Diary Of A Divorce

After getting into bed last night, I kicked myself a few more times for being so foolish as to think now is anywhere near the time to invite a gesture of intimacy such as cuddling on the couch while watching a movie. We aren’t even two weeks into this mess. It was never going to fly. What was I thinking? Actually, I know what I was thinking -- I’m trying to show her the affection she says she’s never received from me. The problem is, I approached it so clumsily while feeling my way through this unprecedented situation. Another blunder to add to the list I’ve made in handling this crisis. Let her be the one to make a move like this from now on.

I fell asleep but woke up again at around 3:30am. Unable to fall back asleep within half an hour, I got up and took a Valium. It worked again. I got back to sleep and slept until around 8:00am.

I’m up for a while before Helen and my son emerge from upstairs. Helen apologises for rebuffing me last night, and I do likewise for making such a foolish, premature move. We get on pretty well the rest of the morning.

I make a food store run. While I’m there, I feel a new surge of defiance come over me. I start to feel a bit more assertive about myself. The grocery store is my home turf, because I do all the shopping. I also do all the housework and run all the household errands. I take care of the kids. I get them ready for school in the morning. I do their homework with them. I run them to all their various extracurricular events, such as karate, swimming, soccer (I coached my son's team for three years until he lost interest), and tennis lessons. Most nights I bathe them and put them to bed. And I have dinner on the table every night, though Helen is often too late home to join us.

I’ve always been there for my kids. Helen begged me to have them, but she’s been minimally involved in raising them from the moment they were born. Sure, she earns the money, which is of course vital, but beyond that she’s rarely made time to be with the kids when it was available. Instead, she’s taken on additional work commitments, because that’s what she enjoys – she’s the archetypal workaholic. She’d be doing exactly what she’s always done even if the need for income didn’t exist. And as I’ve constantly pointed out to her with no success, she could easily reduce the income burden by controlling her excessive spending habits – it’s a vicious cycle of her own making.

I’ve got my share of faults, but I’m not a bad guy. I don’t drink or do drugs. I don’t gamble away the family money. I don't run around with every floozy in town. I don’t beat my wife or kids. I don’t spend us into penury (I wouldn’t dare infringe on Helen’s copyright there). On the contrary, Helen has often quipped that I don’t spend enough money. I like to think I’m honest, loyal, moral, witty, and have integrity. My friends say I have those qualities.

I could of course have done more to contribute financially, and I will do in future, but my contribution hasn’t been as negligible as Helen thinks. Add the wages I brought home for twelve of the fifteen years of our marriage I worked before staying home with the kids to the substantial monetary contributions my family has made to us and you get the functional equivalent of a yearly contribution on my part of around $42,000. Not an immense amount, but hardly peanuts either. Factor in the vast savings on interest payments by my family’s paying off Helen’s $200,000 medical school loan debt and the value of the contribution from my side of the ledger rises exponentially. When I pointed this out to her, Helen expressed her opinion that she was somehow owed this extraordinarily generous gift.

“I always expected that you'd be earning enough money to pay off that debt,” she said, “so if you couldn’t do it, it’s only fair that your family did it instead.” That’s fine if one accepts her dubious premise, revealing as it does her overdeveloped sense of entitlement, but it requires acknowledging the contribution, which she doesn’t, preferring both to take it as her due while ignoring it. She can’t have it both ways. It also betrays the lack of value she attaches to the role I have played raising the children largely in her absence and maintaining the household, of course.

I gave up family, friends, and whatever contacts and job opportunities I had in England, where my educational background also would have served me considerably better, to move here to build a life with Helen. I'll bet she's forgotten that, for the first few years when she was still completing medical school, I was the sole breadwinner. I even worked two jobs for the best part of a year to support us. I would work my regular nine-to-five office job, then go straight to the video store across the street and work until closing time at 11:00pm. I was also playing in a band at the time, so rehearsals and gigs added to an exhausting schedule.

