Winning!! Duh.

Isn’t that the name of the game? Winning? Do you know of any athletes that bleed and toil and rise at dawn for practice every day for decades that really don’t mind losing? Do we cheer for our favorite teams, indifferent to their success or failure? Of course not. After all, who doesn’t love watching the big World Series win, replete with a teary eyed pitcher thanking God and his team, insistent it wasn’t his efforts that got him there…as we all sit there eating our wings and our nachos, feeling good about his triumph as a collective body of sports fans? We can’t get enough of winning.

But we like our winners…humble. We like ’em gracious when they trounce their opponent in the big game. We’d like those folks who burned with laser focus on that win for years to suddenly shuffle their feet in the dirt and mumble ‘aw shucks’, and at least don the facade of good sportsmanship…even if that’s the farthest thing from what they feel like doing.

Maybe what they feel like doing, but never do, is walk over, grab the trophy, shove the 90 year old team owner down on the field and yell ‘Do you really think this was an accident, Grampa? This was ALL ME, baby!’

But this kind of unabashed self-promotion and flagrant disregard for others leaves a God-awful taste in people’s mouths. Just ask Charlie Sheen.

It would stand to reason, then, that anyone with good sense would hide their desire to strip naked and ride a tiger around the stadium chanting ‘I am the God of Winning! Bow before me, pusillanimous peasants!!’

No one likes a braggart. Why? Because it’s a dick move.

So, the winning-obsessed often hide it. But the intuitive among us often get a sense that something’s amiss. We may not share our suspicions with others, lest we be labeled negative, cynical, or – God forbid – jealous. We may be the only ones able to tell that there’s nothing more than a thin applique of stinky humble-pie cologne all over ’em. Whether they ever show their true colors or not really just depends on what they’re in it to gain. Or in some cases, what they’re not willing to lose.

If people really knew they were a self-absorbed ass, disregarding others by seeing them as nothing more than human stepping stones on their way to victory, they wouldn’t get the accolades and acclaim that fuels them. The narcissistic supply would run dry. The cheering would stop. Hot dogs would be thrown.

So maybe, such as is the case with my good pal HomeWrecker, they just really suck at keeping appearances up. Cracks in the facade appear, and for those of us keenly aware of that particular brand of cologne, we get a big whiff of what no one else seems to be able to smell.

Ode de False Humility.

This leads me to HomeWrecker’s utterly unsubtle gloating about her ‘victory’ in removing a married man from his wife and children. Now, please don’t misunderstand me here. Honey is ultimately responsible for his decisions. But seduction of the weak-minded is predatory, and disregard for innocent people who’d be hurt is reprehensible. So both of these calloused narcissists bear the blame equally in my book. We’re talking about the woman who used a Mr. T meme to mock me in the darkest hour of my life, so it’s not as if I need to go looking for cold-hearted behavior to draw this conclusion. It’s in abundance all around me.

How did she gloat? How else? FaceBook.

There wasn’t ever a moment where I thought ‘Now, Wife…maybe that post could have been a coincidence. Not everything’s about you, you know!’ Nope. I smelled the cleats and the popcorn a mile away. This was her naked-on-a-tiger victory lap. Her intent seemed perfectly clear to me. Rub her ‘win’ in my face while she feigned piety with everyone else…and while she knew I was watching.

Gaze upon the resplendence that I was gifted with in the first few days and weeks after Honey left. This is but a tiny fraction of the crazy-making nonsense I was treated to, but these are my personal favorites.

This was posted the day after I told Honey I knew who she was and had found her FB page.

This was posted within days of HW learning I’d found out who she was, and that I’d found her FB page.

She tagged Honey in this one. Guess she believes she’s the better reason…and sanctioned by God himself, at that!

Winning!!!

It was a win, alright. A victory secured by a thoughtless harpy content to get that win by kneecapping her opponent. The kind of player who sees nothing wrong with tripping the runner as he rounds third towards home. In other words, she was perfectly happy to get that win by CHEATING. The game was fixed. The irony is, I didn’t even know there WAS a game. I never got to play. Hell, I didn’t even get one of those crappy plastic ‘participant’ medals with the obnoxiously colored lanyard.

