This will be an ongoing entry I think. I'll just add things as they come to me. This is also just my own experience, you may well disagree, feel free to do so. I'm still working on following my own advice, I'll let you know when I succeed.
Please do leave comments, anonymously if you wish. I'm open to suggestions, corrections.
Emotions:
- Expect anger, sadness, loneliness and a sense of deep loss. They will come, and hopefully in time they will go. Anger and bitterness are persistent houses guests. Try to find the beauty and happiness that is still in the world.
- Expect to nearly lose your mind at times, to feel obsessed, angry, sad, distracted.
- Avoid thinking about how you have been wronged. It may be true, but dwelling on it serves little purpose. I have a hard time with this.
- Avoid over-generalizing the wrong done to you. I have a really hard time with this. ALL my memories are tainted, they are all "gone" in a way.
- Acknowledge the reality of what happened: the wrongs both you and your spouses committed. Own you own failures absolutely, don't make excuses for them. No, it was not ok to screw the babysitter, no matter how lonely you were and how hot she was. I didn't do that, but I did have an affair.
- Be patient. I'm really tired of being a head-case, I want it to be done. This makes me feel "stuck", like it will never change, that makes me feel hopeless, depressed. I need to relax and give myself time. I'm told a year is a good minimum to expect. God, 9 more months to go!
Actions:
- Make new friends, and or start hanging out with old ones. Try not to talk too much about your problems, you'll burn them out. That's tough. My friends are understanding and ask to hear... mostly.
- I would say fall in love, but it wouldn't be fair to the poor person you fall in love with. You are probably a bad bet for a long-term anything. You are probably emotionally unstable. I am having an online flirtatious friendship with a wonderful woman who makes me feel loved and appreciated, handsome and desirable. She also gives me the opportunity to pour my affection onto another person, even if it is "virtual".
- Write about your problems, even if just to yourself. Anonymous blogs are great.
- Stay busy: take classes, work on your house, do your hobbies, work a lot. An idle mind is dangerous.
- Get enough sleep, but not too much.
- Eat right.
- Exercise.
- Don't drink excessively. I find that when I do, I am always sad and angry the next day. These last 4 items are important (sleep, food, exercise and not drinking too much).
- Get out, even if it is by yourself, and do stuff. I am so used to just going home after work that it doesn't naturally occur to me.
- Get counseling. I haven't done that, but will soon. That gives you an outlet to talk to people.
- Join a divorce support group. I haven't done that either.
- Get in touch with some kind of "spirituality": start going to church, meditate, pray. Shave your head and sell flowers at the airport (joke).
Your Ex:
- Try to not hate them. Despite their failures, they are human, like you. At one point they loved you, and you them. They allowed you to get to this point in your life, perhaps gave you children, helped you through school, whatever.
- If you can, talk to your ex about stuff, but only as much as they want and as long as it is useful.
I had a small epiphany about this yesterday: My ex deals with stuff by pretending nothing happened and minimizing the importance of what did, in our case justifying her choices. That is her coping mechanism, and whether right or wrong it works for her, it seems to allow her to "move on". I want to talk about it, examine what happened in close detail and wish her to fully own up to the deep moral failure that her actions were, even as I admit mine. That is my way of coping. The two are not compatible. I can't really talk to my ex about stuff: there is no way she will ever really be able to accept the full wrongness of what she did did, it would be too destructive to her self-image. She needs to "bury" her past. I need to unearth it and roll in the putrescence. I need to stop getting her to do that, she just won't go there.
Update:
So it is now about 3 months after the initial post above. I was officially divorced last week. The divorce itself helped me gain some closure. I also started seeing a counselor, that is helping a bit. Time heals things too, as things receded into the past, the pain is less intense, the anger less immediate.
The thing that helped the most though is beginning to date someone. I hope I am not just 'using' her as human prozac, but the feeling of being loved, cared for, hugged, kissed is therapeutic beyond words. Everyone t me I should avoid getting emotionally 'involved' with anyone, just date, they all said. The problem is that I appear to be incapable of not falling for someone I date. Honestly, I need some emotional involvement at this point.
