One FaceBook Tantrum to Rule Them All…  

Is HomeWrecker talking to herself, or to me in these posts? I never can tell. Oh wait, sorry. This is Gollum’s wall.

Once HomeWrecker had her little one sided conversation about me/to me/to herself on FaceBook to call me out,  I decided to delve more deeply into her timeline. Maybe I could find more answers there, answers that Honey had denied me. He’d only been gone for a couple of weeks at this point. We hadn’t even filed for separation or divorce yet, and he was very much still my husband. I had been clinging to this irrational hope that somehow none of this was really happening. On the night of 1,000 horrors, he’d told me next to nothing. And for good reason. He knew I’d try to find out who she was. He even blocked me on FB right after he left me in an attempt to cover his tracks. Access to pictures of his kids, past, present and future be damned! All I had was her first name, yet I still managed to find her. All I could get him to confess that night was that he had been seeing someone for ‘a while’. So I figured, let’s just take a look-see and find out what constitutes ‘a while’.

I scrolled back in time to see, among other things, this picture of a vase filled with flowers from  January, saying they’d been together for 3 months.

This is how I figured out he’d been seeing her since October. That was basically the entire time he was  on the road. How delightful! Another uppercut to the ribcage.

Wait a minute…

I immediately thought about one of the best texts I’d ever gotten from him. He’d sent it in October. He always sent me great notes and texts when we were apart, but this one was especially memorable. I grabbed my phone. Scrolling back through our conversations, I saw hundreds of ‘I love you’s’, hilarious things we’d laughed about together, pictures I’d sent him of the kids, our inside jokes…it was like a dagger right to the heart. And then, there it was.

As I laid my eyes upon his words, a crushing pain struck in my chest. I don’t know how it’s possible, but emotional pain of this magnitude can and does manifest into physical pain. It was gone as quickly as it came,  and was immediately replaced by a deep, burning rage. One I didn’t recognize. I wasn’t just angry. I was out-of-my-effing-mind infuriated.

I sat there paralyzed with anger on the floor of my exploded house. Hair unwashed for days, no sleep, food and dishes and mess in every corner of the kitchen and living room. My tidy house now in shambles, my kids watching endless TV as I sat in my own personal hell incapable of being the kind of mother they deserved. I had guilt about the house, I had major guilt about the kids, but I could not drag myself up to do anything about anything. I was the walking dead.

So I grabbed my computer to write Honey an email. He ignored most of my texts if they had anything to do with what he’d done. If it had to do with the kids, he’d usually reply. But without fail, whenever he did respond to something about his betrayal, he was robotic and businesslike. He even had a favorite go-to reply.

‘We are getting a divorce, Wife.’

Translation: ‘I don’t need to explain myself to you. Divorce magically means I am not obligated to explain.’

It was brilliant, really. And perfectly commensurate with his stunted maturity. All he had to do was utter these 6 little words to shut me down, and then he’d be scot-free. It happened so often that I’d even started envisioning him holding up an actual sign emblazoned with his crappy new mantra. Kinda like that guy who holds up those signs at golf tournaments.

How ironic that both signs are meant to shut me up.

I suppose I simply hadn’t grasped the full scope of his betrayal until I’d seen those flowers with my own eyes. I felt that I had to tell him that I knew how far back his treachery had gone. But…did I know? All at once, it occurred to me that virtually every word, every explanation I’d been given about how he spent his free time, every complaint about how bored he was, and every ‘I love you’ and ‘I miss you, Baby’ had all been lies. FOR FIVE MONTHS.

And then it occurred to me that that’s just the treason that I know about.

During that five month period, Thanksgiving and Christmas had happened. I was sick on Christmas day of 2013. Really sick. But I held the camera for Skype time with him for almost 2 hours so he could see the babies and I open presents and visit with family. It was such a burden for Honey to be away from us, so I wanted him to feel like he was there that morning. HomeWrecker’s post, in one fell swoop, had made the pride I felt in doing that turn into horror. There I was, giving of myself despite feeling like I was going to faint or throw up in order to serve and love my husband, and I was being made a fool of. And once you begin to look back at life through that lens, you can’t help but now see every part of your life framed that way. How many times and in how many ways did this man take advantage of my desire to serve him, to serve our family? How far back do I need to apply this question? WAS HOMEWRECKER IN THE BACKGROUND ON CHRISTMAS DAY WHEN MY CHILDREN AND I OPENED PRESENTS AND TOLD DADDY HOW MUCH WE LOVED AND MISSED HIM?!

Probably. Yes, she probably was, Wife. This level of injustice is beyond my comprehension. Both of these people are cold blooded and selfish to the bone.

