Who IS That?

I can't even recognize myself. All I can see is a fat, tired, sad, old lady. I didn't sleep last night. In the early hours of this morning, I texted this blog address to his sister like some sort of psycho.

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When I found out about the unprotected sex, I hit him. I slapped my husband. I didn't want to stop. I wanted to hit him until he hurt as much as I did. Who does that? I'm not some out of control ghetto bitch who asks her girlfriends to hold her weave while she beats the shit out of her rival.

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Why does he have to keep giving me away? I waited for him every day. I trusted him every day. I begged him to be with me. To be present in our marriage. Instead, I'm a line that he uses to try to get laid. 'My wife doesn't understand me', 'we never have sex'. I am an object of scorn, pity and ridicule all over the skankiest parts of the internet.

dammit.

You know, I felt like this had to get worse. I mean, as bad as it's been, it didn't feel awful enough to be rock bottom. I was calm, and nobody had been kicked out of the house.

I was right. NOW I may or may not have found rock bottom. I am actually going to post it here. I may even wrap this whole fucking blog up with a ribbon and deliver it to my in-laws as a 50th wedding anniversary gift 'cause this shit is goooooold, baby.

In addition to doing his girlfriend in a parking garage (I know, classy, right?), the two of them were unprotected. You heard me. Supposedly she is 'fixed' or 'defective' or something, so they figured 'why not?'

WHY NOT?! Yeah, why the fuck not. Try thinking about the two other people in you marriages YOU ASSHOLES. Maybe think about the possibility that one of you has picked up a guest on your travels around the adulterous whore circuit. Maybe the one of you who is ACTIVELY TRYING TO CONCEIVE A CHILD with their spouse could think about someone other than themselves for one damn moment. But I guess that would destroy the magic of an affair... if you thought about someone else...

So, it gets better. Yep. At my first OB appointment for my current pregnancy, I will need to ask for a full STD screening. No shame there. Happily married, monogamous wife joyfully conceived her second child with her husband of 15 years. No reason for tears.

AND IT GETS BETTER. They met in person for the first time ON MY BIRTHDAY. No birthday lunch for the wife, but for the internet whore, sure. Oh, and he complained to her about the infrequency of our sexual encounters. Asshole. My next husband will want to be with me every damn day.

This one is not coming near me again.

Look Over Here

My post title is two-fold.

First, there are a few (very minor) layout changes to the blog. Check out my profile pic. That's me right now - partially submerged in case of emergency. If need be, I can close up my nostrils and dive for safety. You heard me. I'm a hippo. Also, I changed the header. I'm no longer poking the bear, I'm just talking about me. I am going to leave all of the previous posts intact. They were my truth at the time.

Second, I'm a tap dancer. Not in real life. In real life, I'm a terrible tap dancer - just ask my last teacher. She would yell things like 'Ba-da-da-da-DUM' and expect me to do the corresponding step immediately. She expected this because I had taken tap dancing before in my life - when I was 13 (and I wasn't that great at it then). When she knew me, I was 25, overweight and awful at tap. But I digress (Kittyn, does that make me part of the team?!). The tap dancing that I'm talking about is a diversionary tactic. If things are going poorly, I plow ahead full-steam as though everything is fine and I know exactly how to fix it if they're not. Usually when this occurs, I am also a bit wan faced and have a scarily manic look in my eye. You know. Tap dancing. 'Look over HERE! Not over there. Everything's FINE! I've got this!!!'

My hope is that this time around I will not tap dance. While I don't plan on wandering around looking lost, pathetic or hopeless (mainly because I'm not), I also don't plan on becoming manic and crazy trying to prove that everything is all right. Because it's not. But there is no need for crisis mode either. No one is in any danger.

I would like to promise myself to try and take this as it comes. No borrowing of trouble. No idealizing of possible outcomes. Just live in my now and breathe. I can do this. Whatever 'it' ends up being.