I don't have any really close friends I can spend a lot of time with, and I need emotional intimacy and connection like I need oxygen.
So my advice, for what it's worth, is to get that intimacy however you can: friends, family, dating. Find people who make you feel loved and appreciated, who remind you that you are a wonderful, beautiful, precious human being, who can't wait to talk to you and make you want to get out of bed in the morning.
I am aware enough to realize this may just be a 'rebound' relationship, that she may primarily be a person filling a role I need filled now. I hope not, but even if she is, I think I am meeting her needs too, making her feel precious, beautiful and wanted. Humans are meant to love, life is too short to live without love.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Friday, June 20, 2008
Open Letter to My Wife's Lovers
(This is not a happy piece. I am in fact very depressed today, but it felt good to write this)
"Pat" is a pseudonym I am using for my wife.
Bruce, Gabriel, Son, Frank, Stephan and possibly others:
I am writing you as part of my attempt to heal from the pain of the end of Pat's and my marriage. The point of this letter is merely to inform you of the damage and pain your actions had and will continue to have on Pat, me and our children as long as we live.
You all have children, you are all married or have been. Please think about your own wives and children as you read this and imagine what it would feel like if this had happened to you, your little kids. Think about this as you kiss your wife or make love to her, think of this as you hug your children.
Try to imagine what it is like to have to reinterpret 18 years of memories, those of nearly my entire adulthood. In part because of you, my children will grow up without a normal family. My life, as I knew it, is not only over, but never existed. I was living in a lie you helped perpetuate, a fantasy existing only in my mind.
Pat's violation of the trust I deliberately extended to her is of course the main problem. I knew she had "crushes" on you, but took her lies at face value when she assured me there was nothing going on. I was happy to give her the freedom to "flirt" with you and feel beautiful and wanted. The main guilt is hers.
You are nonetheless complicit in her deception and also responsible for the end of our marriage. You enabled Pat's bad choices and encouraged her to do things which destroyed her life along with her children's.
You helped destroy any trust which might ever exist between us, Pat and you tainted the happy memories of my youth, exposed them for the screenplays they were. You knew when you were dating her that she was married, most of you had at least met me. Son, you knew my children well. Many of you shook my hand, smiled at me and said it was nice to meet me, and then proceeded to sleep with Pat. Despite knowing me you chose to sleep with my wife, in later years the mother of my children. You understood the risk you were putting her at, in case I found out, but you didn't care enough about her or me or my children to refrain from doing so. One of you gave her genital herpes, since you didn't even care enough about her to use a condom all the time.
Collectively, you took from me something that did not belong to you. You stole my wife's time, libido, affection, passion and energy. You introduced The Big Lie into our marriage which set up a barrier to emotional intimacy between us. You helped establish a pattern of behavior in Pat where she went looking outside our marriage every time there was a problem or she was unhappy. When Pat began sleeping with you, she largely stopped having sex with me, actively denying it to me for months at a time. You were more fun, more exciting. She never had to balance a checkbook, pay the mortgage or raise children with you. I could not compete. She never had any real sexual interest in me after that.
You went on vacations with her, had secret romantic getaways with her, went out to eat with her, had nice relaxing times, afternoon naps with her. All this as I watched the kids and dogs so she could date you without having to deal with the trouble of domestic life. I helped pay for airfare so she could see you.
You could say "well if it hadn't been us, it would have been others". You would be right right, but it was you.
Bruce: You cost our marriage the most. You were the first, you were with her the longest, at a very critical stage on our marriage, 4 years into it. All that time she spent with you she was not with me. You enabled her first to set up a life-time habit of lying, deceit and betrayal. You took the most passion, time, and energy from our marriage. Pat was desperately in love with you and spent two years vainly pursuing your affection. Her first "kinky" sex was with you. You probably gave her herpes. You are the reason I recently had to reinterpret one of my most cherished memories: A rare moment of physical passion while on spring break in Florida. It is no longer a brief reconnection between us, made possibly by a respite in the living hell my life was, it was because you weren't available and I guess she needed to have sex with someone. I miss my old memory, I hate you for playing a part in stealing that from me. You were young, but that does not excuse your selfishness. It cost Pat, me and my kids tremendously.
