Back To Our Regularly Schedule Blog

Sitting at an empty desk in a brand new office, staring at a pile of first-day paperwork, marveling at the ways life turns on a dime....

A month ago, I left a job I never really wanted, in a town where I never cared to live. Until my husband started talking about leaving last summer, I had the hardest time picturing my future in that place. But as soon as he started dangling the possibility of the big city in front of me, I started thinking of reasons to stay. I was afraid that he'd resent me for taking him away from a place he loves; that his kids -- with whom I've made peace and great progress -- will blame me for taking him away from them; that I've inflated this place in my mind to the point that it could never live up to my overblown expectations.

I hemmed and hawed throughout the summer, particularly after I found out about his infidelity, trying to decide if I was brave enough to throw myself back into the mix. What if no one remembered me? What if the world had changed too much in the time I'd been gone and my knowledge base was irrelevant? What if my mind-numbing job had atrophied my skills? What if my best days, professionally, were behind me?

I did my best to convince myself that I liked (or at least didn't hate) my small town job. But no matter how hard I tried, I was always a fish out of water. My suspicions that I didn't quite fit in -- with my creative solutions ("We don't do it that way around here!") and big girl suits ("What're you all dressed up for?") -- were confirmed at an office retreat last summer. When my group did an exercise on interpersonal styles, we were asked to list three adjectives to describe each person. When the lists were compiled, the traits that appeared most often were "nice," "friendly," or "people person" -- except me. My colleagues called me "smart," "organized," and "efficient." The closest I got to nice was "well-connected," whatever that meant. In most organizations, it would be better to be thought of as "smart" than "nice," but there, it was isolating.

When I was a single girl, I defined myself professionally. I had hobbies and interests outside work, but work was the thing that drove my life. Until I left, I never realized how much of my identity was tied up in that big city job. And because the small town job required me to travel half the time, I wasn't able to put down roots in my new community. When I looked to meet people outside my husband's circle, I found that it was impossible to do things like take classes, join a book group, or even get involved in volunteer work because I couldn't commit to being there. I was frustrated, but I worked overtime to make the best of the choices I'd made. And as awful as it sounds, the happiest day of my small town life was the day my husband confessed HIS frustrations to me. His unhappiness was enough to push me off the ledge I'd been dancing on for months.

At the end of my first day, it's good to know that at least one of my fears is unfounded. The jury is still out on the others, but I am breathing a huge sigh of relief. It's good to be back.

The Wife Who Knows

News Flash

Once again, we interrupt this blog for a dose of real life. We are moving to the big city.

Although I am delighted, this was not my idea. In fact, when my husband first broached the subject at the beginning of summer -- a couple months before I found out about any of his extra-curricular activities -- I asked him if he was sure about it. When I moved, I was determined to make a new life for myself. I turned my back on everything, except my friends and the occasional Sunday Times, from my old life. Professionally, especially, I let it all go, because I was afraid I'd miss it too much if I kept up with anything. I was not going to get my hopes up, I told him, for a passing fancy.

My husband was serious. His business partnership had fallen apart badly -- there were lawyers involved -- over ethical differences between him and his partners. Even though he won, it cost him a lot both financially and professionally. It took him about five minutes to find a better job, but it also took him about five minutes to grow bored and restless. Without the incentive of ownership -- of feeling like he was building an empire -- he was just another salary man.

He'd also started feeling empty nest pangs -- two of his kids are in college and the third is finishing high school. It's not so much that they don't need him, it's that they don't need him the same way they used to. As they launch their adult lives with all the fits and starts of late adolescence, he had started feeling more like a bit player in their world. Being "Dad" had been the biggest part of his identity since he was the same age as his eldest, and it hasn't been easy letting go.

He decided that a change of venue would be the cure for everything that ailed him, professionally and personally. What better place to make a new start, he reasoned, than the place where I'd been so successful?

I was cautious at first, testing out the old network to see if anybody still remembered me. When I got nothing but positive reactions to my trial balloons, I updated my resume and sent it out to a couple places to test the waters. When these efforts didn't bear fruit fast enough, I decided to take the plunge. A month ago, I quit my job and started spending half my time in the big city making the rounds among prospective employers.

