Is love enough??

My love is not enough.  It never has been, although now it isn’t enough, but it is for very different reasons.  I have always hoped that my love would be enough for him, but it never has been.  He has always had me, yet he always wanted more – wanted to know what else was out there, what he was missing.  Now, it seems, he may soon find out what it is like to be missing me.  Not because I want it to be over – I don’t.  I have never wanted my love to be enough more than I want it to be enough now.  I want it to be enough to carry us through this storm, and although I have always thought it was strong enough to carry us through anything, I think this storm is just too big.  We can’t move on past the betrayal--past the lies and the hurt and the anger.  I know that he loves me, and god knows I love him and have loved him as fiercely as any person has ever loved another.  But is it enough?

It’s not.  I can’t let it go. I can’t wrap my little brain around the fact that he could do this to me, to our little family that he, at one time, so desperately wanted.  I can’t believe he would have unprotected sex over and over with someone he didn’t really trust and then come home and risk me and our unborn child.  I can’t believe that when I loved him unconditionally and gave him another chance, he lied more and betrayed me again.  I can’t believe that he missed out on the whole summer with our children while he was caught up in his own head trying to decide if he loved her (wtf??).  I can’t stand that they still work together and that she is a part of my daily life.  I can’t take it that he tiptoes around her feelings so he doesn’t “antagonize” the situation at work.  I can’t take it that she is still trying after four months of him being committed to us.  I cannot handle that I am supposed to be the bigger person and be well-behaved and not confront her when she is screwing with my family. 

I’m so over it.  I wish I thought my love for him was enough to see us through.  I need to start making some decisions that I can live with and not question every single day.  I need to move on, but I’m not sure it needs to be with him.  I don’t deserve this torture everyday.  I deserve to be happy and healthy and to be in a relationship where I don’t have to worry and wonder all the time. I love him so much, but is love really enough?  I am just not so sure anymore... 

To know or not to know...I kind of wish I didn't

White Trash Barbie

My husband's lovely choice for his OW

I am going to skip to the week of D-Day, and I will fill in all the rest later.

For me, D-Day was more of a D-week.  It all started on May 28th, 2013.  We had a one month old at home, so I was at home all day.  My husband was leaving that evening for a business trip.  As a physician, pharmaceutical companies pay him to give talks about their new drugs, so he was scheduled to fly to Memphis on Tuesday night, give a talk there on Wednesday evening, give a talk in Jonesboro, Arkansas on Thursday morning and be home by Thursday night.  While he was getting ready and packing up to leave, I was sitting in our bathroom talking to him.  He asked me to help him trim his body hair (he is a very hairy guy, and trims his entire body regularly to keep neat and groomed). I thought nothing of it, and I helped him to trim and get finished up and ready to go.  He had a two hour drive to the airport, and during his drive, I checked our phone records to see who he was talking to on the way to the airport.  Hmmm, no calls or texts to the number I was expecting I might see (Kelli's), but there were other calls to a number I did not recognize.  At this point in the game, I could not really explain my suspicion of his and Kelli's relationship.  I really honestly had no concrete reasons or proof for thinking that something might be going on between them, and truthfully, I was starting to think that it was my crazy hormonal brain that was leading me to my nutty, suspicious, checking up.  Nonetheless, my checking up continued.  The calls that I noticed were a 913 area code, so I logged into his gmail account to search for 913.  I thought that maybe it was someone associated with the pharmaceutical company, and if so, their number would likely be at the bottom of a work related email and would pull up during a search.  But the search turned up nothing.  Then, I started to wonder if I could even search for numbers or if it would only search for keywords, so I searched for Kelli's area code (781), knowing that if I could search numbers, her number would definitely pull something up, as her number was listed at the bottom of the numerous work related emails they exchanged.  So I typed it in - 7-8-1...hit search...and BAM!  A bunch of emails I had never seen before!  Never in the maybe TEN THOUSAND times I had checked his email, searching for her name, had I seen these emails.  They were dated August and September of 2012, at least three or four months before she was hired and they began working at the same hospital... 

