Part 8…….What in the Hell were You Thinking?!?!?

“Ninety percent of the people in the world end up with the wrong person.  And that’s what makes the jukebox spin” – Laurie Anderson

I was all in, in the beginning but little did I realize that it would be the longest “beginning” of my entire life.  The discovery of my emotional theory was a personal breakthrough, it was amazing and I felt I finally had an answer to his indecisive nature. Only my theoretical bubble burst as I drove into my parent’s driveway because I also realized that I too was a victim of this relational Stockholm syndrome.  As I sat there in my car covered in imaginary bubble goo listening to Paul McCartney singing “Baby I’m Amazed”, I knew I had to either get him to leave me alone or make a decision to divorce his wife.  I also knew this wasn’t going to be easy, or that it would happen at all.

I suppose it’s like an arranged marriage, you marry someone that your parents or elder relatives make you marry and at first you know you will never like let alone love this person because you were in love with someone else or wanted a different life.  Then after years of marriage you begin to develop caring feelings for this person you were forced to marry.  Then slowly those feeling of like turn to love over a couple of years of sharing a home and life together.  But sometimes there are signs that you should pay attention to because that may have saved you from an unhappy marriage.

As our relationship evolved as did the trust between us, I became his best friend and he became mine, I became his confidant and adviser to a certain extent as he did the same for me.  All of this happened in spite of our situation, it’s like cultivating a crop of nothing but weeds, somewhere in those weeds you find a rose….a rose with a lot of fucking sharp thorns.  With that came deeper more involved conversations about our past and our lives, marriages and kids.  One night while staying at a hotel we were lying in bed talking and we began another one of our philosophical conversation of “what might have been and what was.”  He decided to tell me the story of how he had built their first house, before they got married he bought a parcel of land off of Piedras street in Central El Paso.  He said his intention was to build them a house so they didn’t have to live with his or her parents or rent a house until they could afford to buy one.  I thought to myself that was very admirable and I would have loved for a man to do that for me (of course what I got was single wide mobile home in Fabens six blocks from my monster-in-law).  Lestat explained that at the time he had started his construction company and would work all day and at night go and work on the house he was building.  He said at times he’d sleep on pallets of roofing shingle or sacks of dry concrete and in the morning would take a shower in the back yard with the garden hose to go off to another day of work.

He also explained that she’d get mad because he would work so late, mind you she didn’t know about that house he was building it was going to be a surprise right before their wedding.  So after months and months of hard work, the day finally came to surprise Fiona with her new house.  He said he picked her up and drove her to the side of town where he’d built the house.  He pulled up in front of the house and she asked what he was doing, he asked her to get out of his truck and then as they both stood there in front of a brand new home.  He told her that this was his wedding present to her.  That this was why he was working so late and that now they had a new house to live in after their wedding.  That’s when he got quiet (which by the way isn’t like him) and I asked him what happen next.  He told me she began to cry, and I thought of course she did, it would make any woman cry to know her future husband not only bought her a house but built it with his own loving hands. You know like what Charming might do, I mean if the fucker was around.

He said he thought the same thing and as he hugged her he began to tell her that he did this as her wedding present, but that’s not why she was crying.  That’s when he said she responded with “I don’t want to live in this neighborhood, it’s so far from my parents’ house and I don’t like it here.”  He said she cried for a week and even asked if they could sell the house to move closer to her parents.  When I heard him say that it drove me into a rage I rarely experience, it was because of the love I felt for this man at the time I was livid at what he was telling me.  I said to him “Are you fucking kidding me?  The bitch said that to you?”  He looked at me and said “yeah she did and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.”  I told him yeah there was you didn’t have to marry the selfish bitch!  I asked him if he didn’t think this was a sign he should rethink marrying her. But we discontinued that particular conversation and my disdain for his wife only grew as the years passed.  He also disclosed to me that day that the reason they had another child was so that their son wouldn’t be an only child and he’d have a sibling to grow up with, not because they actually wanted another kid.