My gamble paid off. A couple days ago, I was offered a position by a man who supplied one of my references when I moved to the small town. He confessed that my initial e-mail, saying I was coming back, was like manna from heaven. He'd been trying to fill a senior position in his office for months, and had not been able to find anyone with the right combination of experience, contacts, and personality to make it work. After jumpstarting a stalled human resources process, he hired me at almost twice the salary I was making in my small town job. Needless to say, we're both delighted.

My husband -- who has been amazingly supportive through this whole process -- is also delighted. He's revved up his job search, and is telling anyone who'll listen about how excited he is about the opportunities for him in the big city. He's fully engaged in our house hunt. He's even started encouraging his kids to look for summer internships up there.

Though I have nothing concrete on which to base it, at times I get a nagging feeling that his enthusiasm is all an elaborate ruse to get me out of town so he can start playing around again. Every so often, he will tell me that he's thinking about moving into "a cheap little apartment" if he doesn't find something in the big city before the end of the year. We can commute on weekends "like when we were dating," he said, until he lines something up. Bachelor pad redux?

Like the President said: fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, well... I won't get fooled again.


The Wife Who Knows

What Did You Do Last Summer?

A few months after moving to the little town, I needed a break. About the time we got settled in our house, I started traveling for work two weeks out of every month. While it was not hard travel -- I got to stay in nice hotels and rent decent sized cars -- my days on the road were filled with meetings. I was occasionally able to catch up with old friends along the way, but more often than not, I spent my time with strangers.

I decided to tack a few days in one of my favorite places on to the end of a business trip. I asked my husband if he wanted to come along, expecting that he'd decline. He had been working night and day throughout the summer, and I always gave him a lot of leeway where work was concerned. Shortly before I met him, he quit his job and went into partnership with a couple of guys to build a business from scratch. They put up most of the capital, and, for a modest buy-in and a lot of sweat equity, my husband got an equal share of the business. This enterprise was his "lifelong dream," and one of the biggest reason why I moved to the little town in the first place.

I was surprised when he said that he'd join me for a long weekend -- he'd fly out on Friday afternoon and back on Tuesday morning. He was upbeat when I picked him up from the airport, in a much better mood than he'd been in some time. All the tension of the spring and summer blew away in the salt breezes, and we slipped back into the easy patterns of our courtship. For the first time in months, I was relaxed enough around him to remember why I turned my life upside down for this man. It felt good.

It was raining when we woke up Saturday morning. The coastline was shrouded in fog, and it was hard to tell where the sky ended and the ocean began, everything was the same steely shade of gray. We didn't care -- we were on vacation in a place that was out cell phone range. As we headed out the driveway in search of adventure, he turned to me and said, "I suppose we should set a date."

"Really?"

"Yeah, I think it's time."

"What were you thinking?"

"Soon. Before the end of the year."

And that was the end of that. After giving me months of grief, we settled the issue in three short sentences. We didn't talk about it for the rest of the weekend -- we were going to keep it simple, so there wasn't much to discuss. I never wondered too much about what prompted his change of heart. I was only glad that he'd worked through whatever issues he'd had, and that he was ready to finish what he'd put in motion almost a year earlier.

I probably should have wondered more. I'm certain I would not have been so eager to make any plans had I known that he broke off a long-term affair the day before he got on the plane for our vacation. She didn't know that it was over; he only told her that he was going away with me (under great pressure) for a few days. But once he made up his mind, he was ready to be done with her and move on with me. He'd leave the messy part until later -- mostly, I'm guessing, to guarantee that she wouldn't sabotage his plans.

Maybe I should be thrilled that he picked me. But it hurts. It hurts like hell every time I think about it. And the only reason I didn't leave immediately is that I can't find any evidence that he's been unfaithful for the past 15 months. I'm still not certain that's enough, but right now, it's all I've got.

The Wife Who Knows

Moving Day

I hate moving.

