The Beginning

To understand what I have been going through, one must understand where I've been.  This situation stretches back several months all of which have consumed me with tears each and every day.  I actually can't recall the last time I didn't cry.  I had to have been sometime before Thanksgiving of last year.  Think it's impossible for someone not to cry for that many months in a row?  Well it's not.

It started in November with him telling me he wanted the big D word.  He said it and I laughed.  I was sitting on the lanai and he was across from me on the wicker couch and he said Divorce and it didn't register.  He's just mad at me because I went out the other night.  He is stressed out at work.  He doesn't want to really get divorced because there is nothing wrong in our marriage.  Why would he possibly not want to be married to me anymore?  We are the best team?! 

That night with my anxiety brimming and oozing out of me, I highjacked his cell phone and found the evidence that knocked me completely off kilter.  The photo of a girl on his phone.  It was late when I found it and I shook him from his sleep.  I asked him to explain the picture to me and he wouldn't.  That night started months of lies from a man who never once uttered a single lie about anything to me.  When I realized our trust had been compromised I stopped at nothing to try to scoop it all up and put it neatly back together. But, it always fell from my arms.

The night I found the picture on his phone, I took a picture of it on my phone and went to work the next night and stared at the girl in the photo.  She looked familiar.  She was someone I had met before.  But who?  It didn't take more than a day to figure it out.  When I confronted him it was another lie.  And then the lies continued for months after months after months.  I don't know if he thought I was really believing his lies and he was really fooling me or if he was just buying time to figure out what his next move was and he didn't really care how bizarre his lies were.  Either way, I saw right through it yet I wasn't sure how to handle the information that was coming in.  I knew everything about what he was doing, yet I didn't have the strength to admit that what I knew was going to change everything I knew to be normal for the past twelve years.

Finally, after therapy and arguments and tears from both of us thing erupted into an all out war that ended with the love of my life, the world's greatest dad I had ever known grabbing a little gray suitcase and walking out of our home we worked so hard to obtain.  And, in his departure he took my heart and ripped it from my chest and so carelessly tossed aside.  My feelings meant nothing anymore, though I doubt they meant anything leading up to that point.  The affair was in full swing and out in the open and I was left looking around wondering what the fuck just happened.

He blamed me for his actions but I didn't need him to blame me because I was already blaming myself.  I still blame myself.  I am that woman whose husband runs off  with another woman and then wonders what they could have done to kept him at home.  I can't even think right now of what I could have done because thinking about any of this causes that old friend Anxiety to creep up and completely consume me to where I can't even muster the strength to get out of bed or it causes me to delve into a cleaning frenzy where I am so zoned out even the Marble's know to just let me have my time on my hands and knees with a Magic Eraser cleaning the tops of the baseboards. 

I have been dealing with this now for five months.  He has been involved with her for probably longer.  I don't ask.  I don't want to know.  To know the details of his affair will only cause me to more pain.  I know some people would want to know everything.  I know some people would want every single detail.  But, I want to know nothing.  He was sneaking around and being secretive about the things he was doing.  He was lying about where he was and who he was talking to on his phone.  He put a passcode on his phone and changed his email and facebook passwords.  All things that indicated to me that there was something going on he didn't want me to know about.  So fine, I don't want to know. 

Where am I today?  The same place I was five months ago when he said Divorce.  The same place I was the weekend he left.  The same place I was over easter weekend when his girlfriend was here hanging out with my Marble's and our divorce papers weren't even filed yet.  The same place I was last night when I had to stand next to him at our Marble's school function and act like there wasn't this huge wedge between us.

Twelve years of marriage can be broken with one person coming back into a persons life and not having the decency to realize the marriage is fragile and back off when asked to do so.  Twelve years of happiness with the man who was my everything; my security, my friend, my teammate, my cheerleader can be ripped away from you because he can't resist the temptation and he wasn't strong enough to come to me and figure out how to fix it.  In that time, he moved on.  He move away from the marriage, the family, the life that we had built in Florida that I was so proud of and left for a fantasy.  I can't compete with fantasy.  So, I live in reality.  And my God this reality sucks.  It totally fucking sucks.