families.
The truth though, is that mine no longer feels whole. I know she feels that way too and I just do not know if that is going to change. I don’t even know what to use to close that wound for us.
He sees his daughters twice a week and provides for us financially.
But this is no longer a safe person in my life. He will always be the person who selfishly, so fucking selfishly, destroyed our family. The one who stole away our promised future together. I still sometimes wake up with this strange sense of emotional vertigo because the ground he ripped out from beneath me hasn’t yet reformed in a way that makes standing tall easy.
For twelve years, he was My Person. All at once, he became a stranger; a nightmare version of the man I loved and a cheap knockoff of something irreplaceable. For him to be able any of the things he did, to me and to our girls, he could not have ever have really been the person I believed him to be. And if that’s true…than maybe it was always on me to be the strength for our family, but I just didn’t see it because of the space he took up in our lives while he was, as he now says, faking years of contentment.
Maybe it was always me and my girls with him on the side. Maybe he was a fairytale I told myself , maybe I clung only to the ghost of a weak man who fizzled out years ago. This is what he seems to be trying to sell me, and maybe it’s time I start buying.
I can borrow people to stand in as parenting partners. It’s hard, but I have been working on reaching to grab the hands of those extended to help us. It’s hard, but part of being strong is knowing when to ask for help. It’s hard, but I have been calling on The Village and the Village has been On. It.
I never wanted to be a single mother. It is overwhelming. But I’m going to have to do what it takes to withstand all of the literal or metaphorical storms that come our way because I want my girls growing up knowing that they can do it too, that they don’t ever need to lean on someone who doesn’t want to be there for them.
If I can be their shelter, then maybe I can be mine too.
