One More Rant Before I’m Finished With These People

This week, I had a conversation that left me annoyed and wondering why it is always poor people that threaten to get their lawyers

right on your butt. Chef’s girlfriend doesn’t seem to be the sharpest knife in the drawer, and now I’m getting an idea where she gets her weird ability to blame HER affair with my husband on ME. You are probably as sick of this subject as I am, but bear with me through one final rant about the insanity that my life was a few months ago. Call this a mental health post, if you will.

T’s mother, B, is just as appalled as I am that her daughter took up with a married man ( who is older than she is), and about once every two weeks, she tries to call me. I never answer her calls because really, what is there to say? I don’t want to chat with my husband’s girlfriend’s mother. Plus, I can never really follow what the woman is trying to say, except that she blames this whole sordid mess on Chef, and gives her daughter every excuse in the book for it not being her fault, including blaming their affair on me. What the h…….?

Here’s the thing. T is 29, as of yesterday. She is a Christian, and knew that what she was doing was wrong. Chef is to blame, but so is she. They’ve had a rather public thing going on since at least February of this year. That was long before I knew about it. That’s all I have to say about the matter. However, I don’t really understand why, but B somehow thinks that some of this crap her daughter has pulled is my fault too, and I just don’t want to hear it. This week, she cleverly restricted her number and called me looking for Chef’s phone number. I use my cell number for work, so I have no choice but to answer numbers during the day that I don’t recognize, and to say I was less than thrilled to hear from her is an understatement. She rattled on, and I hung up.

Later in the week,  she (T’s mom) sent me a text saying she forgives me and my family for everything. What??? I texted her back asking what that meant. Why should she be forgiving me? She told me to go to my husband’s house and try being nice to him from now on, and then he would take me back. She insisted that my problem was that I wasn’t appreciating my family enough. Seriously?

Listen. I tried everything when all of this was blowing up. I tried being nice, understanding, and supportive. I tried being mean, angry, and insulting. I tried every emotion in the book, and guess what? Nothing worked because the one thing I wouldn’t do was let him have all my money to use on drugs. And since that is what T is doing now, I have no chance of “winning” him back. He has exactly what is important to him, and it wasn’t important to him who provided him with what he wanted. He isn’t in love with T; he’s said pretty insulting things about her when she got a little perturbed with him about his conduct. He isn’t in love with me, either. He wants his drugs. Period.

Why would I want to reconcile now? He has chosen a course in his life that doesn’t work for me. I don’t want to be an addict, nor do I want to be married to one. I don’t want to always be worrying about where my next fix will come from, or deal with him when he is in the throes of the same worry. I don’t want to have to move from place to place because I don’t pay my bills. I don’t want to take care of someone who won’t work. I don’t want to take care of someone who doesn’t want to get well. So, I haven’t tried to get him back lately,  because if we couldn’t succeed in this relationship when he kind of cared about it, we certainly won’t make it now that he’s obliterated any trust I can ever have in him. The time of Chef and Bird is just over, and I’m making a new life for myself. I would like the people from my old life to stop calling me. Enough. It is over.

To say I feel total forgiveness for T and her family would be a big, fat lie. I’m really humiliated and embarrassed by a woman carrying on behind my back with my husband. I’m embarrassed by the lies he told her about me, and I’m really rather appalled that T thinks that somehow she can write her scriptures and testimony of undying love for the Lord on Facebook while flaunting her adulterous union with my husband to everyone around her. Somehow, she has justified her position in her own head, and I have no choice but to accept that. I struggle less with forgiving Chef…I consider him sick. Plus, I have loved that guy for decades. But to have this person he cheated with send me apology texts that try to justify her position by making me a poor wife is sometimes a bit too hard to take. Having her mom do it for her is enough to make my brain bleed. I will eventually move into complete forgiveness, but these random texts aren’t helping. Leave me alone.

There is always room for improvement in any marriage, and I am no exception. But it is a pure falsehood to say that I deserved my husband’s infidelity. No where in the Bible does it give a man permission to cheat on his wife, no matter what she is or isn’t doing. Ask Hosea. I’ll have to live the rest of my life with the parts of this I’ve done wrong, but I’m not going to fold up and die, and I’m not going to  make you feel better by accepting that some random adult woman couldn’t help herself from cheating with Chef because I was neglecting his needs. Nope. That isn’t what happened at all. I neglected to feed his drug habit, and she didn’t. She wins in this losing game right now, but I’m winning in the overall battle each day I don’t have to deal with all the pain and worry that comes from living with an addict who can’t shake his addiction. I am sad for Chef, and I want him to get the help he needs, but  I think if I’ve proven one thing in all of this, it is that you can’t help someone who just doesn’t want to be helped. Chef has to want to get clean. He just doesn’t right now. Period. Should he die of his use at this point, I don’t need to feel guilty. The question is, should you? Ignoring a bad habit such as this one is dangerous. How will you feel if he dies? Gets arrested? Goes to prison? These are the questions that would haunt me continually when we were still together, and I unfortunately don’t have the talent of laying my blame on other people. I own my own guilt, and those were the  problems that would haunt me all the time. Even now, I know I would struggle with the “what if’s” should something happen to him, but I also know that I waged one hell of a battle against all of this happening to both of us, and I have that to fall back on. It’s just out of my hands, now.

When I got sick of B’s texts, I finally wrote her a rather chastising one of my own about her daughter being the one who needs to be asking forgiveness, along with some angry referrals to some of her other messages to me (all without profanity, I’d like to note), and I got a call from T’s dad. Of course, I didn’t answer, but his message informed me that I needed to not be texting B or he’d call his lawyer. My first reaction was to be angry. I didn’t open up this dialogue! Then I started chuckling because it seems to me that it is always people who can’t afford a loaf of bread that throw around lawyer threats. Remember, I had to lend this family $500 to pay their rent, but now he’s going to pay a lawyer to make me not reply to texts that his wife sends me? Oh please. I wish I had enough money to afford a phone that blocks phone numbers. Forget lawyers. I have quite a list of numbers I’d like to never hear from again. Still, the threat was ludicrous, and I finally just turned the stupid phone off and enjoyed the rest of my day.

I know the T Family follows my blog, obviously for other reasons than what most people do, so I want them to know that I don’t want to hear from them. What is done is done. If you think this is my fault, suck it up. I don’t agree. I’m not going to help put Chef in prison so your daughter has to come home. I’m not going to apologize for not being nice to him and trying to win him back. The man, and your kid, are your problem now. Stop writing/calling me. And oh, please! Spare me your lawyer threats! I can’t believe you even bothered with that! It would mean so much more if I didn’t have the fourteen messages from B on my phone!!!! Are you kidding me??

Anyways, I’m sick of talking about this crap, so I’ll write another post later about how you meet love connections in the most random of places… 🙂 I have a date tonight, so I’m outta here! Have a nice Sunday afternoon!

— Bird