Gabriel: You are perhaps the most culpable. You were an adult when you slept with Pat in grad school and again recently. You are the reason I found out about Pat's cheating: she checked her email on my computer and left it up. At the top was an email from you with the subject line "I've got tickets!!!!". You have been divorced before, you knew exactly the pain you were putting Pat and our family at risk for. You knew better. You nevertheless chose to meet her in Spain, then when you were done satisfying your curiosity, told her you weren't interested in any kind of a relationship with her. Your use of Pat cost us our marriage and all of us our happiness. My favorite picture used to be from 1994(?) of Pat returning from a conference in Florida. I had met her at the airport with flowers. She was holding those flowers and petting our little dog, smiling, happy to be home. In actuality, she was happy because she was madly in love with you, and had just spent several days hanging out and having sex with you in a fun, relaxed environment. I miss that old memory too. That was supposed to be me having fun and relaxing with my wife, not you.
Son: I don't know exactly what to say to you. You knew my kids well, they trusted you. Yet, you began an affair with a woman in Vietnam to adopt a child. Have you no sense of decency? You pulled yourself out of Pat to answer the door when Tina knocked on your room door and stood there with your erect penis exposed as you spoke to my 11 year-old girl. You were perhaps too high and drunk to know what you were doing and this may have thus been unintentional, but you did it nonetheless. The first image Tina will ever have of a man's erect penis will be yours, not her boyfriend's or husband's. She had to listen to you and Pat fucking in the room next door for a long time, both before and after you exposed yourself to her. That is how she found out her mother was cheating on her dad. She held that secret for over 6 months, racked by misplaced guilt and shame at what she *thought* was going on, but didn't want to believe, much less say. She said she thought it was her fault, somehow. I hate you for damaging my child. Think about someone doing that to your child as you hold your baby. You now act as though nothing happened. What are you going to do when your wife finds out? Do you think she will understand what you did with Pat and to Christina? Do you know what it is like to have to try to defend your cheating wife from an 11 year-old girl's accusation of being "a whore"? Since last summer Tina never wants to return to Vietnam. How does one do what you did? What kind of person is even capable of thinking of doing something like that? I am at a loss for words to express the anger I feel for what you did to my girl.
All actions, even those borne of a desire for happiness are not equally moral. Taking something from someone (my wife's time, libido, passion) or exposing them to a risk (STDs, divorce) to make yourself happy is a profoundly immoral act. I don't know what religious or morals beliefs you claim to have, but there is no moral code I can imagine which makes it ok to steal, cheat, lie, and hurt. You have dishonored yourselves and hurt at least one person you perhaps claimed to care for at some time, or maybe you didn't. Perhaps you are all just users of people. I don't know you well enough to assess that.
You will now need to live with the consequences of your actions, as do we all. Perhaps you don't care. You will never meet me (again), never see my kids (again), perhaps not even Pat. You can live the rest of your lives and forget what impact your choices had on our lives. I hope you are unable to do so.
I understand your culpability because I too had an affair with a married woman: a sexual encounter with someone I was very much in love with. I understand how it happens. I also understand how guilty we "other men" are. I knew precisely what I was doing and the risk I was exposing my lover to. I knew I was taking something not mine, that I was acting selfishly to fulfill some perceived need I spent quite a while justifying (she really wasn't happy, her husband was not meeting her needs). I had a right to be happy, and if it meant ruining someone's marriage to be happy, hey that's life. I deserved happiness. I was lucky, as was my lover, because we weren't found out. You were not.
I'm guilty as hell.
So are you.
"Pat" is a pseudonym I am using for my wife.
Bruce, Gabriel, Son, Frank, Stephan and possibly others:
I am writing you as part of my attempt to heal from the pain of the end of Pat's and my marriage. The point of this letter is merely to inform you of the damage and pain your actions had and will continue to have on Pat, me and our children as long as we live.
You all have children, you are all married or have been. Please think about your own wives and children as you read this and imagine what it would feel like if this had happened to you, your little kids. Think about this as you kiss your wife or make love to her, think of this as you hug your children.