I found out what I needed to know from looking at her timeline, and then some. I was more than ready to speak my mind to Honey without restraint. So I sent him two emails, a couple days apart.

The first email was titled ‘Traitor, Thy Name is Husband.’ (click to read). The second email was titled ‘Your Lies: A Pictorial!’ (to follow soon). I was not kind about HomeWrecker in either email. Nor should I have been. She, like many other unapologetic homewreckers on this earth, gets mad at the wife when she goes ballistic and calls her out on what she’s done. No introspection about their role in forming inappropriate bonds to someone unavailable, someone with a family counting on them. No consideration for what encouraging his departure would mean to my life, or the life-long damage that comes from removing a father from the lives of little ones. You hurt my children, HomeWrecker. You of all people ought to know what that unleashes in a woman.

Honey didn’t reply to either email. But HomeWrecker did. Rather than confront me directly, she had a temper tantrum on FaceBook. Again. But this time, she didn’t show any of that ‘restraint’ she’d patted herself on the back for the week before. I no longer have the screenshots of it (and she has since deleted the sh**-show, probably at Honey’s urging), but I recall most of what she said. She posted several separate status updates in a row. Each was about 5 sentences long, they were in all caps, and each horribly misspelled sentence was followed by a good 9 or 10 exclamation points.

Sigh. It’s enough to lose faith in the entirety of the human race. Then, this.

“YOUR (SP) NOT PERFECT YOU KNOW!!!!!!!!!!! YOU DON’T KNOW ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YOU SHOULD GET A LIFE AND STOP CREEPING MY FACEBOOK PAGE, STALKER!!!!!!!!!! YOUR (SP) PATHETIC, I PITY YOU!!!!!!!!!

I AM NOT THE CAUSE OF THIS!!!!!!!!!! You’re right. Much in the same way bulldozers don’t bring down houses, gravity does. Semantics, HomeWrecker.

YOU HAVE DONE THE EXACT SAME THING!!!!!!!!! I have? Wow. News to me. Honey sure has been busy spinning his yarns, hasn’t he? I bet he could make a sweater for the empire state building by now.

YOU’RE (SP)  ROOF WAS LEAKING AND YOU’RE (SP) BASEMENT WAS FLOODID BEFORE I EVER GOT , , HERE!!!!!!!! Oooo! An analogy. I love analogies. Here’s one I’m fond of:

But you know, I find it also really helps to know the light is out. Honey was blowing so much sunshine my way, I never had a clue about the darkness I was living in. See? Analogies are my friend, too.

YOU EVEN GOT AN EMAIL ABOUT IT GIVING YOU A HEADS UP SO DON’T ACT LIKE YOU DIDN’T’ KNOW!!!!!!!!! YOUR (SP) NOT SO INNOCENT!!!!!!!!! (Deep breath) So, let me make sure I’m hearing you correctly. If I actually had gotten some mysterious email from Honey (which of course I never did) telling me that this was coming, that would have somehow made it…okay with you that he ended his 14 year friendship, marriage, and parenting partnership in the way that he did? Lying? Cheating? Leaving me with 2 babies in diapers with no plan? Furthermore, this ‘heads up email’ that magically would have made me ‘not so innocent’ in all of this…would have meant that I deserved betrayal and abandonment? Because I got some email that Honey claimed existed?

So using that logic, I suppose you’d find it equally acceptable if he’d scrawled ‘we’re through’ on a cocktail napkin and slid it across the bar to me? How about if he’d left a post it note on the coffee maker that says ‘I don’t love you anymore’? How about a singing telegram? Or while we’re indulging the absurd, how about, oh I don’t know, speaking meaningful words towards my face region using sounds that come out of his mouth hole?

Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure that if Honey had attempted to give me a heads up (which he of course did not) the only form of communication accepted at this window would have been verbal. Any other form of communication would have to be taken to the next window down the hall to be signed, notarized, presented in triplicate, and shoved neatly up his ass. Because he’s a grown-ass man, and it was his job to open his mouth and speak. An email? Really?

And the Comments Section. OH MY GOD THE COMMENTS SECTION. Her mother wrote ‘string the bitch up’. I can’t even. That her mother felt free to say this on a public website to the brokenhearted wife of her daughter’s married boyfriend tells me so much about why she is the way is. Horrifying.

