I was newly pregnant then with our second child and he was deploying in a matter of weeks, after having only been home for a few months, so I didn’t even consider divorce.
How could I divorce someone who wasn’t even there, while I was dealing with pregnancy and newborn madness (we already knew he wouldn’t be home for the birth) and single parenting a toddler? Divorce would have to wait.
We went to counseling with the chaplain. We tried. I told my mother-in-law everything and she kept our son so that we could get away to a bed and breakfast for a few days. It all seemed to help. And then he deployed again.
Two years passed and things seemed better. Then I got another email. This time the stranger contacting me was a man, the husband of a female British soldier. She had been stationed at the same forward operating base as my husband during his last deployment and, months after she’d returned home, her husband found pictures on her computer. Pictures he attached to the message he sent me. Pictures of my husband. Naked pictures. He said he had asked his wife about them and she had confessed to an affair. He Googled my husband’s name, found my name, and then searched for and found my email address. He decided I had a right to know. How unfair it was, he wrote to me, that while he and I were home raising children and worrying, our spouses were over there getting it on.
My husband was – of course – again deployed when I received that email, so I did the only thing I could do – I sent him an email, only this time I didn’t demand that he come home. This time I told him to kill himself and I asked him to do it so that it would look like an accident, so that our kids would only know him as a war hero, and not as the philandering jerk he clearly was. Only my language was much more colorful than that. I told him I was filing for divorce. And then I ignored him for six weeks.
I did not accept any of his phone calls and I did not respond to any of his emails. He called every member of my family, confessed everything to each of them, and begged them to make me talk to him. They all (quite wisely) refused to get involved. I did read his emails, though. He sent me one every day, telling me how sorry he was and how grateful he was to have been found out, that the knowledge of what he’d done and the guilt were destroying him. These were long emails and in them he told me about all the soul searching he was doing and what he was learning about himself. He confessed to two other affairs, too. One with another active duty female while he was deployed and one with a woman he met in a bar while TDY in the states. Both were one time encounters and he had never even learned the women’s names, he said.
I’ll stop right there to answer the question you’re probably asking yourself right now:
Why is she telling us all of this?
