I recently found out that my husband of nearly 14 years has been cheating on me for nearly a year. I don’t know how to feel about this, how to get through it without losing my mind. So when life gives me so many lemons, I use them to write, so write I shall.
2017 was a dumpster fire of a year, started off with swallowing the reality of a giant buffoon taking over the running of our country. A buffoon who hates women, of which I happen to be, and have four of whom I am raising. That has been a struggle as these offspring have been deep in the throes of hormonal upheaval, also known as puberty. The respect provided to me in my household has been severely lacking. It’s also caused me to put a severe dent in my liquor cabinet that had been carefully honed over years of acquisitions.
The second speedbump that decided to interrupt my ever-stellar year was the near death of my best friend, who managed to impale himself on a fence after driving through it. This trick landed him in the ICU for weeks, his wife refusing to leave the hospital until he did, and the stress of wondering if he would make it through each day. Luckily he had an amazing team of doctors and surgeons who were able to patch him back together again and bring him back to the land of the living. After nearly two months of hospital visits, I was quite weary of seeing the inside of hospitals, but was not nearly done with my adventuring in hospitals it seemed.
I had failed to do what every flight attendant tells you in their pre-flight speil, and had forgotten to put the oxygen mask on myself before tending to those around me. Because of this lapse in judgement, I managed to turn a simple cold into double pneumonia. So I then got my very own hospital room with not so luxurious accommodations. Normally, when one checks into a lovely hotel you don’t ask to be woken up every hour on the hour to check your breathing, yet here I was. Luckily I had a wonderful team of doctors and nurses taking care of me and they were able to keep me out of the ICU and got to go back home after a week of their care. The road back to wellness is still taking its time, recovering from double pneumonia is hardly a freeway. However this still wasn’t the worst thing to happen to me in 2017, oh no, the shitstorm was still on the horizon.
Because I had missed so much work due to my illness, I ended up losing my job. I wasn’t happy there as it was, but I am the primary provider in my household and that took a huge toll on the family, especially as it was right before the holiday season. In my line of work, companies don’t hire before the holidays and end of the year as my role falls in a cost center, so it’s better to hire once Q1 begins. And yet I still tried to keep my head above water, although i was barely treading at this point. Trying to conserve my energy, my will was beginning to falter. Days seemed darker, I was struggling to get through each day that lay before me.
Skip to three days before Christmas, my husband had left his cell phone at home when he went to work. He doesn’t normally forget it as he needs it for work, and looking back at that I wonder if he subconsciously wanted to be caught. I picked it up and sent him a text, letting him know it was here. Out of curiosity I decided to peruse through his phone, we didn’t have any secrets (that Iknew of anyway) and we each had each other’s finger prints to unlock and passcodes just in case. So I perused through his most used apps, peeked at some silly pics our girls had taken on his phone (they like to snap selfies and change our lock and home screens whenever they get their hands on it), and happened to see that he had been using WhatsApp. That struck me as odd as I recalled that he told me he didn’t use that or know how to use that or Snapchat as our girls use Snap daily and I’ve started to use it to keep up with their lives and conversations. Curiosity again compelled me to open this app and see who he had been messaging. Most of the names i knew, but there was one that stood out, this was someone I didn’t know nor had I heard of her. I started going through their chats (which were all in Spanish), and then decided to click on the starred audio message. Only the audio message was not what I was expecting, only it kind of was.
I’m not fluent in Spanish, instead I had taken four years of French in high school and like most other romantics dreamed of a life lived in France someday. I had tried to pick up Spanish, but he’s a horrible teacher and makes fun of mistakes and errors in pronunciation. I also have white-girl tongue and can’t roll my R’s to save my life, which of course provides him with hours of entertainment at my expense. So I only skimmed their text conversations, I knew they were telling each other that they loved one another, but it could have easily been a relative. That is, until I opened up that damned audio file. What was in that dastardly little bits of ones and zeroes was her having an orgasm. At this point I’m praying that they’re not related. After the shock wore off, I remembered that he would be on his way home from work soon to retrieve the little device that contained his lies. I quickly exported their little chat sessions, complete with all the incriminating media files attached and deleted any trace of my fingerprints on his phone. When he got home to retrieve his little friend, I plastered a little smile on my fuming face and pretended like all was normal.
But beneath the surface of my fake smile lurked a rage that was slowly boiling. I couldn’t wait for him to return to work so I could get busy translating his months and months of daily conversations with his little tart.
Time for a little coffee break, friends.
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