So I open the first one...and my heart drops.  It is a very risque picture of her in fancy, lacy, sexy underwear.  OH.  MY.  GOD.  And the next one is the same.  OH.  MY.  GOD.  I am sitting there holding my one month old, with my three year old sitting on one side of me, and my five year old sitting on my other side, and I am literally about to have a panic attack.  I text my husband: "FYI, when you get home, I want a divorce."  Instantly, he starts calling me over and over, but I refuse to answer the phone.  I text him and say "fuck you, I knew I was right - I knew it.  You are having an affair with her!"  He texts me back and of course, says that he has no idea what I am talking about.  I text him the two pictures of her in her underwear. In the meantime, I text Kelli, "Kelli, this is Jennifer, Tony's wife."  I am waiting to hear back from her so that I can ask her what the fuck she is doing emailing dirty pictures to my husband!!   He calls me again and again, and I finally answer the phone.  He says, "I'm so sorry, but I sent those pictures to myself from her phone!"  And I said, "What kind of idiot do you think I am??  I have already texted her to find out what the hell she is doing sending you pictures like that?!"  He says, "Oh my god, you are going to get me fired, please tell me you haven't contacted her--she doesn't even know that I have those pictures--she left her phone in the conference room one day, and I looked through it, and I sent those pictures to my phone from hers!"

At about this same moment, Kelli texts me back and says, "hey Jennifer, what's up?" An internal battle ensues in the maybe 60 seconds that passes before I respond, and I think "oh my god, what do I do?  what if he is telling the truth?  what if I get him fired? what do I do?"  As usual, I choose to protect my husband, and I lie to Kelli, "I just wanted to see if you would help me with a list of hospital people for a surprise party for Tony."  "Sure, just let me know when," she replies.  And that's that.  I know, I know.  You are all thinking what kind of fucking moron believes such a ridiculous and obviously untrue story from her husband.  All I know to say in my own defense is that I so badly wanted to believe that what he was saying was true, and that the love of my life was not screwing someone else.  But deep down, I knew there was more to it.

For the next two days while he was away, he spent what seemed like every free moment on the phone with me, apologizing for being such a pervert, trying to convince me that there was nothing going on between them, and professing his undying love for me and our family.  I was feeling a bit better by the time he got home, but I still felt like I was missing something...something BIG.

Over the following weekend, he was on call, but when he was home, he spent the majority of his time kissing my ass, apologizing, saying that he would never do anything so stupid and risky again...he even swore on our children that there was nothing going on between them.  On Tuesday, June 4th, I could not shake the nagging feeling that I was missing out on some very crucial information.  Although I had religiously checked our phone records for the last six months, it didn't tell me much, since there were always texts and phone calls back and forth between them - I mean they worked together directly every single day for god's sake.  So I decided to pull our records all the way back to the beginning of 2012, a year and a half prior.  ***I should interrupt myself here and note that I did know that they knew each other that far back, because during my spying and checking up over the last six months, I had discovered some photos in his email from a stroke conference in New Orleans, where they both were present, although they worked for different hospitals at that point.  In one of the photos, (probably the single biggest thing that made me suspicious), the two of them were drinking out of the same hurricane glass with their faces smushed up against each other.*** (see below)

So anyway, I decided I would check our phone records that far back and see what I could find.  I went through with a highlighter, and highlighted every phone call and every text exchanged with her number, and OH. MY. GOD.  There were hundreds.  There were 30 minute phone calls to her number when he and I were having a romantic getaway in Vegas - I mean, where was I?  How did he have enough time to make a 30 minute call to her?  Was I in the shower?  Did he say he was going to work out?  God, I can't remember.  There were texts and phone calls to her on nights when I knew we had been out with friends, hanging out with family, out on dates...it seemed never-ending.  Until May of 2012...In May, all of the phone calls and texts literally stopped completely.  I texted my husband at work and told him yet again, that I knew the truth, and that I wanted a divorce.  He canceled his clinic, sent his patients home, called me, and explained that they hung out in New Orleans at the conference and had been involved in an emotional affair for several months after, but that they had ended things in May sometime (which magically matched up perfectly with our phone records).  Again, he swore that there was nothing between them and that there had never been anything physical. I texted Kelli and asked her what was wrong with her and why would she get involved with a married man with a family, and she told me exactly the same story he did.  BIG SHOCK.  Like an idiot, I believed him again, but it was still there in the back of my mind.

