Sex was painful. It felt like I wanted to kick my husband off of me and throw him across the room. Something was wrong. Why did it hurt? Well, to be honest, my insides had hurt for a couple of weeks before that, but I never wanted to throw him across the room before. What was going on?
I told him to stop. Get off. Leave me. I doubled over in pain and limped to the bathroom. What was wrong with me?
I remembered one time, ten years prior, when I went in for standard STD testing. A nurse mentioned that some STDs feel like you want to kick someone off of you during intercourse. Could it be? Did I have an STD?
I was married with two kids. I had never had sex with anyone else in my life; nobody else, only my husband. He was all I had known and the only one I had ever been with.
I turned to husband, “Why did that hurt? Have you been with someone?”
He shook his head and said no. I pulled out the black lap that lay open on my dresser, and quickly did a Google search on the subject. “Painful intercourse” I typed watching my bitten nails hit the black keys slowly while my mind raced one hundred miles an hour.
Many items came up: Google is hardly the doctor I needed. Everything was neat and listed clearly in a row on the screen, unlike the mess that my life was about to become. I read about HPV, cancer, chlamydia, pregnancy, and more. I thought I was dying of cancer.
Husband thought that I was crazy, and needed to see a doctor. He did ask about the chlamydia symptoms though before he wandered downstairs and sat in front of the television screen once more.
My mind was reeling. I called and found a sub for the following day of teaching, not knowing what a smart decision that was.
Later that night….
In the dark, downstairs in the dark, with my two kids asleep in their beds and Husband passed out alone, I sat on the couch. I pulled out the laptop. The clock on the laptop said 2:04 am. There had to be an answer on the computer somewhere. What had my life become? Nothing was private these days. Nothing. I would find my life on the internet somehow.
I checked Facebook, scouring all of his 157 friends. Who were these people? How did Husband know all of them? What did they want with him? I couldn’t find anything conclusive. I tried a couple passwords to no avail.
What about the phone records? I went to the T-Mobile website and logged in. Husband usually paid the phone bills, but I had no reason to go to the online stuff until tonight. What was I looking for? Phone records or numbers or something. And then I found them.
Over and over and over again. Husband was texting the same number. All. day. long. 425-420-XXXX. Who was this? What was going on? Then I saw it. The chatting records unfolded before my eyes. Everyday for up to an hour, multiple times a day, Husband was talking to someone. Who was it? I picked up my phone cross eyed, blurry, and in pain and dialed the number onto my old and outdated piece of shit of phone.
Who would pick up the other end? Who was this person who was talking to my husband everyday and texting him during my family time?
No answer. No answering machine. There was nothing at the other end at 2:04 in the morning. So I hung up the phone, and marched up the stairs in a blaze of resentment, fire, and scorn to approach my sleeping husband.
That is how I found out! Innocently paying the cell phone bill and I stumbled across texts and repeated phone calls to a number I didn’t recoginize. The realization of what was happening hit me like a ton of bricks and physically my body reacted. My heart felt like it was literally breaking! It has been a year and there are still some triggers, but the pain is lessened and there have been lessons learned.