Life trudged along. I suspected my husband wasn't happy in his job but when I asked him directly he said he was fine. I made it clear he didn't have to stay in his job but he told me it would get better. He continued to spend hours on his computer playing videos games and, I suspected, surfing porn. I knew he was surfing porn because I found it on his computer. I solved this problem by not entering the office when my husband was on the computer. Ignorance is bliss. We worked on the house and shared our work frustrations. I got a pay raise but the life of a contractor was difficult and I worried constantly about my company losing the contract I worked on. I made some inroads and tried to make myself indispensable.
I traveled quite a bit. One of my first trips was to Germany. Others followed to bases in the US as I begin teaching accident response classes for the government.
One morning I noticed my husband forgot to take his cell phone to work. It had become habit to check his email but the cell phone was sacrosanct. There it lay and I picked it up and checked his voicemail. It required a password but as before, a couple of tries got me in. My heart sank and breathing became almost impossible as I listened to a woman's voice thank my husband for lunch and "everything." She said she really enjoyed talking to him and would like to see him again. She gave him the times she would be at her studio and told him she looked forward to seeing him.
Why couldn't I pick up his phone or read his email or check his drawer just once and not find anything! I was sick to my stomach. I had suspected he surfed porn and suspected he visited chat rooms but this was real. This was right in my face. He met this woman for lunch. I didn't know what to do. My head spun. I went to work. I sat at my desk. My husband was as cheerful as always when he left for work that morning. Cheerful while he was meeting this woman for lunch. Cheerful and loving while he was, what, sleeping with her? With who else? I couldn't think. I was angry. I was sick. I was frightened. I called him at work and told him I heard his cell message.
The pleading began immediately. Wait, wait, he said. Don't do anything, it's not what you think. Please, please he begged. Let's talk about it. Don't do anything. I hung up. In minutes he was walking through my office door. He was shameless. He begged me not to leave him. I told him to be quiet, my entire building would hear him. He cried and I made him walk outside with me.
We sat in my car and I tried not to scream but I told him how disgusting he was. How this was the last straw. How I was filing for divorce. My husband looked devastated. He looked devastated. He begged me not to do anything right away. Not until we could talk about it. My world was crumbing around me. Everything I thought I knew, everything I lied to myself about was laid bare and it was ugly. It was as ugly as I never wanted to know it could be. I sent my husband away and told him I would see him after work.
I had never known such pain in my entire life. It was like being buried alive. I could not breathe. I could not break out of the pain that engulfed me. I could not see the future. I could not think of the past. I cried and moved out of our bedroom. My husband begged me to stay and I told him I would on one condition; he needed to find a marriage counselor for us. I stayed away from out bedroom for a week and then crawled back. I needed any kind of comfort I could find. My husband found a therapist and met with her. She was not a licensed marriage counselor but she felt comfortable and my husband was willing to go.
He dismantled the computer bunker and asked me to stay in the room with him while he was on the computer. I moved a treadmill in there and started exercising. We went to counseling and made some headway and after a while the pain dulled...but the suspicion never did. I often found phone numbers on his phone from women who were not related to his work. He deleted them and told me they were old friends.
In the midst of trying to get better, things got very much worse.
