Once Honey left me on the floor of our house with our babies and had driven off toward his ‘romantic new beginning’, I was throwing up and sobbing from the most intense night of hell I’d ever experienced. I just kept thinking ‘Oh my God, he’s really left us. He took our family away from us. He left us and he’s gone thousands of miles away from me, from his babies. For a stripper he met in a bar. This can’t be happening. No warning. He lied to me for 5 months, and that’s just the part I know about. He’s supposed to protect us from harm but he’s just caused more of it than anyone else ever could. He’s just abandoned our family to the cold world like it was nothing. Oh my God this cannot really be happening.’

These thoughts were on continuous repeat 24/7. Each one would cause searing, panicky pain and start a fresh river of tears flowing. I felt the grief of death. The sting of rejection. The shame of placing my trust and loyalty with someone who would abuse it so fully. And I felt deep guilt for my part in causing these 2 beautiful human beings to start their lives at such a massive disadvantage and with such a huge gaping wound. The daddy wound.

The implications began to unfold and only created more questions without answers. I was beside myself and in shock. Not shock as in surprise, shock as in the bio-physical bodily response to trauma.

My nervous system felt like it’d been hooked up to an electric chair and fried to a crisp.

My stomach had a sickening pit in it that never went away, day or night.

Sleep was the only relief, but falling asleep was basically impossible. I’d have to stay awake until my body literally began to shut down, and once I’d felt like I’d taken a blow dart to the neck, I could lay my head down and go right under. But if I tried to lay there before I was passing-out from exhaustion, the thoughts and the tears would start and it was totally futile. Once I was lucky enough to go under, sleep was extremely sporadic because merely turning over and waking up slightly would make me become aware of everything, and I’d sit up in a panic, frantic and sobbing. I got only a handful of hours each night, which only served to intensify my problems.

I trembled.

I had constant stomach problems and wanted to throw up every waking minute, but couldn’t.

I was in a fugue, a dream-state.

I felt as though I wasn’t capable of sustaining my own life, let alone the lives of two very intensely needy babies. I honestly don’t know how I survived those first few days, or how I met all their endless needs. I did so…very minimally. I remember at one point throwing cheerios down for them like chicken feed and then going to lie down on the bathroom floor so I could be next to the toilet. I had, and still have, deep guilt about this. Yet I know the party that should have been feeling guilt about putting us in that position was sleeping soundly in post-coital bliss somewhere in a soft, warm bed…with HomeWrecker.

Neither of them once saw me as a human worth a moment’s thought. Neither gave a drop of respectful consideration to me at any point in this whole thing. I wasn’t a person, a loving wife, or new mother worthy of dignity and respect.

I was an obstacle.

Wife who? What’s she got to do with me? I don’t care if this humiliates her or causes her anguish. F*** her, I’m happy and that’s all I care about. She’s probably a bitch, so my actions are justified. Well, I’m not a bitch, Homewrecker. I’m a decent, trusting, normal person. Well, I was, anyway. Maybe I’m a bitch now. But I certainly wasn’t then. I was as trusting and naive as they come.

As you read this blog, you may wonder what the point of recounting all of this is. Why drag this ugly event and these awful feelings back up and detail them, ad-nauseam, for myself or for readers? There is a very simple answer for that, one that anyone who’s been betrayed can relate to, I’m sure.

I want it on record that this happened.

The injustice is too much to bear if this story simply gets washed away in the haze of time. I want it on record. I matter. My kids matter. My story matters. Whatever cocktail of lies he’s fed everyone to get his shiny new life, this is a record that he can’t just get in his truck and drive away from. It’s one he can’t just leave in his rear-view mirror, believing no one will know how horribly he behaved because all they ever see is his sense of humor and his warm smile. Just as I once did.

I have no interest in making my life’s legacy fraught with despair, unforgiveness or hatred. The rest of my story has yet to be written, and I don’t get to read to the end of the book. None of us do. And if I’m honest, I guess I really don’t care if people think I’m bitter. They’d be right. What other word so perfectly conveys the taste left in one’s mouth when they’ve faced such mistreatment? Do I want to remain that way? God no. But…can’t we just be what we are, and have that be ok for now? Maybe it’s not the best to tell someone to ‘Just be positive!’ Or to tell them ‘You’re going to have so many great things in your future, and you’re going to meet Mr. Right, I just know it!’