Also during this time, Helen spent several months doing her surgical rotation as part of her medical studies. This meant rising at around 4:00am. As she had no parking privileges and I could not allow her to walk to the medical center on her own while it was still dark, I got up with her and drove her there every morning, returning home to get a few hours more sleep if I could before getting up again to begin my regular work day as previously described.

Helen also chose to extend her medical training the year following our marriage by taking optional sabbaticals abroad, each of two months’ duration. I agreed to this even though the separation was difficult because I knew she really wanted these experiences. My recollection is that this delayed the completion of her training and therefore the point at which she would begin her medical career and start contributing financially. Don't I get any credit for this? Evidently not.

I don’t deserve this. There have been problems in the marriage, sure, some of them longstanding issues of mine I never addressed, admittedly. But it hasn’t been a bad marriage – no one who knows us would say it was. The good times have far outweighed the bad, even Helen would have to admit that. And it hasn’t all been one-sided – she has her own faults that at times drove me to distraction: The reckless spending and constant debt, necessitating my father baling us out on more than one occasion. The ever increasing materialism and need for instant gratification. The lack of consultation with me on the purchase of big ticket items. The long hours away and lack of time with the kids.

I almost asked her for a divorce the year after our son was born when she trained in a subspecialty that was so time consuming she may as well have been gone the whole year, leaving me alone many nights and weekends with an infant, which often left me at my wits’ end. I had been reluctant to start a family on the grounds that her long work hours meant she wouldn’t have time to devote to a child, but she promised me that she’d make the time. That promise turned out to be worthless and I was left literally holding the baby. It was the worst year of our marriage until now. I was miserable, went through my own mid-life crisis, and briefly succumbed to temptation when I had my fling. I quickly realised that this was inexcusable and that I couldn’t be one of those guys who habitually cheat on their wives, so I rededicated myself to my marriage and to my son.

My lone infidelity therefore was an aberration while Helen’s first fling seems to have been a blueprint for her future behaviour. Because of my own experience, I know exactly what Helen’s going through and the extent of the mistake she’s on the verge of making. While I handled my mid-life crisis responsibly, never totally lost my grip on reality, and faced down temptation in the form of longing for a relationship that could never be with someone with whom I’d had the briefest of dalliances, she seems to be approaching hers like Godzilla stomping his way through Tokyo leaving nothing but a trail of wreckage in his wake.

Oh, and here’s the kicker: To top it all off, the subspecialty Helen trained in which put such a strain on us proved irrelevant to her career – she stopped performing the procedure within a few years.

So no one gets everything they want in a marriage. You have to be willing to compromise. Sure, I’ve had my moments I’m not proud of. I’ve lost my temper sometimes and said things I didn’t mean. Like I said, I have issues. But the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. Twice now in our marriage that I know of Helen has reacted to problems between us by having sex with other men. Is that fair or appropriate? She has issues of her own – big ones.

In doing so, especially this time with the much more serious component of her feelings for this other man and her request for a divorce, Helen has reacted to the relationship equivalent of a street riot by going nuclear. If she’d told me she was thinking about divorce, that would’ve got my attention just as well and we could’ve attempted to fix the problems. Instead, she started the affair, which threatens to destroy everything. She doesn’t seem to appreciate the severity of her transgression – and therefore my willingness to twice forgive something most people would have a very hard time getting past. This gets back to her licentious attitude about sex and her relentless self-centeredness. She doesn’t take full responsibility for her actions. She thinks my bad behaviour justifies her worse behaviour. It is mind-boggling.

While I will work on and intend to finally fix a lot of what’s wrong with me, there are some things I either won’t or can’t compromise on. I will never be as materialistic as Helen. I see no reason to change that, because her crass acquisitiveness is nothing to aspire to in my book, though I can stop being such a nag on the subject. And while I will keep looking for a job and begin contributing financially again, with the best will in the world there’s very little chance I’ll ever be as successful as Helen. I’ll certainly never be as remorselessly driven as her. I don't see how such an arrangement would serve the interests of our children, who wouldn't get to spend any time with either of their parents and who would be sentenced to being raised by a revolving series of hired hands.

