Perspective

DB’s ex blames me for their divorce. Of course, she blames DB, too, but she describes him as “emotionally lost,” a compromised state of which I somehow took advantage. In truth, if he was emotionally lost, it was because she emotionally put a burlap sack over his head, beat the crap out of him, shoved him in the trunk of her car, drove around for 14 years, dumped him in a ditch in the middle of the Everglades at night, then sped off. Rather than owning her piece of the responsibility for the fact that DB was abjectly miserable in his marriage before I got anywhere near him, it is much easier to think he had a mid-life crisis, and that he never would have had such a crisis had I not arrived on the scene. It’s an interesting perspective.

I’m not saying DB was justified in cheating on her because he was unhappy in the marriage. I’m not saying DB wasn’t responsible for his contributions to the sorry state of his marriage before I came along. I’m just saying that he didn’t stray out of the blue, and she had a large role in creating the circumstances under which a good man did a bad thing. He didn’t lose his mind or his senses. He had simply had enough, and after multiple rounds of marriage counseling and realizing things were not going to get better, he became severely depressed at the thought that he was serving a life sentence. When we found each other, it was like a prison door opening. I didn’t tempt him. I didn’t have to.

The only things that had kept him in the marriage were his love for his children and his sense of duty. He never stopped loving his children, and he continued to do his duty. He picked up his son from preschool, he made dinner for the family, he unloaded the dishwasher, he did the laundry, he installed baby gates, he pruned the hedges, he gave time-outs, he went to the grocery store, he took the dog to the groomer, he made the coffee every morning. I know that he did those things, because now he does them for me. My ex didn’t do any of that. I did it all, and held down a full-time job, and took care of two small children. I would have been thankful every day if I had had a husband like DB. I am certainly thankful that I have him now. I would be bitter if I lost him, too, especially if I had spent so many years making him feel like a deadbeat and then realized only after he was gone that I was never going to have it that good again.

As for his children, she accuses him of having abandoned them for me. What really happened was that she took them. One day not long after he told her he wasn’t interested in fixing the marriage, he came home from work, and they were gone. No note, no message, luggage, clothes, toys, gone. And then she gave him an ultimatum: return to the marriage or lose his children (he cannot relocate to where she moved with the children – it’s complicated). This was the moment that I knew what kind of person she really was. She thought she could force someone to love her, and that if they didn’t, they deserved to be punished, no matter the cost to her sweet, beautiful children.

DB decided that the psychological effects of living with her in daily misery would detract from his ability to be a good father far more than not living in the same house with them, which I take as a testament to how unhappy he was. He also believed that engaging in a lengthy and acrimonious court battle to keep her in the state was not in the best interest of his children. He decided to go the peaceful route, and he is a cooperative and involved co-parent. He talks to them every day. He sees them as often as he can. When they are with him, he makes sure they brush their teeth and go to bed on time and use their nice voices. When they’re not, he misses them terribly.

Whenever she wants to slap him around, she says that he chose to be away from his children, which truly baffles me. He chose to cheat, but he never stopped loving and taking care of his children. He didn’t want her, but he will always want them. He did not choose me instead of his children. He is not with them because she took them. That was her choice. Not his, not mine, hers.

Look, she can be angry that he cheated, obviously. But I didn’t marry her; he did. I didn’t seduce him. She lost her husband a long time before he found me; she just didn’t know it yet. I didn’t lead him astray. He was already astray. She played a big part in that.

Supporting DB through this emotionally wrenching situation sometimes robs me of all objectivity and sends me into protective mama-bear mode. When I can calm down, I try to view her with compassion, because she was wronged. I know her life is harder now. Financially, she is fine (great, actually), but she is finding that moving thousands of miles away from the one person who would have provided her with regular time to herself was not such a great idea, after all. She chose to move off in a huff, but she didn’t choose to have her world yanked out from under her. She is doing the best she can. She is upset and confused and angry, and she has every right to be. She just doesn’t have the right to hold me responsible for it.