Day: February 5, 2018

Taking a family vacation when your family is falling apart

The morning Handsome, our two kids, my 84 year old mother and I were to leave for our long awaited two week holiday trip to Europe, I logged into my work email from home.  There, in my in box, was the message from my secretary: “A gentleman named Fire Dude called for you. He asked for your voicemail.”  He had left a polite but agitated message stating that Handsome had been sleeping with his wife and that they had been sexting each other since at least some time in August of 2016.  He said there were over 10,000 texts between them, including photos and videos, in the 17 months of data on her burner phone.  Sexting? over 10,000? WTF? What happened to “keeping in touch?” Trickle truth.

I called Fire Dude back.  He was kind to me. He believed that some of the contact between Handsome and the Whore occurred while Handsome was working, so he told me that he had shown the phone to Handsome’s boss. Then I gave up any remaining dignity and I begged him, literally, to please not get Handsome fired as we would likely lose our home and we would certainly lose the health insurance we need so desperately for our kids. He agreed to stop pressing the issue with Handsome’s boss. I told him that we could speak again when I returned from the trip. I was physically ill when I hung up with him.

I do not think that I looked at Handsome throughout any of the flights to Europe.  I tried very hard to be excited, enthusiastic, and attentive to my kids and my mom.  Meanwhile, I felt like I was dying on the inside. As if at any moment I would stop breathing or fall over dead.  I’ve lost people in my life that I dearly, dearly loved.  I’ve experienced profound grief.  This was worse. Correction, it IS worse. As I write this I am 8 weeks removed from DDay and the damage has not diminished.

A day or two into the trip I had a small epiphany. Most betrayed spouses likely have to go on with business as usual after DDay. Work, kids, school, etc.  I made the choice to try to make the most of my extraordinarily crappy situation.  I did not have to worry about work. I did not have to do laundry or cook or clean. And, most importantly, Handsome didn’t either.  He was, literally, stuck with me. For two weeks. I decided that we would take the time after the kids went to bed each night and talk to each other… try to work through as much as we possibly could before we got home. And we did.

It was brutal and I was averaging 3 hours of restless dozing a night and barely eating. I swear like a sailor and there were f-bombs dropped all over 4 countries. I yelled occasionally and assailed him. I was often snarky and mean. He kept saying he was sorry. He kept saying all the things he’s supposed to say. That it was the biggest regret of his life.  That he’d go to individual counseling. That he’d go to marriage counseling. That he’d do anything to keep his family together (the fact that this did not include remaining faithful in the first place is not lost on me…). I cried. And cried. And cried.

While we were gone Fire Dude forwarded me about two dozen screen shots from the Whore’s burner phone. The texts were explicit. Handsome said many of the same things to her that he said to me routinely. He called her by my nickname. There were dick pics taken in our basement, masturbation videos from our master bath, and he told her she had the most beautiful pussy in the world and that no one excited him like she did. She reciprocated in every way imaginable. I was crushed. One night I made him sit and listen to me read those texts to him. He wept.

Much of our trip is a blur. I look at my photos and they’re very scattered and disorganized from my usual.  There are lots of pictures of my kids and my mom- and we posed together for them – but I have only one or two pictures from the entire trip of us in the same frame.

By the time we started our long journey home on Christmas Eve, I knew a few things that I didn’t two weeks earlier: that my inclination was to see if the marriage could be saved, that he was honestly remorseful, and that Handsome was not who I thought he was for a very long time.

The day after DDay – trickle truth

Less than 10 hours after disclosure, life had to go on.  Handsome got up and went to work.  I had kids to feed and a trip to pack for. (A trip… how on Earth was I going to be able to go on vacation with this man?) I feel like I was alternately shaking, crying, or just in a fog the entire day.

Handsome came home. We sent the kids off to their friends for a bit. I yelled and cried, and he just kept saying “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…” like a broken record.

On this day I got my first dose of what is often referred to as “trickle truth.” I knew that I could not possibly have been told everything the night before. I started to ask question after question.  Some things Handsome could answer.  Other things, he could not or would not answer.  It was exhausting, and frustrating. I hadn’t read any affair related blogs or websites yet. I did not know that this was just the beginning. I did not know that facts and details would continue to drip, drip into my life, each one inflicting a new wound as it arrived.

