Wow…….time flies.

So long since I blogged. My computer died and I exist with an iPad. Not so jolly to use….very very slow.

we are still living in the tiny town. We are still together. We did a lot and I mean a lot of talking about his actions with desperate single bitch. While I was gone for months he did a lot of therapy with a great no bullshit therapist.

Since Christmas we seem to be on a vastly different level from where we were when 2016 ended. It feels to me like he is finally accepting his issues. He no longer defends himself and we are able to talk about everything in a much more calm manner. We talk about everything and anything. It has given us freedom from guilt and anger as well which feels like a great constraint has lifted.

sadly I have lost my beautiful border collie who was 14 and still chased a ball like a pup but her time came. Yesterday I lost my 17 yr old three legged black cat whose life was no longer viable. Sometimes I wish I never had pets as they give me such heartache when it is their time to go. On the bright side I have a new kitten, I think she is a rag doll x and she is tiny and cute and I hope to have her for a long time.

vale poppy……vale otta.

 

i am relearning my native language and it brings with it so many memories of my childhood……the language I spoke as a baby and toddler before learning English from my older sisters. I keep so busy with the garden here where for the first time in years and years I am able to grow roses. I love them.

I catch up a lot with girlfriends and as they live far away it means Travel but who can resist Sydney? I still have frequent trips to go to my home city to see the oncologist etc…….btw 4 years cancer free………

 

seriously sorry about spelling…grammar etc but iPad hates WordPress for some dumb reason.

He Sucks.

One of the good things about having moved to this desolate part of Oz is that one of my oldest girlfriends lives a mere three hours drive away and in a very beautiful region of this state. Think wineries and foodie restaurants and in winter it is bitter cold. Snow cold. I was dying to visit her as it had been nearly a year since we had seen each other and we had some catching up to do. Husband and I headed over there for a few days.

One morning as we were having breakfast in a beautiful lakeside restaurant my friend looked at me and asked me how am I really doing? I looked at her and thought a moment and then the tears started slowly falling from my eyes. I am fine I tried to reassure her then I started to tell her how much I miss my daughters and my house and my garden and how much of my city life I have given up to accompany the husband to the middle of nowhere. I just had not really given it much thought until that moment but the floodgates opened at this realisation.

That night an unexpected guest arrived at my friend’s house for dinner. I had met her before and knew she was quite a dominating woman who was mainly interested in talking about herself. No sooner had she walked in the door that she announced she was on match.com and elite singles and desperate for a man. Husband sat next to her at dinner and soon they were having an exclusive conversation which carried on THE WHOLE DINNER LONG. Even as my friend and I were clearing the table there sat husband and desperate single female chatting to each other.

At first I was thinking he was just being sociable but then I noticed he was flirty with her, telling her jokes, then arguing about feminism but what really struck me was the exclusiveness. No one else at the table was invited to join their conversation. I started to feel humiliation creep up, I started to feel disrespected. I started to think how the fuck dare he flirt right there in front of me. I got angry and went in the other room at which point she left and then I went to bed.

H comes to bed and realises there is something wrong with me. Really????? Are you fucking serious? I did not want to have an argument with him in my friend’s house so I tossed and turned all night and then woke up early in the morning and decided to leave. We drove three hours home during which time I could not speak to him, nor could I even look at him. All that was going through my mind was that he was a true utter bastard and no idea what he had done to me and was so selfish in his behaviour. What an arsehole!

We got home and I started to pack my clothes and belongings. I also started to tell him why I was so upset and he just started to defend his actions. I even asked him if he got her phone number at which point he just walked out the room. The boundary we had set up was if he fucks up in any way then I am gone. Rules is rules. Trouble is he did not think he had fucked up. He was just chatting to an overbearing woman. His defence at this point was that he had no intention of any liaison with her but she was hard to get away from and that he did not want to hurt her feelings by being rude. ( Of course it was quite alright to hurt my feelings.) For me, it brought back all those feelings of being ignored and disrespected especially if we were out socially and he just had to be the centre of attention with a bunch of women. I would always get pissed off at him and ruin his good fun and no matter how much I told him his flirting hurt me he would argue that it was just harmless socializing and that he could not help it if he got on with women better than men. Fucking Douche. Of course now we both know how that harmless flirt can easily be the first step to something more serious.

He went off to work the next morning and I got into my car and I drove for 11 hours. I  headed home to my house in the city. I cried so much on that drive. I only stopped for fuel. I could not even play any music. I hated what he had so effortlessly done to me and I hated it even more that he was such a retard that he could not even see it.

