Category Archives: Divorce

Fartbuster Lost It

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RingPut I told y’all how Monday was kind of weird because of that wedding ring memory, right? Well, it got even weirder when I came home from work. G met me at the door of our bedroom with the words, “I’ve got some bad news. Not big bad news…” He held up his left hand. “I lost my ring.”

I shit you not. My body went cold because that’s not the first time a fellow who’s wearing my ring confesses that he’s “lost it.”

Guess who? C’mon, guess.

FARTBUSTER.

About a month before I found out that Fartbuster had been having an affair, he met me at the door as I walked in from the garage. He was picking at the skin of his palms, all sweaty looking and panicky. “Don’t freak out–I lost my ring at lunch today.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say so I stayed quiet. Funny how the only thing I could hold in my mind at that moment was the door mat from that fall. Funny how that betrayal came right back to mind.

“I think what happened was I took it off to wash my hands in the bathroom and I stuck it in my pocket but it must not have gone all the way down in there and it fell out. But I didn’t hear it maybe because the water was running. When I was getting in my car after lunch I realized that it wasn’t there. I looked EVERYWHERE–in that bathroom, under the table, I asked them to look in the kitchen. I was an hour late getting back to work because I didn’t want to stop looking for it. I left my number with the restaurant manager. We even looked in the parking lot.”

I still couldn’t say anything because all the blood in my body had gone to my head to pound between my ears.

“I’m sorry. I’ll go back and look tomorrow.”

I shrugged.

“Are you mad?”

“I’m sad. That was a beautiful ring.” Handmade and special ordered from an artisan in California. A wide band made of alternating braided gold. Even with Tony the Jeweler giving me the family discount, that ring had cost me $1500.

ring I was sad. Maybe I had been sad since the summer before, when we took that miserable trip to England. Or since that August, when he came home with the lipstick on his collar. The door mat had made me more angry than sad, but sad at the heart of it. I had been sad back in October, when I planted those daffodils in the backyard and wondered if we would still be married when they bloomed. Had I been sad since January, when he had lost his job? It had been a sad year.

That ring was never found. A couple of weeks later, we went down to Tony’s and ordered a new one. I thought it would be a fresh start for us.

A few days later, Fartbuster told me that he wanted to move out and “get his head together.” I STILL didn’t know about the affair. But I was pretty sure it wasn’t the time to lay out another thousand dollars on a wedding ring. I was too embarrassed to call Tony myself and cancel the order. Big Gay took care of that for me.

So a few weeks later, when Fartbuster came clean about the affair and I threw my own heavy gold wedding ring at his head, his finger was already bare. I remember saying, “Oh! Now I know what happened to your ring!” and he said, “No! I wasn’t lying about that. About that.”

Yeah, G didn’t know WHAT can of worms he was opening up when he told me “I lost my ring.” I kept quiet, working through all these thoughts. That was the same day I had been visited by the memory of Richard’s wedding ring–now here I was reliving a deja vu ring scene from ANOTHER marriage!

Luckily, while I was tracing my way through all that mental drama, G found his ring in the sofa cushions. Sometimes, if I keep my mouth shut, things work out on their own!

I Should Have Slugged Him: My Husband Confesses to an Affair

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This story contains scenes that some readers may find disturbing. It contains strong language, mild violence, and mockery of a Braves legend. Baseball fans and cuckolds are strongly cautioned. Intended for immature audiences only.

Here’s the story of the April night in the year 2000 when I found out why Fartbuster had moved out of our house. We had been separated for three weeks. I was parking my car in the middle of the garage and already cooking for one. He and I talked every day and cried just about every day. I just couldn’t get it through my head WHY he had moved in with his friend downtown when he was telling me every day how much he wanted to be back together.

So one night he came over for dinner and drama. We were sitting on the couch with our dogs–pretty normal night. He started crying first, which usually meant that I would end up crying most.

“I’m not good enough for you. You deserve better.” He sobbed. I patted his knee and assured him that that was not the case. He was a WONDERFUL person. Ominously, he peeped at me out of the wet corner of his eye and said, “You don’t know everything.”

I didn’t say a word. My heart stopped then raced to catch itself. “What don’t I know?”

“I had an affair.”

Well. What’s a wife supposed to say to that?

This wife, being a bit of a codependent class clown type, made a joke. A bad joke. The dissolution of our marriage happened just a few months after the public meltdown of Chipper Jones’ first marriage–when he confessed to fathering a child with a Hooters waitress. I don’t follow baseball, but Chipper had been married to a girl I knew from college. I had felt so awful for her when he was busted–the situation was terrible enough, but imagine having the world discussing your cheating husband on drive time radio shows and Entertainment Tonight? So to lighten the mood in our living room that night–oh, when will I ever learn???–I said:

“At least you didn’t get a Hooters waitress pregnant, right?”

