Summertime Blues

I knew when we moved into a house on the water that we'd be overrun with houseguests come summer.

I knew because I used to delight in being one of those guests. And now, my friends and family have collectively ganged up on me to exact their revenge for all my years of warm weather freeloading.

They started coming Memorial Day weekend and will continue, pretty much unabated, until we leave for vacation in mid-August. Last night was the first night in almost a month that we didn't have anyone at the house except ourselves. It was nice just to sit there with a glass of wine and the remnants of the Sunday paper without feeling like I was ignoring people who came from long distances to see us.

My respite will be short-lived -- tomorrow, my best friend and her husband arrive for a few days. We've been friends for so long, they seem more like family and hardly count as company. In fact, I knew my husband was a keeper when he passed muster with these people. When they met at Best Friend's annual backyard barbeque three years ago, it was love at first sight. Best Friend's Husband, a man whom I have known since I dated his brother in high school, pulled me aside in the middle of the party and gushed like a starstruck teenager, "I like this one! You've got to keep him!!"

So I did.

When the four of us get together, it's as if my husband has been part of our gang from the start. And while I really like my husband's best friends -- who are coming to visit the week after the Fourth of July -- I don't have the same easy connection with them that he has with mine. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to seeing Best Friend more than some of the others who will be coming this summer!


The Wife Who Knows

Girls Night Out

I had dinner last night with a group of girlfriends, including the woman who is dating the Guy Who Broke My Heart. Girlfriend knew him years before I did -- she was even there at the dinner party where we met -- and was always part of our circle when we were together. During those five years, she never missed a chance to tell me how lucky I was to be with such an extraordinary man. So lucky, in fact, that when I confided in her as things were falling apart, she saw it as an opportunity. Of course, she neglected to tell me, as I was pouring my heart out to her, that she was more interested in being with Guy Who Broke My Heart than in being my friend.

I didn't know any of this until a couple years later, when Guy Who Broke My Heart and I started talking again. We ran into each other by chance on the street outside my house on a Saturday night. After a few minutes there on the sidewalk, I realized -- to my great surprise -- that I wasn't angry at him or sad over the situation any more. Since neither of us had any place else to be, I invited him around to the back porch for a drink.

About halfway through a really good bottle of Chardonnay, I said, "You know, you and Girlfriend should really bury the hatchet. We've been over long enough that it's just silly for her to still be upset over our breakup."

He spat out his wine and sputtered, "That's what she told you? Ha! She's not mad because of the way I treated you -- Girlfriend is mad because I turned her down when she made a pass at me right before we broke up."

You could have knocked me over with a feather. It's been almost ten years, and I still feel a twinge when I think about that conversation. Not because four years after that night on my back porch, Guy Who Broke My Heart and Girlfriend finally got together -- I'm over him -- but because it still hurts to know that someone I trusted betrayed me. When I think about how long I've held on to that hurt, it makes me wonder if I'll ever be able to let go of the lingering anger at my husband for his affair....


The Wife Who Knows

Let's Recap

Five months into a whirlwind long-distance relationship, my husband asked me to marry him.

Within a month of saying yes -- while I was making plans to move to the small town -- he started having second thoughts about the engagement.

Six weeks after we promised to spend the rest of our lives together, we spent our first weekend apart. He used the opportunity to assert his independence by sleeping with The Other Woman.

A few weeks later, while I was looking for a job, my husband's one night stand intensified into a full-blown affair; it peaked in the two-month period after I accepted a position and was winding down my life in the big city.

Six months after our engagement -- or four months after he began his affair, depending on how you want to count -- and despite an overwhelming sense that his commitment was waning, I moved to the small town to be with my husband.

Shortly after I settled in, I started traveling two weeks a month for work. My frequent absences gave my husband enough freedom to continue his affair with reckless abandon. I'm still amazed I never caught him.

Four months after I moved in with him, my husband began encouraging The Other Woman to find another job. Their relationship would improve, he said, if he wasn't her boss.

One month later, after she put up a hell of a fight, he fired her for insubordination. This was the end, he told her.

Two weeks later, my husband hired The Other Woman back as an independent contractor to get himself out of a jam. They had one last fling while I was out of town on a week-long business trip.

Two weeks after that, he broke it off with her for good -- the same weekend we set a wedding date.

Two weeks later, she FINALLY took a new job and moved 100 miles away.

Six weeks later, and only two weeks before our wedding, my husband told me that The Other Woman was threatening to "bring him down," threatening to hurt me, and threatening to disrupt our wedding. I accepted his explanation -- "She's crazy" -- without question, and took steps to protect myself. This is the point at which that 20-20 hindsight really kicks me in the ass.