He has an online therapist. He started to work through what had happened and finally saw that his actions truly sucked. How stupid can he be though?  How could he not see that what he was doing would be perceived by me as a reversion to his old behaviour? How could he not see that to talk exclusively with a single woman at dinner was offensive to me. The trouble is even though he may not have had any future thoughts on this woman his actions to me showed otherwise. I can’t read his mind. I judge by his actions. Where he thought he was being nice and kind to her he did not think how I would be affected. What a fucking idiot.

I was in the city, back in my house and living with my youngest daughter who is house sitting for us. Thank god we kept the house. I could not speak to him. His defence just wore me out. I filed separation papers. It felt good though even though it was quite traumatic. I felt I had to make the stand. For heavens sake, it is two and half years since I found out he was a lying deceitful bastard and I had given him two and a half years of trying to rebuild a shattered marriage and he thoughtlessly in his own innocent mind fucks up. See how it is still all about him first and not a thought given to think about me?

I left to give myself some space. I needed to be away from him distracting me. I needed some time to think. I loved catching up with people and more so with my daughters. My time away was tinged with sadness. No matter how hard I tried to show everyone I was happy and doing the right thing I was deep down suffering sadness and pain and no amount of distraction would help me.

I did however, spend some time at a health and wellness retreat in the gold coast hinterland. It pushed a big reset button for me. It affected me in Mind Body Spirit but my time there deserves a post all of its own. I have been without my computer these past months and I just can’t post on my ipad so I have some catching up to do.

I had stayed away for two months. I am back. He has a lump. He has had ultrasounds, biopsies and now needs surgery. I came back because I know I could not. I came back to help him drive two hours back and forth to the nearest doctor. I came back to hold his hand while we wait for results. I came back because I had a gut feeling he was desolate. I came back because I know he was devastated when I left. I came back to help him.

I do not think I will stay. I will stay long enough to help him after surgery.

 

Nonchalant

Life in a remote part of this huge country is interesting. We have lived in remote towns many times but never a town as small as this. Everyone wants to talk to me, where am I from, what do I do, where do I live, how long will I stay. It is so different from the city where no one gives a care or even notices you. I find it a little invasive but not in a bad way.

I know I will have some issues when the newness wears off but I will maintain to choose to take life with a more grateful attitude. Each and every day. My new house is so small and there is no garden but on the upside I have less to clean and I will grow things in pots. I miss my volunteer work with horses and disabled kids but I will find something just as rewarding here….I hope. I miss my yoga community so much but I find I am getting mindful meditation from yoga practice on my own. I miss my daughters but we speak and text and snapchat every day and when I do go back to the city next month we will have some good quality time hanging out.

I was just thinking this morning about missing some of my friends and suddenly remembered an incident that happened just as we were leaving. It was a comment from a really lovely lady who was more of an acquaintance than a friend and when I told her we were leaving town she said she will miss seeing me and that she will also miss my H because she has a huge crush on him. She then went on to say how boring and serious her husband is and that whenever she sees my H he is always friendly and smiling and loving and she thinks he is so funny. Really? Really? Really? It floored me. Is it that easy for him? Must be……I guess ……because he is no tall handsome devil, he is short, he is cute and I guess he is friendly and funny and maybe that is all that it takes.

So then I start to think, sometimes this is not a good thing but today I think it is therapeutic.

H catches the mine bus to work every morning. There are two busses. One is for the miners and one is for the admin staff. H catches the admin bus and they have an hour trip to the mine site. There are a lot of women on the bus. ( whore lizard was a bus friend) H also works in a very close knit team of three people. They are the exploration team and spend hours together either in the office or out in the field. One of the team is a young woman. (H has had crushes and an affair and attempts at affairs with colleagues.)

I was thinking how nonchalant I feel about these situations. I actually do not give a damn about his close proximity to females.  So this leads me to wondering why I don’t feel an instant dread or threat or a trigger….why? Could it be that I trust him?  Bhahahaha……no, I don’t think so. I don’t think I will ever trust him.

So what is it? What makes me feel like this?

Moved

I have not posted for a month because so much has been happening.

H was offered a job in a remote mine in the outback. For a week or so I kept thinking this could be an opportunity for us to have a break. He could go off to the never never and I could stay in the city.

To be honest I just could not do it. When I sat down and had a really good think about us and how our life is at the moment I came to the realisation that our relationship now is really very strong, honest and fun. So, why not go off and have an adventure?

