Category Archives: children

affairs, Betrayal, cheating, children, family, father/daughter, infidelity, loss, marriage breakdown, parenting, relationships, separation, single parent

The ex discovers I am dating

I’ve just taken out identifying names but here is a cut and paste from the email I received from my ex on January 20, 2015:

“I am concerned about (our older daughter who lives with my ex). But I’m also concerned about (our younger daughter who lives with me). You may be enthralled that someone is paying attention to you, but don’t forget your obligations to protect your daughters. Moving in with a guy you know nothing about after a few months is ridiculous. It again goes to show the lack of good judgment exhibited by you over the last two years. Get a grip on your emotions and start being a positive example rather than an embarrassment to your children. I’m happy that you’re dating someone, but keep a proper distance and allow yourself the time to get to know him before you introduce him to our children, let alone move in with him and tie yourself financially and emotionally. That’s all (our younger daughter) needs is for you to move in with someone and then 6 mths from now you realize he’s not all what you thought he was and you’re moving again.

He has his own issues to work out, such as his own divorce, so I’d like to think you’d consider that in your thought process before even contemplating things like this. It scares me to think that you’d even entertain this, let alone talk about it with the kids when our own situation is not resolved. You have no idea what the kids think of him, which as I understand it they are not over the moon about him. That should be your priority. Not having a companion to help with your bills and someone to sleep with.”

Wow, this coming from the guy who was lying to me and his kids while having an affair with a co-worker choosing to do things still with her or for himself instead of putting our children’s needs above his own. Is he really talking to me about “obligations”, “priorities”, being “an embarrassment” to my children, my need to be a “positive example”, “protection” and “lack of good judgement”?

Firstly, I have been seeing this man for 8 months. My ex is only getting wind of him now because I have not talked about him or introduced him to my children or had him even know where I live until recently. My older daughter has only met him 2 times and that is because she chose to come into the house to specifically meet him when she saw his vehicle in the driveway when she and her dad were dropping her sister off. They exchanged hello’s and that was it.

The man I am dating is so respectful of my situation and of me being a mom first. He has never slept at my house except when I was called that my older daughter was in emergency. He was the one who drove my younger daughter back home from visiting her sister in the hospital. He came and picked her up after midnight. My ex would not do that. In fact, my ex was more concerned that he was at the hospital when he had a 7:00 a.m. hockey game. I had girlfriend coming to the hospital to pick my younger daughter up but when the man I am dating offered to get my daughter and sleep on the couch until I came home she chose that instead. My ex raised zero concern about an unrelated male driving our daughter and staying alone with her. Instead he jealously said in front of both our children that I could go and get our younger daughter’s bag from his vehicle as he didn’t want to interrupt my “love fest”. When I arrived home at 2:00 a.m. he stayed on the couch with me for 1 1/2 hours and let me talk about the situation and calm down so I could go to sleep and then he left.

I have met his parents and his 20 year old daughter. I like them all very much. Both his daughter and his parents know that he is 100% reliable and I have witnessed all the things he does for them. He is the one who picks his daughter up if she is out with friends on the weekend to ensure she gets home safely and to ensure she is actually home. I have been to his beautiful home and have seen the house that he built with his own hands. He’s invited me to visit him at work. He’s taken me out with his best friend. He rarely drinks and doesn’t do drugs or smoke. He is a coach and runs and cycles regularly. I continue to ask all of the hard questions. I have introduced him to 3 of my friends and their husbands/boyfriends who also have been brutal at times looking for deep sincere answers to their questions. He told me after our Super Bowl party that one of my friends talked to him when I wasn’t around. He said he knows what a valuable friend I am and how much I am cared for because of how they have pressed him.

However, I am not interested in anything other than dating this kind, gentle man who respects me. I have no intention of moving in with him. He was kind enough to offer us a home he recently bought near my daughter’s school, that he plans to fix up and flip, if I haven’t found a suitable living option when my house sells. My daughter knows this because she is feeling very insecure about having to move. She is afraid we will have to give up our dog and 2 cats. Knowing we have options has given her more of a feeling of security. Her dad has taken all her security away. She has no positive male role models in her life and the counselor has impressed it is really important to surround her with men who do not behave badly. Unfortunately her best friend’s dad did the exact same thing that her dad did so having a man in her life who didn’t use an affair to end his marriage and who actually wants to be with his own children and my daughter, too, is a big deal.