Two weeks later, I had security guards stationed in the parking lot and patrolling the grounds around the chapel to keep her away.

Five hours after we said "I do," my husband showed me a text message from The Other Woman, wishing him a happy life. Dismissing her for the millionth time as "crazy," he promised to have nothing to do with her, ever again.

* * *

Flash forward nine months after the wedding when I discovered that pretty much everything my husband ever said to me -- about us, about The Other Woman, about our life together -- was a lie.

Two months later -- sleep deprived, not eating, and barely able to catch my breath -- I started writing Infidelity Bites to sort it all out.

Eight months and 63 posts later, I'm not quite through it, but almost.


The Wife Who Knows

Wedding Bell Blues

My wedding day might have been the happiest day of my life, but I was so preoccupied that I couldn't relax enough to enjoy it. Technically, it was perfect -- everything went as planned, on time and according to plan. But under the surface, I felt like we were dancing inside a fragile house of cards that could tumble apart at any minute. I don't think I took a deep breath until we were a thousand miles away on a tropical island with umbrella drinks in our hands.

Our first thought after we got engaged was to elope. But my husband wanted his kids there, so we switched to Plan B -- a small gathering of immediate family and best friends. An influential colleague pulled some strings so we could have the ceremony on a balcony of a landmark building in the big city. But because my husband balked at setting a date until the last minute, we couldn't work out the logistics on such short notice. Hence, our wedding: a bigger ceremony in a sweet little chapel about 20 miles outside the small town.

The wedding itself was so simple we didn't even bother with a rehearsal. Even if we had, there were still a million moving parts that were beyond our control. For instance...

My dress: I ordered my not-really-a-wedding-dress wedding dress from a dress shop in the big city. I should have had it made-to-measure, but after I moved, my travel schedule made it all but impossible to get there for the fittings the dressmaker required. I had her send it to me, and took it to a small town seamstress for alterations on the recommendation of a friend. When I picked it up, the bodice didn't quite fit right. Because there wasn't time to get it fixed before the wedding, I stood up straight and threw my shoulders back to take up the slack. Unless you were really looking, you couldn't tell that it was less than perfect. Toward the end of the day, when my posture started sagging a bit, you can see a little blousing in some of the pictures. You can't tell a thing, however, in our formal portraits.

The cake: I made our cake from scratch. I baked the layers and whipped up monster batches of orange-vanilla custard filling and Italian meringue buttercream two days beforehand. On our wedding eve, my best friend and I assembled, filled, frosted, and decorated the cake in the room where we were having the reception so we wouldn't have to worry about it falling apart during transport. Needless to say, it didn't look (or taste) homemade.

My look: On my wedding day, the first thing I did was treat myself and my best friend to an up-do, makeup, and a manicure. We came out of the salon looking extra-fabulous, with big hair and smoky eyes. When my dad told me that I should wash my face, my little sister shut him down before he could start in with the same "painted woman" lecture he'd been giving us since we were thirteen. She told me, "You know, if Dad thinks it looks like too much, it means they did a good job."

The flowers: My best friend's daughter put our bouquets together an hour before the ceremony, using 50 white roses and several yards of gold wired ribbon I picked up from a local floral wholesaler. I remembered to hang the bouquet upside down before we left for the honeymoon, and now it sits in a crystal vase in our china cabinet, next to the vintage bride and groom cake topper I found on E-Bay.

My grand entrance: My dad seemed relieved when I told him I'd prefer to walk in by myself, but my husband was disappointed when his kids told him they'd rather not play for the ceremony. It's not that they weren't happy for us, it's just that active participation seemed a little too disloyal to their mother. Instead, my best friend's husband played me down the aisle with a little tune he said he made up on the spot.

Our vows: The minister, who was a colleague of mine, wrote the most beautiful, personal ceremony for us. She paid a loving tribute to my husband's parents, both of whom are deceased. She wove stories from our long-distance courtship into the homily. She chose one of Jesus' parables for the lesson ("anything but I Corinthians," I said) that highlighted the precious and random nature of love. She even managed to work in a fishing analogy, to the delight of my sportsman husband. I choked up when it was time to say my vows -- how odd that the girl who is never at a loss for words would be speechless at her own wedding.

Bottom line: If all I'd had to worry about was losing my voice, or the way my dress fit, or whether my dad thought I looked trashy, or if my flowers would wilt before I got down the aisle, or would the frosting on the cake melt, or did my soon-to-be-stepkids hate me, the day would have been a breeze. All that was small stuff I was long past sweating. No, my biggest wedding day worry -- the one that kept me up at night, tied my stomach in a knot, and had me looking over my shoulder all day -- was my fear that The Other Woman would follow through with her angry threats to disrupt the day.

