It’s hard to stabilize and establish a new normal when even doing the most mundane and unavoidable tasks have become an emotional minefield, making that new normal a place of nightmarish misery that every instinct screams at you to seek shelter from immediately. Only there is no more shelter. It’s like being stuck in Silent Hill with it’s sudden, jarring blare of the siren causing the world to darken and corrode, summoning monsters out from once familiar corners, and I don’t even get to have a flashlight.
At a doctor’s office filling out some standard medical forms, I was on autopilot when I put my husband’s name as my emergency contact. I was trying to rush and not think about it- the hook in my heart had already been tugged right before at having to check the ‘separated’ box right between the familiar ‘married’ and the very final ‘divorced ’ options. The next box was “relationship to patient” and I don’t think the word husband that I scrawled there was even legible because at that point my eyes were burning with tears.
As I discovered on the plane back in July, crying in a mask has the advantage of mostly hiding the fact that you are seemingly breaking at random, but the sudden downside is crying makes it too hot inside the mask, making it feel like you cannot breathe, which of course causes you to panic, making you breathe faster, the mask hotter, and… the whole thing just devolves from there. So I left the paperwork and tried to make it to the bathroom where I could rip the thing off and try to calm the hell down, hoping that no one would notice me on the way and ask if I was okay, because I honestly don’t know how to answer that question anymore.
Such a silly thing to upset me considering what I’ve already gone through. I cried less signing my yet-to-be-finalized divorce papers, but there I was in the thankfully private bathroom staring at the water rushing into the sink. Trying to breathe. And who do I text? My husband. My Person, my best friend and partner until he very abruptly decided he no longer cared to be any of those things.
I text him everything that I’ve just felt and I’m not sure what I mean to accomplish by doing so other than to let him know that this pain is what I have to step around every single day in order to get on to the things that need to get done. It’s a pain I have to climb over before I get to experience even a degree of comfort in the things that once brought me joy. It’s a pain that he has caused by abandoning me. By cheating on me. By ruining our family and breaking everyone’s heart so that he could be free to be with another woman.
“In case you are at all curious about how I’m doing.” I end the string of texts with this because part of me wants to think he had to have not known the damage he was going to do to me, not really. Or else he wouldn’t have been able to do it. I wanted to believe that he was just thoughtless and not heartless. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I wanted to believe that the man I loved was still there somewhere.
I always am. He texts back, and I want to smash the mirror in with my own face.
I instantly remember that my feelings and who I was as a person hadn’t mattered to him for such a very long time. His utter disregard for me has been criminal- literally so if you consider that adultery is actually illegal. Yet he occasionally would respond with how hard this all is on him too, how well he relates to the ceaseless pain he’s put me in.
Sorry, but no.
I have to think any pain he might feel comes from elsewhere when he never even tried to stop this from happening or made an effort to heal it once it had, despite promising he would. I on the other hand suffered the axe swinging over my neck since the night he suddenly turned his heel and left me with vague and strange promises of rebuilding what he was destroying once he got enough away from it; saying he loved me, cared for me deeply and that I was his very best friend, but oddly still slithering away without discussion as though he were in a hurry.
When I found him out, he only lied harder. Lied more cruelly. The night I lured the truth from him, he dropped that axe by telling me he wanted to be with her. Easier to do that then to actually fix anything at home, despite what it meant he was breaking and who he was hurting. Saving our family had never been his intention at all -he had just been buying time.
I knew right then I was finally really seeing him. He had stripped away all that made him a good man to me and taken everything I held dear and crushed it on his way to be with someone he decided was more important. He was just dismissing me as he was dismissing our family, and I knew that nothing he could say to me would ever matter after that.
My best friend. My Person. And he treated me like I was nothing to him.
There were no words I could say that would change anything because his mind had been made up all along. He had just been trying to ease his way out of our marriage with as little personal upset as possible.
****
From that moment on, I never wanted to speak to him again. I did not want to even know this man. Yet, I couldn’t escape him. It was nauseating to know he had caused all of this pain knowing I would be bound to him through our children for twelve more years. A dozen years behind us,, a dozen more shattered at our feet.
The blow of that axe was nearly completely severing and I didn’t speak to him again until I absolutely had to. Oh, I hated that I had to, but we had to come up with plans about what the sad, watered down version of the family we’d had together would look like now that he had left us. Once our financial and custody agreements had been set up, I thought I could breathe easier and maybe talking to him wouldn’t hurt so much or leave me feeling so angry. But it turned out that without distraction of what I needed to do, I would be left to confront the deeper cutting issues of what I had lost and what had been stolen.
While I was in Buffalo with the girls, a time meant to heal and regroup, I started to feel the bands from this next emotional storm start to land. My heart still reached for him, but would recoil in the same instant as the man he had always been to me and what he had become clashed almost violently in my mind, leaving me stunned each time. It only got worse when we came home and the house seemed so small yet the emptiness there was so vast . Some treacherous, secret part of me had been expecting him to be here waiting for us.
Over the next few weeks, I occasionally messaged him some more of my heartbreak and sometimes my rage, knowing how pointless my words were but needing him to hear them all the same. Yet in the couple of actual conversations we had, he managed to morph into something even more foreign and so impossibly far from the man I knew and loved. He took to blaming me for things that could not have possibly been my fault- even trying to change his own story to suit that new narrative, something that only added to my shock and anger over who he decided to become while at the same time doing nothing to quell my absolute fucking despair. I would cry myself to sleep, yet my dreams were graphically violent.
