Read Being The Other Woman: Who we are, what every woman should know and how to avoid us Online
Authors: Micalle A. Culver
That afternoon, we were thrilled to discover cannoning, and we rediscovered each other all over again as we swam through tunnels and slid down waterfalls. When we left the mountains, tears filled Blake’s eyes. “I am such an ass,” he told me. “You deserve for me to be the best that I can be to you. I’m going to try to be the best man you have ever had in your life. I just want to show you how fortunate I am to have you in my life and how much I really love you.” He was filled with remorse for the craziness we had gone through on what had begun as a beautiful lovers’ get away. Upon leaving the Dominican Republic, we decided it was full of “bad juju” and vowed never to return there again. Spending the next day alone together in Puerto Rico, we were very quiet and a little distant.
Shortly after our return home, Beth left for a two-week vacation. She left their youngest child with Blake, thinking (I suppose) that he would not be able to spend time with me while caring for the toddler. Instead, this opened the door for Blake to invite me into the world that I had not been able to share with him. He begged me to come to his home, to share the side of his life that I had been denied. I was apprehensive. Was I ready to see how he lived while apart from me? I liked my fantasy world, a world where Beth did not exist. In this world, I could ignore the fact that he shared his life with another woman. But it was important to him that I see his home. He wanted me to know all of him, to share his whole life. Wanting him to have what he wanted, and also wanting to be privy to trinkets from his childhood, I reluctantly agreed.
I had an eerie feeling when I went into Blake’s house. Walking through it I was struck with many slaps of reality. Children’s toys scattered the floor. There were left-over dinners in the fridge. Every wall I looked at had a family photo or piece of artwork done by the kids. There was a piano with the keyboard open, as if someone had just stepped away, and a blanket tossed on the couch that said the same thing. The bedrooms had freshly folded clothes on top of the dressers. In the home office, his and hers desks sat with the files she had been working on still open. Entering the master bedroom, an unmade bed on her side, and a book she was currently reading sat on a night stand with her glasses set beside it. There were artistic hangings of their wedding day on the bedroom walls and her towel hung and toiletries in the master bathroom.
I was extremely uncomfortable. I hated being in that home. It was
her
home, and
her
presence was everywhere. Everything in the house said,
“I’ll
be
right
back.”
I could not be in that house without feeling that I was invading the most private parts of her space. I was suddenly afraid of karmic repercussions. I felt my real intrusion. Being there made the fact that we were having an affair very real to me. It didn’t feel like him, or us, in that house. This was a life that was foreign to me. I was in the home of a stranger, sneaking about like a thief.
Every second I spent in that house left me thinking about how I would feel if I were her. How would I feel if I discovered that another woman had been in my home, let alone in my bed? It was an ugly, disgusting feeling. I felt tainted and dirty. Being in her house made me see Blake in a negative light. He couldn’t even honor this space. How could he be capable of finding comfort with me in his wife’s house? How could I live with myself for staying there?
I tried to understand why inviting me there was important to him and pushed my feelings down deep when he brushed over my upsets. I allowed him to show me their photo albums and memorabilia from his youth. I spent our time feigning enjoyment while internally on egg shells. We played with his son and even brought my children to the home to squash their questioning about why we never went to his home in the city. I helped care for his little boy, which allowed me to build a bit of a relationship and a quick love for the child. He would climb up next to me and cuddle with me, calling me his “nuther one Mommy” not understanding who the mommy imposter was. I rocked him to sleep when he woke up at night and brought him into “our” bed to sleep beside us when he was being restless. I myself was restless every night that I spent there. I felt like throwing up the whole time and hardly slept the entire two weeks.
One night during that week, we attended a potluck dinner together, for which I prepared a dish in Beth’s kitchen, moving uncomfortably in search of pots and pans. In my nervousness about intruding and the insecurity over being compared to her superior domestic skills, I flopped the dish altogether, which increased my humiliation. Everything I had believed about myself was beginning to crumble. We also took our children—his son and my daughters—with us to a dinner party. His son’s neediness gave me a feeling of what our family life together would be like and made me long for it to be “right” all the more.