On Thursday night, June 6th, we went out to dinner to do some talking.  He spent most of dinner trying to convince me that nothing had happened between them.  He said he would do anything to prove it to me - take a lie detector test, truth serum - literally anything.  I mean he really laid it on thick.  On the way home, I said "fine, I found a company that will extract deleted text messages if you send them the backup of your iPhone, so I want the backup file."  He stumbled around his words and said he wasn't sure he had one, but if he did and he could find it, he would be happy for me to have it.  Lies!  I knew it!  My husband is quite possibly one of the most tech savvy guys I have ever known, and I knew that he had a backup somewhere.  As I laid in bed that night, I also knew, that if morning came, and he went to work with his laptop, that backup file would be no more.  So I got up as he slept, went out to his car and got his laptop out of his bag, and came into our living room to try and find the backup file.  The backup file was never found.  But, boy was I in for the shock of my life!  As I was searching for the backup file, I came across a file called iPhone photos that was dated for the previous week when he was in Memphis.  I opened it, and it was a file with almost 4000 photos apparently cleared off his phone after I discovered the pictures in his email.  I start going through every picture, and probably 200 pictures in, I find it.  A series of pictures of that nasty whore blowing my husband.  Yep, I would know that dick anywhere.  My whole world was shattered in that one instant.  There was her trashy self staring right back at me from the screen with my husband's dick in her mouth!  I started shaking uncontrollably and almost threw up.  Then, the lawyer in me surfaced, I gathered my thoughts, and I went to my office and got a flash drive.  I spent the next two hours going through the remaining 3800 pictures, and I saved every single one that had anything to do with them - pictures of her masturbating, pictures of her blowing him, nude pictures of her in the tanning bed, screenshots of texts between them, screenshots of them facetiming where she was naked or masturbating and he had this stupid silly ass grin on his face.  You name it, it was there, and I saved it all!  I hid the flash drive, and I opened the picture of her blowing him.  I walked into our bedroom, holding the computer screen so that he could see it,  flipped on the light, and told him he needed to get up, get dressed and get out.

A little background...

Ok, so I guess that first post was a bit confusing.  That letter was written to Kelli, the whore who is still trying her best to destroy my family, in an attempt to "let her go", as suggested by my therapist less than a month in.  She suggested to me that I should "write a letter to Kelli" to get all of my feelings out, but "keep it, and never send it to her."  Now, how fucking cathartic is that?  Not very, considering that I wanted some sort of heinous awful revenge on her - I wanted to hurt her like she had hurt me.  Problem was (or should I say is), I am way too nice, well behaved, and well perceived in our little community - the community, I might add, that I grew up in.  Oh, how I wanted to go ape shit crazy on her trashy ass, but alas, I have, to my great dismay, remained well-behaved, protected my husband and his career, and been, dare I say it, "mostly nice" to the person I wish would get hit by a fucking mack truck.

I am starting this blog only three months after DDay in an effort to start the healing process for myself.  Otherwise, I fear that I will fall into a deep, dark hole of despair, anger, resentment and sheer agony that I may never come out of as a whole person.  Read below for the beginning of the shitstorm that I now call my life.

So...My husband is a neurologist, one of only a few in our community, and definitely the only hot one who is not approaching either the possibility of retirement or kicking the bucket sometime soon.  He is hospital-employed, which means he handles all of the really bad neurological shit that comes into the hospital, like strokes.  What that also means is that the hospital hires his support staff, and I have no say-so in who is working for him or with him every day.  Damn right - if he were in private practice, you can bet your ass, I would make sure his office employed only old, fat, unattractive nurses with a good work ethic.  But nope, not the situation here.  So, now you are beginning to see...my husband is a physician who has been fucking a nurse.  I know, right?  How much more cliche can it get?

