The Truth

The Truth

On Jan 1st, 2016, after disappearing for 15 hours, my husband finally returned home. I was attempting to sleep on the couch with my 2 1/2 month old baby close beside me in his bassinet. If I slept on the bed and he came home, I would not be able to escape the room if I needed to. He was normally always very angry and verbally abusive. This wasn't the first time he had not come home, but it was the first time he had left during the day and not come back.

He walked in the door, came to the couch where I laid balling my eyes out, and asked if he could talk to me. I was balling because I really thought he wasn't going to come home this time. I thought he had wrecked and was dead on the side of the road somewhere. It wouldn't have been the first time he wrecked the car.

He asked me to go out on our back patio so we could talk. He said he had something he needed to tell me and that he couldn't live with the guilt anymore. I sat

down, with him next to me, struggling to find his words. I was just waiting for him to say "I have been cheating on you, there is someone else." Instead he just kept saying "This is really hard for me." and nothing else.

My gut was in knots and I had a lump the size of a softball growing in my throat. This was the man I loved more than anything. We had just brought our child we wanted so badly into the world. He was my best friend and had been for almost 17 years. And here he sat, not being able to say the horrible words he needed to get out, that he knew would destroy us forever. Our forever. We had a great forever planned.

"I didn't come home because I was out smoking crack all day."

I don't even know what my reply was. It might have been nothing. I just sat there in shock. I am sure I followed my silence with a bunch of questions, like I always do. By the end of it I knew he had been doing it for a while and that he couldn't live his secret life anymore. I didn't know what his secret life was, but the words he took so long to say were enough for me.

He abandoned his wife and newborn baby, our plans to have a special New Year lunch at our favorite restaurant and all of the New Year day because he chose to be "out smoking crack all day."

All I remember is the moonlight shining down on us in the darkness on the patio, the cool air and the feeling that my marriage with the man I loved so much would be over with whatever words he was about to say.