How The Heck Did I End Up Here…Part 2

Part 1 of post can be found here:

How The Heck Did I End Up Here? And Where Do I Go Now?

So I am not sure how it happened or why I believed that this relationship was nothing. We had been getting along so well for a while. I just believed that I was giving him everything he needed, he had no reason to talk to her, they were just friends.

And maybe they were just friends, but I just couldn’t understand how you could talk to a person for many, many hours everyday, consider this person that good of a friend, but you can’t tell your wife that you talk to this person, daily. How do you act as though this person doesn’t even exist?

I mean as far I was concerned this person didn’t exist, she worked at a different location. Yet he spoke to her everyday. Multiple times, several hours, everyday. I cried. A lot. I He convinced me he loved me and only me and that he would never do anything to hurt me.

I don’t know if it was low self esteem, no confidence, fear. I don’t know. But whatever it was I thought I could get past it. We had 2 small children. I thought I had to stay with him because my kids needed their parents together. I thought I needed a man, that I couldn’t be a mom, a woman, or a homeowner, without a man. Again I don’t know why.

So we moved past it. Or he moved past it. We went through the motions of life. Go to work, take care of kids, go to sleep, get up and do it all again. All the while I am dying. I am miserable, but for a long time I don’t realize I am unhappy. I am just there.

He eventually gets put on a better shift, the baby starts sleeping better. Things get more normal. One year after I find out about Kim, I get a phone call. From Kim.

She tells me that she is sitting in a parking lot watching my husband kiss another woman. Another woman that he works with. He is supposed to be taking care of a friend that had surgery that day. Kim explains that he is sitting in a restaurant parking lot, she say his truck and she wanted to return some items that she had. Photos of our kids. She assures me that she is very happy. She makes reference to “their special relationship”. I hang up, I try calling him and he doesn’t answer. I keep calling he doesn’t answer.

I probably call him 10 times. He finally answers. I ask him what is going on. I explain the phone call I received. He says, he went to lunch with 2 people from work. A man Mike, and this woman Lisa. He tells me Lisa locked her keys in her car and was waiting for AAA to come. He said they were jut sitting in his car. Nothing else. He blows off the fact that he told me he was taking care of the friend that had surgery. He convinces me again that it was nothing.

More time goes by I, get another promotion, this time to a bigger unit. But it requires a lot of my time. It is at a college, so while school is in session, I work around 60 hours a week. But the best part of this job is that I have 5 days of at Thanksgiving, 10 days off at Christmas, a week for spring break, and during the summer I work about 25-30 hours a week. The down time is totally worth all the extra. He will never see it this way. Never. This puts more strain on an already fragile relationship.

But work is going well. I even have one of his co-workers working with me, she drives into work with me 2 days a week. It helps me out and it gives Wendy extra money. So everything is okay, quiet for about 6 months. Then I receive a letter in the mail. It is a typed letter, inside a card. Basically the letter says that my husband has been “seeing” multiple woman at work, including Kim and Lisa. It also says that he continued to see Kim after he told me he had stopped. Right away I called Wendy. I thought the letter was from her. She said it wasn’t. She also said she didn’t know what was going on with my husband and Kim and Lisa. Again, he said it was all lies. Convinced me that only a coward and a liar would send a letter like that.

A few weeks later Wendy stopped working for me. We kinda had a little argument. I now feel she just wasn’t comfortable working with me. Oh well.

A couple of weeks later another letter is delivered to my moms house. She gives it to him, he reads it and throws it out. The he doesn’t even tell me about it. My mom does. When I confront him, he says it was all the same as the first letter, and he was going to tell me but was going to tell me in a few days. This is where is it sketchy. I guess I just ignore it. He loves me, none of this could be true.

Again, I was just going through the motions of life. I wasn’t even really present for half of it. I mean I was there, but not really focused, or participating. I pretended everything was great. But it wasn’t. Again I was scared. Scared of being alone. Scared of hurting my kids. So I worked a lot. I thought if I focused on work I would worry about where he was, what he was doing, or who he was with when he wasn’t answering his phone. I became obsessed with what e was doing and where he was. I had to know at all times. I literally was obsessed. And if I thought he was lying, there was a huge fight.

Eventually this would lead to the end for me. Through all of this I never realized how emotionally abusive he was. I never realized he made me cry almost daily. I never realized he criticized and belittled everything or anything that mattered to me. My clothes, my hair, my sister and her family, my parents, my cooking, (I am a trained chef) my house keeping…everything. Nothing was ever good enough for him or his family.

Eventually I got tired of it. My boys Bubba and Denver loved me just the way I was. They didn’t care if I was fat or thin. They didn’t care if we had a gourmet meal one night and pizza the next. I woke up one day and realized that was all I needed. I just needed those boys. He will never believe that I was filing for divorce on my own, but I did. I didn’t need my mom or my sister to tell me this life wasn’t right. I just needed their support to get myself to make that decision. While I d have some regrets, fling for divorce is not one of them.