Some days I burn and others I drown and there’s nothing I can do but wait it out. After all, time heals all wounds. Or you die from them.
****
So for now I live in a fallout zone where it seems that everything I take in is making me sick. What he’s done has planted a poisonous seed in me that I can’t root out. Taking long walks to clear my head sometimes works better than others. I only walk at night because I can’t predict when I won’t be able to outpace my own thoughts and end up just weeping in the streets, and a strange lady with red-rimmed eyes and a sniffling nose strolling through the neighborhood is probably an unsettling site in these Covid times.
Grief ambushes me in the strangest places. It was in this notebook I found with old shopping lists for dinner plans and remembered making those meals for us, making those lists and having to be careful to avoid the many foods that he couldn’t have. He had so many stomach problems and I was always trying to get him to eat better, like the annoying wife I apparently was.
It’s at the grocery store, where I often have to wear headphones now because I cannot risk yet another panic attack when Journey comes over the store radio. I’ve learned to plan these shopping errands when my daughters are home so I don’t have to come home to an empty house. I can’t stand coming home to silence anymore.
Sometimes I find myself watching random families while out, feeling either sadness or suspicion that borders on anger. I wonder if the father there is a pretender too- or if they get to have the kind of life my husband promised to have with me. I suppose they’re all candidates to take over the lease for my castle in the sky.
I’m not safe from it at home, but at least it’s easier there because I don’t have to hide from it. I will be cleaning up toys and have to stop when the tears start burning through because I had subconsciously been running through the catalog of memories of every christmas and birthday and outing where each one came from.
I sit on the bunk bed and remember the day we surprised the girls with it and wonder how I’ll ever be able to take it apart and put it back together on my own next time we move now that he’s gone. There are times I’ll be cooking dinner and crying , only aware that I’m doing one of those things until Violet asks me what’s happened. She’s always worried that more bad changes are coming to her life now, so I tell her I’m fine.
That it’s all fine.
I was tickling Lily in the bedroom and she was laughing in that way that children do with pure, unhindered joy. And I felt nothing. I caught myself glancing at the door and knew that I had been expecting him to come around the corner, that disbelieving part of me at work again refusing to accept that he will never come around that corner- that he did not want this. My child was laughing and I could feel nothing of the happiness I used to have in these moments because now they are incomplete. It’s as though he packed half of my joy up with the rest of this things and took it with him to give to someone else.
The worst though, is when he comes to take them on his days off- those days that used to be our family days. When school was in session, he only saw our children a couple of days a week because of his schedule. I would save outings for these days so we could do things together, and if we stayed home we’d play a game or watch some videos and most importantly, we would always sit down at the table and eat dinner together as a family. We would eat, tell jokes, and talk. I would encourage the girls to tell their father about their week to try and keep them well connected. It was only two days a week, but those days mattered most.
Now those are the days where he takes my children away and I am alone and feel every bit of it. It feels so fucking wrong on every level and I am powerless against the crushing emptiness that surrounds me. The birds are singing outside and I am sitting on my daughter’s bed sobbing, waiting for this too to pass and wondering how he could have ever wanted this.
We have not eaten at the table since the night he left.
****
I keep waiting for this to get better, but the drags of that hook in my heart only get deeper the more I take in and things get worse in these long, slow waves. It digs in as the children still struggle at their own pace with all of this, and that pain I have to step over to get through my own days I have to quickly swallow down when they are hit with their own heartbreak, confusion or anger because of their father’s decisions.
Another twist of the hook comes with knowing that he’s still with her, his cowrecking hostess.
Oh, he still insists that she had nothing to do with his abruptly walking out, but less than 6 months after doing so and less than four months after my finding out about her existence and the affair, he is already introducing her to his family.
The last day I spoke to him on a personal level, he was angry because I was writing things about him. He accused me of trying to break them up. There were other things said, but the thing that really drove things home for me, was when he said that he thought about killing himself a lot less since he left. He said this to me, someone with an actual history of suicidal depression.
My husband essentially told me that being with me made him want to kill himself.
What do you say to that? What do you say when your partner of twelve years, your best friend, tells you that despite there having been no signs of this depression he’s trying to sell now, that being with you makes him want to die? What do you say to your Person, when they tell you that you are what was wrong with their life?
Nothing.
You say nothing to them. Ever again. You owe them nothing because you have already given them everything.
I will no longer look for the man I love in this person. I was right when he first dropped the axe and knew he was fucking lost, but I guess despite everything, I had been wishing beyond all reason that I had been wrong. My Person is dead and gone and he took the life I loved with him.
Over these months I’ve watched him go from the best person I knew to the worst, a quick drop at first, then a slow slither steadily downward. From that last talk on, the door has been locked shut on the last unsevered thread of that bond between us, finally and completely cutting it away . I will not call or text him when I’m breaking down. I no longer yearn to reach out for the now cold space where he once lived in my heart.
Our only contact since, and likely for the years ahead, will be for practical parenting and money matters. And you know what? I’ve actually been feeling a bit better, or at least I’ve been feeling a bit less, which I’ll gladly take at this point. And that in itself is sad, considering all we were, but I need to stop doing that. I need to start looking at us, at who I thought we were ,as so much less. Just like he did, or I’ll never heal.
It could be worse, but there will always be that sting knowing it could have also easily been so much better, if only he had wanted it to be.
