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Look for the girl with the broken smile...ask her if she wants to stay a while...
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After the conversation about divorce, we stayed together for three uneventful years. I decided to focus on the kids, and that was enough for me at the time. I camped out with the Girl Scouts, and was the loudest cheerleader at my son's rec ball games, soccer, every season's sporting event. I made myself happy in them. And, I squirreled away a little cash here and there for the day the kids were old enough to choose the parent they wanted to live with. I was told a child of 14 could likely choose their custodial parent in a divorce, and my youngest was 8 when all this happened. However, my son was 10, and I really didn't think a judge would split them up, or award cusody of my little daughter to her father. Sometimes I wanted to kill him. I was devoted to them, I wasn't getting their lights cut off. I was violently pissed that I had to endure more of his bullshit, and I was becoming sick, worrying all the time about having stuff turned off, and what disaster lurked around each corner.
I did OK living like this for about three years, but I found out a woman (a person) needs love, acceptance, self-esteem. Something. Some reason to live. Children shouldn't be burdened with keeping their mother alive. It was a shitty way to live. I'd always had a moderate baseline of depression--but in about 1997, it was full throttle. I wanted to die. Consciously, there was no way I would leave my children--subconsciously, things were going badly. I didn't recognize myself in the mirror. I didn't even think about my appearance. People who have been really depressed know how you are just removed from life, even though you're still walking around in it.
I didn't even notice a new guy at work, except to think it was intrusive for him to try to start conversations with me. I was sitting in there, in the dark, relieving everyone of my presence and me, of theirs. I didn't want to meet new people. I didn't want to talk to the old ones. I didn't have enough money to buy lunch at work, and I didn't have an appetite, so for the hour lunch break, I sat in an unused room on the campus. I didn't think anything of it. I guess, though, it was the subject of conversation. I was so checked out, I didn't really see him--I couldn't tell you what he looked like at the time--I just knew he intruded on the time I tried to rest my head. It was a big room, set up for the patients to watch TV, but they rarely used that room, and never did during my lunch break, and he asked me if I minded him sitting in there and watching TV and eating his lunch.
Later, I found out friends had put him up to being friendly to me, to see if it would shake me out of my gloom. That was embarrassing. I had not thought of another man. The thought was foreign, as foreign as it is now.
The things that happen, happened. I used to think that cheaters were amoral, slitherers, who lasciviously sought people to screw for the sake of screwing. That sterling upbringing. I had no idea it could sneak up on you. Of course, everyone is still accountable for their decision. He had long fulfilled his favor to my friends. Weight dropped off of me; people remarked they didn't know I had colorful clothes in my closet. My appearance and my mood changed dramatically. In later years, I read one of those Cosmo articles with a check list of What To Look For When Your Spouse Is Cheating. I was a poster child for an extramarital affair. And, this was before we had sex. We talked for six months before seeing each other away from work. We went fishing on his boat, we went dancing, we "dated" for another three months. I thought I was in love with him. Of course, I was in love with the way he mad me feel. I had so desperately needed to feel something. I threw everything I believed out the window. I would divorce my husband and be this man's lover, and raise my children alone.
We had a very romantic, hot affair: it lasted four months, and a good deal of it was videotaped by my father-in-law's PI. The old guy told my husband in his dad's office that he should think hard about whether or not he wanted our marriage to survive. He said over half of the couples he investigated stayed together, if the accusing spouse didn't see the tapes. Not one couple who had seen the tapes stayed together. He didn't watch them.
I didn't know any of this when I admitted I'd been having the affair. The most bizarre thing...when I admitted it, the first thing he said was "Stay with me. This is as much my fault as it is yours. Let's start over." Not at all what I expected. But, as usual, it wasn't that simple.
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