Oh, By the by. I have to poke one more time. Whoever that woman was that sent the info in February, she's alllllll worked up now. She thought that I would thank her for the info, and her feelings are hurt that I got all crazy angry and didn't believe her. Have I mentioned that I have e-mailed her at least once a month begging her to spar with me? Well I have. Turns out she was forwarding those to The Man. Now she's asking him to 'make me' leave her alone. Wow. You send one (or 5) taunting e-mails to a stranger and they get all bent out of shape... so I sent her one more. Just for closure. Oh, and by the way, even in the midst of this, The Man and I don't 'make' each other do anything. We're adults. We present situations and the other one decides what path to take. I chose this:

Geez


Calm down, woman. 


First, I'm sorry that I assumed that you were someone else. Second, I'm sorry that I on-line taunted you, but in all fairness, you never gave me reason to a) believe that you weren't the person that I suspected or b) believe you - since you never followed up with the requested proof. Frankly, when you backed off, it made me even more sure that you were lying.


ALSO, I'm not 'bothering' you. I'm simply responding to the e-mails that you sent to my husband, but that's all over.


I'm done. I guess you are too.
Take care.


Oh, I almost forgot to ask you - how bad is it that I sent The Man's main 'girlfriend' like... 4 really ugly taunting, poking e-mails yesterday and today? Really bad? Well, too late. I already did it. She won't play either. What is it about these gals? They're perfectly happy to talk smack about me if they think that I don't know about it, but they won't stand up to  me - even on-line?! I guess it's one thing to fuck somebody else's husband in secret, but when faced with the actuality of her, it becomes less fun?

On that note... good night.

First Step?

When you find out that you are the spouse of an addict, what do you do? Do you 'stand' next to them, sort-of near them, or in another room? Where do you begin to draw the lines of 'what you have done is unacceptable'? How do you continue to parent together? How do you define what's left of your marriage?

How in the hell do you go from being in the best time of your marriage to the absolute worst in an instant? What are you supposed to do?

Why do I have to lose my husband and my best friend in one fell swoop? Why can't any of it have been real?

Is there a chance that he'll ever be healthy enough to fix this?

Am I strong enough to walk away?

And So It Transpires:

That I am a rube.

That I e-bitch slapped some stranger. Not to say that she's not her own brand of psycho (wouldn't know), but she's not the psycho I thought she was. Oh, and she was telling the truth.

That all of my internet sanctimony about love and fidelity was delusion.

That The Man has a serious addictive compulsion... and probably sociopath tendencies. He knows that he has a problem, and the first word out of his mouth when confronted was 'help'. While it would be good for him if he means it, the truth is it's a fantastic cover and a truly masterful dodge/parry tactic.

That I am wounded. Deeply, horribly wounded.

blech.

Found out more than I wanted to. Sick to my stomach. SOOOOOOOOOO, the girl who wrote to me in February was not who I thought. She was indeed a new girl.

The Man is a cheating, lying, whoring asshole.

Getting it OUT

I know that I've previously mentioned how I found out about The Man's affair with The One Who Threw Him Back (or Boobs McChesty if I'm feeling cranky and/or fat), but I didn't really get into it. Since it is the most recent wound, I avoided poking at it until I was pretty sure that it had healed.

Last fall, we took a trip with extended family. World's Most Amazing Baby got to spend a long weekend with two great-grandparents, all four of her grandparents, her dog, one of her cats and both of her parents. It was really a great experience to have all of us together for more than just a holiday meal.

Rather, it was a great experience until our last night there. We had been whooping it up after dinner with wine, music and games. Everyone else had gone to bed, but The Man and his mom stayed up way too late acting highly competitive and silly. By then, I was puttering around the perimeter tidying and making noises about how tired I was. I wandered over to The Man's laptop to check out the playlist that he had thrown together for the night. I pulled down the 'history' tab and was confronted by a log-in name that was unfamiliar to me, but seemed to reference an inside joke between The Man and myself. I paused briefly to check that The Man and his mom were paying no attention to me, then started clicking.