Helen has to be willing to compromise a little, and I have to hope the changes in my other problem areas will allow her to do so. She has to decide if she can live with a little less than her ideal in the interests of preserving the greater good of the whole or take a total flyer on someone she barely knows, or, if not him, then the complete unknown. I know she fears being alone, yet that is precisely what she’s risking based on her brief fling, since she can’t possibly know Pascal’s true intentions or how their fledgling relationship will turn out. She knows by how hard I’m fighting to save our marriage that I’ll never leave her, and I’m ready to make the changes to improve our relationship.

Helen goes out to get her hair done and get a manicure today while I take the kids to the pool. She is gone a long time. The kids keep asking after her. When she finally arrives home, she announces that she has just bought a $300 bike for herself, which explains why she was gone longer than expected. She wants to start riding a bike again. Another questionable expenditure, but these days with therapists’ and lawyers’ fees rapidly mounting, and in view of the critical situation, my former frugality seems a long way off. I say nothing.

This evening, we leave our son at a birthday party and take our daughter for a bite to eat at an Asian noodle house. In the car on the way, Helen chimes in with a thought that struck her today.

“Maybe my standards are too high,” she says. “I expect perfection in everything, and perhaps it's unfair to apply this to our relationship.” Despite the fact that this seemingly redounds to my favour, I tell her that, in fairness to her, she has a right to expect better of me in the areas we’ve identified in which I need to change.

“The only danger of high standards,” I reply, “is if they become unrealistic and make you lose perspective.” I’m certain that’s exactly what’s happened to her, though I leave that part unsaid in the hope that she'll realise it herself before it's too late.

We enjoy the meal. My appetite has finally returned and I eat the full portion. The anxious grip on my stomach has loosened, though not totally disappeared, and it can reappear at a moment’s notice.

Excerpted from Diary Of A Divorce, by Richard Pearce, available for £8.99 from www.amazon.co.uk or for $14.75 from www.lulu.com

I spend the first part of the day really getting stuck into the job search. After the usual run through the local newspaper classifieds and applying for a few suitable positions, I go through the phone book and call just about every employment agency in it. After weeding out the vast bulk of them who only deal in temps and administrative staff, I find a good dozen who deal in professional placements. I get on board with them by e-mailing my resume so that they can set me up with a potential job match. It takes about five hours, but I feel good. I feel productive. I feel like I’ve baited a lot of hooks now. Fingers crossed I get a bite or two.

I speak to Helen during the day. She’s okay on the phone, no real tension in the conversation. Buoyed by last night’s unexpected closeness, I suggest we watch a DVD she bought a few weeks ago but hasn’t gotten around to watching tonight. She agrees. I’m happy. I imagine us snuggling up on the couch together as we watch it. That would be so nice.

I spend the rest of the afternoon getting the house immaculate. At least while I’m still performing the household chores in lieu of the kind of employment I must find, I can do it well and hope Helen appreciates it to some degree. The place looks great. Our daughter had been invited to spend the night at a friend’s, so I make dinner for my son and myself. Helen had said during our phone conversation that she had had a big lunch and wouldn’t need dinner, so I eat with my son. I actually manage to get through a whole chicken pot pie – the first substantial meal I’ve had since all this happened. It sits uneasily in my stomach the rest of the night though.

Helen gets home at around 7:00pm. We arrange to watch the movie at 9:30pm and I go downstairs to the basement to be with my son while she settles down on the couch for a nap. My son watches cartoons while I sit there ruminating, as has now become my custom.

At the appointed hour, I go upstairs to wake Helen and watch the DVD. I get everything set up while she goes to the bathroom. I recline on the couch and upon her return, beckon her to join me. She sits down but doesn’t take the hint to lie next to me.