At the end of our pretend family time, I helped Blake wash the sheets, clean the house, and erase any evidence of my being there. I departed with deep-rooted hurt and confusion. I wanted space to digest what I was feeling and couldn’t get out of the driveway fast enough. Why was I continuing to just “go along” with things when I did not feel good about them? I felt certain that what I had seen in her home would backfire on me later in life if he and I ever married. I was hurt to see the easy “turn over,” the casual “changing of the guard.” I was confused by his apparent ease in bringing me into her home and his lack of guilt. Or was it that he cared for me so much more than her? Was she really this much of a non-issue? Was she really
this
bad of a person?
Before I drove away, Blake pled with me, “Don’t ever let me forget how good I felt these last couple of weeks.” He had gotten much more out of this time than I had. He got to see me in the circumstance of a “normal” life. I had witnessed the lack of compassion and honor he was capable of, and his total disregard for how I felt about participating in this time together. I was feeling the sickening evil of what we were doing.
While Beth was gone, I went to church to sooth my empty soul. While I was waiting for my children’s Sunday school class to end, one of the assistant pastors approached me. I was staring out a window and my misery was probably transparent to him. He asked me if I was all right. I looked up at this tall, incredibly built man, who shone with strength and kindness, and suddenly confessed that I had been having an affair with a married man for over a year. He suggested a counseling session with a minister. I agreed.
When I met with the church counselor, it filled Blake with anxiety. He was afraid the minister would persuade me to end our relationship and give me the strength I needed to walk away. The minister I met with, however, was not the man to whom I had originally confessed. The minister I met with seemed to be a very angry man. I had just begun telling him my story when he interrupted and started with what appeared to be his own agenda. I wondered if what I was saying reminded him of anything in his own life. “He doesn’t love you,” the minister said in a snide voice. “He doesn’t love her, either. The only person he loves is himself.” This seemed to be a pretty bold judgment of someone he had never met. He refused to hear about Blake’s struggles. As a result, instead of feeling any need to repent, I felt more protective of Blake. Blake loved me. I did not doubt that. He also had love for Beth. The one he didn’t love at all was himself, I decided.
Irritated at the minister, I changed the subject and asked a Biblical question to test the value of his advice. “In the Bible,” I began, “it says that the only way to heaven is by believing in Jesus Christ. Unless you are a Christian, you are damned to hell. Right? As children raised in the Christian religion, this is pounded into our thinking, and therefore we are closed out of fear to any other belief, just as other religions have similar fearful thinking pound into them. “What,” I continued, “about the children being raised in other cultures? The ones who have had the Muslim religion shoved down their throats? The ones who are not allowed the choice of believing in Christ or something different, having the same fear of our religion as we do theirs or any other belief. If they refuse to believe in anything different from what they were told they must believe with similar fears of damnation being the cause of their refusal, will they go to hell?” To which my counselor replied, “That’s what the Bible says.”
I thought about the beautiful little brown haired children I had seen in Turkey and about our tour guide who I had shared several deep conversations with about his Muslim culture. I had developed a quick affection for our guide who was a warm and passionately spirited man. The children were as innocent, carefree and playful as Christian children; would an all loving God really send them to hell? I left the church that afternoon and I have never been back since. I drove to Blake’s house where he had been waiting for me, holding his breath. I told him my counseling session was a waste of time and that the man had angered me. Blake sighed relief so hugely that I could see his muscles loosen as he dropped to the couch. We spent that afternoon comforting one another. I felt all the more love for Blake because he would have been hurt by the churchman if he knew what he had said about him and I felt sorry for him as if he had heard it. All I wanted was to shower him with affection.
When Beth returned, she promptly booked a girls’ trip to Hawaii with a new friend with whom she had been commiserating. A few days before she left again, Blake had phoned me with the news that he had discovered a motor home for sale and bought it to fulfill an adventure idea I had shared. I had always thought it might be fun to drive across the United States in a motor home, exploring each state along the way. I wanted to fill in the stickers of every state in the U.S on one of those maps of America pasted to the back of some RVs.
