June 2013

This month marks a year since I had decided to write a blog and share my experience as a middle-aged woman going through a separation, and now a much anticipated divorce.

It has been quite a year, and it just keeps getting a little more interesting with each passing day.

I'm still legally married.  I'm still in our house. I'm still trying to come to terms with everything that has happened, and just when I think there is nothing else that I'm going to have to process, something new is served up on a platter of trash.

This month has been filled with huge revelations, and it's only the middle of the month.

My daughter has known since November that her married father has been having an affair. She felt that, as the adult, her father should be the one to tell his wife that he was seeing someone new before he was divorced. Unfortunately, she was expecting too much from a man who lies as a way of life, and who was no character.

I just found out this month that he has visited my daughter twice since January, and he wasn't alone. The first visit, he showed up with his girlfriend, without taking the time to mention to my daughter that he was bringing this person. On the second trip he showed up with his parents and his diamond-engagement-ring-clad girlfriend. Again, his plans were vague, and he certainly didn't have the courtesy or the courage to mention to my daughter that they were engaged.

My immediate reaction was anger, not because he chose to end our 21 year marriage for another woman, and that he lied to me for almost two years about it, but because he and his parents thought that this was a perfectly acceptable thing to do to my daughter.

This was the kick in the pants that I needed to finally realize just how disturbed this man and his parents are. For a year and a half I kept thinking that he was suffering from some trauma, and I kept asking him to talk to someone and get some help. I thought that he needed to work some things out and he would come to his senses, but as it turns out, the only thing he needed to work out was to get my daughter to tell me what was happening because he wasn't man enough to do it himself, and how to try and ease his guilty conscience about being such a jackass.

The one thing that I would like to impart on the women out there who might be going through something similar; listen to that inner voice that is trying to guide you. Women are very smart, and we know when something is off. We just don't always pay attention, or we try to rationalize what is happening.

I knew deep down, as soon as I saw my husband get off the plane from Iraq a year and a half ago, that everything was different between the two of us. He denied, denied, denied and denied again that there was anyone else, but I knew there was. I just hoped that I was wrong, so I held on to that sliver of hope. By doing that, I was holding myself back from moving forward while he's just been having a grand old time.

Now that the truth is out, I've finally been released to move on.