We called the removalists and packed up some furniture and we hopped in the car and we drove ten  + hours into the middle of Australia. We left a daughter at our house along with the cats and dog as I still need a place to stay when I go to the city for doctor’s appointments and checkups.

We now live in a a tiny little duplex in a town of 2500 people. I quite like the smaller space for a change and it is warm and comfortable. H is picked up every morning at 5.30 am by a bus and taken to the mine an hour away. H is dropped off every night at 5.30 and works a nine day fortnight. He is pretty happy as he is right back to grass roots exploration which means to me he is playing with rocks and coloring in maps. A far cry from his corporate life in the city. He is actually very happy. He is stress free and loving the work.

The town is tiny with a smattering of the usual suspects including a small supermarket and the butcher and a couple of pubs. Fresh fruit and vegetables are a thing of the past and do you think I can find coffee pods? My daughter sent me a ‘care’ package which included coffee pods when I told her I could not find any. There is a town two hours east from here where I will be able to stock up on fresh foods and coffee and I think it might be a fortnightly trip.

The other interesting thing here is that it is bloody cold. I could say almost freezing with day temperatures around 10 to 15 and nights at 4. I was used to days at 25 and nights at 15 so it is a bit of a shock to my system. I am a sook when it is cold and I have the heating going full time at a balmy tropical 23.

The interior of Australia has had a real drenching and so everything looks green and lush. The river that flows through this town is flooding. I don’t know if anyone knows the term we use in Australia for a redneck type of person but it is ‘BOGAN’. Guess what the river is called that runs through this town? The Bogan river! Bogan is actually an aboriginal word meaning ‘the birthplace of a notable headman of the local tribe’. I did not know that.

The countryside here is sheep farming. Not the cute green sheep farms with barking collies but huge big stations running massive flocks. Farmers are called ‘Cockies’ and come into town with their muddy four wheel drives and a thirst for the local beer.

It is such a change from the city lifestyle we had but so far I am enjoying it. It took a while to get internet connected and it is much faster than what we had in the city so there is a bonus around every corner. I have set up a sewing room and have brought 5 unfinished quilts with me so I am on a mission.

It really is a DIFFERENT NEW LIFE.

Healing

 

Husband simplistically thinks that now everything is out in the open and having decided he is going to be the good and honest man I always thought he was that we can just happily reconcile. See how silly he can be? I must admit that I had not encountered much infidelity in my life. No one in our immediate families had divorced or separated and occasionally we would hear about friend’s marriages breaking up but there was no one close. We had no exposure to adultery or infidelity.

I start to read and educate myself and this takes up a lot of my time and also many different avenues. I am actually interested in finding out what goes on to make someone risk their family for short lived adulation and pleasure. I am one of these people that will dig until I am happy with the results and then just dig a little more.  Husband seems to me to hide his head in the sand. He says that thinking of what he has done makes him feel really bad about himself and he becomes very sad. If only it were that simple as his thinking that he was bad but now he is good and everything will be fixed. In conversations he would start to repeat what the psychologist spewed at him. I called it therapy waffle. After six months of intensive sessions his psychologist felt there was no more need to see husband. Psychologist was a silly simple man as well. His diagnosis was that husband was a very immature young adult with selfish traits that led to his infidelities. He then went on to say that now that husband had been caught he was able to confront his wrongs and he had immediately matured. All fixed.

Um…..No!

He ditches the therapist. Husband still thinks he doesn’t need to do anything. He still thinks he is now on the right path and that he will never veer off it. I am feeling continuously frustrated with him accepting he is fixed. Husband starts to go to Sex and Love Addicts and he also starts Sexaholics meetings. He spends six months going to the meetings and working his way through steps. He likes the theory behind the concept but he tells me he feels like he is a fake. He feels he does not relate to the traits that his fellow addicts have. He is an analytical scientist and he felt that giving up his power to God just did not sit right with him. He knew that every choice and decision he made in his adulterous life was on him. He knew he was self-centered and selfish and his first thoughts were always what were best for him. His priority in life was him. He did not suffer from low self -worth or low self-esteem. It was the opposite. He loved himself so much that nothing else mattered. He was the most important thing in his life.

The exterior façade that he showed to the world was a happy friendly confident and intelligent man.  He was the man he knew he should be on the outside. Inside him his very core was a molten mix of self-love which fueled his secrets, lies and fantasies. It consisted of the things he felt he deserved because of his self -righteous attitude. I rarely glimpsed this evil core in the first twenty years of our life together but when I did we would argue the point and mostly end at an impasse.  He has always been a difficult man to argue with and analytical people can be very manipulative in their conversations.