There’s nothing wrong with the spirit in which it’s offered, but the fact is, you don’t know anything of the sort. That which we love and strive to protect can crumble into a million pieces in a second.

Control is an illusion.

I may live the rest of my life so damaged by this that I can never have another successful relationship with a man, which simultaneously would leave my children fatherless (or without one that isn’t just an image on an Ipad screen, anyway). That truth haunts me. While I do know it’s only one of a myriad of potential outcomes for my life, it’s the one that keeps me up at night. It’s the one that feels the most…likely right now. Because who’s lining up for this damaged mess?!

Well, Van is. But that’s for another day…

Here’s the highlight reel from after Honey left…

• I told Honey that I was going to find and talk to HomeWrecker. I eventually found her and sent a text. More about that ridiculous tet a tet in a future blog…
• I sent a total of 8 emails to Honey (and dozens of texts) in the days and weeks that followed his abrupt departure. Some were rage filled, some were pleading for an explanation, some were crying out in my agony for my husband to take away my pain. 90% were ignored.
• Those that he did respond to were brief, to the point, coldy businesslike, and robotic. ‘We are getting a divorce, Wife.’ This was his ‘go to’ reply. When I’d beg for some explanation of how he could do this, this was his way of telling me ‘I don’t need to explain myself to you. Divorce magically means I am not obligated to explain.’ Pretty awesome treatment of the wife that loved and trusted him for 14 years, wouldn’t you say?
• Two of the emails I wrote were very…ugly. I was at my most furious, and most frail in those days. His refusal to explain only fueled my rage and desire to learn the truth for myself. So when I found HomeWreckers FB page, I came apart. I copied and pasted the pics she’d posted of his love notes and flowers to her. They were posted well before I had any idea she existed. I wrote him an email condemning her actions, and her tacky and cruel choice to post these things when she knew he was a married man…and that he hadn’t even bothered to clue his wife in to his apparent ‘unhappiness’ yet.
• HomeWrecker READ the emails I wrote to my husband. We had only been apart for a few weeks at this point. She read the furious, snarky things I’d written about her, and about his flagrant betrayal of trust. So, the following day, she went on what I like to call a ‘Facebook Status Update Rampage’. She posted five or so in a row. They went a little something like this (and without exception, almost every single word was misspelled): I AM NOT THE CAUSE OF THIS!!!! YOU ARE EXACTLY THE SAME AND HAVE DONE THE SAME THING!!!!! YOU HAD PROBLEMS, DONT BLAME ME!!!!!! I’M NO HOMEWRECKER!! THE ROOF WAS LEAKING AND THE BASEMENT WAS FLOODED BEFORE I EVER GOT THERE!!!! BESIDES, YOU GOT AN EMAIL GIVING YOU A HEADS UP, SO DONT ACT LIKE YOU DIDNT KNOW THIS WAS COMING!!! YOU’RE PATHETIC, I PITY YOU!! And just below this last status was a picture of Mr. T, with a caption that read ‘I pity da fool!’
• Um…wow. I don’t even know where to start. First, let’s begin by simply going on record as saying this has got to be one of the classiest women I’ve ever encountered. She’s just a delight in every way. Honey…really? This is who you left me for? This is who you left our family for?? I don’t even have the words.
• At the time she did this, I was so emotionally fragile from the rawness of it all that it caused me to have a legit panic attack and sobbing fits for hours. She was…laughing at me. She knowingly had a hand in breaking my family apart, but that just didn’t do enough for her. She had to stand over the flaming wreckage and laugh. That’s the same as seeing someone lying on the ground with 2 broken legs, and deciding that this seemed like a pretty good time to heap some burning hot coals on top of them. Cruel and cold-blooded as they come, this one.
• A few weeks after that, they got these beauties:
• 
• To be clear : We were separated for 7 weeks when they decided to get these tacky, awful, hideous, revolting, prison-tat style gems emblazoned on their throats. For all time. Yep. Please believe me when I say that this was not the person I knew as my husband. We’re clearly seeing the ‘mid-life crisis’ version of Honey at this point.

From here, things only went downhill with HomeWrecker and her ilk.

She put endless FB Posts on FB in order to taunt me…

Went online and added rude comments in response to things I’d write to my husband…

Laughed off my anger as if it was some pathetic joke…

And though I couldn’t have known it at the time, a string of the most absurd online temper tantrums awaited…

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