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All the stupid books that talk at people are no help no matter what they say, because each person’s experience is different. And because my Mom and the other women around me made it look so easy, I felt like a failure when it wasn’t as easy for me.
I didn’t know back then that those women were pretending while living in their own hell. I think they should stop. I roll my eyes these days when I see these trad wife bullshit artists on their social media reels pretending that they’re super moms. Only to end up in the news at some point for some heinous shit they did to their families.
In my day, way before social media became the highway to hell that it is, it was the country club Moms and the Donna Reed black and white TV shows that my own mother and grandmother cut their teeth on that told the big fat lie.
Now I know that these women were reading from a script and getting paid to lie to the known world about their perfect Leave it to Beaver bullshit. No one has it perfect, and some have it worse than others, but I didn’t learn that until it was too late.
When I was sitting on my bathroom floor, stressed the hell out, hating my life and everything in it, then feeling like a monster for my own thoughts and spinning on that cycle time and again, too ashamed to seek help because everyone else had done it before me and wanting to end it all, there was nowhere to turn. Why? Because even my own mother had hidden her hardships from me because it wasn’t the right thing to do.
By the time my little Alyssa was born, I was tired to the bone. Four babies in the span of ten years might not seem like a lot, but it was plenty, and I wasn’t ready for it. I don’t regret giving life to my kids, but I wish someone had prepared me for the reality.
Even with household help, it was never enough. There weren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done and still be the perfect twenty-two-year-old who’d gotten married at the country club on that sunny Saturday afternoon.
Shit, that time had been long gone by then. Before you knew it, I was a thirty-something-year-old mother who had given up her dreams of working outside the home to keep on top of things with my husband and kids.
Corbin was making more than enough money to take care of all of us, not to mention I came from money, so finances were never that big of a deal. You’d think that with that burden lifted, life would be a breeze, but it wasn’t because money has shit to do with human life.
Beyond paying the bills and buying the latest everything, money didn’t help me put a colicky baby to bed on time when I wanted just two minutes with my husband.
It didn’t give me more time to do the things that I was being pulled in ten different directions to do. My husband got the precious little princess he wanted after three boys, but my mind and body had paid the price.
Whoever heard of needing a shrink to deal with being a wife and mother? It’s only now that the world talks about PPD and all the other horrors that women face as mothers, but back in the day, women were frowned upon and abused if they weren’t perfect little housewives.
That abuse didn’t come from their husbands, not in all cases anyway, but from the society we live in. I had no one to turn to when my own mind and body betrayed me, so I just walked into the dark one day and let it take over. I was too tired to fight.
What I didn’t know and didn’t have time to care about back then was the toll it was taking on my marriage. I didn’t think about who I had become in the eyes of my husband, who, because he wasn’t taught any better, still expected the girl he fell in love with when he walked through the door and not the worn-out, tired-as-hell housewife she had become.
I didn’t even realize when I stopped sleeping with my husband. My mind was doing all it could to hang in there, and as for my body, that, too, had betrayed me. I wasn’t the thin put together debutante of yesteryear. I was now the thirty pounds heavier mother of four who couldn’t lose an ounce if I starved myself for a week.
My body had changed, my mind was no longer under my control, and I lost all care about anything and everything. On the other hand, my husband, who didn’t have to deal with the changing body of motherhood or the hormones it came with, was just coasting through life.
He'd spend a few hours with them before bed each evening and on the weekends, but he had a life to live as well, and just like his father before him, that life didn’t involve spending too much time at home when there were golf games to get to and nights out with the boys.
Because you see, he was living the same black-and-white movie his parents had cut their teeth on as well, so for him, I was supposed to do the heavy lifting where hearth and home were concerned. Don’t get me wrong, he spent plenty of time with the kids, and they never went without. But we never stood a chance because we were fed lies and made to believe that life could be a dream.
When he told me about the affair, I think that’s the day my world stopped moving one way and went off kilter. That wasn’t part of the perfect script. Which part of the love story was that? After the hell that I had been through, fighting my own mind to hang on, he had the nerve to find solace in another woman?
Back then, I couldn’t see my own faults; I wanted to blame him for everything. I hated him enough to kill him. He was telling the whole world, our friends and family, that I had failed. My depression got even worse, but no one seemed to notice or know how to help because, as I came to learn, everyone else had their own demons to fight.
I still had my kids to think about, especially little Alyssa, who seemed to be doing even worse than me. It broke my heart to see her like that, but I was too deep in my own dark hell to do much for her.
The first couple of years after the divorce, I was a mess. I cried rivers, begged, pleaded, and made an ass of myself trying to get my husband back and put my family back together. And then, one day, I just stopped. I realized that I had to get use to a new reality because the world was not going to stop for me to get my shit together.
I don’t know how to explain it, but it was like something came over me one day, and I was no longer the same person, and in a way, I wasn’t. I was a divorced mother of four with a broken heart and no will to go on.
Then I looked at my little girl, the one who seemed more hurt than me, the adult in the situation, and knew that I had to do better. I didn’t make a big fuss outwardly, but inwardly, I had taken steps to make changes in my life. I had only one thing motivating me, to do better for my kids.
It wasn’t about putting my own needs on the back burner, I never looked at it that way. It was more about getting used to the new normal. It was then I realized how withdrawn my daughter had become. Maybe it was the fact that her last brother had gone off to college, and there were no longer any buffers to keep my notice off of her, but I saw it.
She was about twelve then, which meant it had been four years since my own personal hell began. I didn’t even realize so much time had gone by, and the guilt was enough to send me into another downward spiral, but this time, I pulled myself together because of the sadness in my little girl’s eyes.
Now, Alyssa was always a Daddy’s girl, but the first time I heard her call Corbin Dad instead of Daddy was the day I tapped into just how hard this whole thing was on her. She’d also gone and grown up without me noticing, and I realized how selfish I had been.
I called all my boys and apologized to them; we had a family meeting when Alyssa was out of the house because I had to ask them about the last four years of her life that I had missed. My sons didn’t berate me, for which I am eternally grateful, but they didn’t sugarcoat how hard it was on them and their sister either.
They were still hurt, still pissed, and they absolutely detested their father’s new wife. They blamed her for the affair and the divorce, and it was then I realized that they, too, were victims of the same fairytale bullshit that I had been.
It took a while and lots of self-reflection on my part, but eventually, I was brave enough to tell them the truth that it wasn’t just Helen or their Dad that I, too, had a hand in the demise of my marriage.