So in short, this man married a woman that he wasn’t attracted to but somehow grew to love and after their marriage began to disintegrate decided to have another baby so their son wouldn’t be an only child.   How fucked up are the reasons that this man made in his lifetime and then decided to have a mistress because he wasn’t getting any emotional or physical affection at home and then told his mistress he loved her but wouldn’t leave his wife whom by this time had told me he didn’t love but still “cared” for?  It’s enough to give you the emotional and mental equivalent of brain freeze. The relational Stockholm syndrome theory began to sink in around about the seventeenth year of our relationship.  Yes I realize that’s a long time but again Charming was still in the back of my mind and I was somehow hoping that he would prove me wrong and show the fuck up.

Now I know many people are going to sit there and judge me for having an affair with a married man, again it didn’t start that way.  But some will question my morals and my sense of self-worth and how I could do that to another woman.  Well, the fact is I wasn’t doing it to another woman I was doing it to myself, because as I put it to Lestat in our last and final fight, I didn’t give a fuck what his wife went through or why, yes that sounds selfish but after everything I knew about Fiona, there was nothing else but hatred for her, her indifference towards him as her husband and taking him for granted everything he provided (even though he was doing the very same thing to me).  You see marriage is a team effort, I knew that from when I was married and I found myself having to pull the matrimonial wagon up every steep hill I encountered in my marriage…alone.  I knew that I should have gotten support in every way from my ex-husband, but I didn’t.  I knew that our marriage fell apart because of the parts we both played in its demise.  We were both at fault and yes sometimes one carries more fault than the other.  But regardless a marriage is made up of two people, and they both have to work at it.  And it equally failed because both had contributing factors and both parties have a hand in the failure of any marriage.

So for those of you pointing your hypocritical fingers at the “other” woman, just stop it, it’s not entirely her fault.  The breakdown begins in the fiery crash that is the marriage involved and within the two people flying the marriage plane.  Both people invested are responsible for the success or failure of a marriage.  One can’t blame one more than the other it’s a partnership and it’s hard work.  Affection, emotional and financial support is only the beginning of trying to keep a marriage afloat.  But some people (both men and women) fail at the physical/sexual part of a marriage.  They get busy, they concentrate on children, careers or education.  But above all sexual/physical affection is important to keep your significant other “fired” up so to speak.  The sooner that both men and women accept this fact the sooner they will realize that they can either try to fix it or leave.  Unless you’re like Fiona who could live with no physical contact because her idiot mother taught her that sex was dirty and wrong and purely for procreation purposes.   But the bitch must have done something right because she tricked a man into marrying her stupid ass right?

Even at forty-nine I still try very hard to look my best, not for a man but for me.  I realized that the hard way that one needs to first love and accept themselves before you can love someone else.  I tried for so long to do what the man that I considered the love of my life wanted from me and I lost sight of who I was, and even worse turned into someone I didn’t recognize.  I was so hell bent on being what his wife wasn’t so that he would see I loved him more than she did he’d divorce her so he could be happy with me.  But that was an illusion, as I mentioned before I suffered from the Relational Stockholm syndrome and the Sleeping Beauty effect, I was metaphorically asleep waiting for this Prince Charming guy to come along and wake me up.  In my case I pricked my finger and then deep emotional sleep set in from all common sense.  Except in my case the emotional sleep was what I believed to be true love and the prick was….well a prick in the shape of my married, obsessive-compulsive, passive-aggressive boyfriend.

Let’s go back to explain about Fiona, his wife because I refuse for anyone to think that I had it in for this woman, which okay I did but not without good reason.  Let me start by explaining the issues I had in my marriage.  As the admitted “other” woman, I realized that I could not have been so stupid to NOT know that my husband was having an affair.  In fact, it did happen to me but I found out not because I cared, but because I wasn’t a total idiot that I wasn’t paying attention to the signs.  My ex-husband is/was a mechanic that worked for a gas company maintaining their company vehicles.  At this company was a secretary named (oh for the sake of this story well call her Gina).  It was obvious they were attracted to each other, I could see it but my marriage was on the last threads of its ever fraying rope and really didn’t care.  I might have if I still had any kind of emotional attachment to my ex, but I didn’t.  It wasn’t the first time either, he (as did I) began to find comfort elsewhere when we began our twelfth year of marriage because the animosity and maturity on my part began to grow as the years went on. We grew apart as most couples do, but because we married as teenagers we grew apart in different ways.

