March 1, 2023: A woman's voice asked me that question from the other end of the phone line. I confirmed, and as she continued to talk, it felt like all of the oxygen had been removed from the room. My head spinning and heart racing, I braced myself against my bed as I held the baby and tried to regain my composure.
He was cheating on me. And had been for a while. The other woman?
The other woman was seventeen years old, worked for him, and still in high school.
I immediately began thinking of the days & weeks I had been absolutely killing myself to keep it together for the kids while he was "working late closing up" or "on the road" and taking a day or two (or sometimes a week or two) to respond to my texts. Sure, he was on a road...a road fifteen minutes from our house. When the woman kept referencing "that house", I was so confused. What did she mean? What house? I was home most of the time with the kids - had they been in our house?
Apparently he had rented a house for them in a nearby subdivision that they referred to as "our home". HE WAS PLAYING HOUSE WITH A TEENAGER THIS WHOLE TIME. Of course, when I played that game as a child, it didn't involve illicit affairs, delusional fantasies of a future life, alcohol, and other substances.
It was all too much information to take in. After I hung up, I immediately called my mom and scream-told (is that a thing? It is now) her what was happening. She immediately instructed me to get the kids and come to her house. It was the middle of the day on a Wednesday. What is actually happening? How is this real?
Nothing was adding up, but there was just no way. This kind of thing didn't happen to regular people, right? I had convinced myself that he was gambling to account for his erratic behavior. Surely that combined with the exhaustion from all of his time driving out of town (as I was led to believe) would cause anyone to shift their behavior. I told myself he had gotten us in a financial bind and was gambling to get us out of it (he's always been a good poker player). That would explain him closing our bank account, leaving me with a limited amount of cash anytime he would "leave town", and him getting defensive whenever I would ask about paying for things like formula and daycare. Right? To me, that was something we could still work on and save our marriage.
Except that was not at all what was happening.
Since he had become increasingly mean to me, the gaslighting happening on a daily basis, I'm so glad that I had recently retained an attorney. I thank God daily that He pushed my close friends & mom to sit me down when they saw me drowning.
I called my attorney's office, told them a woman had reached out to me with information about my husband, and I was panicking. They quickly got in touch with the woman, verified the proof that she had (texts, videos, pictures - it was alllllllll there), and called me back to say I had to leave town before he got home. What they saw and read was too concerning to leave our safety in question.
I called one of my closest friends, who was enjoying a beach day with her husband for their anniversary (of course). She immediately went into Mom/planner/friend mode and had a plan in place in a matter of seconds. They left their beach day immediately, drove to my house (about a 45 minute drive from the beach), moved my middle child's carseat into their vehicle, helped me pack, loaded up my dogs, and drove to the girls' daycare (45 minutes in the other direction) to pick her up. I loaded up the baby, canceled her feeding therapy appointment (the only reason we were home - otherwise I would have gotten the woman's call at work or while driving and that would have been a disaster), and headed to my son's school to pick him up. We met back at my friend's house, got everyone loaded, went through the drive-through, and got the heck outta Dodge.
I told the kids we were going to my mom's house for a special trip, and they were thrilled. They had never noticed before (miracle) that my car had the pull-down screens for DVDs, so once I started a movie they were in awe and cooperative for the three-hour drive.
We got to my mom's, unloaded, and after getting the kids to bed & enjoying an adult beverage, I sat there with my mom in shock. Complete and total shock. How was this happening and how the hell am I supposed to navigate the next steps?
We will need to rewind a bit in my next few posts to give you some background. In hindsight, there were absolutely signs that something was amiss. However, as I will get into later, years of grooming and an unbelievable traumatic birth for my youngest had left me a shell of a human. I couldn't see the forest for the trees. I wasted month after month trying to figure out what I needed to do to help him, when in reality there was nothing I could do. And what he did was beyond my wildest imagination.
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