This is my mom. She is 85 beautiful years old, and she enjoys a good pomegranate martini from time to time. I loved this picture of her from July of 2015. We had a fantastic day together that included lunch at the restaurant where Handsome and I had our wedding reception. The sky was clear and blue, and the martinis were delicious. We shared our memories of my wedding day and we both had fun.
Unbeknownst to me, several hundred miles away, also on that day at the exact time this photograph was taken, Handsome was screwing the Whore in a no-tell motel.
To say the least, it is now difficult to view the picture quite the same way. The experience, the memory itself, feels tainted.
Just a few short days later, Handsome joined the rest of us for our family vacation with nary a word about his indiscretions and misdeeds.
Here we are on a kid-friendly fishing trip. We look happy, don’t we? (Handsome is, I assure you, smiling under that heart.) The kids are happy for sure, but what about Handsome? What about me? Was it “real” if only one person in the picture had the whole story?
Was Handsome actually enjoying himself with his family? He says he was, but can that really be true? His betrayals continued for two and a half more years. They continued through children’s birthdays, wedding anniversaries, trips to Europe, vacations in New England and Florida, attending the Kentucky Derby each year, school plays and concerts, and during child-free couple’s weekends away. In short, he acted out through everything in our lives during those years, both the important and the mundane. Was he ever actually happy with me? With us?
I was happy on that day – really happy in fact – based on the information I had at hand. I thought I had the greatest family in the world. If I had known what Handsome was doing with some other woman’s skanky vajeen a week earlier I wouldn’t have been happy or smiling. If I had known that he was lusting for the Whore and the Flame, I would have been in tears, my heart broken to pieces. So was my experience that day authentic or not?
At the moment, this debate is my biggest hurdle to overcome on my path to healing. I am stuck on the issue. It is incredibly difficult for me to stop feeling like the last several years of my life have all been a lie. I feel like each incredible memory is false – because they were created under false pretenses – and thus inauthentic or a sham. Everything seems damaged by the stain of Handsome’s infidelity. I feel the loss of that time, those experiences, that happiness “in the moment,” and those memories very profoundly. I am a deeply sentimental person by nature and those losses are gutting me.
A well-intentioned gentleman told me that I just have to change my mindset and “get over” this struggle and accept that my experiences were indeed wonderful and authentic in each moment and that they are thus untainted now. I want nothing, nothing in this world, more than for this awfulness to be erased from my mind. If I could make believe that what Handsome did never occurred, I would, in a heartbeat. But it did happen and I know about it and here we are.
If anyone out there has some words of wisdom on this point, I welcome your thoughts. I think it’s going to take a village to get me unstuck on this. I’m sure that I do indeed need to change my outlook or viewpoint, but I’m not sure how to do that in a way that doesn’t scream “denial.” I’m doing really well in a lot of areas of my recovery, but this is a killer for me. I liked my life pre DDay. Writing off years of that time seems like a fatal blow.
A shout out for raising the authenticity issue few weeks ago, and finally compelling me to write this down (it’s been lingering in my mind for months), to both Cad Confessional and The Queen Is In