Try to imagine what it is like to have to reinterpret 18 years of memories, those of nearly my entire adulthood. In part because of you, my children will grow up without a normal family. My life, as I knew it, is not only over, but never existed. I was living in a lie you helped perpetuate, a fantasy existing only in my mind.
Pat's violation of the trust I deliberately extended to her is of course the main problem. I knew she had "crushes" on you, but took her lies at face value when she assured me there was nothing going on. I was happy to give her the freedom to "flirt" with you and feel beautiful and wanted. The main guilt is hers.
You are nonetheless complicit in her deception and also responsible for the end of our marriage. You enabled Pat's bad choices and encouraged her to do things which destroyed her life along with her children's.
You helped destroy any trust which might ever exist between us, Pat and you tainted the happy memories of my youth, exposed them for the screenplays they were. You knew when you were dating her that she was married, most of you had at least met me. Son, you knew my children well. Many of you shook my hand, smiled at me and said it was nice to meet me, and then proceeded to sleep with Pat. Despite knowing me you chose to sleep with my wife, in later years the mother of my children. You understood the risk you were putting her at, in case I found out, but you didn't care enough about her or me or my children to refrain from doing so. One of you gave her genital herpes, since you didn't even care enough about her to use a condom all the time.
Collectively, you took from me something that did not belong to you. You stole my wife's time, libido, affection, passion and energy. You introduced The Big Lie into our marriage which set up a barrier to emotional intimacy between us. You helped establish a pattern of behavior in Pat where she went looking outside our marriage every time there was a problem or she was unhappy. When Pat began sleeping with you, she largely stopped having sex with me, actively denying it to me for months at a time. You were more fun, more exciting. She never had to balance a checkbook, pay the mortgage or raise children with you. I could not compete. She never had any real sexual interest in me after that.
You went on vacations with her, had secret romantic getaways with her, went out to eat with her, had nice relaxing times, afternoon naps with her. All this as I watched the kids and dogs so she could date you without having to deal with the trouble of domestic life. I helped pay for airfare so she could see you.
You could say "well if it hadn't been us, it would have been others". You would be right right, but it was you.
Bruce: You cost our marriage the most. You were the first, you were with her the longest, at a very critical stage on our marriage, 4 years into it. All that time she spent with you she was not with me. You enabled her first to set up a life-time habit of lying, deceit and betrayal. You took the most passion, time, and energy from our marriage. Pat was desperately in love with you and spent two years vainly pursuing your affection. Her first "kinky" sex was with you. You probably gave her herpes. You are the reason I recently had to reinterpret one of my most cherished memories: A rare moment of physical passion while on spring break in Florida. It is no longer a brief reconnection between us, made possibly by a respite in the living hell my life was, it was because you weren't available and I guess she needed to have sex with someone. I miss my old memory, I hate you for playing a part in stealing that from me. You were young, but that does not excuse your selfishness. It cost Pat, me and my kids tremendously.
Gabriel: You are perhaps the most culpable. You were an adult when you slept with Pat in grad school and again recently. You are the reason I found out about Pat's cheating: she checked her email on my computer and left it up. At the top was an email from you with the subject line "I've got tickets!!!!". You have been divorced before, you knew exactly the pain you were putting Pat and our family at risk for. You knew better. You nevertheless chose to meet her in Spain, then when you were done satisfying your curiosity, told her you weren't interested in any kind of a relationship with her. Your use of Pat cost us our marriage and all of us our happiness. My favorite picture used to be from 1994(?) of Pat returning from a conference in Florida. I had met her at the airport with flowers. She was holding those flowers and petting our little dog, smiling, happy to be home. In actuality, she was happy because she was madly in love with you, and had just spent several days hanging out and having sex with you in a fun, relaxed environment. I miss that old memory too. That was supposed to be me having fun and relaxing with my wife, not you.
