Fear Factor

We’re settled into the new house, and other than random hassles like a daily commute on car-choked roads and a breathtakingly complicated vehicle registration process, everything is going really well. We’ve both settled into routines at work, I’m reconnecting with old friends, he’s finding his own space in the big city metro area, and his kids like coming to visit us.

We’re going to the small town this weekend for the first time since we moved. There is a little family celebration that we don’t want to miss. It's our chance to prove that even though we’ve moved, we’ll still be there for the stuff that matters. As we’re making our plans, and despite how good everything feels since we’ve moved, I can’t help but feel a little apprehensive at the prospect of getting sucked back in.

My husband commented the other night that he has none of the staples of his social life in the small town – drinking with his buddies, playing music and poker until the wee hours, hanging out with his kids – but that he’s much happier here than he was there. I take what he says with a grain of salt, because I know what it’s like to put on a brave face after a big relocation. But when we were talking about this stuff last night, he emphasized that he didn’t come here to make me happy. He came here because it was the best way out of his old life.

Which got me wondering what it was about that life he wasn't brave enough to let go while we were still there. There was always a frantic bachelor quality to his routine -- especially when I was traveling -- that didn't go away after we got serious about each other, or after I moved in with him, or even after we got married. He tempered it, but he never wanted to say no when one of his buddies called. "Hey baby," he'd say, "Do you care if I (fill in the blank) with the guys tonight?" Most times, he'd invite me to come along, but it was clear on those evenings where his priorities were. Even with The Other Woman, he'd take her along on the boys' nights out -- some of them knew about the affair; to the rest, she was just "this girl from work" -- rather than miss any of the action.

When we decided to leave, I was surprised when he told me, "Except for my best friend from first grade and the kids, there's not a single person here I'll really miss when we move."

"Really?," I asked, eyebrows raised in disbelief.

"Yeah," he said, "I'm so over this whole scene."

How ironic that in the end, he was guilty of the very thing -- the inability to make new friends in the small town -- that he complained most about in me. I guess it's a lot harder to reinvent yourself in a place where everybody knows you than it is in a place full of total strangers.


The Wife Who Knows

Random Notes From the Road

Debating whether to pay $7.95 for what will amount to 15 minutes on the Internet before I catch the second leg of my flight, and marveling that it wasn't that long ago that wireless access in an airport terminal wasn't possible. When I travel on business, I always feel a bit guilty when I'm not fully connected. But since I can use my phone to check e-mail and surf the web, the debate over whether to spend the extra money is for the convenience of speed.

My husband is much more anal about staying connected than I am, and always asks me to bring my laptop on road trips so we can stop at the wi-fi hotspots along the way to check in. We were sitting on a runway last summer, caught in a ground stop, when he snagged my computer and discovered that he could still log on. After checking his e-mail -- nothing new in the twenty minutes since we'd stowed the computer in the terminal -- he went to CNN to read the headlines. Again, nothing different from the complimentary USA Today they gave us at the hotel. After a few minutes of current affairs, he surfed over to his favorite on-line poker site, which is when I realized that he wasn't on the Internet because he HAD to be, he was on the Internet because he could be.

My favorite thing about flying is that the airlines make passengers turn their cell phones off during the flight. I can't count how many times I've seen people cheat, and I read somewhere that the FAA is revisiting this rule. It will be a sad day, indeed, when they allow unlimited chatter in the air. My second favorite thing about flying is that I have uninterrupted time to read. The busier I get, the more precious these hours are. I've never understood my fellow travelers who would rather watch the lame in-flight movies than crack a good book.

My husband's kids are coming to visit again this weekend. It's been a month since we've seen them, and he's worried that if we don't see them more often, they'll forget to include him in the big things in their lives. He's commented more than once that they don't check in with him as often as he'd like or that they take their time returning his calls. They did this when we lived in the small town, but because we were close, we often came home to find them lounging on our couch, watching our TV, eating our food, and drinking our beer -- all without calling first. It's tempting to think they miss our stuff more than they miss us, but I know that's not true. I'm glad they're coming this weekend -- I'll feel less guilty about taking a girl's night out on Sunday (gotta love those dead Presidents for giving me Monday off!) after leaving my husband for three days this week.

Enough. They're calling my flight. Happy trails.


The Wife Who Knows

VD

My least favorite day of the year.... I was sitting in a meeting this morning, doodling notes in the margins of the handout, thinking about what to say about this silly made up holiday that would adequately express my longstanding disdain for Cupid and his minions.

My bitter, anti-romantic essay will have to wait. When I got back to my desk, I found this waiting in my inbox:


Untitled

The Problem with Valentine's Day
Is that it's so restraining
How do I show my love
When everyone else is shouting

Pressing through the clamor to find
The biggest balloon, the prettiest bouquet
The sweetest candy, the brightest stone
To demonstrate true distinction

Or can this voice, subtle, still and simple
Speaking truly from my heart
Be loud enough to convey
The greatest love of all ages




The Wife Who Knows

Another Day in Paradise

Oh how I love rum drinks when I’m sitting under a beach umbrella, surrounded by beautiful people. I’m winding down what was essentially a daytrip to paradise – killing that last hour before returning the rental car -- and find myself wishing I could stay longer. But predictions of bad weather back home and a full week next week are pushing me toward my scheduled departure time.

