Adultery is like a spider web. It starts out small in the center and then continues on each corner connected to another growing and spinning until it's huge and you can't see where it began anymore. This has been my experience as the survivor of someone else's rampant adultery. There's no part of my life it hasn't touched. I still live in the same town where most of the affairs occurred I still see the women who participated. Most of the time I process this just fine. Yeah...not today. Maybe it's because so many of the spiders were women in my circle of friends and acquaintances. That's what makes it harder to swallow or maybe because some of them are not only not apologetic for what they did they're straight up proud of it. Maybe it's because knowledge of one affair in particular reached one of my kiddos despite my best efforts to avoid that. Whatever the reasons, today I used my most powerful weapons and attacked the core of the twisted spider web. I railed him. I swore at him and I lost all my composure. Despite my efforts to block all unsavory faces from my Facebook.. I missed a few and they reared their ugly white trash heads. Right there in the middle of my newsfeed. THEM. The evil Wondertwins. The slutty version of Dumb and Dumber. Standing together arm in arm in a picture as if they were there just to piss me off. I wish I could say my only reaction was to be smugly pleased to see the beer gut the one had, or that the others thinning hair made me smile. Today.. I saw them and a flood of pain came back to me and then I texted him a screenshot of the two of his conquests. Not a proud moment for me. It's bad enough that these things happened, that the memory of them exists but to remind someone of one their least fine moments was certainly not one of mine.
I DO have the right to be angry. That sentence took a long time and a lot of therapy to be able to say. I have the RIGHT to be angry and dammit I am. I don't have the right to put that anger on anyone else. I've taken and will continue to take a lot of stuff on the chin as a result of my 16 year marriage. That was an agreement I made the day I laced up my hot pink Doc Martens and stood in front of all the important people in my life and took my vows. BUT when this mess lands on my kids I get angry. When I'm angry I don't make the best decisions and today I chose to throw the mess right at him. The kids are the innocent ones and their lives have changed enough as a result of our divorce without one of them having to be embarrassed at school and have to play it off like it didn't bother them in front of their classmates. Instead my kiddo fell back on humor to hide the pain, just like I do. What could be a funny response to " My mom had an affair with that kids Dad" you ask?? My brilliant kiddo came right back with "Yeah, my dad's kind of a man whore, who cares". Everyone laughed but the damage was done. That child cared and I care. So my better angels left my side and the little devil that I try hard to stomp down took over and I unleashed the fury. Ya know what? It didn't even have the desired affect. At least not that I could see. What I wanted was an apology for my child and for me. What I got was a bitter argument that lasted for several hours and was less about what had happened to our child and more about how its all my fault because I can 't let it go. Maybe he's right, maybe I can't let it go because I'm such a Mama Bear. Maybe its just BS but why should I have to ? I still have to deal with the fall out and clean up the mess he made, I should be able to throw a fit and dump some of it back on him now and then.
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