My main take-away from the day though was what led to the disclosure in the first place. His affair partner (I’m going to call her “the Whore” here because, well, it’s my blog and I can…) is married.  With three kids. Her 12 year old son found her burner phone and told his father. That was on November 20th.  My DDay was December 9th.  Handsome knew for weeks that the cat was out of the bag, but he never willingly disclosed.  It was not until her husband accosted Handsome at his job on the 9th- after figuring out that he was her affair partner – and specifically told Handsome that he intended to call me, that Handsome realized that he had to tell me about the affair.

To hear Handsome tell the story, he says he didn’t disclose earlier because he didn’t want to ruin our big trip or the holidays but that he knew he’d need to tell me. Maybe, but I doubt it. I do not think a day after the holidays would have ever come where he would have just suddenly decided to confess. I owe the Whore’s husband (he’s going to be Fire Dude herein) a debt of gratitude. If it weren’t for him I’d still be living in a lie of a life. As painful and soul-shattering as the last several weeks have been, at least I know. I can take steps to protect my health, my finances, my children, and my future. I will not be caught off guard again.

I couldn’t sleep that night, or for many nights thereafter, and I had no idea whether I was actually going to be able to get on a plane with him the following day.  How could I even fly when I couldn’t stop crying and I felt like I couldn’t breathe?

D-Day – Deceit as a Lifestyle Choice

One thing that I have come to realize since my own Disclosure Day (DDay) – December 9, 2017 – is that all betrayed spouses have had to experience such an unfortunate day.  I’m not alone in that.

If you had asked me at 11:17pm on that night if my husband would ever have an affair, I’d have told you that you were out of your mind.  By 11:19pm, my life as I knew it was forever altered. It’s not that I thought it impossible for Handsome to behave inappropriately, but rather I thought he would never cross THE line…the line between monogamy and infidelity.

To give you some background, my husband – I’ll call him Handsome in this blog – and I met in 1997. We were colleagues first, as we were both in other relationships, and eventually we started dating in 2001.  We fell in love and, between then and our eventual marriage in 2005 we lived at various times both in the same city, as well as a long distance from one another, but our relationship was solid despite that disruption. After we married we settled down in a small house on a lovely quiet street in our borderline Mid-Western city. Two children followed – a daughter in 2006 and a son in 2009. Life was, I thought, good.

Flash forward slightly to 2012.  Handsome and I shared a single home email account.  On that account I started to notice a number of emails from a woman I did not know. He volunteered that she was an old girlfriend and that they had met for lunch and exchanged a few emails. Her husband was supposedly gravely ill.  The emails were, indeed, platonic.  Until they weren’t. After seeing two fairly flirtatious emails referencing the merits of his butt and her chest, I hit “reply all” and suggested that if she was lonely she should to talk to her own husband instead of mine. He wasn’t happy with me and called her to apologize for my over-reaction. She was never heard from again and he later (over a year later, in fact) apologized and said that he did not want to be shady or for me to ever think he was anything less than transparent.

Flash forward to the end of 2013.  I log into my cable account to put parental controls on our TVs and learn that Handsome has been secretly ordering and paying for porn a few times a month for a year (the cost of which we could ill afford at the time). I confronted him and he denied, denied, denied (“we were hacked!”).  It was not until I printed out all of the detailed cable invoices showing all of his purchases that he finally fessed up.  I figured that he felt ashamed, and I didn’t want to further embarrass him by pressing the issue. While there was no further porn ordered on our cable account, I always assumed that he switched to free online porn.

Between then and DDay life had ups and downs. We both lost parents. Our beloved pet died unexpectedly of cancer. Our daughter had multiple serious health issues. But we also became more prosperous as strategic job decisions began to pay off. We could travel, and we did. We closed on a long awaited purchase of a summer home in New England. We both worked really hard, but we seemed to live life to its fullest. In fact, we had a two week family trip to Europe planned for 2 days after DDay.  That trip was long awaited and several years in the making.

On DDay night, we took our kids and a group of my clients to an NHL game.  My kids had a ball, and Handsome is a huge hockey fan and he does a great job of chatting me up to my clients. It was a fun night. Later, with the kids tucked in and asleep, Handsome came into our bedroom, stood next to the bed and told me he had something he needed to tell me.  He went on to disclose that “roughly three years ago” he slept with a woman in the town he worked in and that he bought and used a burner phone and that they had “kept in touch” since then.  He might as well have taken a shotgun and shot me.  I felt absolutely shattered.  Obliterated.  After those words I have very little recollection about the specifics of the rest of the conversation. I do recall:

Burner phone

Hotel

Oral Sex (“just once!”)

and the word “years”… I just could not get that word out of my mind… this wasn’t an “accident” or a “mistake” or a “one time thing”.  No.  The life I had been living was a lie.