It’s Harder Than It Looks

Part One.

As Adam walked out the front door, he glanced over and caught Janie already staring at him. He quickly looked back to the items he was carrying in his arms, hoping that she couldn’t notice the brokenness and emptiness that he was trying hard to hide. He was able to turn his head just in time to hide the first couple of tears starting to run down his cheek.

Whatever you do, do not show her any weakness, he told himself.

He had been telling himself a version of this since the first day of 8th Grade. That’s when he started learning that if the world perceives you as weak, they will take notice. Bullies, mainly. Middle school and high school are hard years for any kid. Kids can be quite mean to each other. Relentless about it, too. Adam felt he dealt with some degree of bullying every year he was in school. He managed it well, in his opinion. He was able to offset the hard times, by clinging to his small group of good friends, so it felt like it evened out in the end.

In Adam’s mind, there were only two kinds of people in life. First, there are bullies, in all their various forms. Kids, teenagers, adults, wherever you find them. The kind of people who just take whatever they need from you, whether that’s your lunch money or it’s a small part of your soul. And then, there are the other kinds of people. The kind who aren’t the bullies, but the ones who will ignore you into oblivion. Pick one group or the other. Or if you’re a real go-getter, pick them both!

His parents had always taught him and his sisters to have a better, more hopeful view of the world. You know, to believe in ‘most people are good’ and ‘good things tend to happen to good people’ — that type of stuff. And he tried to believe it, he really did. He tried to have faith too. But sadly, all the things he’d been through over the previous five years had swayed his opinion of life to believe something else. A little bit lower on the happiness ladder than his parents had hoped for.

The bottom line was that he simply had to hold it all together. His job. His marriage. Being a good dad. Oh, and his affair too. Sure, having an affair while he was married was not part of his life plan, but once it materialized, he just had to add it to the list of things to handle. Handle your business. And do not show any weakness.

It’s not as though it really mattered much anymore. Being exposed as a drug addict who was carrying on an affair with a co-worker for the last eight months will provide plenty of proof as to how weak a man can be.

It was the world that told him that weakness wasn’t acceptable in the first place. And then it was echoed by the girl he decided to marry just four short years prior to this. You see, she grew up with a deadbeat dad, and so ever since the day they got engaged, something she said or did would serve as a constant reminder of how strong and stable she needed him to be for her.

He couldn’t blame her for needing him to be strong. Nope, not when he could imagine what it must have been like for her to grow up without a father who virtually never came around. And when they got married, he felt really good about the fact that maybe he was giving her the support that she had always needed from her dad. He was proud to be her rock, to be a man who she could lean on. Not is some arrogant, boastful contest of manhood. No, nothing like that. He wanted to be the man who never, ever let her down. Or let her go a single day without knowing just how much he loved her and cared for her.

Somehow it had all gone wrong. He knew that it was mostly his fault. But nailing down just where and when he had made the vital mistake was keeping him lying awake at night. He had messed up somewhere, long before this other woman had shown up. Long before even the drugs went from being fun to being a problem.

Shame and guilt were beating the shit out of him constantly, taking more and more from him as each day passed by. He didn’t know what he truly wanted for his life anymore. He was confused as to how it all got so bad, so quickly. He never wanted a whole lot, or needed a whole lot to make him happy.

Some days, all he felt like doing was running to Nora’s house, knocking on her door, and declaring his undying love for her. Other days, he was committed to doing whatever would be asked of him by his wife to save their marriage. One thing he did know for sure though. He had hurt both of them, in such a terrible way.

Despite the uncertainty he experienced growing up, he felt that he had at least become a man who could do the right thing, at the right time, for the right people. At the very least, to do the right thing for his family. He knew he wasn’t perfect — who is? — but he had become something he never thought was possible. He had become a broken man, in every sense of the meaning of the word to him.

He wiped more tears from his cheeks, as he stacked the last box into the bed of his truck.

It felt like just a month ago, their marriage had been solid. I mean, solid enough. No marriage is ever 100% solid. And now he was being thrown out of the house. Or, more accurately, he was voluntarily moving out so that they didn’t have to argue so damn much. The kids were aware of their arguing, of course. But Adam felt terrible for forcing this situation on his two young daughters. It wasn’t fair, any way you looked at it. Dylan’s parents were still married, so he didn’t know what divorced parents felt like. Seeing the kind of pain his choices had brought into his daughters’ lives was a heavy burden.

He would have dealt with living in Janie’s doghouse for as long as it took, if it meant that his daughters could be spared from the pain of being children of divorce. But she was done with him, and she seemed to be even a little bit excited about the process of moving on. He felt that Janie had made up her mind. It felt final to him.

“That seems to be the last of the things I need,” Adam mumbled, as he stepped into the front hallway of the house. He wanted to get the whole ‘moving thing’ over with as quickly as he could, before the girls were dropped back off at home.

Janie didn’t reply. She was sitting on the couch, staring off into space. The kids had been picked up by her mom a little bit earlier that morning. Grandma wanted to take the girls to the mall to see if they wanted to get their ears pierced. And they both felt this would be the perfect opportunity for him to pack up a few things he’d need with him.

“You remember when we first moved into this house? Remember we had that five-year plan, where we were going to make sure we were moving into a bigger house by year five…”

Her voice trailed off while she stared at the wall.

There was sadness and despair in her eyes. Their eyes met briefly, but she quickly looked away. It was like she couldn’t stand looking at him. Like he had let her down in every single conceivable way. Like he failed the test, and was not even worthy enough to have another chance to take it.