To address my ex’s concerns: I think our children have suffered far more damage by their dad moving out after living with them for 15 and 10 years than if I were ever to move in with someone and move out after 6 months. They were far more tied emotionally and financially to a dad who no longer provides or meets those needs and worse has crippled us in both of those areas. I think our kids have suffered far more by realizing we are being forced to move because it is their own father who is not the person we thought he was.

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cheating, children, deceitfulness, divorce, infidelity, lies, other woman, relationships, Uncategorized

Intuition

It has now been 1 year since I discovered my husband’s affair.

I decided to go back and see what was going on in e-mail conversations during that time.  Unfortunately my phone was replaced so I don’t have text messages between us from back then.

There are some specific things that stand out in my mind.  In January 2013 my husband left me, our 2 daughters and one of their friends waiting at a very busy restaurant for 45 minutes before he showed up.  My daughter had talked to him just 30 minutes before the agreed meeting time.  He failed to answer his cell phone when I was trying to find out where he was and when he did finally arrive he said, “I was out on a claim and I never said I would be here at 6:00 p.m.”  Then he shoved an onion ring in his mouth.  Maybe I was so trusting I accepted what he said; maybe I couldn’t accept another reason at that time; maybe I was too lazy to inquire further or more likely I was just too annoyed, disappointed and hurt.

When I discovered with no doubt an affair was happening, I was so shocked and disbelieving but should I have been?  I realized after the fact that there were some other things I should have questioned further.

The last e-mail where he told me loved me was September 9, 2012.  Our 18th wedding anniversary was September 10 and he joked he was spending the night with his mistress as it was their one year anniversary.  There is a gap in our email conversations from September 27 – October 16 and the emails following that date are about a fight that Dave picked with me upon his return from a couple of days away on business.  He arrived home the weekend of my first 1/2 marathon.  He complained that the house was still as messy as it was when he left and made a way bigger deal of this than seemed reasonable.  He didn’t come to support me at the 1/2 marathon and didn’t bring our girls down to cheer me on.  That was Thanksgiving weekend and when I came home from the race, as sore and tired as I was with blisters on my feet that prevented me from walking without limping, I still put the turkey in the oven and then left the house and went to the beach to get away and to rest.  I returned to put dinner on the table and my husband announced in front of the girls “the stuffing tastes like shit.”

He didn’t want to come with me to my girlfriend’s surprise 40th birthday in November but I finally convinced him that I really wanted him to be there with me.  He always seemed to pick a fight or wouldn’t come with me to meet new friends or do anything with my friends when we had plans to go out.

At his company Christmas party on December 14 he ignored me the entire time.  I noticed a couple of women hanging on to his every word but I didn’t ask about them and looking at them I didn’t see anything special that would make me think my husband was interested.  It turns out that the one woman was the “other woman”.  Something happened the night before at their client party because that date, December 13, came out in a text I found when I discovered the affair.  We left his Christmas party hand in hand.  The 2 girls who talked to him all night followed us out at the same time. I was social that night with his other coworkers and their wives but I was not enjoying myself.  He was drunk and on display so I just let him have his fun.  After all, it was his company party.  I even tried to build up his ego by commenting on the girls hanging off him.

When we went to my sister’s house in Vancouver on December 27 for our family Christmas he got very drunk and told my sister in front of her 3 girls, who are in their 20’s, my kids, and my niece’s boyfriend that if he wasn’t with me he would be with my sister.  When I told my sister about his affair she was stunned but said he was acting so inappropriately at Christmas that she and my nieces were all commenting on it afterwards.  The next day when we were travelling home he was just being mean and not wanting to do the Boxing Day shopping that me and my girls were interested in doing. He said he wasn’t hung over and was feeling well.  He definitely had started to drink a lot more since joining his new company in the summer of 2011.   He had dial-a-driver programmed into his phone.  He had been using this service quite frequently over the previous 6 months.