He froze.

I froze.

Holy shit.

I lifted my hand off his knee. He hopped up off the couch and got a safe distance away before he turned to face me. “Not exactly…but pretty close.”

Every sound in the world was replaced by the buzzing inside my head, a metallic hum that seemed to begin deep in my bones and rattle through my body. “Ah,” I whispered. “She doesn’t work at Hooters.”

“Yeah.” He stared at me to make sure I had put two and two together. Or one and one and gotten three.

He started babbling about how he had cheated but knew it was wrong and he had ended it but then she had turned up saying she was pregnant and that was why he had moved out–to clear things up with her. He planned to come back to me as if nothing had ever happened. As if. His fancy German therapist had pointed out the problem with this logic and had suggested that Fartbuster come clean to me if he ever hoped to patch our marriage back together. I had to know the truth.

And now I did.

Like you might expect, I stomped and screamed and shrieked while he stood there with a hangdog expression in the middle of the living room. The dogs hightailed it for the bedroom. I tore off my heavy gold wedding band and beaned at his head, but I telegraphed my pitch and he had time to dodge it. He scooped the ring from the floor after it bounced off the fireplace and held it between his hands. He was still crying.

I dropped into a chair as my fury dissolved into anguish. It was my turn to cry.

He approached me hesitantly. It’s hard to know if you can comfort someone when you’re the one who dealt the blow.

“Don’t you dare lay a finger on me,” I snarled. Then I hung my head and sobbed. He knelt on the floor before me, so still and just a foot away, my wedding ring still in his hand.

We sat frozen there for a long time, like some mockery of a marriage proposal–him on bended knee with a ring and me weeping.

He reached out slowly and touched my hair. I let him.

I whimpered, “This hurts so bad. …. I want you to hurt like this. ….I want to hit you.”

He stretched his arms open wide and smiled. “Do it! Hit me! I’d feel better if you did.”

We both laughed as he continued to encourage me to punch him. “C’mon…this is your chance…”

“No. I’m not going to.” Laughing with him like that, like old times, minutes after he confessed to pulling a Chipper? My fury flamed back. “I don’t want you to feel better. I don’t want you to think that makes up for any of this.” I snatched the ring out of his hand. “And I’m keeping this. I can always melt it down and make a pair of earrings.”

Well. That was the beginning of a long journey–a year it took us to finally go our separate ways. I think back sometimes to that moment, that choice I made to withhold my fist and not beat the shit out of him. I didn’t want his atonement to be that easy. A punch in the face was nothing compared to the punch in the gut that he had dealt me with his confession. I took the high road that night, but there were many many times in that year when I wished I had walloped him. Swung for the fence. Smashed a tater. Blasted a homer. Belted him. Slugged him. Knocked a four-bagger. Hammer time.

But if I had, I would have chipped away at the awful burden that he had to carry. If I had hit him, he would have walked to first.

P.S. – The ex-Mrs. Jones, Karin Luis, has flown far far above where she ever could have gotten with that turkey. She’s a therapist, author, and speaker who focuses on women’s resiliency and spiritual development. She is co-auther of the book The Fatherless Daughter Project. Check her out on Facebook as “Dr. Karin” or on her website.

Goals, Outcomes, and Daffodils

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As I left my office yesterday afternoon to walk to the car, my heart was equal parts heavy and joyful. Heavy for a friend whose life is in a tangle right now. She’s sad and confused and overwhelmed. I remember those sunless days in my own past and ache for her. I know she’ll figure it out and find herself on the other side of this, but right now she has no place to rest. The path ahead seems so long and dark and she’s having a hard time believing that she will find her way.

The other part of my heart was joyful, because yesterday I reached a goal I had set for myself a few months back. February 4th marks the one year anniversary of Baddest Mother Ever. I wanted to reach 100,000 page views on the site in that first year. That happened yesterday! Thank you so much for reading and sharing and building this community. I feel great joy that I have stuck with this and it is growing.

These are the thoughts that were on my mind when I looked down into the snow and saw green shoots of daffodils peeking up into the frigid air. Those shoots took me right back to a time in my life when I had no idea what my future would look like. My birthday is in late October, right around the time you plant spring bulbs so that they can sleep through the winter and surprise you in the spring. I got a big bag of daffodil bulbs from my mom for a birthday present about a month after Fartbuster came home with lipstick on his collar that first time. I hadn’t told anyone about our situation because I was ashamed of my husband’s behavior. One bright Sunday afternoon, I took my bag of bulbs and a trowel out to the backyard and started planting them around the pine trees and along the fence. On my own and with time to think, my thoughts gravitated back to our marriage, my trust in him, and whether we would ever get back on track and feel normal again. With each bulb that I tucked into the earth, I wondered, “Will I still be living here to see these come up in the spring? Will I be married? Will we make it?”