As it turns out, the screen name was for a playlist account that The Man and TOWTHB had shared. It was full of songs that I love and had introduced The Man to. It also had messages and photos... and a LONG letter from The Man to Her (dated before our daughter's birth) begging her to take him back, and detailing their relationship.

I was in shock. I felt duped. I felt betrayed. I felt like he had YET AGAIN given pieces of me away. Nicknames, songs... he took things from my life and gave them to someone else... I guess I could be flattered that I'm so awesome that everything about me is worth copying (HA!), but it really just felt like it depleted me.

I was also very deeply hurt to discover the true nature of their relationship. I had chosen to believe The Man when he told me that they were 'just friends'. I knew that their 'friendship' was allowing him to cross a line in that it was an outlet for him to receive flattery and to flirt, but I was pregnant and hormonal and wounded. I didn't want to believe that he could be selfish enough to start another affair after what we had been through. To find out that he had deliberately chosen to start another relationship while I was pregnant... all I could hear in my head was 'He didn't chose you. Look at that letter - he loved her. He would have stayed with her. She left him so he was stuck with you.' It played on a loop in my head.

I couldn't stop shaking. I wanted more information, but had no way of getting any. The Man was passed out. The interwebs were failing me. It was the middle of the damn night, and I had no cell phone reception, so I couldn't even call a friend.

I stayed awake all night. I drifted in and out of fitful sleep for an hour or so right before dawn. I woke The Man up and told him that I knew about 'her'. I asked him to tell me what happened. I imagined that I could see his mind racing as he tried to decipher how much I knew, how I had found out, exactly what he had to own up to and what he could conceal. In his defense, he was also still more than half asleep and really hung over. I battered him with accusations then left the house.

He avoided being alone with me for most of the morning. I finally cornered him. To his credit, he had been giving the whole thing serious thought. First, he was completely taken off guard by my anger. To him, the relationship had been over for so long that it was almost as though it hadn't happened, but he understood that I felt newly betrayed. Secondly, he said that when he wrote that letter, he was in one of the worst mental states of his life. He had immersed himself so deeply in the 'selfish jerk' persona, that he was almost unrecognizable. All he knew was that her attention was something that he wanted, and it was being denied to him. She wouldn't accept his calls, return his texts or read his e-mails. The letter was his last appeal to her, and she never replied. Fine. Then why was it still there? Oh, he didn't even think about it being a part of that account... he just really liked the playlist that he had put together (for her!!!), so he kept the account open and listened to it from time to time. Jerk. Third, he addressed my fear that he was 'stuck with me by default'. He swore that it just wasn't true - here with me was where he wanted to be. He admitted that it had taken a while for him to get back from Selfish Jerk Land, but he was ridiculously grateful every day that I had been willing to take him back when he had finally returned.

I asked him to close the account. Not because I believed that he still used it to communicate with her, but because if it was open, then there was a possibility that one day she would return to it. He agreed, then hesitated - he REALLY liked those songs, and it had taken him a long time to put the list together - seriously!? I walked over and pressed 'delete'.

The part of this that wounds me the most is the continued theme of giving bits of me away. During that time period, he chose to give these women nicknames, create on-line accounts to communicate with them, created playlists for them, showered them with romantic gestures... and through it all, he used memories of things that we had created and shared together over the years to impress them and win them over. As though I wasn't there. As though he had come up with these things on his own. Meanwhile, I would have wept with gratitude if he had put even part of that huge amount of effort into our relationship.

This is one of our last big hurdles in getting past that time. I want that kind of effort. I want to feel pursued and wooed. I feel loved, but knowing that he put more effort into other relationships continues to really hurt. I'm not asking for diamonds, but I am asking for a level of thoughtfulness that doesn't come easily to him. We butted heads about this again recently. We may or may not have broken through to the next level on this one. I feel like he finally heard me. I hope that he did. I hope that I really heard what he had to say as well.