In the end, she didn't, and everything went like beautiful clockwork. But why she made the threats, and why I chose to believe my husband's version of events, are stories for another post.

The Wife Who Knows

Mothers Day

I put a package in the mail today for my mother, hoping that four days will be enough time to get it there before Mothers Day. My parents don't live off the grid, but they're close -- their tiny, backwoods community makes the Small Town seem cosmopolitan by comparison. They bought this place as a sanctuary when I was in college, and moved there full time when my dad retired several years ago. They still own the house I grew up in, though they spend less time there every year.

I love my mother. But I've spent my life determined not to be her. From puberty on, any time I found myself in an uncertain situation, I asked myself, "What would Mom do?", and then I did the opposite. I don't mean this as a criticism of her. She taught me many things that have served me well -- how to write a gracious thank you note, how to bake a pie, how to maintain long distance friendships, how to fill up a library card, how to keep my eye on the ball (literally) -- but Mom's world was way too small for me. I knew early on that I had to get out or I would die.

If she had dreams, she never told us about them. Coming of age in the 1950s, maybe she was hardwired to be June Cleaver, but I always thought Mom would have been happier if she'd been able to get away from her family for a few hours a day. When she was seven months pregnant, however, the women in her office threw her a shower and wished her a nice life. There was no maternity leave in those days -- if she had wanted to go back to work after her baby was born, she would have had to reapply just like anyone else off the street. She didn't go back, even though I'm pretty sure she would have liked to.

Since it's Mother's Day, I'll stop wondering if Mom has regrets about swapping a career for kids. Instead, I'll wonder whether I'll ever regret that I wasn't brave enough to find out if I would have been any better at it than she was.

The WIfe Who Knows

The Leather Anniversary

My husband and I just passed the third anniversary of our first date. I'm not usually good with these sorts of things, but I remember the day because it's the birthday of one of my oldest and most cherished friends. According to tradition (or Hallmark, whichever came first), three is the leather anniversary. I didn't buy my husband the vintage club chairs he's been coveting; nor did he bring me home the Kelly bag of my dreams. In fact, we let the day go by, unremarked and uncelebrated.

When I look at the changes in my life, a thousand days doesn't seem nearly long enough for such a fundamental transformation. But, truth told, nothing was the same after the day we met. I drove home that Sunday afternoon three years ago with more than just a good date perma-smile on my face -- I drove home with the certainty of a woman who had seen her future.

I've thought about this a lot, and think that our fabulous first date might have boxed us in from the start. We created a myth based on some epic sense of destiny, and when you add in the urgency that comes with long distance, it was pretty much impossible for us to address his second thoughts without admitting that maybe, just maybe, we might be wrong about "us." Every time we thought about slowing down, we were overcome by the notion that we BELONGED together, and kept barreling full steam ahead. Too much predestination, I suppose, and not nearly enough free will.

So here I am, with the benefit of three years hindsight, still sure that we would have ended up where we are. And you know what? If we had backed off a bit in the beginning, taken it slow and gotten to know each other -- demons and all -- before making any big moves or commitments, we'd still be right here, ignoring our leather anniversary.


The Wife Who Knows

My Space

My husband has a My Space account. He started it mostly to keep up with his kids, who all have accounts. So far, I've resisted the urge to hop on that bandwagon. To me, My Space has a creepy, cult-like feeling -- look, it's your first friend Tom! -- that I don't get from Blogger. That being said, it's a really good way to keep tabs on the kids and their friends from a distance. Their sites are pretty tame when you consider what's out there, but I doubt they'd post some of the things they do if they thought we were looking.

It's also a good way to keep tabs on my husband. Most of his "friends" are either family, people we knew back in the Small Town, or his favorite musicians. He has, however, added a couple people he's met since we moved. One of these new "friends" is a girl his kids' age he met at a jam he found through a local music list serve. He came home that first night singing her praises -- New Friend is talented, ambitious, and knows "everyone."

He introduced us at one of the jams. She is talented, but so focused on her music that she comes across as one-dimensional and sort of immature in conversation. When you consider the more-than-20-year age difference, it's not terribly surprising that we didn't find much in common.

Except my husband.

They post a lot of cute-sy messages on their My Space pages. When I asked why he always addresses her as "Hey Gorgeous," he told me that it's just a little harmless flattery to keep in her good graces. After all, "she's going places," and "she knows everyone."

"Okay, fine," I said, "if anyone knows the importance of a good network, it's me."

I may have changed the subject, but I'm not sure I've changed my mind. My husband's dismal track record with "friends" makes it very hard for me to see his on-line flirtation with New Friend as anything but a red flag. I don't want to blow this out of proportion, but I think Ronald Reagan said it best:

Trust -- but verify.


The Wife Who Knows