Everybody Plays The Fool, Sometimes
Entry 1 7:45 a.m.
Entry 2 5:15 p.m.
Loving kindness. I am no saint. I am not a martyr. What I am is a man who was in love with a woman who no longer loved me and who was mentally ill. At the beginning of this journey, I spent many sessions discussing how I could never leave Jenny. [To be clear, the foremost reason is because I couldn't put the kids through that. One would have stayed, the other left in an instant. We even talked about getting an apartment on Queen Anne Hill, found some very nice places that took dogs, even. The toll on the sisters' relationship would have been incalculably bad. I couldn't do that too them.] Putting aside the girls and my concern for them for the moment, the other key driver keeping me at home is that I love Jenny. I realized the relationship was in terrible shape well before I found out about the affair, well before she was diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer. It never crossed my mind that I could do anything except care for her. I wanted her to suffer as little as possible, and wanted to help make sure that would happen.
When my therapist and I would discuss this, she would tell me that I had to focus on two things, taking care of and also separating myself from Jenny. She told me, after several lengthy dialogues, that I would never leave Jenny, it wasn't in my makeup as a person. I knew this to be true, and also know that it would be true for anyone that I loved. I wonder if it is genetic? Watching my sister Jane care for Jenny was extraordinary, preternatural, instinctual. My mother had the same qualities when it was for someone outside the family or for me when I was her little boy. I had this terrible need to make sure Jenny would be okay. I showed up everyday as a person who was loving and kind to her, but who also had to build a wall to protect myself from the continual slings and arrows of outrageous behavior I endured. She resented this two track approach, Jenny did. She would tell terrible lies to her friends that I didn't cuddle her, didn't hug her, was cold to her. I was business like when I was strong, which I was to varying degrees over the 18 months I knew of the affair while she was alive. Even then, if she needed a hug she would get it. And in reality, when she was home at night--because she was sick or because she couldn't drive--we were on the couch and she would cuddle me, I would put my arm around her, I would stroke her hair. We watched both seasons of The Morning Show with us snuggling up closer than conjoined twins. I would jump and get anything she needed without complaint at any time. She even discussed this fact in therapy, baffled. I wanted to take care of her, to make sure she was alright. I wanted to pamper her through this terrible suffering.
But this woman who was having an affair--and knew I knew she was having an affair--was just as baffled that I wouldn't just let the affair go. She wanted that and more. She was furious for 16 months that I wasn't in her bed anymore--complaining to anyone who would listen how cold and unfeeling I was for not doing this. As you know, she told terrible lies about this to both our tandem therapist and me, claiming soon after I told Eric el pinche's wife about the affair in February 2021, that she no longer could see him and was dying and starved for affection. She wanted more from me, and she lamented over and again she had no one in her bed with her at night to hold her. I held fast on that, until she was so sick I needed to be with her all the time. Even then, she would go and see el pinché.
I am licking my wounds now, knowing the terrible things she said, the ridiculous lies through commission and omission, intentionally. She likely lied not realizing she was lying anymore after a while, believing the fabrications she made up.
I think about why I stayed with her. It was the girls, it was my love for her. But, also, I had this twisted notion that if she could just see how kind and loving I am, she would see the error in her ways, and make amends. She would love me again. She would not hurt me anymore. It was a belief born of my childhood relationship with my mother, to be sure, and a sickness I didn't understand I had. The worse Jenny behaved, the more convinced I grew that I deserved her bad behavior, and the harder I tried to convince her I could do better. My therapist told me this was a fool's errand. I countered that I had the qualifications to complete just such an errand, and never stopped holding this irrational belief. In fact, I would double down, try harder, with each new injury suffered upon me. I tried to be perfect, while still maintaining enough individuation to keep my so-called boundaries up. I was Daffy to her Bugs, Wile E. Coyote to her Roadrunner, Charlie Brown to her Lucy.
Since you are inviting comments - I think you hit the nail on the head, making the connection between your upbringing, and your reaction to the infidelity. I learned in therapy that when we are parented by a person with a narcissistic personality, their love is always conditional, so we grow up doing anything possible to win approval, especially when we are being treated cruelly. We also grow up understanding that it's their world, and we are just living in it, and our own needs and feelings don't really exist. So I think that you were probably programmed from birth to have the exact reaction that you did to this situation. Any suggestion that you were ever cold and unfeeling is just pure manipulation. The fact is that you acted selflessly, and prioritized your daughters above all else. So when you replay the tapes in your mind of everything that happened, give yourself credit for all of the extraordinary things that you did - and those things mattered, even if no one appreciated them.
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