A Dance With Divorce
I got the text around 5:00 a.m. It went something like, “I’m not coming home. I need some time to think. My phone will be off, but I will call to talk to the babies. Please don’t hate me. I hope we can still be friends”. That’s it. Fourteen years together, twelve of them married all reduced to one hollow text. He was leaving me. My fairytale romance quickly turned into a nightmare.
For the months building up to that point, I had been struggling to stay afloat. We have three children together. The youngest are only fourteen months apart and I was the sole caregiver 99.99% of the time. I was losing my mind. Every day when my husband would leave to go to work at our Italian restaurant, I would cry. Every day.
I didn’t want to be left alone with the kids, trapped in my own self pity and misery. I was never meant to be a stay at home mom. I wanted to work at the restaurant, too. That was also my dream, not just his, but he shamed me into staying home to raise them. “My mom did it, why can’t you?” I thought this was the sacrifice that I had to make for us to grow a successful business. He would leave around 7:00 a.m. and would return no earlier than 11:00 p.m. I was all alone with my ugly thoughts, and three needy children.
For a while, I tried to stay up to greet him when he came home. Talk with him about his day. Most of the time I just couldn’t do it because I was exhausted from keeping three little people alive all day. Then the health problems started to manifest inside of me. Diarrhea everyday for months, vomiting and stomach cramps nearly every morning added to the tears that spilled from my face every day. I never wanted to do anything or go anywhere, I just wanted to sleep. Postpartum depression had its claws gripping my neck, tearing away at my sanity.
The only thing I did regularly was go to the grocery store alone on the one day my husband had off. Even this made me feel guilty. That one hour of freedom I was allowed would be filled with thinking about them. All he ever wanted to do was sleep on his days off, he was deservedly exhausted, too. I didn’t want him to have to do anything extra after working so hard at our pizza shop, even if it was just taking care of his own kids. The only thing that I could consistently do for my man was to make him coffee in the mornings before he went to work. I would get up with him, no matter how many times I was up in the night with the babies. I wanted to see him off to work because I missed him so much. We continued to grow farther and farther apart.
Which leads me back to that early morning text. He had gone to a Carolina Panthers game the night before, his beloved football team.(The Panthers would go all the way to the Super Bowl that year, and lose. To this day it is the single most satisfying football game I have ever witnessed.) We had a fight before he left that morning. He was shutting down and not talking to me, mentioning that he was just too stressed out by the restaurant. I needed him to talk to me, I needed help, and he was just walking out in my darkest time.
I tried to block the door and grab the keys, forcing him to stay. This was the one and only time that man raised his hand at me. I dared him to hit me, but instead he grabbed my daughter, who was by now upset with what she was seeing. He thrust her at me “Here! Why don’t you care about your children!”. I turned around and violently punched and kicked the wall of our bedroom, effectively breaking my hand. Our oldest child ran downstairs so he didn’t have to hear us.
As he walked out our door for the last time, I grabbed a decoration off the wall and hurled it at his car. It bounced off of his passenger side window. We locked eyes, I screamed “What are you doing to us?”, and then he was gone. We had been abandoned. I immediately called him and said to him that I was so glad to have had him for those years, even if this was the end. I felt like my state of mind was what was causing all of this. He was crying, too, this time. I said to him, “You are magical and you are an amazing man, I just need you to know that”. “No, I am not”, he yelled into the phone before he hung up. I tried to call him back, but as he said, from that point on his phone was off for almost an entire week. He would turn it on long enough to read the texts I was sending him.
I had begun journaling again when my world started to fall apart and the depression intensified. I was trying everything I could to bring peace to my mind. This also included taking up yoga. Writing has always helped me to express myself better than just talking. I tend to write when bad things are happening in my life, and this was the absolute worst. I had broken my hand so I couldn’t perform a lot of the yoga positions and I couldn’t write, it hurt my hand too much. Now my coping mechanisms were gone, too.