“Don’t you want to cuddle while we watch the movie?” I ask her.
She shakes her head. “No,” she replies. My hopes for the pleasant evening I imagined are dashed. I feel like a fool, and the anxiety returns to grip my stomach with a vengeance. I’ve made things awkward. We watch the DVD mostly in uneasy silence. The film is rubbish, but the whole point is to spend some time with Helen, which I have bungled with my clumsy invitation to cuddle. So I suffer through the tedious film in a high state of anxiety instead. A pretty graphic sex scene doesn’t help matters. I can’t help glancing in Helen's direction to gauge her reaction. No outward sign, but I know instinctively what – and who – she’s thinking about.

The film ends close to midnight. We exchange a few perfunctory comments, then I say goodnight and head downstairs to bed.

Excerpted from Diary Of A Divorce, by Richard Pearce, available for £8.99 from www.amazon.co.uk or for $14.75 from www.lulu.com

I speak to my friend Jay in the morning. He and his wife Natasha are our oldest and best friends since Helen and I have been living in this area for the past sixteen years. They’re both obviously distraught at the turn of events.

Jay tells me that he had lunch with Helen several months ago, when all this was building up, and she told him she felt that, having just turned forty, she either had to “get out now or be trapped forever.” Classic mid-life crisis bolt instinct, with nary a thought to the real world practicalities and ramifications involved. Understandable perhaps in a bad marriage, but ours wasn’t.

Jay tells me he’d told her to calm down, reminded her of all my positive qualities, and tried to focus her attention on the big picture. Every marriage has its difficulties. He and Natasha have had theirs. But you hold onto the good things, try to fix the problems, make compromises for the greater good, and only consider divorce as the last resort. He says he regrets that he obviously failed to get the message through to her.

Helen and I plan to attend an event at our kids’ school this afternoon. It’s a presentation of stories written by the kids in our daughter’s class during the school year. Helen comes home early from work to attend. We arrive together and see my friend Scott and his wife Marcy, with whom we’ve become friends through our daughters, who are in the same class. I’ve discussed our situation with them, and the meeting is clearly awkward. They’ve been very supportive of me and take a dim view of what Helen’s done.

“I can feel the cold shoulder they’re giving me,” she whispers to me. “I suppose this is something I’ll have to get used to,” she laments. My initial instinct is to regret talking to so many people about our situation and thus humiliating Helen like this. I’m so desperate to smooth things between us that I feel bad for her and kick myself for blabbing too much.

But then I catch myself. Wait a minute, I think, I’m not the one at fault here. If Helen feels bad about people’s attitude toward what she’s done, she shouldn’t have done it. I need make no apology for trying to deal with the worst crisis of my life in the best way I saw fit, including talking to friends for their advice and support.

Somehow, we get through the rest of the event maintaining the mostly positive vibe between us. When we get home with the kids, we take them to the neighbourhood pool and talk a little more while the kids swim. Again, the communication feels constructive and I feel as long as we keep it going we’re making tiny steps forward, which is all I can hope for. Maybe if we’d communicated as much and as effectively throughout our marriage as we’ve done in recent days, we wouldn’t be in this mess. What a tragedy. I just hope it’s not too late, though I fear it may well be.

I make arrangements to meet up with my new friend Tim tonight for a beer and to borrow his fishing tackle box so I can take my son fishing at the weekend. Tim is the singer in a new rock band I’ve been putting together for the past few months. The pressures of parenthood made me quit my last band seven years ago, and I thought I was done playing rock and roll guitar. But I’d been missing it more as the years went by, and finally about six months ago I decided to try and get back into playing music again. I ran an ad in the local paper and assembled a lineup. Tim as singer was the final piece of the puzzle.

Tim is everything you want in a front man – garrulous, loud, brash, upbeat. I knew he’d been through a divorce, so he was among the first I contacted when all this happened. I value the input of people who’ve experienced what I’m going through. We meet at the house, he gives me the tackle box, and we head for the nearest bar for a beer and a chat.