I thrive on order, so I find the chaos unsettling. Over the years, I've developed a system of small boxes and elaborate labeling to minimize the dissonance. It starts with the first box I pack and doesn't end until I tag every cupboard, closet, and shelf in my new house with a post-it note before I carry in a single box. I unpack just as systematically -- starting with the bedroom and progressing room-by-room through the house until I'm done. The moment I hang the last picture, I send out invitations to the house warming party.

When I moved to the little town, I was even more organized than usual because most of my stuff had to go into storage. My husband and I decided I would crash at the bachelor pad for a couple months while we looked for a house. Other than a season's worth of clothes, cosmetics, some books and CDs, and a few kitchen basics he lacked, everything I owned went from the back of a truck into a storage locker.

At first, he resisted sharing the bachelor pad. It was a fairly small, sparsely furnished two-bedroom apartment, the antithesis of his suburban ranch house -- no kids, no pets, no wife... just lots of empty space to decorate as he pleased. He chose everything -- furniture, rugs, pictures, plants -- with care. Other than pictures of his kids, some books, trinkets, and a couple pieces of art, there were very few artifacts from his married life. He promised to clean out the little closet in the back bedroom for me, but warned me not to disturb anything else in the apartment. This place was HIS and he was proud of it.

After 15 years in the big city, it took me a couple months to shut down my life there. I stopped going to the little town on weekends because I wanted to savor every last moment in the place I'd made my home. My husband and I didn't see each other for most of that time -- the longest stretch of our courtship we spent apart. He came to visit a couple of weekends for parties, but mostly we kept our distance. We stopped having our hours-long phone conversations and daily e-mail banter. Our exchanges were terse and to the point. I kept him updated on my progress, but he made it clear that he didn't want to hear about how hard any of this was for me.

By the time moving day came, I was ready to go, if for no other reason, than to put the long goodbye behind me. I figured that the big chill that had been growing between us would thaw once I was in the little town. I would get established in a routine at work, we would find a house, and I would start making connections in my new community. If only...

Even though I had almost two months lead-time, they weren't ready for me at my new job. After a couple days orientation, I found myself with nothing to do but surf the Internet and read the paper. When I approached my boss about giving me something constructive to do, he confessed that he had failed to properly plan for my position, and that I wouldn't be able to start anything until the beginning of the fiscal year. Which meant another six weeks of staring at a database that wouldn't do me any good without a travel budget. So much for a routine.

Things were not much better at home. My husband accused me of being clingy, needy, weepy, and just plain in the way. My being there full time disrupted his routine, and he resented that he felt responsible for me. We argued over the littlest things -- like how I put my knives on the kitchen counter in a way that purposefully messed with the flow he'd created, or how he was deliberately ruining my hand-washables by throwing them in the machine with everything else. By the time I'd been there three weeks, we were walking on eggshells around each other, unsure what the trigger would be that set either of us off. Somewhere in there, we stopped having sex.

If it hadn't been for house hunting, I probably would have gone mad. My husband started looking before I moved, but gave up in frustration because he couldn't find anything that was quite right. We were both adamant that we didn't want to live on a cul de sac in a featureless subdivision. He was torn, however, between wanting to live in one of the newly converted warehouse lofts in "downtown," and wanting to find a lake house in the country. I said I'd be happy in either place, as long as I had a decent kitchen and enough closet space for my stuff. The first place we looked at together was perfect -- on the lake with a dock for his boat, a pool for the kids, a big enough (though somewhat dated) kitchen for me, and more than enough storage space to keep our junk out of sight. Needless to say, the owners did not accept our offer.

When we lost the perfect house, he gave up. He told me that he didn't want to look any more, and that I should use my best judgment to find us a place to live. Three days later, I found the second-most perfect place. A recently-gutted and beautifully renovated row house, it was at the opposite end of the spectrum from the lake house. It had 12-foot ceilings, a beautifully modern kitchen, hardwood floors throughout, enough bedrooms that none of the kids would have to share, gas logs in the fireplaces, a Jacuzzi tub in the master bathroom, walk in closets.... All we'd have to do was change the paint in a couple rooms and we were good to go.