I could no longer take care of my kids. All I was doing was blaming myself for what was happening. I was so miserable that even my husband didn’t want to be around me anymore. I cried in front of my children so much that it became normal for them to see mommy sad. I called my younger sister pleading for help and she made the hour drive as quickly as she could to get to me, I believe she left work early. Then later on in the week, my mom came to help. All this time I was still blaming myself, still trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I was so unlovable that he could not stand to be around me anymore. I was a complete failure as a wife and as a mother.
Somehow I got wind that he was going to Florida. I knew his best friend lived down there. I also knew that his best friend had just recently become engaged. I found his fiancee on Facebook and told her what was going on and asked her to let me know if he showed up. This text showed up around 1:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning. “He’s here”, it said. I asked if he was alone. “No”. I’m not sure when my heart started to beat again after I read that one word. I told her that I needed a name or a picture of whoever was with him. “Adrianna. She just stormed out of the house and your husband followed her saying she was crazy”. It was nice to know I wasn’t the only crazy woman in his life. Adrianna. Adrianna. Adrianna.
Did I say woman? I meant child. This girl who stole my security, stole my children’s father, was one that I hired and trained at the start of our restaurant when it first opened about two years prior. I trained this bitch to be as good as I was, I trained her to take my place. It was a girl my ex always said felt like a daughter to him. This girl that once toyed with my engagement ring, commenting on how it was so beautiful. This girl that comes from a completely dysfunctional family, who likes to sleep with her own sister’s boyfriend. White trash at it’s finest. Why is it that when men cheat, they always trade down from what they already have? When I finally was able to reach him on the phone, I simply said, “I know where you are, and I know who you are with”. His only reply was, “Now what?”. I was about to show him.
So, I found out what he had done early that Sunday morning. The next day I was at my lawyer’s office bright and early filing for divorce. By Tuesday, I had packed up my kids and my family came to help me move back home. My ex didn’t even know what hit him. He came back to nothing, which is exactly what he came to me with. I had cut up all of his clothes and shoes, threw them all out our bedroom window, and poured bleach all over them just for good measure. I did all of the stereotypical actions of a woman scorned.
Of course, he had knocked this girl up. He told me that he knew she would be a shitty mother and that he was staying with her for the kid. He knew that I was the more capable one, that my kids would always be taken care of. He never even looked back at us once. He never even tried to make things right. He knew he had no chance. I told him in the beginning of the relationship that if he ever cheated or put his hands on me it was over. Unlike him, I always keep my promises.
For the next couple of months, I was deteriorating. I would just sit in a chair, staring off into nowhere crying for all that I lost. I couldn’t listen to music because every song reminded me of him and Adele was all the rage then. I dropped 60 pounds, I was wasting away from the stress. I had no energy, no desire for anything, and I still was having daily diarrhea. I began to go to counseling weekly and was prescribed antidepressants to help ease my mind. A little bit of light started to shine in my life.
I began to start taking care of myself. I started by just taking a 2 mile walk everyday. Usually listening to Eminem screaming about “Kim”, but eventually my choices softened to an L.L.Cool J. There was spring in my step again.
Somewhere in mid April, I had to go back to our broken home. We had sold the house and I was going to have a yard sale. More like a divorce sale, I wish I had advertised it that way. I sold all of our memories. Anything that reminded me of him was sold. Wedding gifts, plants he had given me, everything had to go. I did leave my wedding lingerie hanging in the closet with a note that said “Give these to her, and you can both pretend she’s me”. (She left her underwear in my bed, so I figured she might need some extras) I cried to random strangers just for their kindness, So many women told me they went through the same thing, it was comforting to know I was not as alone as I felt.
Upon returning to the house, I had the most gut wrenching experience of my life. That home was dead. As dead as we were. The furniture had been moved around, staged to sell the house. Did she do it? Come into my home and rearrange my stuff like she had done my life? This wasn’t my house any longer. I had been replaced. The silence was maddening, there had always been the steady chatter of children. I went in the back yard to my cats Sammy and Dinah’s burial sites, digging up some of the dirt to use in a future garden. I took a picture of the graves, knowing it would be the last time I ever visited. I walked to the basement and fell to my knees. Wailing, I have never cried like that before in my life. There is no way to describe what betrayal feels like. You can not understand unless it happens to you.
