I’ve been gone for a minute. I needed Summer to regroup and repair my soul a bit. I thought I was coping well enough with my mom’s passing and with the car accident my daughter had that seriously injured my husband. In retrospect that might have been a little wishful thinking. It was a lot, all in a very short time span. I probably didn’t process either of those events very well at the time. I miss my mom. Holy heck do I miss her. We often battled and she was a tough cookie, but I know she loved me fiercely and always had my best interests in mind, even when we disagreed over what those best ..read more

It may not seem like it here, but I am a reasonably optimistic person. My glass is more than half full. I have said on more than one occasion that karma would sort stuff out, so I need not worry over it. Generally it worked well for me (or for my little slice of the universe). OW #1- Husband divorced her. OW#2 – Husband became incapacitated so now she has to care for him 24/7 on welfare. OW#3 – Repeatedly arrested and occasionally homeless. It goes on and on. Karma. And yet my own fate/ luck these last few months has been utterly awful. Or has it?? Shortly after I last posted, Handsome and my ..read more

I have spent hours writing here about Handsome’s faults and flaws. I do, however, want to be fair and give credit where it is due. Over the last 6 weeks my husband has shown up for me in a way I haven’t really seen in a long, long time. When I last wrote we were in the midst of Handsome’s potential dementia/ Alzheimer’s diagnosis. We are still toiling away with that as he has received differing opinions from two cognitive neurologists and also an MRI that purports to rule out both Alzheimer’s and Vascular Dementia. Let’s just say that getting to the bottom of this is a slow work in progress ..read more

I’ve been pretty silent here as of late. It’s been a bit of mayhem but not, thankfully, anything having to do with Handsome’s SA. Nope. Just regular life nuttiness. Our daughter fractured her spine at a school event in May. It was a terrible injury, but she is wrapping up PT next month and is healed enough to go back to sports. We are very, very lucky. Despite being fully vaxxed, my mom and I both had bouts of Covid. Mine was quite bad. Paxlovid helped, but I was utterly exhausted for close to half of the summer. (Brother-in-law’s new GF did not appear on my vacation, so that was good.) Then ..read more

While I cannot believe that it’s July already, I am excited that means that my family’s annual summer sojourn to New England is just around the corner. Handsome has a younger brother who, throughout the entire 20+ years I’ve known him, was in a long term relationship with a lovely woman my kids have known as “Aunt _____.” They never married but they were together as a couple during that entire time. In January, Aunt ____ was summarily replaced with a 23 year-old new girlfriend. (Handsome’s brother is 57.) It is reasonably clear that this relationship started as an affair. They were living tog ..read more

On my DDay, almost four and a half years ago, my children were 8 and 11. After assessing who knew of Handsome’s behavior and what the possibilities were of the kids learning anything, I made the decision not to tell them about their dad’s infidelity and sex addiction. There was simply no reason for them to know. Handsome was drinking often before DDay. While they never saw him drunk, they did see him drink daily. We did have some discussions with the kids when he stopped drinking about why he made that decision. We also talked to them about why he went to Sierra Tucson for 6 weeks for mood di ..read more

Pre-COVID I had an assistant who was really young. Young enough to be my kid, and from a very limited background. Very naive. That said, she’s also the person who would close my office door if I burst into tears post-DDay or if I was too loud fighting with Handsome on the phone. I didn’t have to tell her what had happened. She knew. When I ran into her in the office a few months ago, she told me she met a great guy. I was happy for her. Then I saw her again yesterday. Turns out, that “great guy” was married. She found out 3 months in, and broke it off immediately. She relayed some of what he ..read more

This feels like a weird topic, but maybe it’s not. Perhaps we just don’t talk about death enough in polite society. Q (from my best friend): Has the betrayal changed your estate planning? A: * hurries to revise will and write out directions about last wishes I had always assumed that Handsome and I would be buried together. That is, if we were to be buried at all. Cremation has long been my personal game plan. Then DDays (plural) came and I realized that -like Beyoncé – my version of Heaven is a love without betrayal. Suddenly, spending eternity next to the source of my trauma seemed a lot le ..read more

If you’re keeping track, my DDay #1 was in December of 2017. After multiple fits and starts Handsome did a full, therapeutic disclosure this past January, a hair over 3 years later. My presentation of my impact statement took place just a few weeks afterwards. (I had written it ages ago but it just sat in a file on my computer till he finally reached the point where he could hear, absorb, and appropriately respond to it.) The next, and last, “step” on the path towards healing that our CSAT uses calls for an emotional restitution letter to be prepared by the betraying partner in response to th ..read more

I recently had an experience with my 89 year old mother that opened my eyes to a lingering side effect of my husband’s infidelity and related nonsense. Namely, I am accustomed to making myself small. I am not small in stature or in voice. Despite that, I realized that my goal since DDay, has been to blend in with the wallpaper. The seeds were certainly sowed before then, during the period of my marriage where I was slowly manipulated into making my needs nonexistent. I was astonished though to see how it still impacts me, even when I least expect it. Picture a stereotypical New England clam s ..read more