Everyone Has A Back Story Too

It would seem that I’ve stirred up some stuff about cheating spouses, angry wives, and mistresses bearing the brunt of the blame with my last post. I guess I’ve really been healing up nicely… I forgot how I desperately crawled through the internet looking for some answers to questions that weren’t even clear to me, and how easy it was to read things into what people said that they might not have meant.

I admit, I did not see the quick post about not being harsh with women who’d been hurt stirring up so many people’s emotions.

In an effort to explain my reluctance to verbally bash all Other Women for their membership in the club that ruined my own marriage. I’d better spill something that I failed to address during the The Dark Year, when Chef and Tanya were the new Chef and Bird, and I was just some lunatic codependent living in the ghetto who was writing her crazy on a blog for the world to read.

I won’t lie to you and say I didn’t think about this a lot while I was terrorizing Tanya. I did. I have a conscious.

Here it goes.

The man who is actually Rebekkah’s biological father was married, and we lived together for a couple of months before I kicked him to the curb for cheating on me.

Horrible, right? I was The Other Woman.

The problem with living a life being dictated by only black and white scenarios is that rarely does anything in life ever really falls in either of those categories. Most of what a person does that really gets our attention started long before a bad decision is made.

I’d been trying to find a way to leave home. I was attending college, but still living with the person who molested me, and I felt almost desperate. I’d asked a relative who lived in the same town if I could live with her, and she didn’t want to become involved in this sordid mess, and flat told me no. Don’t you just love family??

I worked the evenings at a 24 hour restaurant, and had gone on a couple of dates with a guy I liked okay. I will admit, I would have seduced Norman Bates if I thought it would buy me a ticket out of the hell I’d been living in for years. Turns out, a misunderstanding and a guy afraid I would tell his secrets were about to take care of my problem for me.

I went to work as usual, but a few hours later, I began to feel sick. I spoke to my manager who let me punch out, and then I called home for a ride. No one answered, so I left a message. My manager had me lie down in the break room. I fell asleep…and woke up there the next morning!! I called and called home, and still got no answer. Finally, I called the guy I’d gone on two….TWO…dates with, and he came and picked me up to take me home. When I arrived at my house, all of my things were in garbage bags on the lawn and my family were all in the house ignoring my calls and knocks. The person who could be hurt by my knowledge had decided that since I hadn’t come home that night, it was the perfect opportunity to kick me out, and my mom was soothed by scriptures about rebellious children and how it was God’s will to make me suffer so my soul would not be lost.

Sidenote: I hate when people twist the Bible to justify something a moron naturally knows is just plain wrong. I ended up smack in the middle of the stupidest “Christian” crap constantly. It’s a wonder I didn’t go atheist….

Patrick, my two-date guy, was freaked out. He did not come from a dysfunctional family, and the experience of witnessing it worked in my favor. He was angry on my behalf. He loaded the sad two sacks of junk and clothes my family had packed for me up in his car, settled a stunned me in the front seat, and I found myself living with a guy I didn’t know.

A few weeks later, Patrick and I had just signed a lease on an apartment. I felt grateful to have a place to live, and more than a little unsettled about living with a man who had some glaring flaws. Patrick was, and is to this day, the most intelligent human being I’ve ever met.

He is the kind of guy that does long multiplication in his head, and then explains how that number is the equation that explains how a cow in Africa’s hair color is related to the orange orchard that his father worked in as a kid….Bizarre, but I believed him. If anyone would know, it would be him. I spent a great deal of time listening to stuff that made no sense to me and nodding when I thought it was appropriate. He never seemed to notice or care that I was never adding anything to any of our conversations. He was obviously just happy to have a captured audience. I remember thinking this must have been one lonely kid…

The night before the big move to our apartment, we were awakened by a pounding on the door of the trailer we had been staying in. Incidentally, it was parked in his parents’ back yard. I could go all sorts of hilarious places with just that, but I won’t. He did give me Rebekkah after all.

Patrick jumped up and headed towards the door, telling me to stay in bed. I’m pretty sure we both thought it was a cop. It was worse. It was an angry wife.

Patrick recognized her voice screaming obscenities before he made it to the door, and instead of answering the door, he had a yelling match with her through it. She knew he had a girl in the trailer with him. In other words, she wasn’t retarded. Why else wouldn’t he open the door?

After he tried lying to her about me, he then resorted to name calling. I don’t remember much about what she was saying. I remember her crying. I remember thinking Patrick was a douche, who’d taken me on two real dates while he was married to a woman who was home taking care of the kids.

I also remembered I had no where else to go.

This guy had failed to mention a wife, and five stepkids he’d raised for years. It had been bad enough being a Fornicator. Now I was also an Adulterous Woman. I felt pretty positive that Patrick wasn’t going to be the true love of my life. I watched in pure horror as this professionally dressed, attractive woman pulled off a high heeled shoe and beat it against a window in an effort to break inside. I hadn’t ever experienced having my heart broken, and frankly, it was just unsettling to watch her act like a complete nut job. I tried to blend into a corner in the living room/dining room/bedroom and not be noticed.

The wife, on the other hand, could notice nothing else, and it was the site of me cowering in a corner that made her hell-bent on getting in that trailer. What seemed like an eternity went by before she limped back to her car, broken high heel in her hand, and drove away. I tried tentatively to discuss his marital status, but Patrick was upset about his wife flipping out, and needed time to think. We went to bed, both of us doing a lot of thinking.

In the end, I moved in the apartment with him, knowing full well he was married, and that his wife was devastated by what he had done. It didn’t matter an iota to her what my story was, or the reason I had ended up in bed with her husband.

We lived a very unpleasant existence together for a few months, and then I found out about my pregnancy. He was delighted to have a baby on the way…not. We had a fight, I went to work, and the next morning, I caught him in bed with two...two...women. I did not love this guy, and it was pretty apparent when I flipped out over them trying to steal my clothes, and not saying all that much about finding them both naked in bed with my boyfriend. After they left, I tried to talk to Patrick about all of this, and he locked himself in the bathroom and wouldn’t come out. Two hours later, Patrick still hiding in the bathroom, I had a suitcase packed, a relative on the way to get me, and I was shipped off to live with some distant relatives in Central Texas. Rebekkah was born and the rest is history.

I tell this story to say this: there is always a back story. The people who want to like me will tend to agree that me being The Other Woman was strictly by accident, and Patrick is the Douche Bag in our scenario. People who don’t like me will wonder why I didn’t call those distant relatives instead of moving in with him after I did know. Life is all about a point of view.

What happened in the case of Chef and Tanya and myself can’t really compare to my experience being The Other Woman, other than I learned first hand how pain can make a normal, intelligent woman beat a window with her high-heeled shoe. It isn’t a mystery to me anymore.

I don’t judge people mainly because at some point or another along my way. I’ve committed sins that disqualify me. I’ve struggled with addictions, sexual promiscuity, and fornication. I lived for almost a decade with Chef before marrying him. Don’t even get me started on what most people consider smaller sins….cussing, lying, taking revenge for perceived injustices, not honoring parents, letting things be more important than God…I think you get what I’m saying. There aren’t many commandments that I haven’t trampled on repeatedly on my way to this moment. I’m a Christian who has blown it a lot.

I know first hand how much a person who is forgiven so much feels toward the One who forgave her. It is no small thing for me to try in some small way to spread that feeling around to others who probably need it as much as I did.

~Bird