The long way home

On the way home from vacation, we decided to visit my child at college. We decided to keep his infidelity a secret. On the way home, I would be driving, he was pretending to sleep a lot, and I would start having a panic attack, where I would start tapping at his leg saying ” Talk to me, please, talk to me,” He has long accused me of not talking in the car on long trips. Now he was the silent one. His scarlet A was out in the open and he had nothing to say to me. I have never been silent, just not constant chattering. I like to look out the window, see what I see. Car dance. Look at the birds as we drive. He likes to listen to books on tape. He likes mysteries. He also skips over violent, or scary parts of books and movies, something that bothers me. I chitchat when it strikes me. We had a good co-existence. But this is something it turns out, he secretly held against me.

We picked them up at their college and then had lunch at a local restaurant. It was so good to see them. I wanted some sort of normalcy. Everything felt like normal during lunch. We laughed. We talked about school. We chatted about vacation and everything that had happened while they had been gone. It had only been a few weeks, but it felt like an eternity. I had been a single mom with my child since they were 2, until I started dating my husband, when they were 12. That’s a long time to be just the two of us. As much as I love them, they are a teenage mystery to me. I longed for days of infancy when they were just pure innocence instead of this angst and anger that presented to me most of the time. No matter what, my child was my first love, but I never, and still don’t, quite understand them. We had a big falling out some years back and it’s never been the same since. It was shortly after my husband and I started dating. I’m still unsure if that’s why; or if it was because they were just trying to grow up away from me. That was my first great big heart break. We can talk more about that later.

My husband went to bathroom during lunch and was gone a long time. Every minute he was gone was agony. Every second that passed I wanted to stand up and scream the truth out loud. Tick. Tick. Tick. I knew he was texting her. Couldn’t even make it home. I just talked to my child like nothing was wrong, but I was dying on the inside. My heart was breaking. It pounded so loudly in my ears I could barely hear anything. I silently willed myself not to pass out. While I sat there and tried to make small talk, my mind was going on overdrive; a gear it was getting used to, and hasn’t really stopped since. Was he coming back? Was he sneaking out the bathroom? Was there another exit I couldn’t see? Was she meeting him there to take him from? My heart was racing.

The bathroom door opened and there he was. I calmed down when he came out of the bathroom and gave him a grin that stretched ear to ear. I am sure he thought I was crazy. I did it so I my eyes wouldn’t well up with my tears. I couldn’t let my child see that anything was wrong. I had so few minutes there face to face with them. I had missed them so much at home. Crisis averted. They never knew. We finished lunch, paid the bill and returned them to college.

I had been kicking myself that the affair was my fault. I am still kicking myself that this is my fault. I can not wrap my head around that he is the truly broken one. That he didn’t have the guts the take on the parts of our relationship that he didn’t see fit to work on them together. That he had to venture outside of our marriage and find this thing, this shell of a human existence that he deemed worthy of our secrets, of his body, that I loved so much, to ruin it all for me. So many nights I have spent wondering how, where, what I have done wrong, and I still can’t come up with an answer. I know in my head that I didn’t do anything. But my heart. My broken, shattered, torn up heart, it screams so much louder than my brain. It won’t let my brain even get half a word in edge wise. It shrieks at the top of it’s lungs how I missed every cue that he was giving me over the years. Everytime I should have seen that he was telling me he needed me. That I shouldn’t have been staying at work late. That I should have gone to the the awards nights. To the dinners. To the meets. I should have stayed downstairs. But when you are told “It’s ok,” and you are supposed to be in a partnership, you believe them. You believe the words coming out of their mouth. You believe when they say that they love you and only you. When the words come out of their mouth that they will love you forever and carry you when you can’t walk anymore. These are the things that you hear. You believe the words that they say. Forever is a long time you hope. You think about being old and sitting on the docks together. Your tiny, wrinkled body pressed up against their tall, sinewy, lean, wrinkled body. And you will think “This is where I belong. This is where I have always belonged,”

You don’t think you’re going to be on the dock alone, drowning. Thinking, “Shit. I should have learned how to swim,” because forever meant forever to you. It just didn’t to him. It meant expendable.