'HIM'

Forgive me if I revisit old ground, and this may be a long one so make a cuppa because I have a lot to say. You’ll have gathered by now that I didn’t trust people much anymore, and especially not men, my health had taken a bit of a blow and I’d been single for 6 years, so at the age of 30 you now have an average-looking woman, with low self-esteem and trust issues. The steroids had taken their toll as well, paper-thin skin and weight gain the main visible effects, so all round I was doing well, lol. 


I moved home again and set up in a rented house not far from where my new job was to be, it was a complete ‘Greenfield’ build so we had to rent some space in another building while we worked on the start up. It was a brilliant time, all I had in my life was work so I could and would do anything they needed, I fit in with the company culture, which was work hard play hard. We all played that ridiculous old game of “who can get in the earliest, work the longest hours, and still drink everyone under the table”, I sincerely hope that doesn’t exist anymore; it’s a rather toxic masculine thing, like silverbacks thumping their chests to show who is the strongest. 
I, of course, cannot hold my drink. I’d been there for a few months when ‘He’ came along, reasonable to look at, massive ears, humour, a twinkle in his eye and a willing ear to listen, very smartly dressed, he was also one of the bosses and knew it. We were instantly friendly and had to work very closely through those first 6 months before the operation started in earnest. We ate, drank, and worked together, sometimes through 18 hour days. I knew he was married and listened to his tales of woe, apparently she was only in it for his money, she bitched all the time, etc. etc. etc. I tried to see it from her point of view, told him to talk to her more, call her, she must be sick of him being away all the time, and he would say he’d tried but that they were “strangers living in the same home”. 


I should have seen it all at that point, for heavens sake we’d talked about the “woman across the room” he’d fancied, laughed about his flirting, but then he started flirting with me. I know I wasn’t his first choice but I was starved of attention, love, any bloody interest at all, so I lapped it up. I thought I was unlovable and unloved, then 7 months after I’d met him we slept together for the first time, I was mortified the next morning, I thought I would need to resign and move away but he spoke calmly, told me it was meant to be and we should see where it takes us because he was planning to leave his wife anyway. (Remember that phrase for later) We carried on our little affair for nearly 3 months, everybody knew, everybody turned a blind eye. Then one day I was chatting to the receptionist at work, she told me a lovely little story about how ‘He’ had received a parcel that morning and shown her a beautifully framed inscription of a reading from his wedding that he was going to give to his wife as a first anniversary present, A FIRST anniversary present. My mind was absolutely blown, I had naively believed that his relationship had failed over time, but NO we had first met a month after his wedding, and slept together 8 months since his wedding day, what the actual F! 
I dumped him there and then, I told him he was a lying cheating bastard, that he should go back to his poor wife and resolve the differences, sort it out, get a life. 
I was heartbroken.

This is the point where I apologise, sincerely, I never meant to be the other woman and I will never be put in that position again but he could be very persuasive. That is no excuse though, SORRY, so very very sorry to any woman who has ever been cheated on, it is not fair, it is not right, and I whole heartedly apologise. “No matter how good a person you are, you are the arsehole in somebody’s story”.

He wrote to me, he wrote me letters whilst on his anniversary holiday in Spain, he wrote about how much he missed me, how rubbish his life was with her, how much he wanted me instead. I was in love, my heart skipped a beat with every letter, my hopes were raised each time one came, until eventually I said we could see each other again but only if he left her and came to live with me, and basically that’s what happened. He turned up at my house one night with all of his clothes and a few bits and pieces, and that was it. Obviously there was a divorce to go through, and her threats to run me over if she ever saw me, but I was stupidly overjoyed. He came to me with debts, CCJs, an ongoing divorce, but thankfully there were no children involved and my guilt was comforted in later years by his family telling me that he should never have married his first wife and that they didn’t like her. 


In those early days we were terribly broke, but we didn’t seem to need so much, we walked, talked, worked and loved, it all seemed to be going well. His friends were slow to accept me, still inviting his first wife to events before the divorce came through. I still had no friends, whereas he had friends that he’d been to Primary school with, a very close-knit group, all well off and in decent jobs with pretty wives who barely worked. I wasn’t very comfortable with them and found it difficult to fit in, I had more in common with the men but traditional roles were played. We had been living together for about a year when my first warning came.