Talking to Tim really lifts my spirits. He’s forceful, positive, and makes some really good points. His energy is infectious. I give him the lowdown on the situation and he tells me I’m being too hard on myself and that I have to be more assertive. I’m the wronged one here, damn it, and I should be angrier. He tells me I should march back home and tell Helen to pack her bags and get out if she wants out of the marriage. Let the lawyers go to work and get this thing done if that’s how she wants it. He says she’s given me the ultimate “fuck you” with the affair and has dared me to pick up the gauntlet. He says it’d probably blow her mind if I did, since that’s the last thing she expects. But he also cautions that this is a game of high stakes poker, so I shouldn’t make a bluff I’m not prepared to see through.

It’s good advice, though I tell him I’m not yet ready to play my trump card. That will come if I feel I have nothing left to lose because the reconciliation is doomed – for instance, if I discover Helen and Pascal are still in contact with each other. I tell him my game plan is to do everything I can to work on my issues and the problems in my marriage and hope that that combined with Helen coming to her senses and realising what she’s risking on the biggest gamble of her life does the trick. I realise that I’m being more accommodating than most people would be in my situation, and Tim’s point that I’m becoming Helen’s doormat is apt. It doesn’t sit well with me, but it’s a position I’m prepared to take at this stage. Still, I feel empowered by my conversation with Tim.

I return home and Helen and I talk again. She notices my more assertive, upbeat mood immediately and responds exactly as Tim said she would, positively. We have another long, constructive talk. The mood between us is so good she suddenly insists on giving me my Father’s Day present a few days early. It’s a sterling silver key chain from Tiffany & Co. I thank her, we embrace, and I kiss her. It really feels great when we maintain the flow of positive energy between us. It’s a confidence builder that the reconciliation can succeed, though that’s still a long way off, the journey is fraught with peril, and I don’t kid myself about the likelihood of success. But if we keep making tiny forward steps, maybe, just maybe, we can get there in the end.

We say goodnight and head to our separate rooms. Another Valium and it’s time for bed.

Excerpted from Diary Of A Divorce, by Richard Pearce, available for £8.99 from www.amazon.co.uk or for $14.75 from www.lulu.com

If ever a single days sums up the bizarre roller coaster nature of this thing, today is it. It starts with Helen and I having our first couples therapy session at 8:00am. We drop the kids off at Steve and Angelina’s, who will put them on the school bus for us at the usual time, 8:30am, then we head to our appointment.

The therapist, Julie, tells us a bit about the techniques that we’ll use. They include something called reflection, which involves repeating what the other person says to ensure effective communication. The first person then gives marks out of ten to indicate the level of understanding and corrects any misperceptions or fills in any gaps. We use the technique to pick up where we left off in our many hours of discussion over the past few days.

The session goes well. Our reflecting indicates almost universal understanding of each other. I’m totally honest and open about my own shortcomings that have played the most significant role, I believe, in bringing on this crisis and for which I blame only myself. I restate my commitment to finally dealing with them, fixing the problems in our marriage, and saving it if it’s humanly possible.

Helen does indeed summon the nerve to ask about updating Pascal with news of the reconcilation’s progress. Predictably, Julie tells her the idea is a non-starter if Helen is seriously committed to saving her marriage. She must cut off all contact with Pascal. Helen is visibly upset with this advice, but she agrees. Whether someone with her notorious lack of self-control can keep to it is another matter – and a big worry for me. It also relies on Pascal leaving her alone, because what little resolve Helen can bring to bear will dissolve instantly if he doesn't.

At the end of the session, Julie is encouraging.

“In all my years doing this kind of therapy, I've never encountered a couple so calm and so in touch with the issues affecting them as you,” she remarks. “It usually takes at least a year of therapy for most couples to reach the point you’re at right now,” she concludes. I leave heartened by this.

