In the Moment

I have been working on writing more frequently, and while I have shared my story here, this is my effort to concentrate on what the moment meant for me. If you have been through something similar, what did the moment mean for you?

***

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to what I was reading.

“I am running out of interviews to prepare for.  Maybe we could go get a room in the city.”

My stomach flipped and my heart sank. I tried to convince myself it wasn’t real, but a few minutes later, I was running through various scenarios in my mind. I thought I was going to vomit. I sobered up quickly as I tried to rouse him from his drunken stupor. I told him to get out. He was black out drunk and had no idea what was going on.  I had a house full of people coming the next morning and I would not be able to get any sleep if he was here. I pushed him out the back door. I did not care what happened to him, I just wanted him gone. I moved away from the locked door and it burst open again, the frame cracking and splitting. He was enraged, and I called his father for the first time in our near six years of marriage. I asked him to come and pick up his son.

Once he was gone, I trudged up the stairs. I tried to lay down in bed, but his phone was in our room and I could not be near it. I went and sat in the glider in our child's room, listening to the breathing. Sighs and movements made the tears flow. “So what happens now? You leave him, right? Now you have proof he was cheating on you. With her, while you were busting your ass to keep your family together and to keep him from falling into an unemployed back hole. So now you leave. You pack your shit and take your child and you go home. You spend the rest of your life alone, but you prefer that, right? You go, because you don’t put up with that shit and he lost you.” I dialogued with myself the rest of the night. Both selves were right: I should go and I should stay. Ultimately, he will be the one to choose.

When the sun started to come up, I stood up and peered into the crib. My baby's soft cheeks were rosy, and it was a good dream. My baby would be one in a few days, and in a few hours our family would be downstairs to celebrate. I got in the shower so that my mom would not be able to hear my tears or my thoughts. “My child loves him. Can I really break that up? It isn’t your fault though: you were faithful. I fixed my hair and caked on the make-up to hide the bags under my eyes.  I could hear mom downstairs with my baby, making breakfast. I stood in front of my closet trying to find something to wear that would be forgiving. I still was not used to my body after giving birth. I heard a vehicle door slam, then a few moments later, our front door opened and closed.

He walked up the stairs and the vomit started to rise, but I managed to keep it down.

“Sorry about last night. I didn’t know I was so drunk. I’ll fix the door.”

“That isn’t why I had your dad come get you.”

“Then why?” He sounded annoyed.

I took a deep breath, mustered all my courage and looked him in the eyes. “I am only going to ask this once. If you lie to me, I will pack my things tonight and this marriage is over.”

Silence.

“Did you sleep with Her last year when you were out of work?”

As the tears started to well up in his eyes, he looked to the floor. “Yes.”

He tried to pull me close, and begged me to hug him. He pleaded with me to say something, anything. I looked down at the top of his head. He could not bear to look at me. All I could think was how unfair this all was. I married the love of my life. I married my best friend and my entire life as I know it changes at the glance of a text message, because he could not keep it in his pants? In that moment, I decided to stay. Not for him. Not because I am a faithful Catholic. Not because I took my vows seriously, and not for our child. I chose to stay because I deserved the life I wanted. I had spent the last five years and change bending over backwards to make our marriage work. I did in the face of insults and fear. I did it during happy times and awful times while he left it up to me to pick up the pieces. After pleading for his honesty throughout the course of our entire relationship, if I bailed the moment he was finally honest, what would that prove?

“Do not ask me to comfort you right now. That is unfair. You need to take a shower and go get the birthday cake. I will talk to you later. If you can continue to stay honest, I will stay. Lie to me and this is over.”

I bit my lip to keep myself from crying and I walked away. 

After the Initial Shock

After our guests had left and our child put to bed, my husband and I were face to face with all the chaos. I had spent the entire day sick to my stomach. I felt defeated, angry, disgusted and slightly validated.  While I truly had believed that things were on solid ground between us when I discovered the affair, There had been times in our marriage where I was incredibly insecure, and my gut was telling me there were things he was not telling me. I had always felt especially queasy around this woman that would go as far as calling me names in the grocery store if she saw me. Knowing that I was right in my instincts about her was both validating and sickening. I asked if it had happened before while we had been together and he said no. After this initial question, I suddenly felt a surge of empowerment. The things that I wanted for our life together and the things that I wanted for me were crystal clear in that moment. We had married each other with the understanding that divorce was not an option. If we were going to be married it was for our entire lives. As I considered what I called My Life After Knowing, everything felt miserable, but what I wanted and expected was very clear.

I told him that the only steps in fixing the mess that I would lay out for him, were that he cut off all contact with her, that he must tell his friend the truth, and that he answers any question that I have honestly. Sometime in the next few days I sent him an email telling him he needed to figure out the answers to the questions he wasn't answering. I wanted to know details, because my version of our time together while this was happening was not real. I unleashed nearly seven years of being made to feel paranoid and like I was not enough for him.

Our marriage was good, and we had many good times, but in the difficult times I was made to feel as though it was my fault: that I was not meeting the expectations he had for me. I bent over backwards to make our lives better in the hard times, and he was simply never at fault for our problems. Pornography and masturbation had always been a problem in our marriage. No matter how many different ways I tried to explain how it hurt me and effected us, it fell on deaf ears. I felt unwanted and unneccesary, which made me try all the more harder to be what he wanted. In the first year we were married, I had finally received some answers concerning a health matter. I was learning to manage it, and dealing with the symptoms when he told me that he no longer loved me the same way that he did before we were married. Sex was about him when we had sex. He was taking night classes after work and would be gone until nearly mignight most nights. The events of this first year strongly influenced my view of myself within our marriage. His words haunted me, even though things did get better.

After my email, he wrote out a response and read it to me. It outlined his regrets and his plans to make it right for us. He was crying so hard that he could barely get through the letter. It was the first time in seven years that he apologized sincerely.

Nearly a month After Knowing, another serious discussion culminated in him not only revealing two other affairs, but that he believed he had an addiction to sex. One of the affairs was before we were married, and one occured during our first year of marriage. He had been lying to me about how late his classes went, and instead was trolling around bars looking for casual sex opportunities. The sick feeling returned.

To pretend it was anything less than nauseatingly difficult would be a falsehood. I had flashes in my head of how much easier it would be to slap him and walk away. How I wanted to hurt him as much as he hurt me. I replayed our entire life together and nothing seemed true. I looked at photos and I hated what I saw. It was all a lie. I felt stupid, even though I had long ago convinced myself that he probably had cheated on me during the first year we were married. I felt angry.

Something interesting came with that anger: it was a kind of selfishness. I was no longer apologetic for not understanding how to make him happy; rather I was determined to give him the chance to make me happy and to treat me the way I deserved to be treated. I felt as though I had vowed to be his wife and that I was going to hold up my end of the bargain despite the fact he had failed to hold up his. I wanted a chance at happiness, and I wanted our child to have both parents in a loving marriage. I was not staying in the marriage for his sake or for our child's sake: I was staying because I deserved to be happy, and I deserved happiness with the love of my life.