I became extremely anxious and called my best friend. I screamed at her frantically over the phone, “Why would he do this?!”, looking back it must have been terrifying for her to hear me in such a state. She later told me that her husband commented on their meal that night saying it was delicious. She told him it was because it had been flavored with our tears.
After I purged all of our belongings, my frame of mind started to get a little better. However, my health was still suffering. The diarrhea I had been experiencing had become bloody and I could no longer ignore it. After many doctors visits and a weeks hospital stay, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease, a chronic irritable bowel autoimmune disorder. Again, I wasn’t sure how I was going to survive all of this. Why was this happening to me? I would sit, defeated on my therapist’s couch just sobbing, trying to figure out a way out of this hole I was stuck in.
Slowly, the medication for the Crohn’s alleviated some of the pain. At least I had an answer to what was wrong with me. I started to accept my new life for what it was and I started to heal. I had lost everything. My house, my garden, my husband and closest friend, my business, my health all disappeared, but I was still standing.
The divorce was finalized 2 days after our twelfth wedding anniversary. He is still with this girl playing house 2 states over from me. He sees our kids once a month, and tells me that I made my kids into a paycheck. One day, they will see him for what he is, but for now he is still their hero, and I do not want to do anything further to harm those relationships. My kids have another sister that they don’t even know about. A sister that I wished the Zika Virus on. I wanted her aborted. Of course he couldn’t because he was a good Catholic, though that didn’t stop him from the lies and adultery. The greed and envy and all the other sins were always there. The hypocrisy is staggering.
My life has merit now, I am not just existing to take care of children. I have a job so that I can interact with other adults. I am contributing to society. I have focused aggressively on my writing. I wrote a book of poetry inspired by this betrayal. Publishing a book was a goal I never thought I would fulfill, but now I have enough for two more. I have had a couple of short stories published and I am taking care of myself again, instead of only caring for others. My life is full of all the vibrant colors I had been missing all those years. My gray has turned into a rainbow, and I’ll be damned if I let those colors ever fade again.
Now I find comfort in sharing my story. I hope that I can continue to inspire others with my writing, maybe help someone realize their potential after a divorce. It is easy to lose your identity when you devote all of your time to others. I am still evolving into the best woman I can be, for my kids, but most importantly for myself. I divorced him, but I remarried me. — feeling strong.
For the months building up to that point, I had been struggling to stay afloat. We have three children together. The youngest are only fourteen months apart and I was the sole caregiver 99.99% of the time. I was losing my mind. Every day when my husband would leave to go to work at our Italian restaurant, I would cry. Every day.
I didn’t want to be left alone with the kids, trapped in my own self pity and misery. I was never meant to be a stay at home mom. I wanted to work at the restaurant, too. That was also my dream, not just his, but he shamed me into staying home to raise them. “My mom did it, why can’t you?” I thought this was the sacrifice that I had to make for us to grow a successful business. He would leave around 7:00 a.m. and would return no earlier than 11:00 p.m. I was all alone with my ugly thoughts, and three needy children.
For a while, I tried to stay up to greet him when he came home. Talk with him about his day. Most of the time I just couldn’t do it because I was exhausted from keeping three little people alive all day. Then the health problems started to manifest inside of me. Diarrhea everyday for months, vomiting and stomach cramps nearly every morning added to the tears that spilled from my face every day. I never wanted to do anything or go anywhere, I just wanted to sleep. Postpartum depression had its claws gripping my neck, tearing away at my sanity.
The only thing I did regularly was go to the grocery store alone on the one day my husband had off. Even this made me feel guilty. That one hour of freedom I was allowed would be filled with thinking about them. All he ever wanted to do was sleep on his days off, he was deservedly exhausted, too. I didn’t want him to have to do anything extra after working so hard at our pizza shop, even if it was just taking care of his own kids. The only thing that I could consistently do for my man was to make him coffee in the mornings before he went to work. I would get up with him, no matter how many times I was up in the night with the babies. I wanted to see him off to work because I missed him so much. We continued to grow farther and farther apart.