Ok, let me start off by saying that I have been around since he was in med school and I was in law school - yep, you got it - I'm a lawyer, he's a doctor, we have three beautiful children, a lovely home, the perfect life, or so I thought.  He has always been a workaholic, even when he was in residency and we had no children.  Back then, I was the breadwinner - I paid off all the credit cards he ran up putting himself through college and med school, I paid our bills, bought him his dream car, bought our first new home, worked full time, and managed our household.  After we started to have children, I continued to do all of those things, plus everything child-related.  But I digress - we will get to all of my wonderful attributes later, and I will explain why he is a fucking nut for risking not having me in his life.  But anyway, he has always been a workaholic.

We chose to move back to my hometown when he finished residency.  I am an only child, and my parents are quite possibly the most amazing parents and grandparents on the planet, so of course, we wanted to settle near them.  When we moved back, I was pregnant with our second child, we were building our dream home, he was starting his new career and new neurology program at the hospital, and I was starting my own new business so I could work from home and spend more time with our children.  For the next three years, we focused on our children, our jobs, our home, our friends, and maybe not so much on each other.  We loved each other, but maybe had lost that "spark", that "in love" feeling.

Wow, this is really tough to get all this information out here in an understandable, semi-chronological fashion.  I am afraid I may suck at this blogging thing.  Nonetheless, I will continue.  So, around this time, my husband started fucking Kelli, a 25 year old nurse, who get this - did not work for him or with him....YET.  Stupid lil ole me would not discover it until a year and a half later, nine months of which I was pregnant with our third child.  I did, however, become suspicious about 6 months before I figured it all out.  And let me tell you, during those 6 months, if you looked up jealous, psychotic, nutjob pregnant chick in the dictionary, my chubby little pregnant face would be right there looking back at you with this perplexed look on my face.  I knew something was up, but I just could not figure it out for the life of me. 

During the summer of 2012, my husband started talking to me about this nurse at the other hospital in town that he wanted to recruit for the stroke coordinator position, someone who would work with him every single day, someone he claimed would be a perfect fit (little did I know she was apparently already a perfect fit for his dick).  He never told me how old she was or really anything else about her, other than the fact that it was extremely unusual to find a nurse who had stroke training.  Stupid me just assumed she was a middle aged married woman.  So he went on and on for several months about how he really wanted the hospital to hire this person, and then the talking stopped.  I didn't think much of it, as it was not unusual for the hospital to drag their feet.

So, come December, at the Hospital Christmas Party, needless to say I was shocked to be introduced to her and told she was the new stroke coordinator, and absolutely fucking floored to discover that she was a 25 year old single gal who I nicknamed Baywatch, because although she is attractive, she has that bleach blonde, mini-skirt wearing, blue fingernail sporting, too much cleavage hanging out, trailer trash quality about her - much like good old Pam Anderson.  As we walked away, I said, "Well, now I know why you haven't told me they finally hired her!"  In response, my husband claimed that he had told me, but I assure you that my memory is absolutely impeccable, and I knew without a shadow of a doubt he had neglected to give me that very interesting tidbit of information.  He also defensively insisted that he didn't think she was THAT attractive, which, looking back, should have been a dead giveaway, considering that we have always talked very openly about finding others attractive.  And I knew damn well he thought she was attractive - she was a younger, less mature,  much trashier version of me.  That night marked the moment I began to behave like a crazy person in my desperate search for answers...stay tuned.

My Letter to the Other Woman

Dear Kelli,
In an effort to move on and get you out of my head, I want to tell you a story.  It all started almost 12 years ago.  A boy and a girl met, and it was magical!  There were fireworks like crazy, and they literally could not get enough of each other - and not just sexually, although that was indeed amazing.  They couldn't stop talking, couldn't stop figuring out how much they had in common, couldn't stop holding hands and kissing, couldn't stop getting to know one another.  They were like two magnets, pulled together by some twist of fate that kept them from meeting during all he times their paths had crossed in the past, but that suddenly brought them together at just the right time.  They spent every moment they possibly could together, making love, making memories, studying together (and oftentimes, neglecting their studies), making plans for the lifetime that they wanted to spend together.  They dreamed of graduating, getting married, traveling the world together, working in jobs that they loved, having a big family, buying a home, saving for their retirement, enjoying grandchildren, and basically just growing old together.  A year after they met, the boy proposed, and their journey together to fulfill all their plans began.  For whatever reason, the boy made some terrible mistakes that hurt the girl immensely during their engagement, and although they tried to move on and get married, the girl never healed fully.  She never got over it, and she held onto resentment that would affect her marriage for years to come. 