It seemed that we each knew this was happening but didn’t acknowledge the fact because if we did, we’d actually have to deal with it.  And neither of us was emotionally read to do so, so we ignored the situation and continued to go through the motions of our hollow marriage for another two and a half years. One day he called to tell me he was being sent to Carlsbad to fix a vehicle that had broken down over there, and I said that was fine and told him to drive safe and all that jazz.  But that day was payday and I went by to pick up his check like I always did, remember this was before direct deposit, and when I got there his boss (whom I was extremely attracted to, hey at least I’m honest) was in his office.  I knocked on the door and he smiled and asked me to come in and sit down while he looked through all the envelopes for my husband’s paycheck.

He asked me how my husband was doing because he had called in sick, which I found odd because I thought he had been sent out of town, and that’s when it clicked.  I went along with it and told him he was doing better, and then he handed me my husband’s check and I left.  As I walked past the front office I said hi to everyone, they all knew who I was and that I was there every two weeks to pick up my husband’s check.  I asked another girl Carmen where Gina was and she said that she felt sick and had called in sick and had stayed home that day.  I mean, I almost laughed out loud because I actually knew what was going on. I said to her that was too bad and then said my goodbyes to everyone and left.  As I waited at the drive thru at the bank I thought to myself I can’t believe I wasn’t mad or hurt or even felt betrayed for that matter.

I made my deposit and drove to a bar on Montana where I had a friend who was a bartender there.  As I walked in and April (that’s what I’ll call her) saw me she ran up to me and we hugged, she asked how I was and I told her I was great.  I sat at the bar and ordered an Italian Margarita like the ones from Olive Garden, she knew how to make them and they were delish!  As I sat there drinking my cocktail we began to talk, it was slow so she had taken her break and I told her about what I had discovered and she went ballistic.  I told her to calm down and I explained why, she looked at me it complete amazement.  She asked me how long I had felt this way and I told her for a while now.  She also wondered if I was going to confront my husband and I asked why if I was actually okay with it.  I had another two drinks and ate something to help the buzz of the alcohol subside before I drove home.

That day he didn’t come back home until about two thirty in the morning, and I could smell her perfume on him.  I smiled and turned in bed and went back to sleep and didn’t even wake up to talk to him.  I knew of all of my ex-husbands affairs and why did I know without him divulging any details?  Because I wasn’t stupid about the state of our marriage and I also knew that eventually we would go our separate ways, I just didn’t know exactly when.  So when it comes to Fiona it can only be sheer stupidity if she couldn’t figure out that her husband has had a mistress for fucking twenty years of their thirty year marriage. Not that Lestat didn’t do his part to try and hide it because he did, which was another sign that he still cared or loved that ugly horse-faced woman he called a wife.  Why else would he try so hard to keep his relationship with me a secret if he didn’t still love her?  Because neither I nor my ex-husband really cared to cover our tracks when we were with someone else.  Nor did we care to do things together that didn’t involve our boys, because by the end of our marriage we couldn’t stand to be in each other’s company.

But Lestat tried so hard to find ways to cover his tracks when it came to his wife, and of course the only casualty in this entire endeavor was me.  But hold on, this still doesn’t explain why I hate her, there is a so much more than just her being stupid.  How I came to have a deep hate for her existence (so much so that I wrote a short story called Murder on Transmountain Drive, and she was the person murdered in that scenario) was that I saw and heard how she talked to him several times.  I saw many text messages from her where she tells him he was useless and that she was going to file for divorce but never really did.  Texts about how she did everything and he always worked not contributing to the home or rearing of their children when I knew first hand he did.  How she would say that she didn’t care what happened to him when he found out he had skin cancer and that he would have to go through that alone.