Which leads me back to that early morning text. He had gone to a Carolina Panthers game the night before, his beloved football team.(The Panthers would go all the way to the Super Bowl that year, and lose. To this day it is the single most satisfying football game I have ever witnessed.) We had a fight before he left that morning. He was shutting down and not talking to me, mentioning that he was just too stressed out by the restaurant. I needed him to talk to me, I needed help, and he was just walking out in my darkest time.
I tried to block the door and grab the keys, forcing him to stay. This was the one and only time that man raised his hand at me. I dared him to hit me, but instead he grabbed my daughter, who was by now upset with what she was seeing. He thrust her at me “Here! Why don’t you care about your children!”. I turned around and violently punched and kicked the wall of our bedroom, effectively breaking my hand. Our oldest child ran downstairs so he didn’t have to hear us.
As he walked out our door for the last time, I grabbed a decoration off the wall and hurled it at his car. It bounced off of his passenger side window. We locked eyes, I screamed “What are you doing to us?”, and then he was gone. We had been abandoned. I immediately called him and said to him that I was so glad to have had him for those years, even if this was the end. I felt like my state of mind was what was causing all of this. He was crying, too, this time. I said to him, “You are magical and you are an amazing man, I just need you to know that”. “No, I am not”, he yelled into the phone before he hung up. I tried to call him back, but as he said, from that point on his phone was off for almost an entire week. He would turn it on long enough to read the texts I was sending him.
I had begun journaling again when my world started to fall apart and the depression intensified. I was trying everything I could to bring peace to my mind. This also included taking up yoga. Writing has always helped me to express myself better than just talking. I tend to write when bad things are happening in my life, and this was the absolute worst. I had broken my hand so I couldn’t perform a lot of the yoga positions and I couldn’t write, it hurt my hand too much. Now my coping mechanisms were gone, too.
I could no longer take care of my kids. All I was doing was blaming myself for what was happening. I was so miserable that even my husband didn’t want to be around me anymore. I cried in front of my children so much that it became normal for them to see mommy sad. I called my younger sister pleading for help and she made the hour drive as quickly as she could to get to me, I believe she left work early. Then later on in the week, my mom came to help. All this time I was still blaming myself, still trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I was so unlovable that he could not stand to be around me anymore. I was a complete failure as a wife and as a mother.
Somehow I got wind that he was going to Florida. I knew his best friend lived down there. I also knew that his best friend had just recently become engaged. I found his fiancee on Facebook and told her what was going on and asked her to let me know if he showed up. This text showed up around 1:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning. “He’s here”, it said. I asked if he was alone. “No”. I’m not sure when my heart started to beat again after I read that one word. I told her that I needed a name or a picture of whoever was with him. “Adrianna. She just stormed out of the house and your husband followed her saying she was crazy”. It was nice to know I wasn’t the only crazy woman in his life. Adrianna. Adrianna. Adrianna.
Did I say woman? I meant child. This girl who stole my security, stole my children’s father, was one that I hired and trained at the start of our restaurant when it first opened about two years prior. I trained this bitch to be as good as I was, I trained her to take my place. It was a girl my ex always said felt like a daughter to him. This girl that once toyed with my engagement ring, commenting on how it was so beautiful. This girl that comes from a completely dysfunctional family, who likes to sleep with her own sister’s boyfriend. White trash at it’s finest. Why is it that when men cheat, they always trade down from what they already have? When I finally was able to reach him on the phone, I simply said, “I know where you are, and I know who you are with”. His only reply was, “Now what?”. I was about to show him.
So, I found out what he had done early that Sunday morning. The next day I was at my lawyer’s office bright and early filing for divorce. By Tuesday, I had packed up my kids and my family came to help me move back home. My ex didn’t even know what hit him. He came back to nothing, which is exactly what he came to me with. I had cut up all of his clothes and shoes, threw them all out our bedroom window, and poured bleach all over them just for good measure. I did all of the stereotypical actions of a woman scorned.
Of course, he had knocked this girl up. He told me that he knew she would be a shitty mother and that he was staying with her for the kid. He knew that I was the more capable one, that my kids would always be taken care of. He never even looked back at us once. He never even tried to make things right. He knew he had no chance. I told him in the beginning of the relationship that if he ever cheated or put his hands on me it was over. Unlike him, I always keep my promises.