Son: I don't know exactly what to say to you. You knew my kids well, they trusted you. Yet, you began an affair with a woman in Vietnam to adopt a child. Have you no sense of decency? You pulled yourself out of Pat to answer the door when Tina knocked on your room door and stood there with your erect penis exposed as you spoke to my 11 year-old girl. You were perhaps too high and drunk to know what you were doing and this may have thus been unintentional, but you did it nonetheless. The first image Tina will ever have of a man's erect penis will be yours, not her boyfriend's or husband's. She had to listen to you and Pat fucking in the room next door for a long time, both before and after you exposed yourself to her. That is how she found out her mother was cheating on her dad. She held that secret for over 6 months, racked by misplaced guilt and shame at what she *thought* was going on, but didn't want to believe, much less say. She said she thought it was her fault, somehow. I hate you for damaging my child. Think about someone doing that to your child as you hold your baby. You now act as though nothing happened. What are you going to do when your wife finds out? Do you think she will understand what you did with Pat and to Christina? Do you know what it is like to have to try to defend your cheating wife from an 11 year-old girl's accusation of being "a whore"? Since last summer Tina never wants to return to Vietnam. How does one do what you did? What kind of person is even capable of thinking of doing something like that? I am at a loss for words to express the anger I feel for what you did to my girl.
All actions, even those borne of a desire for happiness are not equally moral. Taking something from someone (my wife's time, libido, passion) or exposing them to a risk (STDs, divorce) to make yourself happy is a profoundly immoral act. I don't know what religious or morals beliefs you claim to have, but there is no moral code I can imagine which makes it ok to steal, cheat, lie, and hurt. You have dishonored yourselves and hurt at least one person you perhaps claimed to care for at some time, or maybe you didn't. Perhaps you are all just users of people. I don't know you well enough to assess that.
You will now need to live with the consequences of your actions, as do we all. Perhaps you don't care. You will never meet me (again), never see my kids (again), perhaps not even Pat. You can live the rest of your lives and forget what impact your choices had on our lives. I hope you are unable to do so.
I understand your culpability because I too had an affair with a married woman: a sexual encounter with someone I was very much in love with. I understand how it happens. I also understand how guilty we "other men" are. I knew precisely what I was doing and the risk I was exposing my lover to. I knew I was taking something not mine, that I was acting selfishly to fulfill some perceived need I spent quite a while justifying (she really wasn't happy, her husband was not meeting her needs). I had a right to be happy, and if it meant ruining someone's marriage to be happy, hey that's life. I deserved happiness. I was lucky, as was my lover, because we weren't found out. You were not.
I'm guilty as hell.
So are you.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
My baby is six
Today, we had a birthday party for my little girl. Her actual birthday is tomorrow, which also happens to be Fathers' Day, nice coincidence don't you think? We held the birthday party at "Kiddie Acres" in Austin. If you haven't never been there, and you have small kids, you must. It is a wonderful place, so authentic, so authentically run-down as a friend put it. They have these tiny little carnaval-like rides, pony rides, a miniature train. It is certainly commercial, but somehow has a completely different, and much more pleasant feel than Chuck E. Cheese. For one it is outside, and we got to authentically bake in the authentically hot summer sun. Summer should be hot, and it was that today. Did I mention I love summer?
So my baby is six, which means she isn't a baby. I have maybe another year, two at the most where she will be all mine, then she starts becoming other people's: her friends', her teachers', mostly her friends'. Right now she is still mine, my little girl.
This was the first birthday party my ex and I had as exes. I imagine the there will be other firsts: the first 4th of July, the first anniversary (what's the protocol for that? one wonders), more first birthdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's. It is a strange new world. But we'll be ok. I have people who love me and who I love. I have a good life. As long as I can keep the beast of anger and bitterness at bay, all will be well.
I wish you all a happy Father's day. Hug your kids would you? For me?
So my baby is six, which means she isn't a baby. I have maybe another year, two at the most where she will be all mine, then she starts becoming other people's: her friends', her teachers', mostly her friends'. Right now she is still mine, my little girl.
This was the first birthday party my ex and I had as exes. I imagine the there will be other firsts: the first 4th of July, the first anniversary (what's the protocol for that? one wonders), more first birthdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's. It is a strange new world. But we'll be ok. I have people who love me and who I love. I have a good life. As long as I can keep the beast of anger and bitterness at bay, all will be well.