I was a little nervous when I showed it to my husband for the first time. Keeping my fingers crossed as he wandered from room to room, upstairs and back down again, I waited for his verdict. Finally.... "I love it. You did good baby." The thaw at last!

Six weeks later, we moved in. Though I had to do most of the unpacking and organizing, it was a small price to pay for peace. What I didn't realize as I was setting up our new home, was that it wouldn't take long before he was using it when I traveled for business as an expanded version of the bachelor pad. Home sweet home, indeed.

The Wife Who Knows

Holiday Blues

My husband hates the holidays. Not the normal "Can you believe that they're putting up Santas in October" or "Christmas is too commercial" beefs, but an active disdain for year-end merriment. His mother died on Christmas Eve when he was 13. He said he knew she was sick -- she'd been in and out of hospitals, she wore a wig because she lost her hair -- but no one told him how sick she was. So he went to bed thinking that he was going to wake up to a house full of presents, and woke up instead to the news that he'd never see his mother again.

Ever since, he can't think about Christmas without feeling an overwhelming sense of loss and abandonment. He told me that when his kids were little, he'd push down all his bad feelings and do everything he could to make the holidays fun for them -- decorating a tree, icing cookies, dressing up like Santa, attending pagents at school and church, making the rounds to the relatives' homes. All at the same time he was dying inside.

He warned me shortly after we met that he would go into a funk in late November and not emerge until mid-January. Thanksgiving was sort of a trigger for all these emotions in him, and not to take anything he said or did during that time too personally. Understood, I said.

I didn't tell him that I love Christmas. I love shopping for the perfect present -- I listen carefully to my family and friends and choose their gifts with care. I don't go overboard with decorations, but I love putting up a tree. I have boxes of trimmings -- everything from antique ornaments salvaged from my grandmother's house, to exotic souvenirs of my travels, to a bunch of silly things I've seen in store windows and liked. And I bake like a fiend -- every year, several thousand cookies and several hundred truffles and more peanut brittle than you can imagine come out of my kitchen. It starts about Thanksgiving, and goes through mid-December, when I package it all up and give it away to the people who've been a great help to me throughout the year. And most of all, I love Christmas parties. People get dressed up, they decorate their houses, they put on an excellent spread -- what's not to love?

So I figured that Christmas would be about compromise. I reasoned that I could take care of the little things like sending out cards and wrapping presents. I could lay off decorating if it helped his frame of mind. I could bake a few of his favorite treats along with my usual fare. I could even make the rounds of parties by myself to spare him the grief. What I didn't realize, however, was the depth of his despair over the holidays. That by not hating Christmas as much as he did, I was a traitor.

I started getting an inkling of this our first Thanksgiving together. We were newly engaged; I had just started looking for a job in the little town; my parents were nagging me about a wedding date; his kids bounced between indifference and hostility; and he was retreating behind a wall of Xanax and Scotch. Despite all this, I invited my family to the little town for Thanksgiving dinner so they could meet the kids and get to know his family. Since it had to happen I reasoned, why not over a four-day weekend that focuses on food and football? He agreed.

There were some uncomfortable moments -- like when I wasn't sure dinner would be ready on time because I woke up on Thanksgiving morning with a raging hangover from the nerve-calming bottle of Zinfandel I'd had the night before -- but it was mostly a good weekend. My parents, surprisingly, were on their best behavior. His kids were polite and nice and even interested in talking to their prospective grandparents. The turkey was perfect. My alma mater won the big game against its football rival, cinching a top bowl berth.

At the end of the weekend, after assorted kids and parents and siblings left for their homes, and my husband and I were alone in his bachelor pad, I commented that it went remarkably well. He just looked at me, shook his head, and walked out of the room.

"Never put me through anything like that again," he said over his shoulder.

"Why," I asked, "did you agree to it in the first place?"

"Because it was important to you."