When I was a single girl, I loved to travel solo. I went around the world and back again, often only with my camera and a phrase book or map to keep me company. All that changed when I met my husband. When we started dating, I burned up all my frequent flyer miles going back and forth to the small town. Then after I moved to be with him and started traveling for work, being away from home got less urgent. It wasn’t long before I realized that I liked being home -- a place that, if I’d lived there alone, I wouldn’t have been able to stand for a minute.

This was an amazing revelation to me -- I grew up in small town, in a house full of people who were not curious about the wide world. I don’t know what happened to me, but my feet were always itchy. From the minute I learned to read, I became an armchair explorer. With my face buried in a book, I went everywhere, saw everything – anything to get as far away from “here” as I could. New York City, Paris, Katmandu, it didn’t matter. It could have been Ohio, as long as it wasn’t home. The whole time I lived in the big city, as full as it was of exciting and eclectic things to do, I always wanted to be someplace else.

Now when I’m gone, I find myself either counting the minutes til I board the plane for home or else wishing my husband were with me. And when I’m with him on the road, I don’t take the chances I used to – no more climbing up sheer cliffs to get the perfect sunset shot or lurking in back alleys to catch local kids at play on film. I don’t look for the most colorful watering holes or eat street food or even wander without a plan. He’s turned me into a responsible homebody!

So it’s odd to find myself with a spare moment, alone, in a remote location, wishing I had a little more time to myself. Not really longing for an extended solo adventure vacation, but wanting to sit here long enough for the waiter to come around again with another round of drinks before I have to leave for the airport.


The Wife Who Knows

The Eureka Moment

I think my husband is reading Infidelity Bites. Either that, or he's started twelve-stepping.

In any case, he's spent the past couple weeks trying to explain what was going on in his head during "that time" without actually confessing the affair. Of course, I'm just as opaque, never quite managing to tell him, "honey, I know." So we hit all the high points -- love, commitment, trust -- without ever touching the nasty details. Which means that lately, instead of pondering the state of his love and fidelity, I find myself wondering what would happen if we just had it out. Cleared the air once and for all. Declared the past to be the past, and resolved to move forward from this really good place where we are now.

But I always stop short, a little afraid of what I might learn -- about him, but also about myself -- if we kept talking. It should be enough, I tell myself, that he's admitted behaving badly during our engagement. He's apologized as many ways as he knows how within the boundaries of our little dance. And though I've accepted all his apologies, I'm not sure I'm as good at telegraphing my forgiveness. I keep getting drowned out by the nagging voice in the back of my head that won't stop asking "WHY?"

Let it go, said the anonymous commentator. Wise words, indeed.


The Wife Who Knows

The State of Our Union

Watching the President last night, wondering if there is any doubt left whether this man has balls.... I mean, it takes some pretty serious stones for an oilman to keep a straight face while telling us, "America is addicted to oil." Not to mention the petty schoolboy defiance with which he defended his foray into domestic spying; or his playground bully saber rattling at Iran when there's not a soldier left to spare. But for me, the cake-taking moment was his shameless exploitation of the grieving family of a Marine who perished in a folly of his creation.

This blog has never been political, but it was hard to resist taking a shot at such an easy target while pondering the state of my own union. If I had to address a joint session of Congress about "us" (as opposed to the "U.S."), it might go something like this:

"My fellow citizens: Despite some rough patches and upheavals during the past year, the state of our union has never been stronger.

"Like the hurricanes that devastated the Gulf Coast of this great nation, I weathered my own personal category 5 storm this summer. When I learned about my husband's long affair during our engagement, it shook me to the core. Love, trust, commitment -- they were all shattered in that moment. As I surveyed the damage, I wondered if there was enough left to rebuild. The sheer volume of wreckage prompted me to convene a one-woman investigative committee to ask the hard questions.

"How could I believe that he loves me if he could sustain an intimate relationship -- not a drunken one-night stand, but an intense affair that lasted at least eight months -- with someone else at the same time? Did it mean anything when he called me the most important person in his life, if he thought nothing of betraying all my confidences to The Other Woman? How could he promise to be with me for the rest of his life when he couldn't manage to be faithful BEFORE we got married?

"And once I finished dissecting whether anything he'd ever said had been true, I started wondering what this meant for our future. Would I ever be able to trust him? Would I ever relax enough to stop scrutinizing everything he said, everywhere he went, everybody he saw, every dime he spent, looking for the signs that I missed the first time around? Would he get bored with me and need the excitement of another Other Woman? Could I live with a man who might stray from time to time?

"And finally, I started questioning myself. I wondered what had happened to the strong, determined woman who believed she deserved better than a man who had to lie to be with her. Was my need to put a positive spin on own misery at the time so all-consuming that it blinded me to the huge deceit going on right under my nose? Was I an object of pity to everyone who knew? Did I still love him?

"Over the months, as the initial shock mellowed, I've come to understand that my husband loves me and believes in our marriage. Most everything he does these days shows -- not just tells -- me that he's fully committed to our union. I still have a bit of work to convince myself that his affair was the product of some post-divorce, pre-marital anxiety that I'll never understand; that the circumstances were unique and not likely to be replicated in the future. I'm not all the way there yet, nor can I promise that the road ahead will be without bumps. But I can tell you, my fellow Americans, that our future looks bright from here.

"Good night and God bless this great union."


The Wife Who Knows