Over the coming years, the boy and girl supported one another through job interviews, failed board exams, new jobs, stresses with family, crazy hours, lots of amazing travel together, new friends, new experiences, their first home...they knew they were working together to fulfill the dreams they had built together.  Throughout all of these things, they worked hard, supported each other, had a lot of fun, and loved each other like crazy, but sadly, their love was never like it had been that first year together.  Maybe the girl couldn't let go of her resentment.  Maybe the boy didn't try hard enough to "make it up to her."  Either way, they just didn't have that amazing spark, those fireworks they had in the beginning.

Then, the boy and girl had a baby, and both of them were so very very happy.  They were building the family they had dreamed of years ago.  Unfortunately, that baby, their sweet little girl, Emma, put more stress on their relationship.  Times that previously would have been spent alone together were spent caring for her. The girl built up more resentment because she felt she was doing all the work - with the house, with the bills, with the baby, and the boy was working too much.  The boy and girl still loved each other so much, but they seemed even further away from those fireworks they had at the beginning.

A few years later, the girl got pregnant with their second child.  They were both so happy again.  While she was pregnant, they moved back to her hometown, and as they both started new jobs, they also built a new house - their dream house.  During that time, Carson was born, and he was so sick.  The boy and girl left the hospital without their new baby and held hands as they would visit him in tears in the NICU.  It was so hard and so scary, but they made it through it together, and he eventually came home a happy healthy baby boy that they loved dearly.

The boy and girl moved into their dream home with their two sweet babies, and they each worked to build their careers into what they wanted them to be.  The girl gave up having a big legal career because they both felt like it was important for her to be home with the children as much as possible.  She was lucky to be able to create a job for herself that allowed that.  The boy, on the other hand, was working terrible hours, home very little, trying to build his career at the hospital.  The girl told him regularly that he was not home enough, that he was building a name for himself as a physician in the community, but not at home as a husband and father.  This new resentment the girl felt at being left at home alone with their children all the time, at feeling like she didn't have a real partner in life just built upon the earlier resentment she had held onto, and sadly, the space between them grew.  They still loved each other, but that fire, that spark that was there initially had finally burned out.

They decided to have another baby, to continue building the family they had wanted.  They chose to focus on that family and on their jobs and other interests, instead of focusing on each other, on reigniting that flame that was always there, just waiting for a little help in being "re-lit."  It took a long time for the girl to get pregnant this time, partly because life - children, work, exhaustion - had gotten in the way of their intimacy and alone time together.  It was during this time, Kelli, that you wandered into the boy's life.  You came along at a time when the boy should have been focused on rekindling that flame with the girl that he had always loved, but doing that required a lot of work, a lot of effort, and you were an easier choice.  A bad choice, a choice that would destroy the girl, a choice that would likely haunt him for the rest of his life, but nonetheless, the choice that he made.

You offered the boy a fantasy life - a life free of responsibilities, a life of perfect makeup, sexy lingerie, a fun, uncomplicated escape from reality.  The fantasy was butterflies with someone new, sex with someone new, no morning breath or unshaved legs, no children crying, no expectations, no bills to pay, no real life.  You offered him a life that he did not have at home with the girl - their life at home was chaos, stress, all reality, no fantasy.  The boy took what you offered him, and forgot or chose to ignore that he still loved the girl and that a huge part of him loved the chaos, the reality.  He chose to have an affair with you. 