For the next couple of months, I was deteriorating. I would just sit in a chair, staring off into nowhere crying for all that I lost. I couldn’t listen to music because every song reminded me of him and Adele was all the rage then. I dropped 60 pounds, I was wasting away from the stress. I had no energy, no desire for anything, and I still was having daily diarrhea. I began to go to counseling weekly and was prescribed antidepressants to help ease my mind. A little bit of light started to shine in my life.
I began to start taking care of myself. I started by just taking a 2 mile walk everyday. Usually listening to Eminem screaming about “Kim”, but eventually my choices softened to an L.L.Cool J. There was spring in my step again.
Somewhere in mid April, I had to go back to our broken home. We had sold the house and I was going to have a yard sale. More like a divorce sale, I wish I had advertised it that way. I sold all of our memories. Anything that reminded me of him was sold. Wedding gifts, plants he had given me, everything had to go. I did leave my wedding lingerie hanging in the closet with a note that said “Give these to her, and you can both pretend she’s me”. (She left her underwear in my bed, so I figured she might need some extras) I cried to random strangers just for their kindness, So many women told me they went through the same thing, it was comforting to know I was not as alone as I felt.
Upon returning to the house, I had the most gut wrenching experience of my life. That home was dead. As dead as we were. The furniture had been moved around, staged to sell the house. Did she do it? Come into my home and rearrange my stuff like she had done my life? This wasn’t my house any longer. I had been replaced. The silence was maddening, there had always been the steady chatter of children. I went in the back yard to my cats Sammy and Dinah’s burial sites, digging up some of the dirt to use in a future garden. I took a picture of the graves, knowing it would be the last time I ever visited. I walked to the basement and fell to my knees. Wailing, I have never cried like that before in my life. There is no way to describe what betrayal feels like. You can not understand unless it happens to you.
I became extremely anxious and called my best friend. I screamed at her frantically over the phone, “Why would he do this?!”, looking back it must have been terrifying for her to hear me in such a state. She later told me that her husband commented on their meal that night saying it was delicious. She told him it was because it had been flavored with our tears.
After I purged all of our belongings, my frame of mind started to get a little better. However, my health was still suffering. The diarrhea I had been experiencing had become bloody and I could no longer ignore it. After many doctors visits and a weeks hospital stay, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease, a chronic irritable bowel autoimmune disorder. Again, I wasn’t sure how I was going to survive all of this. Why was this happening to me? I would sit, defeated on my therapist’s couch just sobbing, trying to figure out a way out of this hole I was stuck in.
Slowly, the medication for the Crohn’s alleviated some of the pain. At least I had an answer to what was wrong with me. I started to accept my new life for what it was and I started to heal. I had lost everything. My house, my garden, my husband and closest friend, my business, my health all disappeared, but I was still standing.
The divorce was finalized 2 days after our twelfth wedding anniversary. He is still with this girl playing house 2 states over from me. He sees our kids once a month, and tells me that I made my kids into a paycheck. One day, they will see him for what he is, but for now he is still their hero, and I do not want to do anything further to harm those relationships. My kids have another sister that they don’t even know about. A sister that I wished the Zika Virus on. I wanted her aborted. Of course he couldn’t because he was a good Catholic, though that didn’t stop him from the lies and adultery. The greed and envy and all the other sins were always there. The hypocrisy is staggering.
My life has merit now, I am not just existing to take care of children. I have a job so that I can interact with other adults. I am contributing to society. I have focused aggressively on my writing. I wrote a book of poetry inspired by this betrayal. Publishing a book was a goal I never thought I would fulfill, but now I have enough for two more. I have had a couple of short stories published and I am taking care of myself again, instead of only caring for others. My life is full of all the vibrant colors I had been missing all those years. My gray has turned into a rainbow, and I’ll be damned if I let those colors ever fade again.
Now I find comfort in sharing my story. I hope that I can continue to inspire others with my writing, maybe help someone realize their potential after a divorce. It is easy to lose your identity when you devote all of your time to others. I am still evolving into the best woman I can be, for my kids, but most importantly for myself. I divorced him, but I remarried me. — feeling strong.
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