Probably the cruelest thing that my ex could have done when she told me she was not coming with me to Mississippi was sending my stepson and my daughter with me. Knowing that we weren’t all going to be together in Mississippi drastically changed my packing of the truck. Instead of most of our worldly possessions, I ended up with basically my clothes and personal belonging and no furniture to speak of. Driving all that way with those two kids in the mostly empty truck, trying to keep it together while my world had shattered, was one of the worst experiences of my life. She knew that my love for the kids would make me say yes, but I was hardly capable of keeping my composure. When I broke, there were the concerns and questions by my kids. Trying to answer those questions – and driving at the same time – was a nearly insurmountable task.
Ernie B., (then) wife Pat, stepson Anthony, and daughter Katrina.
The kids stayed with me for about two weeks. Pat came down to pick them up. She finally admitted her infidelity to me. She wasn’t apologetic about it; in fact, she blamed it on medication making her loose her inhibitions enough to seduce the dude who repaired her car after her little sister wrecked it. I took my marriage vows very seriously, so I did what I could to try and save our marriage. I told her we would work things out. We had kids together, so I felt it important that we really try to patch things up. She left with the kids to go back home. For the second time in as many weeks, my world felt completely shattered. Now I was alone with only my grief. I was in a strange town with no friends to call on with my whole world in a car headed three hundred miles away. So, I did the only thing I realistically could do while I was waiting for my wife to make up her mind about where we were headed: I threw myself into my work.
I was pretty distraught. I even turned to the one thing I swore that I never would: self-help books. I found a book that was about couples surviving infidelity. It outlined what I was feeling and what steps we could both take if we wanted to stay in our marriage and make it work. In my desperation, the book’s advice really resonated with me. It gave reasonable, concrete advice for couples that wanted to make a marriage work despite the betrayal of trust. I told my ex about this book and asked that she read it as well. She said she would think about it. The next time she came to bring the kids, we talked for a while. I told her that I just wanted to work past this problem and she said she would try. I asked her to see a marriage counselor with me, and she did. However, she got upset with some of the things the counselor said and indicated she wasn’t anxious to return. I gave her my copy of the book I’d asked her to read. She made no promises about reading it. She left to go home with the kids.
Over the next few weeks, we continued speaking on the phone. I told her to just leave everything up in Missouri and to bring herself and the kids down to Mississippi. I told her that the only thing I required is that she cut off all contact with her lover. I told her no letters, no visits, no phone calls. She told me that she just couldn’t do that. To me, it seemed a simple and reasonable request if we were really going to work things out. Her negative answer sealed the fate of our marriage in my mind. I had put my life on hold for about 3 months while waiting for her to make up her mind about whether or not she would join me and leave her illicit affair behind. I finally felt like it was time to say those fateful words: maybe we should get divorced.
We made an appointment with an attorney to mediate our divorce settlement – which, in reality, meant that I would pay for her divorce lawyer. Unfortunately, I did not realize this until it was too late. I continued to see the kids on a semi-regular basis. While things percolated through the courts, my ex tried to justify herself to me (but mostly, I think, to herself) her reasons for pushing through with this irrevocable action. She blathered on about how she was “in love.” She told me “Real love like this is so different than what we had.” It was amazing to see her leaps of logic all carefully crafted to absolve her of any culpability in the disintegration of our family. She even had the nerve to tell me that I should move on and find someone for myself…even supplying the names of some suggested women that I might be able to make a life with. You will later see the irony of this when I ended up dating and marrying one of her suggested names. That’s a story for another time.
I began the task of starting my own life without her. The first independent thing that I did was to buy a stereo. She had never appreciated how important music was to me, so it gave me a great sense of freedom to buy something for myself. I then had to arrange for furniture. I ended up renting living room furniture. I still didn’t even have a bed to sleep on. I’d left it all those furnishings in Missouri so that my family would have furnishings. I didn’t want a bed that had been used as my wife had used it when I was away from home. The idea of her having another man in my bed when my children were home was almost too much for me to bear.
Towards the end of our separation, before the divorce was official, my ex did a one-eighty. She called me in tears telling me that she had read the infidelity book and wanted to reconcile. I told her, “I put my life on hold for you for more than three months, waiting for you to make up your mind about whether or not you wanted to stay married to me. You gave every indication that you didn’t. I’ve started to make plans…and you’re not in them.” I guess she always thought that I would take her back. My rejection of her appeared to make her a very spiteful woman. Of course, it probably didn’t help when I told her, “Oh, you know all that stuff you said about real love being so different that what we had? Well, you were really right.”
This was the opening salvo in a battle that would rage for the next 13 years.
I always knew that divorce was really hard on children. I had no idea what that meant. Unfortunately, I was about to get a graduate level education in exactly how hard things could get for relationships between parents and children in a divorce – especially an acrimonious one.
Ernie B.
Salubrious Rants 