The other woman

My girlfriend called me this morning with the starteling revelation that she thinks her husband is cheating. When she started going into detail of why she thinks this my heart broke for her. Because she’s right, the signs are there. She knows the truth even if she’s still kidding herself with her husband’s cover stories. (No judgement because I have been there.)

The other thing that surprises me is who he’s cheating with. The other woman, Jennifer, left her husband, Robert, several months ago. Robert is a good friend of my younger brother, so I called my brother immediately. He wasn’t surprised apparently Robert was not exactly a faithful husband. (Small towns – gotta love ‘em.) Are you keeping up?

Anyway. The part that frustrates me the most is that Jennifer was cheated on. She knows how it feels. And she’s willing to help put another woman through that pain. That sense of rejection, the blow to your self esteem, that misery that comes when you find out the person you love is cheating on you? How do you do that to someone else? Now please know that I am not letting my friend’s husband off the hook. Ultimately he is the one causing his wife pain, he is the one who pledged himself to her. But Jennifer, allowing herself to be involved in the destruction of another family? When her’s was so recently destroyed by the same thing?

I just don’t get it. I probably never will.

Living with loss

On Tuesday I was sitting in a restaurant in an airport when I felt the pain of the loss of my ex. Not the loss of my partner, not the loss of the kids father, not the pain of being alone. The actual pain of losing ex, the man, himself. Looking back on the moment I can see the contributing factors, it was like a perfect storm.

My eyes filled with tears. All the reasons that I loved him flooded me, in waves, I remembered the good times. They were few and far between but they existed. And instead of fighting it, I just let it come. The sensation of loss for my ex now feels so foreign to me, I barely recognised it. The pain lasted only a few moments and passed as quickly as it came on.

These days I rarely think of ex as anything other than the father of my children and most days we are adversaries. I rarely feel pain when I consider the loss of ex and I am truely grateful to be out of my marriage. But I loved and I lost and the fact that I still occasionally feel the pain of loss doesn’t make me weak. It makes me me.