The guilt bubbled up in his gut, and he felt tears coming again. But he blinked them away, because crying in front of Janie right now wouldn’t be helpful at all. Over the last two weeks, since his affair was discovered, he had cried twice in her presence. Both times the tears seemed to make her angrier for some reason. He had asked her why she was so upset, and she yelled at him. She accused him of being dramatic and crying only to make it seem like he felt bad. She accused him of not actually caring about any of the pain he’d caused.

She had him all wrong. The truth was that he felt terrible about all of it. The truth was that he had needed her love and support more than he could say.

During those previous eight months, as his drug use became worse, he could hardly live with the guilt of what he was doing. Of who he was betraying. From the outside, people will look at a man who is carrying on an affair, and assume that because he keeps putting one foot in front of the other, that he doesn’t feel guilty and like he was complete shit. They will assume that ‘hey, this guy must have such hatred for his wife and his kids’ and ‘hey, he has no heart and is a soulless prick’.

But nobody ever stops to think that maybe this situation isn’t all black or white. That maybe he feels genuinely terrible about the stupid, idiot-brained choices he’s made. Adam has spent the previous night arguing with his own mother about this very subject. It was something that he couldn’t convince his own mother that he was being honest about.

He hadn’t minced his words to his mom. And he was yelling at her, which wasn’t something that he did very often, if ever.

“Maybe I wake up every single day of my life, and hate myself a little bit more than the day before.”

“You’re not the victim here, son. You need to be thinking about your poor wife, Adam. And your girls, what do you think they’re going through.”

She kept repeating the same two things while they were trying to have dinner, which is what started the yelling and arguing in the first place. He knew by the way she was talking, that she didn’t believe that he was even sorry for any of it.

He hadn’t meant for what he said last, to come out with such malicious intent, but it did. And it stopped the argument dead in its tracks.

“Maybe I can’t stop feeling that if I was hit by a semi-truck and died tomorrow, that it’d be the best outcome for everyone involved, Mom! Maybe I should just take care of this problem by myself!”

He could see instantly, that his words had broken his mother’s heart in an instant. His words had startled her, first of all. And then she looked at him. There was nothing but hurt and sadness in her eyes. Tears ran down her face, as she turned to leave the room, having no ability to speak, let alone continue arguing with her son.

He walked to their front door, and jogged to his car in their driveway, trying to make it inside his truck before the sobs overwhelmed his body. At some point in the middle of the night, he had managed to drive the short few minutes back to his new apartment, and get to bed. I say ‘managed to’ because driving safely and sobbing so hard that you vomit multiple times don’t really mix.

So yeah, needless to say, the next morning brought feelings of a massive hangover that he didn’t have to drink a drop of booze to get.

As he had been driving over to his and Janie’s old house to pick up his things, his mother’s words ran through his mind. She felt that he was trying to play the victim card in all of this mess. And he felt like she was taking Janie’s side. Not that there had to be sides. But there were, of course.

He had only mentioned to his parents once that he felt like he was a broken man, and that he had been feeling that way for longer than he’d like to admit. And somehow, his mom heard him saying that as “hey, y’all need to feel bad for me, and be on my side.” He wasn’t sure where the disconnect was for them.

His mom was wrong. He didn’t feel like the victim. He didn’t want anyone to even have sympathy for him as the ‘victim’, per se. If he were to be allowed to choose what side he was on, he would have gladly sided with his wife and daughters in an instant!

This is how badly he felt about it all.

But Adam wished people would stop tossing him aside like he was a bad person or like he had orchestrated all these poor choices on purpose. He wished Janie’s family would stop casting him as the Villain. As a man who didn’t love his wife or his daughters. If they could all get a peek into his mind, they would see that there wasn’t any terrible and hurtful thing they could even imagine that he wasn’t already reciting to himself on a daily basis, and on repeat.

Everyone assumed Adam was getting a free ride in all of this. If they only knew how hard it was for him to get out of bed each morning and feel like he deserved to live for another single day.

If she would have let him, he would grab Janie by the hand, get on his knees, and beg and plead all day long, for her forgiveness. To beg for her acceptance. To beg for her to see him for the broken man that he was, and tell him that he mattered. That he was enough. He didn’t want to be let off the hook, in the least. He wanted her to know how deeply sorry he was for the pain he’d caused, and to have a chance — even the slightest — to make it up to her.

Or more precisely, to get on the road back to making it all up to her. He would have gladly spent the rest of his life making it up to her and their daughters. If only she would let him.

How do you tell your wife that although you’ve been having sex with another woman, that you love her and you need her more than you have ever needed her in your life? I mean, after breaking her heart like that, how does a man even have the right to ask her to try and see anything from his point of view?

How do you explain to your wife that the reason you resort to taking fistfuls of pain pills, is that you’re trying to numb the pain of feeling completely and entirely unworthy of her love? The world we live in is so jaded. Everyone is so cynical. How would that kind of thing even sound, coming out of your mouth? Especially at a time like this.

Janie’s mom and sister had already fed her a constant diet of “he’s so full of shit”, “don’t believe anything he says” and “he was never good enough for you anyway, girl!” Sadly, even if she would have given him one last chance to salvage any of it, the deck would have been stacked against him.

Telling these things to his wife would have only sounded like cliché excuses, and so he didn’t bother mentioning any of them. Given how the past few months had been between him and Janie, he didn’t dare take the chance of allowing her to see just how vulnerable he really was.

And he figured that none of these things would help her feel any better about the whole situation anyway.

From her point of view, he was nothing but a selfish, rude and heartless asshole. Who had abandoned his wife and children and every obligation he had in his life.

But that wasn’t the case at all. In reality, he was crying out for help and love and acceptance, and yes, he had made some really bad choices — He got it. He only wanted to know that he was enough for her. Or Hell, if he had ever been enough for her?

Part Two is on the way…