The day I started this blog I was doing laundry while my rainbow baby was taking a nap with a lulluby station playing on Pandora. When suddenly a song came on that instantly threw me back into that day when my whole life changed. Without warning I began to sob thinking of my twins. I needed to get it out... all the sorrow. All the regret. So, I sat at the keybord wiping the tears from my eyes and I began to type that first post Vicissitude. Now, 3 years later here I sit in a house that is not my own, in a different city, while both my girls do their school work on their laptops. Again, I'm in need of healing from something life threw at me becasue it decided that I was strong enough to handle it. I wish life didn't have so much faith in me.
In the years since writing that first blog the closeness my husband and I had found which I attributed to my beautiful boys started to fade. I assumed it was just a season in our marriage that everyone went through. Life was busy. We were both in school, him for his Masters and I for my Bachelors. He had recently gotten a promotion at work which came with a much higher work load and we had two kids to raise. By the time the calm of the night would bring would come I was exhausted and usually ready for bed. He however normally stayed up busy either with school work or just on his computer researching random topics that peeked his interest. Or so I thought.
It's funny the little things that you notice that you didn't think much of before. Like the fact that suddenly he had a death grip on his phone. Where before he use to lose it constantly around the house not really caring where he left it. Suddenly he was constantly texting, smiling at his screen, and very protective over it to the point that it was now password protected. My gut told me something wasn't right... my heart told me that he was a good man who provided for his family and worked hard to give us everything we needed. But now if I would get up from the couch while he was texting he would stop and hide the phone enough that I couldn't see the screen while watching to see where I was going.
This went on for a couple months which started to wear on me not to mention that it was September ... my twins' birthday was inching closer. I don't know why exactly but I started to feel the weight of it much more than I had the previous years and my husband was starting to feel further and further away from me. Just having dinner without him being on his phone the whole time was impossible. I had had enough so I decided to confront him. One evening as he sat on the couch texting and smiling I sumed up enough courage to ask him unsure if the answer was something I wanted to hear, "are you cheating on me?" I waited for him to yell becasue he always hated to be questioned but he just looked at me annoyed and told me no. Started explaining he was a manager now so his employees had to be able to get ahold of him all the time but then he said, "and what if I was?" I was dumbfounded what did he mean? I told him as I fought back tears, "well then it would be over." He simply looked at me and said "well I'm not"
Asking him had proved useless. It didn't bring piece of mind but instead just more confusion and questions. I felt like I was going mad. I tried to be logical.. "He's always with me. He works and comes home. He couldn't possibly have the time to be cheating with another woman. Right?" I pushed it to the back of my mind and went on trying to get him to spend time not just as a family but as a married couple. I asked my mom to babysit the girls and tried to plan date nights. But it never felt quite right. It always seemed like more of an inconvienence than something fun. I was feeling more and more like a failure but I went through the motions as if things were fine. I told myself I was being paronoid and talked myself down even though in the pit of my stomach I knew better.
Then one evening as I was getting ready to make dinner waiting for my husband's return from work a message from Facebook came up on my phone. I knew the name because it was the name of the husband to a woman that worked with my husband. He had spoken of her often but they were just friends. She was married with two beautiful kids. They looked so happy on Facebook so why did my heart sink in my chest and my stomach fill with knots? I took a deep breathe and opened the message. It asked, "are you married to... " and had my husband's name. I knew... I already knew what he wanted to tell me. I took a deep breathe and replied.
Turned out it wasn't just a season of marriage we were going through. In fact it turned out that my husband had been seeing this woman for a while and that it was not the first time her husband had caught them.