He told me January 24, 2014 that the guys on his hockey team were taking him out for his birthday the next night. He did have hockey scheduled on the calendar and that was usual for a Friday night.  When I asked where they were going he said to the Keg.  That is a fine dining restaurant, not a boys-going-out-for-a-beer kind of place.   The next night we went out for his birthday to a Pink in the Rink Royals hockey game.   I bought him a chuck-a-puck and he won 2 tickets to Rihanna, hotel and airfare.  When he saw the date of the concert he had a tantrum because it was the day we were to return from our Florida March break vacation.  He stomped and said childishly, “I want to go and you scheduled our trip longer than I wanted you to.”  I was dumbfounded and just looked at him.  Again, this was his behavior in front of our girls.

In February he starts to stay later at work.  I remember calling him on a February Saturday morning just after I dropped my daughter at dance on a Saturday morning reminding him to order tickets to our daughter’s dance recital.  His response was very terse and hurried telling me he had to go out on 3 claims and couldn’t talk.  Usually on Saturday mornings he takes the dog for a hike by himself.  The next Saturday morning in February he tells me he is taking the dog for a hike but not leaving at 10:30 a.m.  He always went alone.  Why was he going at a specific time?  I never questioned this.   My girlfriend invited us to a house-warming party after my daughter’s dance recital and he refused to go.  Another night in February, he wanted to have sex and is mad I don’t feel like using toys.  He turns over and decides then not to have sex with me at all.  On 2 other occasions in February it took a long time for him to get an erection.  I found a bottle of lubrication in our bathroom.  I asked him what it was doing on the counter and he tells me he was looking at the ingredients in it.  On February 14 when we last had sex it was very different; aggressive and raunchy.  I asked him afterwards who he was having sex with because it wasn’t me.  February 18 he mentions separation.  On February 26 he told me he contacted our tenants at our home in Cambridge Ontario saying we were going to sell the home.  That shocked me.  He was moving quickly to get rid of our assets.  I mentioned that our banker suggested a spousal RRSP and he said, “What if you aren’t going to continue to be my spouse?”  I remember talking to him in the kitchen and thinking that he was looking at me as though he despised me.  On the evening of February 26 I was sobbing and begging my husband to not just leave but to go to counseling to work on our marriage.  He said that I would never change.

In Brené Brown’s book, The Gifts of Imperfection, she indicates that “…psychologists believe that intuition is a rapid-fire, unconscious associating process–like a mental puzzle.  The brain makes an observation, scans its files, and matches the observation with existing memories, knowledge, and experiences.  Once it puts together a series of matches, we get a “gut” on what we’ve observed.”

On February 28 he was leaving to go to Vancouver the next morning.  We were watching t.v. together but he got up suddenly to say he was going to bed because he had to get up early in the morning.  I told him we wouldn’t see each other before he left so we should hug goodbye now.  He sighed with annoyance.  I said, “You don’t want to hug me goodbye?”  He said, “No, you can hug me.”  It was exactly at that moment that my gut finally made me check my husband’s phone.

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cheating, children, emails, family, feelings, infidelity, insensitivity, marriage breakdown, relationships

The sensitivity of a gnat

My husband’s birthday is January 26.  He was already having sex with the other woman by this time.  He actually celebrated his birthday with her after playing hockey on Friday, January 25.  They went to the Keg for dinner.  I assumed he was out with his hockey buddies having some beers celebrating his birthday.  I was home with our girls.

In the summer at a golf tournament, my husband won tickets for a Royals hockey game.  He could choose any game to attend.  He chose 4 tickets on the date of his birthday to attend the Royals Pink in the Rink Game raising funds for breast cancer.  We attended as a family all dressed in pink.