I am the complete opposite. I dislike arguments and I feel I have a more Zen like approach to life. It is also a very simple code that I live by. I try to see the good in everyone. I believe in honesty and self- reflection and empathy is foremost in my thinking. He damn well took advantage of me and my nature and he said that if he thought about it then he felt guilty but he preferred not to think about it.

What is the right path to follow? Which direction do we take? How the hell do we heal ourselves?

There is so much information out there. I bought many books, searched the internet for articles, found websites, read blogs and forums and talked to people. It was an overwhelming task.

 

Lies

All the lies are finally out. H says it is an immense relief for him and there I am going back over every memory and trying to rebuild and rethink my life that had just been crumpled and trashed.

We have to start somewhere and work on a foundation from which to heal individually.

At various moments over the next two years I find myself teetering on a knife edge. I stand on the painful knife and if I go left I go into a life without him. If I go right I stay with him. I really do not know which way to go. One thing keeps coming to mind and it is something H keeps constantly reminding me and it is the fact that we did have a strong and powerful relationship in the past. There was respect and a solid bond forged by the transient life we lead and our family unit was reliant on each other. Somewhere under all of this shit there once was a good foundation.

His attitude since discovery has vastly changed and there has been a strong shift of power. I am being flooded with his ‘new nice’ and I realize it has been missing for years. He is so focused on me and my healing, my emotions and my needs.  It is such a change in him and for me it is so lovely to be first in his thoughts once again.

The sad thing is that he was so stupid. I knew he could be stupid but I had no idea of the extent of his stupidity. We all do dumb things at times and I know I have quite a long list. The difference is the lying. We start to learn how to talk to each other again. After all the years of lies or in my case not really being honest with my emotions we both find it very hard in the beginning to communicate with each other. I have anger and even though I know I have to control my anger most conversations will start out calm but I find myself losing it with his selfishness.

H still believes in the early days that his behavior was justified. He believes that he deserved to be happy because as a young adult he found that women were not attracted to him and now that he was older he found it easy to attract them and therefore he wanted, needed and deserved it. This is all very simple for a single man but being a married man he failed to distinguish the wrong. To me this is stupid. I look at all the traits of a narcissistic personality and he ticks every box. He himself seems shocked as well because in his mind he is a nice man with just a few selfish traits. The extent of his negative traits makes him start to look at the rationalization behind his actions.

As a child if he did something naughty and was caught then he would lie about it. He was a really cute kid and adored by his mother so he would get away with it. I can still see MIL telling me how she would chase him around with a wooden spoon but would never want to catch him because then she would have to hit him. I guess he also learnt how to run fast. He also learnt how to get away with lying.

I look back now on our early communicating efforts after discovery and see how ineffective we were in that first year. I would start calm and end up angry and in tears and he would become defensive and argumentative. It felt at the time that we were not getting anywhere. Now I can see that it was just a gradual process of having to relearn and find our way in a very different and honest relationship.  Some of our conversations centered on other aspects of our lives. We talked about how we felt we were perceived in certain situations and how we sometimes wrongly misjudged situations. We talked about our inner fantasies and our sexual relationship. We talked about subjects that we had never talked about before. We talked with honesty and bared our souls with each other. Each time we had a heavy debated conversation/argument we ended up in a much better place than where we were before. Sometimes these episodes might even last for days. Some days my anger would not dissipate. Sometimes H would get frustrated with me and become defensive but slowly as time wore on we very slowly got to a place of better understanding.

There was one issue that kept coming to my mind and it would upset me and it ended up that it was the basis of many arguments. I felt that H was not doing what I needed him to do yet I did not know what it was that I needed him to do. We would go around in circles. He would claim that he was doing everything he could possibly do to be honest, loving, truthful and understanding. He did not know what more he could do. He was a changed person. He hated who he had become in his life. He hated that he had lied and put the whole family at risk. He was disgusted with himself and he knew he would never go back to that person who he detested.

Why was it that I was unable to accept this?

Why did I feel that there was something still missing?

D D 3

 

Two months have passed since DD2. Husband is home after a stint in a cheap lodge he found that is full of homeless men. We are talking a lot. I am asking a lot of questions. We have many arguments. I am very angry. He is very quiet and appears remorseful.  Husband is seeing a new psychologist. I was asked along to a session so the psychologist could hear my side of the story. Husband knows that I will continue to dig and dig if I feel something has been left out. The psychologist tells husband that he needs to come completely clean. I tell husband I have a private investigator I am talking to and he is in the process of getting me a quote. He is going to be able to retrieve older phone records for me.