“YOUR (SP) NOT PERFECT YOU KNOW!!!!!!!!!!! Thank you for enlightening me. I am hyper-aware of this, actually. Had my spouse said ‘hey, I don’t like it when you (fill in the blank) or hey, I’d like it if you’d (fill in the blank), I would have listened. I have a great capacity for humility, self-reflection, and change. But Honey never complained about a thing. He never said he was unhappy. He never even ACTED unhappy. He did, on the other hand, say that he was ‘blessed to have me for a wife’ and that he ‘loves me dearly’. Daily. So, imagine my horror and surprise when he up and walks out on me and the kids, and moves right in with you thousands of miles away. He can claim whatever he wants to about me. But the fact of the matter is, HomeWrecker, that any negative thing he says never once got said to his wife, only to his mistress behind her back. And that is who you’re marrying. You’re about to be the wife. Would you like it if he did that to you? Of course you wouldn’t. You’d deserve to have your private marital issues kept between you, because he’s supposed to have your back, right? Well he was supposed to have my back. But he stabbed me in it instead….right after I had his babies. So, you know. Welcome to the family.

YOU DON’T KNOW ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!! No, and I’m beginning to be increasingly grateful for this as the minutes pass.

YOU SHOULD GET A LIFE AND STOP CREEPING MY FACEBOOK PAGE, STALKER!!!!!!!!!! You’re sleeping with my husband. Your page is public. You can call it creeping, but I call it research. Very amusing, very disturbing research.

YOUR (SP) PATHETIC, I PITY YOU!!!!!!!!! Did you just really mock me with a Mr. T meme? I’d be impressed at the humor it takes to do that if I wasn’t so busy trying to explain to my devastated son why daddy isn’t come back today. Or ever.

And as far pitying me, you don’t. That would require compassion, and it’s clear that’s in short supply where you and Honey are concerned. What happens when two narcissists with no impulse control and zero empathy collide? A love story for the ages! Or, eventual mutual restraining orders. Gonna shake that magic 8 ball and go with ‘outlook not so good’.

Do these people who you seek sympathy from by posting this selective victimization nonsense understand that you’re playing them? That you’re manipulating a defensive response from them on your behalf so you can feel less crappy about being so crappy? I guess what I should really be asking you is where the rest of your post is. I mean, if you’re going to passively aggressively attack me without having to grow a pair to do it directly to me on the phone, shouldn’t there at least be some context? Without context, things get weird. Like, for example, post my emails in their entirety so everyone can see what I said that got you so mad. You know. The part about what you knowingly did to my family. Context: it’s your friend.

And here’s a silly question: why is any of this ending up on Facebook when you have my phone number and email address? Are you 12? What are you going to do next, post a bunch of sad duck-faced selfies on Instagram doing an interpretative dance of your misunderstood darkness? Will you be wearing your pink hello kitty hoodie with the rhinestone studded skulls? Because that would show how you’re super adorable, but also totally badass.

Another thing you should know, HomeWrecker, was that when that you had this tantrum, I was already at the lowest point a human can be at emotionally. I was about three floors below rock bottom, actually. I literally felt like I was dying of my broken heart. I cried multiple times a day, every day. If my kids were in the room, I’d duck out to cry on the floor of the laundry room, just out of earshot, until I could get it together. My hands shook. I was in deep, trauma-induced anxiety for months. I had just lost my husband, my best friend, my partner, my family, my home, my future, their daddy, and the man that promised to be there to hold my hand in my hospital bed when I’m 80. You got that? All of it, gone.

There are truly dark moments in every woman’s life, and I’d like to congratulate you for getting this temper tantrum right up there near the top of my list. Why is it that you get to be as scandalous and cruel as you like, but I’m expected to just sit down, be quiet, and eat the sh** sandwich? You can take a sledgehammer to my life and then mock me publicly from the safety of your keyboard, and I’m just supposed to take it? Well, this is me turning the tables, HomeWrecker. The irony that I am now doing that very thing does not escape me. But since I have enough sense to keep this blog anonymous, I get to freely indulge myself in talking to you/not to you/about you/indirectly on the internet.

The last thing worth mentioning was that as I perused her FaceBook profile that day, I noticed something else very telling. She is flat out in love with herself. She has nothing but dozens and dozens of duck-faced, sex kitten selfies plastered over every inch of her wall.

So to her/not to her/about her/indirectly on the internet, I say…

I often sat around my super boring and inconsequential life before you liberated Honey, HomeWrecker, and thought ‘how many different ways can I stick my lips and boobs out while I fluff my hair in a booth at the Olive Garden?’ The answer, according to your page, is seven.

If I ever wondered over here in my meaningless existence if it were possible to take too many pictures of myself in the reflections of a friend’s mirrored sunglasses, after looking at your page I now know the answer is emphatically YES. For the love of all things holy, please stop.

And when you complained that your teenage daughter was posting too many racy selfies on her wall, I thought ‘It’s too bad I’m not worth a moment’s thought to HomeWrecker. Because if I weren’t so…inconsequential, I might be able to school her on what it truly means to reap what you sow.’

…Director’s Cut!

STAY TUNED FOR PART 3, COMING SOON…