I wanted to hurt him. To humiliate him. To go next door to our neighbors and borrow a baseball bat, then start bashing in every single one of his car windows. In public. That should suffice to get the neighbors talking and no doubt, they would put two and two together and know something awful had transpired against me. I don’t know why I dreamt of these things, but I did.
Perhaps it was because I was pregnant.
Not pregnant as in going to deliver any second pregnant. Try just ten weeks along. Yeah, we had just found out. Just gotten past the ‘oh my gosh, we are really having a second child’ phase. Long enough to feel all the familiar subtle symptoms. Long enough to start dreaming if it was a boy or a girl this time. And long enough to feel utterly conflicted as to why he didn’t feel the need to confess this to me prior to bringing another child into our family.
I was beyond angry.
I felt he timed his confession, at the most inopportune time, to ensure I would stay. That isn’t to say, I didn’t think about leaving him all the time. Trust me, I did. But we had a child together already, and one on the way. And I wasn’t about to go and become a “martyr” at that point, just to prove how strong of a woman I was. “Oh look at her. Poor thing. Raising two kids all by herself, after her husband cheated on her”. Fuck that.
“Why should I be the one to suffer more, when he cheated on me”, I thought. No I wasn’t going to move out, to deal with finding a new home. To pack up and start over. Become a single mom day in/day out. No way. He was going to deal with seeing all my pain each and every day.
But before moving forward, we needed space to try and figure things out. So I did what every wife in that position would do: I kicked him out of the house. To my mothers house in fact. That in itself, was real punishment right there.
He doesn’t have any family living by us. In fact, they live several continents away. Plus he didn’t want to involve any friends at the time. So that was the plan. To my mothers house he went…..
….until my oldest child starting peeing in her pants 10-15 times per day.
Despite arriving back at our home before waking up each morning and despite being there for the bedtime routine, kids figure stuff out. They are like sponges and my oldest, which I will refer to as Vivian (V for short), sensed Daddy wasn’t just over at grandma’s helping her unpack (she had just moved). That excuse only worked for so long. Clearly she was being deeply affected by everything going on between us, even though we tried to shield her.
So two weeks later, I asked him to move back in.
Needless to say, I knew this was not going to be easy.
Oh.My.God. The timing. The confession. You were newly pregnant. One toddler. Holy hell that is familiar. Except that is when my affair started. No confession. Well just before it started I had a talk with wife about what I was struggling with. Did not go well. She also felt very angry that I waited until she was pregnant. Of course I didn’t wait. That was really when I finally all out it together and found the words. Geez. Ok I’m going to have to read through the rest of your blog!
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I know…to this day, it is the most sensitive subject to me. Physically, I had the worst pregnancy with Vivienne (non-stop morning sickness throughout my pregnancy- to the point they nearly hospitalized me). But with my second, physically I had the best pregnancy. Yet emotionally, I was a mess. He ruined the entire thing. Ruined it with a capital R.
I don’t know if I will ever get over that. You move on, but that is ingrained in “our story”. No matter how many times I hear, “I’m so sorry.” It doesn’t do anything. Doesn’t change anything. To this day I feel angry, like, “How on earth could you do that to a pregnant woman?”
He swears he just had a come to Jesus moment, where he felt this sudden need to finally come clean. I always retort, “So you got this off your chest and onto mine while pregnant with your unborn child? Your timing was so inconsiderate.”
It’s still a sore point to this day 😦
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Oh I totally understand. Both sides. It was incredibly inconsiderate both for me and for your husband. But when you get those moments it just feels right – until you do it and realize how ducking stupid it was. Being a pregnant woman is a giant ball of emotions pinned on hope for the future. You DO NOT dash those future hopes in the middle of the ride. Lesson learned on my part. So, now that you have the kids and are not pregnant, when should he have confessed? Assuming it was at that pint or later.
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If you had asked me that question back then, I would have said, “He should have told me prior to trying for baby #2.” But I wouldn’t have our son now, who I love more than words can ever describe. So realistically, he should have waited to tell me until bare minimum- 1 year after delivery. And more like 2-3. There will never be a great time to deliver this kind of news, but doing it while pregnant is just unfathonably cruel. I still believe he unconsciously told me then…so I wouldn’t leave him.
So you confessed to your wife while she was pregnant as well? Curious how that turned out!
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Well I didn’t fully confess. I told her I was unhappy and how it related to sex, but I didn’t talk about the other woman or anything about an affair. Of course we really hadn’t had an affair at that point. Either way it didn’t go well. If I had told her more I don’t know what would’ve happened. She wasn’t handling things well.
1-3 years. That’s a long time. I can understand but that is a really long time. I can understand the cruelty of the timing now. I’m really sorry for you and for my wife.
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Yeah well my thinking is that year 1, any Mom is in the thick of things. Your hormonal from the changes going on post-delivery. It takes a good solid year to recover, get routines established etc. Year 2, you are still battling sleepless nights with little ones. So telling a spouse during that timeframe is just a recipe for disaster. It’s hard enough and really, any confession during that time could very well impact how well a mother bonds with her child then. You aren’t just destroying your wife with the worst news ever, but also throwing the hugest bolder at an innocent child. So that’s why I think year three is more ideal. Not that there is an ideal time to confess, but doing so while pregnant or 1-2 years post-delivery is just not an ideal time based on the above reasons. In a perfect world, my husband would have told me before we tried for Zane. But we don’t get what we always want now huh?
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