After the Psychologist session husband takes me out to lunch  and once we have finished our meal the rest of his story comes out. He tells me there is an affair with my girlfriend from 1986 (which I would not have been able to find out about) He told me of the affair in 2004 as well as the few attempts he made with various friends of ours. His story is disgusting and makes me feel physically sick. I just cannot grasp that he has been such an evil deceitful person. This is man who appears on the outside to have high morals and solid integrity and it is all a farce. He tells me about the whore next door. He tells me of a friend of ours he was sexual with on a drunken night before we were married and how she gave him herpes. He tells me all the stories of each one of my friends that he tried to flirt with and kiss. I slowly begin to unravel. It wasn’t just the last ten years that he was a lying arsehole. He has been a lying cheating bastard ever since I have known him. By the time we arrive home I am feeling more and more at a loss. The pain of my heart is unbearable. I walk into the kitchen and my daughters are there. I tell them the latest bastard acts and they are just speechless and stand there just looking at us both. Husband hands me a cup of tea. I remember taking it and then looking at him and throwing the fucking cup of tea at him. I cannot stand to look at him and yet I am trying to process all this new information. I go into my room. I go into my wardrobe. I curl into a tight ball in the corner hiding behind my clothes and I cry and cry and cry. I am in so much pain. I am there for hours and I can’t stop crying and I can’t move. I actually feel very safe, sad but safe tucked up in the corner of the wardrobe.

 

I hear raised voices. My oldest daughter is yelling at her father. I don’t care anymore. He is dead to me now. After many hours a strange face appears sliding back the wardrobe door and she starts to ask me some questions. I am still crying and sobbing and try to talk to this person as best I can but I am a blithering mess and I know I don’t make much sense. After I calm down a bit I realize she is a paramedic and she is concerned about my previous attempt to obliterate my mind and she takes control. I find myself back at the hospital with my two daughters. I have to go through another assessment. Husband had followed the ambulance to the hospital but he was not allowed to come anywhere near me.

He tells me later that this was one of his lowest points. It was sobering for him to see what a painful affect his lies had on my sanity. He did not realize the degree of pain and hurt he had caused. He sat in a waiting room for many hours knowing his selfishness was the cause of so much pain for his wife and daughters.

Now, finally the whole story of his life of lies is out. I hate him so much for being such a miserable coward and not telling me the whole truth in his first disclosure. I am in a daze and trying to rethink the narrative of what I thought my life with him was. I had so much trouble processing the truth.

At this point I entered the organic holistic centre for three weeks of intensive therapy. I had a great opportunity to rethink my whole life and to set myself a goal for healing. My daughter’s spent many hours researching facilities and treatments and they did a wonderful job. The day they drove me there I can remember feeling like a broken shell of a person. I sat in the back of the car and felt numb. I felt empty and sad and numb.

I emerged three weeks later feeling like a new person. The centre facilitators told me that it is a great feeling for them when they see patients slowly emerge from a place of pain and sad to seeing a patient smile and laugh. I soon loved to look in on the cooks and see what they were whipping up for meals. The food was gluten free, dairy free, sugar free, no salt, and no caffeine. They grew organic fruit and vegetables in vast orchards and there were ducks and geese and even a platypus family. It was a healing and nurturing experience and gave me strength and confidence to face the shitfest that my life had recently endured. I learnt that I had to change the way that I think about certain events in my life. I had to dissect and then reconstruct my beliefs. My time in this establishment freed me of fears and worries about my cancer and taught me to believe in myself and trust my decisions. It was an empowering experience and one that most definitely saved me from myself.

I often tell my daughters how grateful I am for their help and support and how glad I am that they have both turned into strong wonderful women. I tell them how their strength and love for me is far more important that whatever crap their father has done. They can see the reality of what a lie can lead to. They can understand that life will sometimes throw us a ball in the face but we can get up, dust off and get on with life. They can understand now why the three of us have forged such a strong bond and that he was the one who chose to leave the inner circle of our love.

My oldest daughter came up to me one day and gave me a huge hug and said to me that she is so proud of how I have managed to find my way in life over the last two years. She told me I was the strength in her life. It was a very emotional moment for us both.

So far, this is a story of the lies and deceit and disgusting behavior of the man that I married 32 years ago. What will follow is how both of us are learning to live in a very different narrative. There are mistakes we both made and there are things that helped us. I know it will be very different for everyone and my journey is by no means going to end up in a happy ever after castle with Prince Charming.

Rather it is a story that finds me living life after adultery.