After Beth left again, we decided to test the idea on a small scale. Loading up all five of our children, we drove to several remote towns and campsites. We stayed in an old remote mining town on the trip. It was a strange place, an era forgotten. The area lacked many modern conveniences and a large family of seventeen called “The Pilgrims” seemed to be talk of the community. Their lifestyle was much like the Amish. Using livestock to pull trees they lived almost completely off of the land. The family sent their children into various parts of town to play the fiddle. The fiddle was one of their only sources of income along with home baked goods they tried to sell to the occasional tourist.
During the day we took all of our children on a hike through old gold mines and the children scavenged rundown abandoned buildings collecting scraps of copper and antique tools left behind. Spotting an interesting shack with a pulley line, Blake’s oldest daughter and I went off to investigate. Climbing a steep hill we became trapped at the peak while the rest of the kids and Blake teased us for not paying attention. After our hike, we found a dining hall and the seven of us ate lunch. Afterwards, we realized we were too tired to walk all of the way back to the motor home. The Pilgrims had parked a covered wagon, pulled by two horses, at the dining hall entrance and offered us a ride back to our campsite. Blake, myself and our five children laughed hysterically for almost the entire duration of our ride. The pilgrims handed to us, in the back of the wagon, a plate of odd looking fudge for our children. Not looking like your typical Nabisco treat, our city kids made poop jokes for most of the ride. And terms like “Oh, fiddle sticks” became regular comments during our adventure. At other spots we camped along the way, our kids ran off to build forts in the trees and collect odd items left behind by previous campers. The children all had bonded quickly and had a blast together. Blake’s middle child fought to be let into the club of my younger and his oldest who kept sneaking off to their little retreats to tell secrets. My teen became the loving older sister and caretaker. At the end of our adventure, we collected photographs of everyone together, created a scrapbook, and titled it “Dysfunctional Family.”
Because Blake was so present in our home and lives, I had told my children that Blake was in the middle of an ugly divorce and that his kids were too young to understand all that was going on. This was to forestall discussions of our relationship and to explain why Blake and I slept apart on that trip. My younger child fell head over heels for Blake, and my heart melted as I watched the way she looked at him. It broke when she said, “I wish he was my daddy.” His participation in their lives to the extent he did was so natural as if he had always been there.
My domestic feelings did not, however, prevent me from thinking about the risks we were taking by involving our children in the lie we were living. Our children were vulnerable to potential hurt. I didn’t know how we were going to eventually explain things to his kids. I figured it was something he was working out in his own thoughts. As for my girls, Blake promised that he loved me and my children and soon we would all be together in one home. They would never be any wiser. He assured us that his affections ran so deeply that if anything were to happen to me, he would always take care of them like a father. I believed him. I tried not to abuse myself with guilt for being such a horrible mother for exposing them to our relationship.
I didn’t have a backup plan for if the relationship didn’t work out between us. For one thing, I had no idea what kind of future I would face. My reputation was beginning to be pounded to the ground. My friends had been pushed away for not “wanting my happiness.” Whenever they saw me, the negative aspects of my affair were always the first topic of our conversation and their reason for rejecting any acceptance of it. The only person I had left in my life who wouldn’t condemn me for my relationship with him, was him. The more friends we lost, the closer our friendship became. He was the only one who understood why I was willing to sacrifice so much. And I was the only one who understood his complications.
I remember once speaking to Blake on the phone, lamenting, “What the hell am I doing? There are three people here who are sure to experience torment and pain. In the end, one will be forced to leave. Here I am, knowing I will be that person and still doing this.” I was trying to push my way through the powerful persuasion of fantasy. I knew the statistics. The odds of our relationship ending in marriage were slim to none. If we beat those odds and got married, the odds that we would have a successful marriage were even bleaker. Blake detested my lack of faith.