A Letter

My mom has been visiting and keeping me busy.

After she left, the older kids were with their dad and I waited for Jr to be dropped off from his dad, I wrote a letter to DB.

 

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DB,

The first time you decided to text another girl, or flirt with, call, whatever the situation was, with hope that it would lead to something more, you made a choice. It was so unimportant to you that (if you are to be believed) you don’t even remember when it happened or how it started but you chose that moment over our future.

So here are some moments that you decided you didn’t want to be around for:

When K turns 21, you were convinced that taking him out for a drink was important enough to challenge your sobriety. Would we have gone out for that drink? Would you have been able to have that beer and still keep your drinking under control? I believed that you could. I believed that you could take that boy you met out as he turned into a young man and share a drink responsibly.

Could you imagine S in her prom dress? Would you have complained about the skin it showed while I challenged your beliefs about what young teens wore and why? She will be beautiful. I wonder if L would go with her the next year. Watching them both leave for prom and what beautiful young women they were turning into?

In a few years C will be in high school. I worry about the choices he makes. He has always looked for a good male role model. His dad has always had his nose in the computer and C would rather be out playing sports. You would never replace his father but I imagined you both bonding over soccer and teaching him the things he is interested in that his dad is not; cars, tools, talking to women, controlling impulsive urges. I thought you would be the man he needed in his life.

The birth of our baby girl. You won’t see her first breath, her first time opening her eyes, the moment Jr meets his younger sister. You won’t be here to comfort him as this new baby takes over his mommy’s lap and he feels left out. You won’t be here at night to know if she grunts in her sleep like he did or if she only sleeps on my chest like he did. You won’t cover yourself in my breastmilk while spending skin to skin time with her in hopes that she would be comforted in your arms instead of wailing for me.

That decision you made… the one you say you don’t even remember… that was so unimportant to you to risk everything….

It took away watching them learn to drive. Seeing graduations from high school. Seeing these goofy teen girls turn into smart young women. It didn’t even matter to you that when you were cheating on me, you were cheating on them.

 

That house we looked at and will never buy. The one with the creek in the back. I imagined you building a deck on the back.  We would have had a dog and a goat.

I won’t go to school and get my nursing license, helping move our family out of “working class” and helping our family move into a solid middle class. Instead, our kids will grow up in two households, neither making enough money to go to DisneyWorld like we talked about. I won’t ever go back to your home town and see where you grew up and meet your dad.

We won’t watch the next Avenger’s movie and leave the theater obsessed with spoilers for the next week or longer.

The vacation to Grand Canyon I wanted to do next summer. We won’t ever get  a chance to go on the Alaskan Cruise, just the two of us, like we talked about. Maybe doing something stupid like sky diving at our next big milestone birthday.

I told myself lies about T, and stayed in love with those lies. But you… you told me lies and I loved those lies. I have come to realize that you were never who I thought you were and so I am not so sorry to lose you. It still hurts that the future I had dreamed with you meant so little to you.

It hurts that my memories over the last 18 months were as fake as our last family vacation. I just didn’t know it. You were there in body but while these were happy memories for me, now they are a reminder that you were lying and cheating while I remained oblivious and naive. How did you continue your charade for so long? Knowing how much you would hurt all of us?

Our first appointment for baby girl where you making a date with Harley.

Finding out we were having a baby and you were sexting some girl on facebook 2 days later.

My birthday. Your birthday. K’s 18 birthday… all while you were cheating.

Your 1  year sobriety where I gave you a gift and told you how much it meant to this family that you chose us. (Except you actually didn’t).

Playing Wow together and thinking I was doing my part to bond with you, not knowing you spent the rest of your time online with women.

Christmas time where you didn’t get anything for my stocking and I had filled yours with trinkets of things that I thought you would like.

Taking Jr out trick or treating the first time while you sent pictures to your woman on the side.

Going to the pumpkin farm and we seemed so happy and now I wonder if it was because you were seeing Brittany.

Our anniversary… which coincides with when the affair with Brittany started.

Baby’s First  Birthday and shortly after talking about when we would have another.

Going to the Family Reunion after my great aunt had died and knowing that may be the last one.

Camping last year and now knowing you may have had to tell your woman on the side that you would be with out service for a week.

Celebrating our new job. The job I spent hours after work scouring openings, looking for the right locations, pay and experience, writing your resume, and turning in your resume, talking you through the possible interview questions only for you to tell your other woman about landing your new job to impress her.

….

For you those memories are the same but for me, they are all tainted. The memories I look back on and felt closest to you, thinking this was the reason that I was trying to make it work, were memories of lies. you betrayed me, but also your family, with women you say didn’t even matter to you. You convinced me to have another baby while lying and robbed me of happy memories of our son growing up with thoughts like… Did he even feel guilty when he sent those pictures of our family moments to the other women?

I loved you because I thought our family mattered to you. When you quit drinking, I thought I found someone that could put his family first. We fought a lot and things were difficulty. Blended families Teenagers, Teens moving out, Toddlers, Infant, a difficult pre teen… dealing with ex husbands and ex husbands girlfriend. Dealing with lack of time, lack of privacy, lack of intimacy. Those things are temporary. We had our entire lives to figure it out.  Now I realize that you just began lying to me in different ways.

I was wrong but my heart doesn’t break for me. It breaks for Jr. Every time he learns a new skill and there is only one set of eyes to tell him how proud they are. When he does something silly and looks back to see if I am watching and knowing he used to look back to see if WE were watching. And my heart breaking for him is so much fucking worse than just breaking for me. I already did the broken family once. I know how hard it is. I have told you how hard it is.

It makes me so incredibly angry that you were willing to gamble all of that in a moment that you don’t even remember. For women that you say didn’t even matter to you. That you continued to talk to women, even after the pregnancy when you could have deleted all of you contacts, stop tried to fuck everything that moves, and decided to bring yourself back to this family you helped create.

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I didn’t know how else to end it and he walked in the door right about then anyway so I handed it to him as is. I asked him to read it before he left and he seemed fine while he read it but afterwards began to cry and said something to the lines of that being why he can’t read my texts. He said, again, how sorry he is and how he wishes he could take it back.

I told him that I didn’t think there was anything he could do at this point to make it right.