I wasn’t even in the freakin’ stadium.

Wish I could have been there to have at least kept score or something. Ok. So if H-Dubs goes home from her job at the strip club at 3am, and Honey is married with 2 kids and has to leave for work at 5am, how many times can he betray his wife before he’s late for work? 5, 2, 3…carry the 1…damn. I don’t know. I never was very good at math.

And, question. If you’re ‘gonna be around regardless’, why cheat to get the win? Face your opponent and follow the rules like everyone else. But I know better. She’s not capable of that level of self-awareness. She will likely stumble through life grabbing and shoving into her mouth or her handbag anything she sees of interest to her. Whether it belongs to someone else or not is irrelevant. She wanted it. She was thirsty, or hungry, or bored. And the world can go to hell and bend to her whim…or else. Just like Honey.

Then, within weeks of my husband walking out with zero warning, she posted this.

A. Neck. Tattoo. Let me just repeat that. A. NECK. TATTOO. What is this? Pitbulls and Parolees? An episode of Breaking Bad? Nope. This is the FATHER OF MY CHILDREN, ladies and gentlemen. Yep. He now looks like he could make a mighty nice license plate if the occasion ever called for it.

I couldn’t believe it. 14 years together, bails with no warning on me and our 1 and 2 year old babies to move across the country and never return, and 6 weeks after he does so, gets a fresh-out-of-prison looking tattoo of some woman’s name permanently emblazoned across his carotid artery for the whole world to see. Nope. Not humiliating or disrespectful to me one bit.

I couldn’t believe this was reality, on top of already not being able to believe this was reality. Thanks for the cherry on top of the horrific FB posts, HomeWrecker!

I texted him ‘Nice tattoo. Now you both look like ex-cons’. His response? He chided me for waiting to mention it when I’d (likely) known he had it for over a week. Yep. THAT’S the issue here. My laggy response time. What with the whole you-left-me-with-2-babies-in-diapers shenanigans, guess I was a little behind on my correspondence. Not the train wreck on your neck. Not the fact that we are very much still married and haven’t even filed for divorce yet. Not the fact that our children will see the name of the person you left our family for every time they look at you for the rest of their lives. It’s my tardiness in approaching you about your egregious behavior. The humblest of apologies, good sir.

Oh, and how would he know that I should have ‘already known’ about the tattoo? He presumed I’d been looking at FB (which I had) and he knew she’d posted it. So he concluded that I’d known since the moment of her posting it. Since the world revolves uniquely and specifically around him, it was somehow on me to approach him about it…and in a timely fashion, at that. If you think this sounds like the passive aggressive thinking of a 13 year old passing notes in gym, I would have to agree. Melrose Place called. They need this plot line for a revamped pilot they’re shooting.

If I were in person with him, I might be compelled to lean over and quietly whisper in his ear ‘Psssst. Your mid-life crisis is showing.’

Guess H-Dubs didn’t like that I’d confronted my HUSBAND about their tattoos. She went on FB and posted ‘Guess we look like ex-cons now. LMFAO.’ Whew! Sure glad one of us is laughing. You know, I think the thing that most impresses me about this human being is her elegance. Her dignified way of handling things. Her class and her grace, her sense of boundaries…

But her crappy character and underhanded tactics don’t really matter in the end because she WON, right?! She got what she wanted, and she’s standing over my smoldering remains hoisting her victory high for the world to see. Shameless. Guiltless. Clueless. The sad and completely ironic truth is, what she believes she’s won versus what she’s actually won could not be more different. This person has no idea about the cold heart that lies behind that warm smile. Like me, she foolishly believes she’s found the elusive brass ring we all aspire to. The real deal…marrying her best friend. In reality, what she’s won is a prize no woman should ever have the misfortune of ending up with. Honey is one incredibly disordered, dishonest narcissist, packaged as nothing more than a totally harmless comedy movie sidekick.

She’s won her prize, and now she has to live with it. But if Honey gets bored again? Or thirsty? Or hungry? Hang up your cleats.

Game over.