Falling down the rabbit hole: Part 2

I knew I had to divorce him.  I had to.  There was no other real option.

There was no other option that allowed me to keep my self-respect, no other option that allowed me to go on with life not hating myself.

But then... I’d look at these children of ours.  They were both so young and so completely unaware of what was going on.

No, that’s not true.  I’m sure they knew that Mommy was checked out of reality.  I told them I was sick, didn’t feel good, needed quiet, etc.  But they didn’t know anything was going on with us.  If there was anything good that happened during that time, it was that we did not allow the kids to be privy to our shit.

As for the rest… I wasn’t eating.  I was covertly chain smoking, praying my kids wouldn’t see because we had successfully convinced the children that smoking is toxic and deadly, and so how could I let them see Mommy doing it?

I wanted to get hammered, but my stomach was so tied up in knots that while being drunk sounded like bliss, actually putting the drink in my mouth and swallowing was more than I could contemplate.

The first day after he confessed, I woke up feeling unsure of what planet I was on, much less what time it was or what day it was.  He was gone; he’d gone to work without waking me.

I remember feeling incredibly abandoned: How could he do this to me and then just leave me here like this? Sleep had been nearly impossible, and I needed to shove thoughts of him and his actions out of my head for a while.  There’s only so much you can handle at a time.

So, to avoid thoughts of him and our marriage that had crumbled at my feet, I started thinking about her.

The stupid bitch knows me, I kept thinking.   Not only that, but she was in a relationship, too.  The poor bastard she was with, the father of her infant, was probably as clueless as I was.

Well, I could fix that, at least.  So, I looked him up on facebook and filled him in.  I apologized for being the bearer of bad news, but, after all, I would’ve wanted someone to tell me.  I sent it with a tiny, mean feeling of satisfaction.  I never heard back from him.

After that was done, I drove up to The Scene Of The Crime, walked right up to her desk, and made her look me in the face.  I’d already sent her a little thank you note online the night before, so she knew that I knew.

I didn’t say much; I told her that at the end of the day this was his fault, but she was at least going to have to look me in the face, see my dead eyes, and confront the reality of what she had been a part of.  She only nodded and said she was sorry.  She was sorry!  Wasn't that nice?  Fuck her.

After that, I became a crazy person.  I ran reports on the cell phone bill.  I created spreadsheets.  I compared them to the freakishly detailed calendar I use to keep myself and the kids organized in our daily lives.   I made him go through it with me day-by-day, act-by-act, until I was confident I understood the full extent of it.  I knew what I was doing was probably crazy, and that’s what I kept saying to friends that knew what was going on.  I’m a fucking lunatic.  But I don’t know how to make it stop.

The gory details were these, in a nutshell: Over a 2-3 month period, my husband and a girl at his work exchanged flirty text messages, suggestive text messages, more suggestive text messages, naked photo text messages, had oral sex once, intercourse twice, and then he ended it and stopped communication with her entirely about 2 weeks before I found the incriminating evidence.  He had already made up his mind that he had done a bad bad thing, he loved his wife, he was never doing it again, and he was going to go on with life hoping to God no one ever found out about it.

But then I did find out.  

After I had what I thought was a pretty good picture of the events in questions, I wrote her an email.  Here’s what he said happened; do you have anything to change or add?  Do I have a good understanding of how things played out?  She said no, it sounded about right, she had nothing to add, and she was sorry.  She regretted all of it, and she had no self-respect.  Well, no shit.  I told her I didn’t hate her, but if she had any sort of soul, she’d probably be hating herself for a long time.  It was true; I was too busy hating him to hate her.

I wrote this to my husband a few days later:

I had faith in you.  That was my gift to you, my faith in you, loving you through all of the crap because (I thought) I knew the man you were inside, and I loved him unconditionally.  I had doubt and disappointment about some of your choices, but I never believed we could ever be anything but us. 

That's gone now for me, that dream of the life and relationship I was going to have.  No matter where it goes from here, that dream is dead.  Your betrayal has been soul-crushing.  You betrayed my body, my heart, our family, this crazy imperfect love-filled life we built... everything.  I'm left with this man that I don't know.  He looks like the man that I knew and sounds like the man that I knew, but I don't know how to love him anymore.  I don't know how to let go of him either, because he's the closest imitation to what I've lost and what I so desperately wish I could have back.

I seriously didn’t know how to crawl out of it intact.  I felt like a deer in headlights, frozen in uncertainty and fear.  There was nowhere to go to hide from it.  How was I supposed to put my kids’ lives into complete upheaval while it was all I could do to just breathe through the pain?  How could I stay in the same house, the same bed, with him after what he’d done?  The only thing I could do was to keep life totally normal for the kids.  That was all I had in my power to do.

So, that’s what I did.  And I breathed.  Sometimes, that's all you can do.