Of course his wife only assumed he’d be alone going through whatever he was struggling with didn’t know I was around and that I would be there for him.  Her messages to him of how she hated him for working so much and ignoring her and how she tried really hard to be a good wife (I almost threw up on that one).  One time I saw one of his responses and it went something like, “If you try too hard to be a good wife how come we never have sex?  That is a big part of marriage and you essentially got what you wanted and I got played because you lied to me about what you would do for me.  I gave you everything you ever wanted and I got the short end of the stick here.”  First of all I didn’t really like the fact that he mentioned having sex with her because he said and showed me texts that she was as he’d like to call a “dead fuck.”  You know those people (men and women) that just lie there until the deed is done.  I was actually surprised, then he showed me her answer, and of course the bitch may be an English teacher but she has no discernible communication skills, and she said to him “That she though when they got married he’d give up the entire ‘sex’ thing and they’d raise their kids together and be happy.”  And “you got me pregnant when I didn’t want to have any more kids” like the he could have gotten her pregnant all by himself, what a fucking moron she is.

I was in shock, she actually thought that once she got that ring on her fat finger she didn’t have to try anymore.  As long as she got what she wanted to hell with what he wanted or felt.  Sex is not just sex, it’s an expression of love especially in a good and stable marriage so how could this ignorant idiot actually think this way?!  I didn’t even know how to react, I mean no wonder he had a mistress, but that still didn’t justify when he didn’t leave her stupid ass.  Because she is stupid and as I got bolder and my confidence built up I decided one day to show up to an open house or parent-teacher conference night at the middle school she taught at.  Yes I know this sounds very “Fatal Attraction-ish” but I wasn’t hell bent on killing her or harming their kids, I just needed to see what he wouldn’t leave this woman.  Needless to say my boyfriend, whom happened to be there with her because their son went to school there, he decided to go with them that night, was in complete shock and kind of nervous to see me there.  I stood outside her classroom hiding in plain sight with crowds of parents while swirls of conversations were going on around me.

I just stood and listened as she was talking to one of the parents and her student as she was trying to explain to the mother that her child needed to apply himself more by conducive reading but what she said was conductive, not conducive.  The child’s mother whom was also an educator, a math teacher from another school looked at her with a confused look and then she asked Fiona “You mean to say that Richard needs to apply himself conductively?”  And the stupid bitch nodded and said “yes, in order for him to begin reading at his grade level he needs to read conductively” (spell check is trying to correct this but this is how she was saying this word).  By this point the mother looked more aggravated than confused and in one motion turned to her son who was sitting right by her and said “Richard you listen to Mrs. Shrek and read in a conducive manner, which means more productive so that you can catch up with your class okay?”  Fiona finally had figured out that she was using the wrong word and out of context and began to turn red with embarrassment as was my boyfriend.  I could see him from the corner of my eye and he left the room from sheer second hand embarrassment because he knew the mother of this child was a teacher and that she would go and tell others at her school what an idiot Fiona was as an English teacher.

I felt an evil smile come on and turned to leave as I looked through my purse for the keys to my car.  I walked through the parking lot with a sense of satisfactory confirmation about this woman’s intelligence, but still wondered why he was still with her, my cell phone rang.  As I drove I answered and it was Lestat and boy was he mad.   He asked me what I thought I was doing there and I told him I needed confirmation.  He asked confirmation of what, and I told him of what an idiot he had married.  I mean I said I never understood why it took her six times to pass her teacher certification but that night I found the answer.  That wasn’t the only confirmation I had, her school like others across the country had begun to use individual teacher websites for their classes.  So one day I found hers and I was actually embarrassed at the grammatical errors on her website, I mean she was a fucking English teacher and had tons of grammatical errors on her website and what’s worse is that the school left it like that the entire semester!  WHAT THE FUCK!?! What kind of education were these poor kids getting?!  Stay tuned for part nine….