I wish you all a happy Father's day. Hug your kids would you? For me?
Saturday, June 7, 2008
I am a biker
I woke up early for a weekend, 8 or so. I still had the kids overnight and my ex was coming to pick them up around 11. I stumbled around, took a shower, gave instructions to my 11 y.o. on how to care for and feed the 5 y.o and off I went to my first ever group motorcycle ride with the Austin Motorcycle Riders Group, a meetup.com group.
I'm sure you've seen them: long staggered lines of bikers on the highway, conveys undoubtedly setting off Richter scale sensors in nearby states. Contemporary knights going off to battle on their trusty steeds, visors glinting in the sun. That was me today. I was one of them.
It was an interesting group, from the plush Goldwings and low-slung Harleys, both worth more than many cars, to the more modest bikes: the newbie riders' relatively cheap Japanese bikes, me and my "little" 800 cc Triumph. There was a lot of leather, a lot of tattooed skin. a lot of exposed middle-aged fat. There were the old wizened riders whose riding experience went back to the first Nixon Administration, the aforementioned newbie riders, primarily identifiable by their shy demeanor rather than any lack of skill, and many people in the middle in which I will generously include myself. There was one really eccentric guy in a leather vest festooned with patches declaring himself to be a "Christian Infidel", "Biker for Jesus" and other other unusual things, he rode a heavily modified old pan-head Harley with a kick-starter (only) and straight pipes. The people who rode next to him will never hear again.
It was a beautiful cross section of humanity, well at least in the 40-65 year-old age bracket. We were out in the wind, the sun, enjoying yet another beautiful day, our work and worries eclipsed by the sheer gloriousness of being alive, sweating in the hot Texas sun under our layers of black leather and stifling helmets.
It goes without saying that I had the most resplendently beautiful bike, the coolest jacket and definitely the prettiest brightly-colored plastic-bead key chain (made by my oldest when she was 10) of anyone in the group.
We were all cool and powerful, tough and independent, real badasses. That illusion could continue as long as we kept our middle-class jobs to pay for the gas that our beasts drank, and could get home in time to mow the lawn and do the laundry.
Nothing mattered though, because today no one felt more like Steve than me.
It's good to be alive.
I'm sure you've seen them: long staggered lines of bikers on the highway, conveys undoubtedly setting off Richter scale sensors in nearby states. Contemporary knights going off to battle on their trusty steeds, visors glinting in the sun. That was me today. I was one of them.
It was an interesting group, from the plush Goldwings and low-slung Harleys, both worth more than many cars, to the more modest bikes: the newbie riders' relatively cheap Japanese bikes, me and my "little" 800 cc Triumph. There was a lot of leather, a lot of tattooed skin. a lot of exposed middle-aged fat. There were the old wizened riders whose riding experience went back to the first Nixon Administration, the aforementioned newbie riders, primarily identifiable by their shy demeanor rather than any lack of skill, and many people in the middle in which I will generously include myself. There was one really eccentric guy in a leather vest festooned with patches declaring himself to be a "Christian Infidel", "Biker for Jesus" and other other unusual things, he rode a heavily modified old pan-head Harley with a kick-starter (only) and straight pipes. The people who rode next to him will never hear again.
It was a beautiful cross section of humanity, well at least in the 40-65 year-old age bracket. We were out in the wind, the sun, enjoying yet another beautiful day, our work and worries eclipsed by the sheer gloriousness of being alive, sweating in the hot Texas sun under our layers of black leather and stifling helmets.
It goes without saying that I had the most resplendently beautiful bike, the coolest jacket and definitely the prettiest brightly-colored plastic-bead key chain (made by my oldest when she was 10) of anyone in the group.
We were all cool and powerful, tough and independent, real badasses. That illusion could continue as long as we kept our middle-class jobs to pay for the gas that our beasts drank, and could get home in time to mow the lawn and do the laundry.
Nothing mattered though, because today no one felt more like Steve than me.
It's good to be alive.
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