The weekend was awful. I mean, in that elephant-in-the-room sort of way where you can chat politely about other stuff, but mostly you know you’re all thinking about the same thing and not talking about it because it’s just too much. And I was having a hard time having D in the hotel. The first morning after he was there – this is now only Friday! – I had asked him to suspend talking to Sally until he and I could figure out how to cope with what he was doing and what I wanted. He had agreed, saying that he was sorry, that he respected my need for space, and that he wanted to make sure he got to spend some time with our little one.
Sidebar. Aye, the little one. That’s the rub in all of this. See, Little One knew Daddy, and liked Daddy, but when Little One really needed anything, Little One only had eyes for Momma. This was primarily because Daddy had never been around much during little one’s short life. Sure, he was around as in “in the same house” – but he was either holed up in his office, playing video games, or wandering aimlessly around our yard, weeding and pruning and muttering to himself. So Little One had come to rely on Mommy for everything. Given that Daddy had a tendency to drink and smoke weed until he was barely there anyway, I was okay with this deal, since it meant that I knew Little One would be taken care of – because I was always around to do it. The truly tragic part of this is that Daddy never actually figured any of this out. [Sidebar fini.]
So his request to spend time with little one was quite a surprise, since he didn’t seem to want much time before. I invited him to come along on a couple of obliquely painful outings that weekend, as a result – a local farm/amusement park, dinner out. All the while trying to pretend that things could possibly be “normal.” All the while, impressing upon my parents the urge for normalcy that I was so desperately fulfilling.
I was assuming that the marriage was important to him.
The weekend passed; my parents played their interactions with him like the professionals they are. But I knew they would have smacked some sense into him, given the chance. We were all on a low simmer. I was glad they were there, and terrified for them to leave, since it meant I’d have to either live with stasis or somehow find momentum. Neither direction was appealing.
After they were gone, D came home. We talked and talked, disagreeing about the meaning of what I was now calling his "emotional affair." I asked him if he had talked to Sally lately, and he said he had chatted with her to tell her what was going on, and that they were not talking anymore. Phew! I thought. He’s getting it. Maybe we’re on the beginning of the right track here.
Three days went by, three days where I focused all my love on Little One, saw my therapist, wrote in my journal, talked to the only two friends I’d managed to keep during my marriage, and generally pondered my lackadaisical existence. D and I were careful around one another, walking on eggshells, lest one of us might break this uncomfortable detante.
During those days, I read the book “Happy for No Reason” by Marci Shimoff, and I had a revelation. I suddenly realized that my happiness did not depend on D’s opinion of me, or his general well-being, or my ability to be a good, dedicated, loving wife or mother. My happiness was mine – I owned it. What a concept!
That realization made what was hiding around the corner a little easier.
One night, exactly one week after the text message heard round the world, while D was out at a court-mandated AA session (a sidebar for another time), I was talking to my best friend Athena. During this conversation, a few things happened:
1) I started to feel empowered. Not sure why, but I did. (She does have that effect on me, when I let her.)
2) I began to think straighter and more clearly than I had in years.
3) It occurred to me that perhaps D wasn’t telling me the truth.
4) I opened our Verizon Wireless bill.
5) I saw…everything.
I don’t normally go through every line of a Verizon Wireless bill. In fact, as long as I’m not over on minutes or texts, I barely even read the damn thing. But something was nagging at me. I had to look.
The bill was pages long. It was thoroughly, irrevocably detailed. Times, dates, phone numbers. Duration. Quantity.
It had recorded not tens, not scores, but hundreds of text messages, back and forth, between D and the number I now knew to be Sally’s. Over the course of not days, but weeks, weeks which stretched beyond the bill I was looking at, back in time, beyond the day that I had visited Sally's home and been treated to that lovely tour.
The bill had also recorded hours of conversation between the two of them. Not just hours. Hours every day.
And on the day, the weekend, where D and I had agreed he would no longer talk to her – you know what I found?
The texts and the phone calls had nearly doubled. Every day since Text Message Day, multiple hours of calls, multiple texts. Dozens per day.
Athena was on the phone with me while this dramedy played out. "Oh, sweetie, I'm so, so sorry," she said.
"Thanks," I replied hazily. The letters on the pages and pages of my Verizon Wireless bill were starting to fuzz, blend, blur.
"You win either way," she said suddenly.
"How so?" I asked, not really hearing her, focused on the same phone number showing up on D's bill over and over and over again.
"Either you get the marriage you deserve, or you get the independence you earned," Athena said. "As miserable as it may feel, I think you've put yourself in a really good place."
I thought about that. Independence. What might that feel like? It seemed intangible, impossible, the stuff of science fiction movies and teen fantasy novels. I could barely remember myself as independent.
When D returned from AA that night, I calmly, quietly showed him the Verizon Wireless bill. I presented him with what I knew to be the truth.
He immediately went on the defensive, and blurted out, “Well, who else was I going to talk to? I needed someone to help me.”
I let him know he'd need to find another place in the house to sleep for a while.
It had only been 7 days since I'd found the text message. I could feel and taste and remember every waking minute of those 7 days. They felt very, very strange and long to me.
The next morning I woke up from a dark, awful night of fitful sleeping, and I walked over to the dresser in what was now my bedroom. I opened up the jewelry box I kept on that dresser. I took off my wedding ring and engagement ring and placed them on opposite sides of the jewelry box tray. I closed the jewelry box, got myself and Little One dressed, and went to work.
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