I bought my husband and kids souvenir scarves to wear as well as 8 ‘chuck a-pucks’ to throw out during one of the intermissions.  We split the pucks so we each had 2 to throw.  My husband won closest to one of the 3 circles.  I went to collect his prize.  The prize was 2 tickets to the Rihanna concert on April 1 in Vancouver, hotel for the night and air fare.  The prize package was probably worth about $1000.  When I gave my husband his prize he thought it was great.  We were all so excited.  The girls indicated they wanted to go to the concert so we talked briefly about how we would have to see if we could get 2 more tickets.

Then we looked at the date of the concert.  It was the date we were booked to fly home from Florida.  My husband literally had a tantrum.   He yelled at me that I booked our trip to come home from Florida that day and he hadn’t wanted to stay that long in Florida in the first place.  It was all my fault we now wouldn’t be able to go to the concert and he wanted to go.  I suggested that we could do something; maybe change our return flight home to a day earlier or still go the concert as we arrived home 5 hours before the concert started.  I suggested that maybe we could fly from Florida into Vancouver instead of Victoria and I was trying to think in my mind how we would handled our luggage, etc.

Firstly, I couldn’t believe he was acting this way and then acting this way in front of the kids.  Yes, it would have been nice to go to the concert but it was on a Monday night, there were only 2 tickets so we either had to get 2 more tickets for the kids and the kids would miss school the next day or we had to find them some place to stay on a school night while we attended.  We have no family here to look after the kids.  We would also need to find someone to look after the dog if we went over night.  It wasn’t simple logistically to figure out so wasn’t it a great prize to sell to someone else and take the money to use on our vacation?   Plus, wasn’t our family vacation going to be great enough.  It was our Christmas gift to the kids.  Wouldn’t we want that extra day to enjoy Disney World?

I mentioned his tantrum and how his behaviour made me feel and he did apologize to me afterwards.  We decided to sell the tickets.

On March 5, 2013 my husband made comments to me about e-mails that I sent my friends including a photograph of the girl that I thought was the other woman.  I thought the only way he could possibly know this is because he went onto my computer when he came in the house with no one here as we knew he had done the night before when he knew the rest of us were out of the house.

When I called my husband out on that he said in an email to me on March 5, 2013 @ 9:00 a.m.:

“No…I’ve been told what you’re sending to people…. but you went through my emails?  Isn’t that a little hypocritical of you?” 

He is referring to me taking his Blackberry on February 28 to see if I could find any evidence of indiscretions.  I responded by e-mail on March 5, 2013 @ 12:37 p.m.:

“I never went through your e-mails–ever in the 23 years I have been with you.  I’ve never snooped through your drawers, pockets, pagers, phones, etc.  I don’t even know how to use your Blackberry.  Sadly, I trusted you explicitly and let you live your life completely free.  I never once thought you would do this to us and our family.  I thought you loved me.  I thought you loved your kids.  I thought you loved and valued everything we built together.  I am devastated.  I am betrayed.  I am the saddest person on this planet right now.  I ache so deeply for this loss especially for my children who have lost every security they thought they had.  It is unrepairable.  This will affect forever the relationships that they will have.   The best gift my parents every gave me was raising me in a secure marriage.  I am so sad I can’t give my children that gift.  I am so sad my husband didn’t love or respect me enough to fight for our marriage, to fight for our family, to go to counseling like I suggested.  I got counselor names, I told you how much I loved you and would do anything for you.  I am sad that my kids know that you gave up on us.  That we weren’t enough for you.”

His response on March 6, 2013 @ 7:57 a.m.:

“Did you pack the Rihanna tickets somewhere.  I haven’t seen them and would like to sell them.”

 

 

 

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cheating, children, control, deceitfulness, family, father/daughter, infidelity, lawyer, legal advice, legal proceedings, parenting, property disposal, relationships, separation, threats

Husband gets a lawyer

On March 4, 2013 @ 12:23 p.m. my husband sends me the following email:

“I’ve sent your email to my lawyer and you have no legal right to do anything with my belongings.  You will be receiving a letter today which will be a cease and desist order.  When I’ve got my accommodations sorted out I will pick up the remaining contents.”