We both had identical work mobiles, in a time before smart devices, a standard old Nokia. I was first up and had gone downstairs to make tea when I looked at the charging phones and saw a message from the HR manager “Thank God! I thought we were over for a minute there” I know, I absolutely know, and I know it was karma, but I let him brush it off with a complicated story about staff issues, but I’m not stupid. I let him get away with it, I though nearly getting caught might put him off, more fool me…… then there was the Client Christmas party when I lost him for a while, only to find him hiding behind a walkway, on the rat run for the servers to the kitchens, sitting in a chair with a young blond straddled across him practically having sex……. then the time he told me he was in trouble at work because a cleaner had accused him off making sexual approaches…… My self esteem was constantly on a downward spiral, I concentrated on work, our lives moved on, we bought a house, we paid off his debts, he paid off his ex wife, we grew a bit further apart whilst tying ourselves tighter together. It was year 4 when he asked me to marry him, and ridiculously I said yes! I thought it would save us, it would bind us. You can hopefully hear the bitter laughter as I write.
In an age still rife with sexism my boss sat me down and said that I had to leave, that we couldn’t work together as a couple and as I was the female and a lower grade it would be better for me to leave. Oh and by the way, was I certain about what I was doing? Because if he needed to put someone in front of the customer to lie convincingly it would be ‘Him’! I of course said I was certain. We got married, it was lovely and I am glad that I did get to do it once in my life. I found a new and better job, I moved on and moved up, I was now at the same level as him and earning the same if not more money. This seemed to cause issues in itself, he could no longer be the great ‘I am’, he had to be an equal partner. This is when the comments started. 
“When we met you were more fun”, “you had a better figure then”, “can’t you diet a bit”, “Of course I looked [at another woman] she’s got something worth looking at”, “do you really want to be friends with them?”. 
I was a size 12, I was convinced I was horrifically fat, you can track in my photographs the waves of insecurity as I change from slim and happy to fat, cut off all my hair then regrow it, only to have it all cut off again. I was so stupid, I allowed it all to happen, I let him play around and ignored it because I desperately wanted to please him. He told me what to wear, when to wear it, who to be friends with, where we should and could go. I spent all of my money on him, let him use me, let him tell me I was worthless. Stupid. I wanted so desperately to make things work, to keep the marriage going.

We had been together for 8 years and I was nearly 38 when we moved onto the ‘having children’ stage of life. I’d had a contraceptive implant for years and the doctor had always told me that this was the reason why I had no periods, turns out that was wrong. When I had the implant removed nothing happened, no periods, so I went for tests. The Consultant came through to tell me what was wrong, read his notes, got up and stuck his head into the Admin office and called for the box of tissues before coming back, dumping them in front of me, and stating that I had already had the menopause. Game over, the NHS wouldn’t fund IVF after the age of 36 so there was nothing he could do. I was devastated; it was all so blunt. I’ll probably cover IVF separately but for this story let’s rush through two years of prodding and poking, the realisation that I lost all of my eggs due to the Sarcoidosis, and the fact that after a lot of money and private care I was pregnant with my gorgeous donor egg baby.

While I was pregnant ‘He’ suggested that it would be a good idea to move home closer to where I worked, this would be better for childcare, and whilst this was logical and I agreed, I was sad because I loved where we lived at that time but I don’t blame him for this one, it was a joint decision. 
The day my daughter was born was long and difficult, and again, too much for a quick sentence, but she came into my life and I haven’t stopped staring at her since. I can’t believe that she is mine, she is beautiful and caring, intelligent and amazing. She also has all the faults any normal child has, but I can overlook that  One week before we were due to move yet again, when our child was just 5 months old, and I was still on maternity leave, I was made aware via an email that ‘He’ was meeting a woman for sex and other fun activities, possibly not a full blown affair as this was all being arranged on line. He has an online dating profile for ‘no strings quickies’ when travelling. What could I do? I had a baby, I was moving house, my job position was precarious and I didn’t want to be alone. We had plans for the future, we talked about travelling, things we would do in the future, I had so much to lose. I spoke to him, told him to stop, told him we had to keep going for our daughter’s sake, tried to forgive, but my heart was cracked. I was more isolated than ever, we’d moved to a new place where I knew nobody, I had a child to care for, and his life carried on as normal.

