The Whole Thing: Introduction

He was acting weird. Too attentive, and jumpy. He was pretending to be interested and helpful…”Oh, I can get that for you” and saying, “Oh really? So then what happened?” It was ridiculous behavior, his talking that way, and trying to look me in the eye. I knew something was going on…

The next morning, he went to work and I took my oldest to school. Once I had my three year old settled, I went down to the office in the basement and sat in front of the computer…wondering…do I really want to know all of it? I felt it…I knew it was real and I was about to intentionally look at what I had thought he, of all people…would not do.

I played around with some servers and entered randomly considered screen names, and passwords, but after a while, bored with guessing, I began looking around the office. I found it all written under the desk blotter; the screen names and passwords, and thus began the process of swimming in the bile of addiction and betrayal.

He had acquired a membership and profile on a website geared for people looking for anonymous sex partners. The photo of himself that he submitted for his profile was the one I had taken of him on our 7th wedding anniversary. The same picture of “my husband” that I carried in my wallet…I wanted to vomit. He ever so “honorably” admitted to the women on the sex site that he was married, but then claimed that 15 months earlier I had made some kind of announcement that I was no longer interested in sex…Oh there’s a convenient lie!
He professed his love for me by saying that he was not looking for anything emotional and offered, ever so generously, that he would only give that to me. Blah, blah, blah…
He then went on to describe his creepy sexual desires.

On and on I went, finding the emails of the women he was communicating with, and apparently meeting for sex. I also found a hotel charge on one of our visa bills, with a liquor charge, posted a couple of hours before the hotel charge. He claimed he was a dry alcoholic, and since I had never seen him take a sip of anything with alcohol, I assumed it was for someone else. The liquor store was also only a few blocks from the hotel, so it was very obvious what was happening that particular day.

When he came home “from work” that evening, I knew he could feel something was wrong, he was looking at me sideways, but I didn’t share what I knew…not yet. I wanted more time with the computer…I wanted ALL of it!

After he went to sleep that night, I sewed him up in the bed sheets and beat him with a frying pan. Okay, not really, but it would make a shocking part of storytelling. : )
No, I went out to our company truck, which he NEVER locked, and started looking around. Behind the drivers seat was an expandable folder. I pulled it out and opened it. It was empty, except I could see some sheets of magazine paper. Voile! Pages from a porn magazine! Imagine my lack of surprise!

Over the next two days, I got as much evidence as I could find and printed every piece of it. Obviously he knew I was on to him. He had emailed all of his “girls” and told them that he thought I had become suspicious, so he might not be able to write for a while, until things calmed down. Even knowing that this could tear up his family…his children’s lives, he only wanted to delay, but didn’t intend to stop. How pitiful was this?
Who was this person in my house?

That afternoon, I called a neighbor girl and asked her to baby-sit at about 6pm and then… I waited. What a shame. All those years of keeping silent from friends and family…never telling what the girls and I had really been enduring, in hopes that he could be healed…it had been a complete waste of time. All the times I thought that his inability to tell the truth could be corrected, I had never lost hope and had dragged him from one counselor to another…but this…this was different, and was either going to get straightened out, or I was done.
I was out of excuses for him.

He came home as usual, but with that weird, wide eyed look and full of pretentious interest, again. I told him the baby-sitter was coming over and we were leaving. He became very nervous and asked where we were going…but I just smiled and said, “a ride”. I didn’t know at the time, but it was the beginning of our demise.
Over the next year, the truth would find it’s way, fill our home, and drown us all.