I received an e-mail from his lawyer on March 4, 2013 @ 2:33 p.m. stating the following:

“Please be advised that we represent (husband).  It has come to our attention that you have been removing and disposing of his personal property.  This action needs to stop immediately.  My client has been attempting to reasonably vacate the premises in an orderly and cooperative manner.  He is still an owner of the property and there is no reason that his property needs to be removed in anything but a reasonable manner.  My client simply needs a reasonable amount of time to find another place and he can collect his belongings once that happens.”

I respond by e-mail to my husband’s lawyer on March 5, 2013 @ 8:02 a.m. with a copy to my husband:

“None of (husband’s) property has ever been disposed.  As a matter of fact, I rescued his Arsenal hat from the garbage.  When I asked my daughter why daddy’s hat was in the garbage she said, “Because the slut was wearing it in the photo.”  My daughter also said she couldn’t believe that I packed up his belongings so nicely in boxes and bags and placed everything in a neat and organized manner and easy location inside the house for him to access.  She also was upset that I gave him “everything” instead of keeping some things that she thought should be ours to keep.  When (husband) was not able to pick up very many items, we just had them delivered to the building in which he is an owner and where he claims to spend most of his time.  The items were delivered shortly before he arrives at the office, well labeled, well protected and sheltered.

He was asked to pick up the rest of his items while I was at the house and to give  me advanced notice.  This is because it is not appropriate for him to be walking around the premises when someone is not here and removing items without my knowledge.  Furthermore, my children have been very traumatized by his appearances at the house.

While I was at a school function last night with my older daughter, we both received frantic texts and phone calls that my younger daughter was “freaking out” because (husband) was at the house when we weren’t there and without our knowledge or permission.  She was sure he was “stealing” our dog.  When he was at our house the first time, my daughter called to me frantically saying that daddy came to the house 30 minutes before he was supposed to be there.  She didn’t want to be there and she didn’t want the dog to be there when he arrived.  She was hiding because she didn’t want him to see her.  She was shaking because she needed to leave the house so I had to help her go out the front door with the dog and to just keep walking and not look back.  She had her friend call another mom to come over because s he was afraid of what her dad might do to me.  She called me on the phone 45 minutes later asking why he was still at the house saying his truck position had moved and was backed up to the garage and she was sure he was taking my things that are in the garage to dump because he always threatened to do this.  Although I assured her that her daddy wouldn’t be wasting his time doing that now, the thoughts that have been going through my children’s heads are real to them.

Both my children are not sleeping, have been missing school since Friday and are incredibly anxious, emotional, scared and worried.  It is upsetting to my older daughter that her dad didn’t come to her school last night to hear about her Experiential Learning Program that she is going to be a part of this upcoming term and that he chose not to be involved in parent/teacher interviews.  It is even more upsetting to her that he used that opportunity while we were out of the house to do yet another thing that she considers to be deceitful.  She is terrified to be at the house by herself because she thinks he is going to come by and/or try to contact her.

It appears that (husband) came through the house and did take the rest of his items.  There doesn’t appear to be anything left in the garage that belongs to him.  I trust that there will be no reason for him to come by our home again unannounced.  If there is something that he might need in the future that he thinks he left here, I will be happy to try and locate that item and leave it outside our home at a time convenient to us both for him to retrieve this.”

The only response I received was from my husband on March 5, 2013 @ 8:24 a.m. by e-mail:

“Do you think (my lawyer) cares about my Arsenal hat or any of the other drivel that you put in the email?  The simple fact is you have no right to restrict my access to the house to get, store or use my belongings.  I am a legal owner of the property and am entitled to any of the benefits that an owner may enjoy.

I am trying to be nice and accommodating to you.  But when you threaten to throw out my belongings on the driveway or leave them out front my office that is not rational or acceptable.  So I went and got most of my things.  There are still others that I will retrieve when I am able.

Stop using the kids in this process.  Stop making them feel insecure and hiding them in the house and allowing crazy irrational behaviours.  You are perpetuating things that aren’t real and that is simply unacceptable.  You are attempting to punish me through the kids and that is petty, childish and frankly wrong.  You can either start to accept what has happened, move forward and start to work with me or I will retain legal counsel to commence action for my rights to the kids.  Take your pick.”

 

 

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