He worked late, ‘entertained’ at weekends, occasionally helped with his child but generally it was just me and her. I returned to work at 8 months and she went to nursery, we became fairly self-sufficient. 
When he was around he was always on his phone or tablet, his opinion of me still hadn’t changed, I might not be “what I once was but it was OK because he still fancied me sometimes”. My daughter was 2 years old when he called me during the day and asked me to meet him at home for a chat. I don’t remember exactly when it was but we sat outside smoking and drinking tea, while he told me that he’d been having an affair. That the woman in question had a teenage son and a husband, that the son had found explicit pictures on her phone and showed his Dad, and that as a result she had committed suicide. The husband was going to come and tell me all about it if ‘He’ didn’t do so. The crack in my heart grew bigger, I didn’t know what to do, I was in the middle of being made redundant, I needed to stay, I desperately wanted to work this out. I stayed, again. Even his sister told me I didn’t have to put up with it, but I did, we had a child who needed both parents and we are supposed to ‘work at it’ aren’t we?. I told him it was the last time.

It was harder and harder to play happy families, it was harder and harder to include him in our lives. We tried counselling and he made promises that all got broken. He undermined my confidence at every turn, our only friends were his, and my bitterness just grew. I drove past small houses and thought I could cope there, with my daughter, and no ‘Him’. The final straw came as my daughter turned 4, he had been secretive for a few months, locking his phone from me, going outside for calls, and swearing it was all work related. Physical contact between us was limited and conjugal rights were taken without agreement. We had been to France to see my parents over Easter and he had acted like a petulant child half the time, nothing was right and he was making his unhappiness clear. He took to going out more and more and ‘because he was coming in late’ he was staying in a spare room. My routine revolved around a 4 year old, so we were up really early, this was a Sunday morning in July and we were due to visit his family for Sunday lunch. He’d just come through to see our daughter, so I said I would just pop to the spare room bathroom while he was there, as I walked through the room his phone chirruped so I checked it, who wouldn’t ? 
“All I can think of is you, I want your arms around me again….” there was much more, to be honest it is a blur after that, I went back into the room where he was, dropped the phone in his lap and told him I wanted a divorce, then I walked away. I know we talked, I know I wrote down how I felt and he wrote answers, he stated that he had always been intending to leave me but was waiting for a couple of years to get money sorted. Meanwhile I had been planning to surprise him with a holiday, had been considering when my child would go to school, wondering how to stay and make it work. I was over.

It’s like I shut down at that point, I concentrated on my daughter, my work and sorting out the divorce. I didn’t go out unless I had her with me, I had no breath left to do anything else. There were moments when I would have to stop, stand still, while the world tilted under my feet. I found all of this out in the July, on New Year’s Eve my father died and we had to bring my mother back to Britain from where they’d moved to in France. She lived with us while we sold the house, which was a very painful experience, then I moved into a money pit of a house but it was the only one I could afford within catchment for the school my daughter had started to attend. He moved back to where all the friends were and immediately started a new relationship with yet another woman.

Lord knows what stories he spun her, but she told my child that I should hurry up and get over it, she was only 5 years old and suddenly her world had been torn apart. His new woman and her friend used to stand at the window when I collected my girl, laughing at the state of me. It was a hard time and I struggled so much in the early days, if he had died and made me a widow I would have had sympathy, money, support; as it was I had lost everything and everybody, still through no fault of my own but that didn’t seem to matter, he also got to take my child off me for weekends when he could be bothered. I fail to see how that is fair. I got to the stage where I couldn’t do anything on the days when I didn’t have my child, I sometimes just sat on the kitchen floor as the day drifted past. Looking back I was broken and should have sought out help sooner than I did, I’d lost everything, moved house, lost my Dad, relocated my Mum, my child had separation anxiety and clawed her little hands around door frames to try and stay at home when he came to collect her. I tried so hard not to blight her view of him and it was hard, but when other people close to me had ‘proper’ issues like a Cancer diagnosis how could I complain.