I tried to bury my fear and sadness with the bulbs. I committed to a goal–I would be in that house in the spring to watch these flowers bloom.

Well, I reached my goal–I was in that house in the spring when the daffodils bloomed, but Fartbuster wasn’t there. My marriage was gone. That’s the difference between a goal and an outcome. A goal is a milestone along the path. An outcome is the result of all those goals…with a measure of dumb luck thrown in. So yes, I reached my goal of seeing the daffodils bloom, but the outcome wasn’t what I had imagined. Simply achieving the goal didn’t predict the outcome.

We don’t always get to control the outcome. We control the goals. I planted the daffodils at just the right depth and I added bone meal. I tucked them into the warming red dirt and I covered them with a layer of pine straw. But that’s as far as I could influence the outcome. Floods or freezes or insects could have taken it from there and the outcome would have been out of my hands. Same thing with my marriage to Fartbuster. My goals, like going to counseling and working on my own self, were reached. Instead of saving my marriage, I saved my self.

So if you’re walking briskly through the cold wind, with your chin tucked to your chest, look around for that little shoot of green. That daffodil has something to tell you.

Sunday Sweetness–Your Wings

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There are going to be times when the place where you were resting safely falls away beneath you. Your job disappears in a reduction in force. He comes home late from work with lipstick on the collar. The doctor calls you personally with some odd test results. You hear, “We did everything we could…”

Or it just dissolves. One day the branch is there and the next day it’s not. Gone.

Those moments are going to happen. But your wings will be there in that same moment.

Fartbuster and the Dustbuster Dustup

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This sucks.

A few weeks before our wedding, Fartbuster and I met with the minister for some perfunctory premarital counseling. In other words, we met her for dinner at Cracker Barrel so that she could put names with faces–it was not a highly formal religious service. Over our chicken and dumplings and mason jars of tea, we swapped small talk. Then I pulled out a copy of the ceremony that he and I had written so that we could run it by her.

She held up an elegant hand and said, “Let’s do a little bit of talking about marriage before we talk about the wedding per se.” OK. She asked us about trust and partnership and fidelity and communication styles. We had been together for five years at that point, and sharing an apartment for two, so this wasn’t new territory. He and I were MATURE–26 and 27. Well, at least we seemed to be in our own minds.

The minister buttered her corn muffin delicately and asked, “Do you feel comfortable when you fight with each other? Tell me about a time when you disagreed on something.”

Fartbuster and I swiveled our heads around to look at one another face to face, and in unison said, “The DUSTBUSTER.”

A few months earlier, Fartbuster had come home from the store with a Dustbuster. I was delighted at his determination to wage war against the cat hair tumbleweeds in our apartment. He unpacked the Dustbuster, showed me how it worked, and I rewarded him with a kiss for his efforts. Then it came time to charge it up. While I was putting the Dustbuster in the living room window sill, right next to an empty outlet, I heard him bumping around in the galley kitchen.

I poked my head into the narrow kitchen (there wasn’t room for both of us) and asked, “What are you doing?” He had a couple of screwdrivers and a mounting bracket laid out on the counter….right next to the stove top.

“I’m putting up the thing so we can hang the Dustbuster in here.”

“In the kitchen? Right next to where we cook? It will be dripping dust and cat hair all over the place!”

That’s when he presented his rationale: “It’s a small appliance, and small appliances go in the kitchen.”

I spluttered, “It’s a vacuum cleaner and vacuum cleaners go in the laundry closet! Or the pantry! We can even leave it in the window behind the curtains. But NOT next to the STOVE.”

And that was the moment that things took a turn for the…mature. He slammed the tools down on the counter and shouted, “IT ALWAYS HAS TO BE YOUR WAY!!! WHY DO WE ALWAYS HAVE TO DO IT YOUR WAY? I’M HANGING THIS DUSTBUSTER RIGHT HERE. PERIOD.”

Oh. Hell. Naw.

“My way?” I screeched. “I’ve given you three different options and you’ve given me ONE. One that’s STUPID. So who’s really insisting on having it their way?”

We glared at each other like it was high noon in a spaghetti Western.

That fight went on for DAYS. Sniping, carping, bitching and moaning. That was the way we did things. After a while, we forgot to stay mad about it but the issue never got resolved. The Dustbuster and its charger stayed right there in the window sill until we moved six months after the wedding.

Now that I’m older and wiser, I know what I should have done. When a man gets into that “You’re not the boss of me” zone, there’s not much way to argue him out of it. Even with three well-reasoned alternatives, an installation diagram from the manufacturer, and a copy of Better Homes and Gardens “10 Clever Places to Hang a Dustbuster BESIDES the Kitchen!” you’re not going to win.

