Let it go.

April 2012

      When it happened, it sunk me to my lowest low, and I had nowhere else to go. The deceitful messages had been offered up to me with a guise of helping him thumb through previous texts to locate an address. My breath was knocked from my chest when I read them, and I cried and screamed, begged him explain to me what was going on.  I pleaded with him to just tell me that he hadn't been cheating. But he wouldn't. He drove calmly and refused to respond to me. I screamed at him to pull the car over, but he continued on, and I threatened to open the car door as we sped down the highway. "Let's just go to this lunch with [M & B]," he had said to me, "and then, we'll talk about this when we get home."  Was he serious? He was truly expecting me to sit through a lunch date with my kids and my seemingly cheating husband, with some friends of his - a happy couple - one of which was a prime suspect in this cheating debacle - and pretend that my life wasn't suddenly crumbling under my feet.
      After a stiff refusal, he eventually turned the car around, and I sat, sobbing, wondering what in the hell was about to happen in my world.
      When we got home that day, I pleaded for an explanation, but he was cold and hardly responsive. I called his father, and his sister, and my mother, trying desperately to find someone he would speak to, someone who could help make sense of this mess, but he still refused. Instead, he told me he was going to go to a non-mandatory work function, to hang out with some of his buddies. I pleaded still for him to stay, telling him that if he left, he would be coming home to an empty house.
      And then I found myself locked in the bathroom, crying on the floor, screaming through tears that I was going to take a handful of pills if he left our family for his friends. I sat there, fist full of Percocet, thinking to myself that surely he wouldn't leave his wife in this state, his one and two year old children unsupervised in another room. But after several minutes, I heard nothing, and for my children, I dropped the pills, and emerged from the bathroom to find my two babies alone in the living room, front door wide open. He was gone, and I was with my children, devastated and hardly able to form a sensible thought.
      I tried blinking back tears as I tore through my closet, trying with all that I had, to throw a bag together for myself and my kids, so we could drive back to South Carolina a broken family. I called him, over and over again, no answer. And when he finally decided to pick up my call, I told him he needed to come home and say goodbye to his children.
      We didn't end up leaving that day. He somehow charmed me again, and I dealt with lies and mistrust and heartache for another five months before he eventually demanded a separation, and kicked our children and me out of our home.
      Two years later, I struggle to look past the hell and torment I was put through mentally and emotionally, and I struggle harder not to hate him. Because of him, I have these children, I remind myself, but it is still a battle I fight internally everyday, to not despise every fiber that makes him, him. It is for my children that I give my best efforts to tolerate him, but oftentimes, I feel it is all for naught.
      I hope my disclosures of an unhappy past will prove to be therapeutic. I do not want to carry this hatred always, and I certainly don't want my kids to pick up on it one day. It is sad and embarrassing for me, but it is a reality, something that I am trying to grow from and hopefully learn to forgive. I'm a long way away, but maybe one day.