Helen doesn’t have to go into work immediately, so we decide to go to Starbuck’s and get a frappuccino, then take a walk around her favourite bathroom design store. The mood between us is incredibly good, just like old times. It’s as if none of this has happened. We cheerfully look at all the bathroom fittings and talk about how we’d like to redo our master bathroom with this or that unit and in such-a-such way. Maybe we should even do it now, Helen muses. I’m amazed, given that divorce will very likely lead to us selling the house, so what’s the point considering such a remodel? But the vibe between us is so good, I want to keep it going. At one point, we just stop, look at each other, and embrace in the middle of the showroom. It’s enough to make me think we can really pull this off and save this marriage.

However, reality rudely intrudes in the form of my 11:00am appointment with my lawyer, Sheila. We follow up our phone conversation of the previous week by reviewing the situation and discussing my legal options. No real revelations, just a recap of the advice she’d previously given me – I’m not to move out, I’m entitled to half of everything, spousal support, and so on.

The issue of child custody is touched on and she tells me that our state makes no preferential distinction between the sexes in terms of awarding custody, and that as I’m the primary caregiver I’d probably get it. I tell her that in all likelihood we’ll agree that Helen gets custody because I can’t imagine trying to rebuild my life with two young kids in tow, but Sheila tells me not to be so hasty and to think about what’s best for the children.

I tell her about the e-mails and give her copies of them along with the incriminating phone records logging all the calls between Helen and Pascal. She looks them over and to my surprise tells me that they don’t reach the legal threshold of proof in our state, which requires photographic or eyewitness evidence. I tell her of Helen’s offer to exchange them for an affidavit attesting to the affair.

“She can’t possibly have run this by her lawyer, since no attorney worth their salt would allow their client to do such a thing,” Sheila says in response. “But if she's prepared to overrule her lawyer on this and submit the affidavit, tell her we’ll take a look at it and make a decision at that time. In the meantime, give her nothing,” Sheila advises.

“Why not?” I ask. “If the e-mails and phone bills don’t constitute legal proof, what good are they?”

“Ninety-five percent of the divorce cases I work on are settled before they reach court, and the e-mails may at least give us leverage in any settlement if we can avoid going to court, which is to everyone’s advantage,” Sheila replies. She agrees to keep the copies I gave her and puts them in a sealed envelope. We conclude with her wishing me well with the reconciliation and saying that there’s no need for any further consultation or action while the effort to save our marriage is ongoing. She doesn’t even charge me for the meeting, which is very nice and unlawyerly of her.

The meeting has the effect of shattering the previous positive mood though. I feel a little down after it, and on returning home where Helen still hasn’t yet left for work, I can tell her mood has taken a darker turn too. She’s tense and asks immediately about the e-mails. I tell her that on the advice of my lawyer I can’t give them to her, but if she wants to give us the affidavit we’ll look at it and consider an exchange. Naturally, I omit the details that the e-mails don’t constitute legal proof and that her lawyer won’t permit her to submit the affidavit. Let her find those things out for herself. Helen says she regrets that things have become so sneaky and underhanded between us as to include my going through her e-mails.

“That’s what happens when trust is shattered by doing what you've done,” I respond. “What did you expect?” Again it occurs to me how little she truly appreciates the gravity of her actions. If she’s been so duplicitous and treacherous, how can lament the fact that that inevitably dictates how the situation devolves?

The morning’s upbeat mood now seems a long way off. Helen leaves for work and I feel a wave of despair wash over me. As up as I felt earlier, I now feel down. The kids get home a bit later and we go through our usual routine – I let them relax for a while, then homework, then we go to my son’s karate class. I make them dinner when we get back, but I can’t eat anything.

Helen gets home later and has some leftovers. We talk a little more and the communication feels positive again, but I still can’t shake the feeling of hopelessness that has settled over me since the afternoon. What a day. If this thing is destined to be such a wild emotional roller coaster, I just have to ride it out and hope for the best. I head for bed anticipating another difficult night’s sleep. A Valium will no doubt be in order.

Excerpted from Diary Of A Divorce, by Richard Pearce, available for £8.99 from www.amazon.co.uk or for $14.75 from www.lulu.com