I should have kept my mouth shut, let him hang the Dustbuster over the stove, then served him plate after plate of spaghetti and hairballs until it was HIS IDEA to move the damn Dustbuster.

My wise friend, Susan, shared a great piece of advice about getting husbands to do stuff around the house: “You can either tell the TO do it or HOW to do it, but you can’t tell them both.” Of course this might be why there is a stack of lumber in her dining room.

So…I’m dying to know. Do any of you have a Dustbuster hanging over your stove?

Fartbuster’s Worst Fear

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About a week after Fartbuster and I separated, he came by the house one night so we could talk. It had been a rough day for me. I had spent the afternoon at a funeral for the husband of a coworker. He had died too young after a grueling dose of stomach cancer. During the service, I stared at my wedding ring (I hadn’t told anyone that we were living apart yet) and wondered what would become of my life, who would cry for me. That evening, I was overwrought and wrung out and completely used up–so what BETTER time to hash things out with my wayward husband?

So there we met, leaning against the counters in our kitchen. My kitchen. The kitchen. Whatever. And Fartbuster was telling me all about the book he was reading–Hermann Hesse’s “The Glass Bead Game.” In great detail. Greeeeeeaaaat detail. Exhaustive detail. I’m leaning against the counter and listening to him go on and on about this esoteric novel that he probably read because no one else wanted to and it’s as if I finally SEE him for who he really is–someone who thinks he’ll be OK as long as he’s smart. Someone who thinks he’s really special because he’s smart. Someone who desperately needs a pat on the head as he hears, “Gosh, you’re smart!” That had been my job for ten years.

The Glass Bead Game is about the life of a young man who has been raised to be a member of the intellectual elite who goes on a quest to understand other forms of living. So it got Fartbuster thinking about Who He Wanted to Be. (And as a sidenote: remember that Who He WAS at this juncture was a barely employed man with a pregnant girlfriend that his patient and confused wife didn’t know about.)

Finally, he finishes going on about the book. He looks over at me and asks, “What’s your biggest fear in life?’

I considered it for a few moments and reflected back on how I had spent my emotional afternoon. “I think my biggest fear is not being loved. If I woke up in the morning and couldn’t think of anyone who gave a shit about me–that would be my worst nightmare.”

He nodded without saying anything.

“What’s yours?” I asked from my side of our kitchen.

He scrunched up his mouth, rubbed his beard and proclaimed, “Being ordinary. Y’know–wife, kids, house in the suburbs and a job.”

I stared at the pattern in the linoleum to give him time to elaborate. He added, “I want to do something bigger than that, something important.”

Our suburban kitchen ticked with the quiet that hung between us. In our time together, even though I read books just as fancy as the ones he read, I had always been the more practical of the two of us. I like a good Nobel Prize winner myself, but I also believe in paying the light bill. And that part of me had about had enough of making a life with Peter Pan.

“You call that ‘ordinary,’ but I went to a funeral today for one of the most ordinary men you’d ever care to meet. Husband, father, grandfather. Truck driver. House in the country. Watched Nascar. Went to church on Sunday. He was also 15 years sober and helped a lot of other people fight that battle. He was loved deeply and irreplaceable to his wife and daughter. He was funny. He was kind. A hundred people stood out there in the sunshine this afternoon and mourned the fact that he had passed. Just an ordinary guy.”

Fartbuster shrugged and I didn’t push it.

Well, if you’ve been reading here for a while, you know how the story turned out. I don’t talk much about how and where Fartbuster is today, but let me assure you…

Wife
Kid
Job
House in the suburbs

Thank my lucky stars that I got out of that marriage with my self intact, if somewhat tattered. I became a person I loved, then I found someone to love. Then I did it all again and again and again. My life keeps getting bigger since that time.

I found this quote about ordinariness and love. Reading it makes me feel a bit smug, because not too many years after Fartbuster placed me in the “ordinary” column, I went to Paris on my own and I found Oscar Wilde’s tombstone. I put on my brightest red lipstick and I kissed the memorial, leaving my mark. It was one of those moments when I looked back across what my life had become, back to that night in our kitchen. Ordinary? Hardly. Loved? Certainly.

In the words of Mr. Wilde: “Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.”

The Journey

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I know some of you are being brave and bold RIGHT NOW. You are saving your own lives. Bravery doesn’t always come in historic gestures. You might be starting a new job like Karen. Getting your own place like Annabel. Finishing up that first semester of college like Auburn. Fighting for your life like Kristina. Mothering an infant like Jackie. Finding your way in the dark like…you know who you are. Choosing to live another sober day. Choosing to live.

Choose to live, again, today. Save the only life you can save.

Here’s some advice from Mary Oliver.

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