Almostrecovered

"I'll do anything"

If anything was going to surprise me it was these three words

I was expecting a fight, more denials, or more blaming.

Not that I believed her when she said it at first, But this clearly wasn't my father talking. This was another person. My father never said such things and was difficult through the whole affair mess. I was confused and taken aback.

Me- "I honestly don't know if I can ever forgive you and continue in this marriage, but if you're serious and you really mean 'anything' then let's start with the truth."

Over the course of probably 8 chained smoked cigarettes she told me of the affair. That it started when she went to his house and was surprised that no one else ended up coming over but her. (bastard planned it that way and had his buddies say they were coming over but not go) They were having fun and he leaned into kiss her and she didn't stop him and they had oral sex.

At this point I warned her that she's not Bill Clinton and BJ's do count. I also reminded her of the fact of how very good I am at finding things out and if she is just saying that she had oral sex to soften the blow when in fact she did more then she'd better pony up now.

She continued and said that they met at our house from that point on maybe 6 times over the course of the 17 day affair. She said he never brought condoms so they never had intercourse, although she admitted she would have. The sex had always taken place on the living room couch and the bed was never used. (that couch has since been donated to charity)

The thing that struck me as odd was how she described the affair as "just sex". It was almost as if it was a man talking. She even brought up the fact how I joked that the fact that she never had been intimate with anyone other than me that she would have an affair sometime. (see page 1, talk about having ESP!) She also said that "her plan" was to stop when his baby was born. Today I've gotten her to admit now that if it continued without me uncovering it that "her plan" surely wouldn't have seen its end and she would have still continued to cheat and she would have developed more of an emotional attachment.

After the truth finally came out (and more details eventually emerged later but nothing was proven to be wrong from her initial statement), I said, "You're going to call OM right now, you're going to put him on speaker phone, you're going to tell him that he is never to talk to you again and that I will tell his wife if he doesn't."

She did it without blinking. Hearing the fear in his voice was nice to say the least. He even asked if I was there as I'm guessing he wanted to say something else if I wasn't.

After the call, I told my wife that IF she expects me to consider reconciliation that she has to allow me to snoop to my heart's content and she can't say a word about it. I told her that her privacy is now null and void. And that she needed to always tell where she is going what she is doing, etc etc.

She needed to get to sleep as she had a shift that night, she swallowed some pills and went off to bed. I sat there with a buzz in my brain wondering if I could do this. The thing that worried me the most was that OM worked at the same place and I had no way of verifying if they were to have any contact. I didn't know whether to demand that she quit prematurely (she would graduate in 3 months) and suffer financial problems or just bite the bullet.


Looking back and knowing what I know now, I really do have to pat myself on the back a bit here. Once I finally got the nerve to do what I needed to do, I did indeed do a lot of things right. I had no self-help books, I wasn't reading message boards at the time, yet in the span of 1 hour I managed to do the following intuitively:

1) Confront with the threat of divorce and not having it be an empty threat. While this wasn't intended, it was the crucial difference between me and my mom, my mother begged and pleaded and got shat on again and again. I was able break her out of the fog by showing that her that her actions had very real consequences.
2) Got a no contact agreement. While I didn't do a letter or anything like that I made it very clear that they were'nt to be friends or even talk to one another again and if she did then I would leave. (more on this later regarding her work and the one attempt she made)
3) Got complete transparency. I also made sure she wasn't going to try to make me feel bad for verifying.
4) Had her answer any question I asked and had her answer them repeatedly. To me this showed me that she had true remorse. It took a while obviously (more later), but by doing this I was able to not rug sweep.

Which isn't to say I didn't make mistakes either....


next..Part 6 The road to reconciliation