The decisions that the two of you made may not seem to you to have hurt anyone, but they hurt everyone involved.  You took my husband away from his children, on nights when he could have read them bedtime stories or held them when they were sick.  You took him away from them when they were asking me every night when he was going to get home.  You took him away from them in the mornings when they would ask me why he was already gone to the hospital when they got up.  The guilt he felt over what he was doing with you caused him to be short-tempered with them at home when they didn't deserve it.  You took him away from me at times when I needed him most, when I lost a pregnancy, while I was carrying our precious baby boy Lucas, on nights when I was exhausted and needed my partner in life to help me with our children.  You took him from me when I needed his attention and needed to feel desirable.  You took him away from me when he should have been spending time working on our relationship and being intimate with me.  You took him away from us so many times, and even when he was not physically with you, you took his thoughts and attention away from really being with us. 

Now, here we are, a year and a half later, and you and the boy, my husband, have been having an affair ever since he chose to ignore those maybe neglected feelings he still had for the girl, me.  You think that you did nothing wrong.  You think that we had nothing left.  I know that partly, he made you think that, and partly, you wanted to believe that so that you didn't feel guilty for what you have been doing.  You have thought for the last year that you were "saving" him - that you were the only "true" happiness for an "unhappy" married man - that he no longer loved me - that we had nothing left - that he deserved better - that we had nothing worth saving.  I so want to be able to convince you how wrong you are about all of those things, but the truth is that I don't have the power to do that.  I want you to be able to see what we have worked so hard at building together - I want you to see that we have always had something worth saving - I want you to see that no matter what he may have told you, we have always loved each other.

It bothers me so much that you don't have any remorse - that you don't feel anything you have done is wrong - I want you to see how much damage you have done - to understand that there was something there to damage.  I want you to recognize that if there was not a strong love and connection between the two of us, we wouldn't have chosen to try and make this work.  I want you to have a shred of decent human empathy and try to understand how much this has hurt our family, rather than thinking solely of how it has affected you and your life.  I want you to think about how I feel having made an effort to get to know you, having bought you a gift, having written you a thank you note for looking out for my husband at the hospital and then finding out about all of this.  I know that you are young and immature and that you were operating under the illusion that you and he created about his reasons for cheating.  I know that you can't recognize that I'm a real person and that your actions were destroying my life and my family. The defense mechanisms that you likely put into place to justify the affair in the first place are most likely still in place now after the affair. I know that I won't be the one capable of breaking through your denial.  You are so young and immature that you think our children would be "just fine" if we divorced.  Yes, I know they would survive.  But you think that our sweet babies just wouldn't notice if their mom and dad weren't living in the same house? That they just wouldn't notice that we never ate dinner as a family again? That we weren't both there with them on Christmas morning? That we didn't take family vacations together?  I think you are crazy to say that they would be "just fine," as if nothing would change in their life.  You use yourself as an example that a child of divorced parents turns out "just fine."  But I would argue that you clearly have some long lasting issues you haven't dealt with to continue getting involved with married men and destroying families and feel like you are doing nothing wrong.

I want you to realize that you got used.  The lies he told you about the state of our relationship are the same lies that practically every married man tells their mistress in an effort to have their cake and eat it too.  I want you to know that we were having sex, we had plenty of romantic moments, and that we both loved each other throughout this affair, regardless of what he may have led you to believe.  We may not have been madly in love, and we may have desperately needed to rekindle our spark, but our love for one another has always been there.  We have something worth fighting for - we have a lot worth fighting for.  And he chose me - he chose our love, our family, our dreams together, our plans for our life, and we are going to rekindle that spark - really, it's the only thing that has been missing for us - we have been great friends, great partners in life--we just failed to keep the romance alive, and I can certainly take ownership for my part in allowing our relationship to get to the point where you could offer him an easy escape and he would accept.  We have a lot of work to do, a lot of rebuilding to do, a lot of trust to restore, but there is no doubt in my mind that we will succeed.  I know that because we have an everlasting, unconditional love that will help us weather the storms and move forward together.  I sincerely hope that one day, when you find that kind of everlasting, unconditional love with someone (although I realize that the idea of that may seem very unexciting and unromantic to you now), that you will look back at this experience and say to yourself, "Now I understand."