And as those words hung there in the air, I got my first taste of what the holidays for the rest of our lives would be like. He totally agreed that our families had to meet -- that wasn't the point -- but I made a tactical error setting it up when I did. Anything out of the ordinary (and what ISN'T out of the ordinary during the holidays?) from about mid-November on adds stress and makes him retreat. Not from the world -- he has a good game face -- but from me and those closest to him.

I later learned that when I went back to the big city after that Thanksgiving weekend when we started blending our families, he found another way to deal with his stress. I kid myself that if I'd waited for spring break to bring everyone together, things would have worked out differently. I'm not sure that's the case, but it's one of the things I regret when I have trouble falling asleep.

The Wife Who Knows

The Crying Game

I never cry. Or, perhaps I should say, I never cried.

For years, the only things that would prompt tears were sentimental movies and sports injuries, like the time I endo-ed off my mountain bike and tumbled down the side of a pretty steep hill with my feet still locked in the pedals. I didn't break anything, but I turned a spectacular shade of black and blue. The guys I was riding with that day said it looked like something off the ESPN highlight reel. Other than that, I cried at my grandmother's funeral and on the day Congress voted to invade Iraq.

After my bad break up, I never let anyone close enough to make me cry. There were plenty of men who tried, but either they'd lose interest because I wouldn't budge, or I'd cut it off before things got messy. In any case, I never had to worry about my mascara. One of my best friends accused me of being hard, and worried that I'd never "settle down." She probably had a point, but like porcupines with their quills and blowfish with their poison, every vulnerable species -- i.e., the thirty-something urban single female -- needs a defense mechanism. Mine was THE WALL. My favorite Paul Simon song hits it square on the head:

They've got a wall in China, it's a thousand miles long,
To keep out the foreigners, they made it strong.
And I've got a wall around me that you can't even see....

When I met my husband, however, all bets were off. The day I let him in was the day I turned the waterworks on. It took a couple months before the tears started, but once they came, it was hard to turn them off. The first time I cried in front of him, we were talking about our pasts. I was in the middle of one of the many stories I'd collected over the years, when suddenly I felt a lump in my throat and tears welling up in my eyes. These were stories that I'd told a hundred times before; that I used to reel off, Carrie Bradshaw-like, for the amusement of my friends. But telling them to him that Sunday morning, they made me feel very hollow. Because here I was with a man who completed me, and everything that I'd done up to that point had been a very shallow dress rehearsal.

Little did I know that fighting off tears would become a way of life. When he accused me of still having feelings for exes, of not being as committed to our relationship as him, of wanting to hang on to the artifacts of my "old life," of wanting a wedding more than a life, of not adjusting fast enough to life in the small town.... I cried. And I cried. And when I was finished, I cried some more.

And I hated myself for it, because I'd always thought of tears as manipulative. But dammit, this relationship WAS the most important thing in my life. And for the first time in almost a decade, if I lost this man, I would really be losing something. All of the sudden, the tough girl was vulnerable, in a position where she swore she'd never be again, at a place where a man could destroy her. Every tear I cried was an admission of defeat. I did everything I could to harden myself to him, but to no effect. Because at the end of the day, I loved him. And it was that love that made me vulnerable.

Amazingly, after I found out the extent of his lies, I didn't stop loving him. But I did start putting back up a wall. I can count the number of times since that day in August that I've cried -- one. At the funeral of a friend. Maybe the tough girl is back?

The Wife Who Knows

Time Out

We interrupt this blog for a dose of real life.

While in the midst of a minor, but very real, personal tragedy, I was reminded why I married my husband. He is genuinely a good guy, who, despite his flaws, loves me very much. Given everything I learned about him this summer, I was not expecting him to be very supportive. But he's gone above and beyond my expectations. Every day he does some little kindness that reminds me how wonderful he can be. Mostly, he keeps me distracted, so I don't obsess about stuff.

So I'm feeling kindly toward him right now.

This doesn't mean I've forgotten anything he did, or that I'll stop trying to sort everything out in this blog. But I feel like I need to give him credit when he earns it. I'm still not sure if it'll be enough to tip the balance in his favor in the end, but it's definitely what I need at this moment.

For now, that's enough.

The Wife Who Knows