Reclaiming my bliss

I’ve been on a torturous journey these last few years.  The ups and downs of this process have seriously at times felt as though I was on a roller coaster with no end in sight, and sometimes feeling barely strapped in.  Waking up one day in fear, another day in doubt, a third in reserved happiness, only for the cycle to repeat itself again and again, with no pattern, and no seeming reason for one reaction over another.

They say that children learn through repetition.  Having the same stimuli over and over again allows their brains to synthesize the information, process it, completely massage and engulf it, and then spit it out with a complete understanding of it.  I think the same applied to me with the details of the affair, the needing to know all of the gory details, the whys, the whens, the hows.  The whys were the most important.  I would often be asked by friends who were struggling to understand “why would you expose yourself to that?” when they’d learned that I’d read her emails over again, or revisited some of the text messages from the days around the disclosure.  I needed to.  I needed to re-read the details again, with a new set of eyes, and a new perspective to allow myself to FEEL the shift.  The ability to say “the last time I read this, I was trembling in fear.  I was hopeless.  I felt alone and beaten down.  Today, I read it again and I don’t feel that way.”  It was, I suppose, a way of establishing a barometer for how far I’d come.  Without these exercises of reliving, I had no way to objectively measure my progress.  I needed to know that I was moving forward, and not just because I wanted to THINK I was….but I wanted to KNOW that I was.  My feelings in the moment became my roadmap, and the shift in my feelings was showing me that my place on the map was moving.

The last few months have been very hard on me.  My mother passed away in October after a long struggle with an illness.  As I had mentioned in an earlier post, how my mother was ill, and how the mistress’ email to my mother disclosing the affair and the baby hit her quite hard.  The emotional torment she endured over the next while, I won’t ever truly understand.  My mother was very private about her struggles – stoic really.  Where she tried to hide that she was suffering, we all knew.  Her detachment from my husband, her reservations about visiting our home, finding excuses for it to just be me and the kids.  We knew she was angry at him…she could just never say it.  To say it would have made her “insensitive” in her mind….so she stayed quiet and stewed.  Within weeks of the disclosure, her health started to rapidly decline, like a runaway vehicle gains speed on a downward slope.  Every visit represented a marked change in her appearance, her function, her abilities.  She was now dying in front of our eyes, and there was no way to stop it.  Every day since the disclosure to her by email, I’ve regretted her knowing.  Would she still be with us if she hadn’t experienced this pain and trauma along with us?  Would we still have a few good years? months?  No one will ever know.  All I know is that she is gone, and I won’t ever get her back.

With the death of my mother, the grief it raised, the ongoing battles with the mistress’ harassment, and the strength I needed to muster in order to simply function (I had a birthday party booked for the morning after she died that I had to carry on with and put on a happy face), I really didn’t think that a human being should have to experience this much suffering all at the same time.

In August 2011, I received a phone call from the Police.  They called to inform me that the mistress had called them to file a formal complaint against me for harassment.  “Wait…”, I thought.  “How can I be charged with harassment when I am the injured party?”.  None of it made sense.  She has somehow discovered where we live, despite having moved.  She harasses me online by stalking my twitter account to see what I/we are up to.  She creates formal yet baseless (non factual and non-evidence bearing) complaints to my husband’s workplace insisting that he be fired.  Her lawyer sends ridiculous emails asking me to stop preying upon this poor single mother.  I have never once sent any communication to her, or done ANYTHING remotely harassing in nature.  I am not doing ANYTHING to invite further exchange.  It seems, however, that she wants a relationship with us and a window into our lives, and so she makes ludicrous statements in order to maintain dialogue with us, no matter how perverse.

For those who haven’t followed from the beginning, and who aren’t aware of the multiple claims she is making against us legally, she is firstly claiming that she was wrongfully dismissed from her workplace because she became pregnant, even though he informed her quite clearly that she was being fired for her malicious behavior, and not due to her being pregnant.  She sees dollars signs in this claim, and so she is fighting tooth and nail to have someone believe that she was wronged, and that *I* somehow in my anger towards her, convinced my husband to fire her.  Please.  I wish she would for once take some responsibility for her actions, and realize that she messed up.  She crossed the line.  She took it too far and allowed the personal relationship to destroy the professional one.  She was fired with cause, and if anyone finds otherwise in this claim, I will lose all faith in the legal system.

Before any case goes to trial, each side has the opportunity to present their evidence to the “other side” and to be questioned by the opposing sides’s lawyer.  It is called an examination for discovery and typically lasts several hours, with each side having their chance to share their perspective, and provide proof for their claim.  For us, that day just came yesterday.  While I would not be allowed into the discovery for her or for my husband, there was no doubt in my mind that I was going to be present.  In support of my husband, and to reclaim my power, I went.  What I witnessed was shocking.  This woman who has tormented us the past 2 years.  This woman who yelled at me over the phone and ridiculed me in the wake of my discovery of the relationship.  This woman who has signed off on almost every email with a reminder of how amazing and awesome she is – she was anything BUT awesome.  I don’t know why, but with all that has gone on, I suppose I had built up a picture of her in my mind that depicted strength, malice, conviction, confidence, ruthless. What I saw yesterday was anything but those things.  What I saw was a scared little girl, intimidated by process, crying her eyes out at the line of questions that was coming her way.  I saw a woman, poorly dressed (albeit I think she tried, that was just her best), with stringy, greasy hair dangling in her face, shoulder shrugged, looking beaten down by life.  If I didn’t know better, I might think she was mentally ill and suffering with a psychotic episode.  She walked past us, our appointments overlapping, and made her way into the hallway.  I couldn’t help but notice how heavy set she is.  This same woman who has balked about her great physique, her prowess as a runner, her ‘tight’ fit body….it looks like things have changed.  Having a baby will do that to you I guess.  What I saw was a shrinking violet, and it was the most empowering, strength-inducing thing I could ever have hoped to see.  What followed only confirmed our perceptions when our counsel told us what a mess she had been. Inconsistent in her answers, unable to maintain decorum, breaking into tears like an out of control train wreck.  What was supposed to take 2 hours, took more than three due to the frequent breaks needed to allow her to calm down in between questions.  She was, at the very heart of the matter, the drama queen she has always been, looking to invoke pity for herself, and cast herself as the victim.  It was pathetic, and I felt sorry for her in so many ways.  I realized in that moment, that I have won.  What seemed like a big intimidating force turned out to be a small, needy, scared little girl.  In the way that a small person’s shadow can appear long and tall with the right backlight, once the light was removed and she was seen for who she really is, she was pitiful.

My husband then had the opportunity to be questioned by the opposing side.  Two hours of questions which were supposed to pertain to her employment became tangential when her counsel started asking ridiculous questions like “how many times did you have sex at work?”.  The funniest part of that was that my husband was unable to recall.  It has been too long, and he is a man for whom those small details are not worth holding on to.  He has long forgotten how often they were together.  I’d like to think that it was because the sex just wasn’t that memorable 😉

So now, as we embark on the next leg of this journey, the establishment of a family law contract around the custody and child support for this child, and following that, a defamation suit brought against her by us for her latest malicious and false statements made in an attempt to cost him his job. As we prepare for the next chapter of this journey, we are comforted by the knowledge that we are as close as we have ever been, and that the witnessing of this debacle yesterday shows us that what we are facing is not to be feared.  We stand stronger together, and together we will be.