The Final F*ck You

Dear Mistress #?,

We’ve never spoken before, but I don’t need to tell you that he was still mine when you met him. I imagine you are just like I was when I met him three decades ago — independent, self-assured, you know your way around your own heart like I once did. You were blinded by his beauty, wit and charm. I know what captivated him. It was your easy way. It was your calm, cool head and centered caring soul. I’m certain he told you that we’d been over for years — just terrible roommates with a couple of kids between us. He probably told you I broke his heart when I lied to him, cheated on him with an old boyfriend — that my friends and even my mom encouraged me to do so behind his back. I ruined our marriage with my enmeshment with my mother, our children, my friends. I wasn’t a team player. I didn’t know how to love. I didn’t follow the rules of a marriage. I plain didn’t love him enough. I was selfish and cold to him. I didn’t groom myself properly because I just didn’t care anymore. I was angry and ruthless. I’m sure he showed you texts of me going insane. He probably even showed you videos he took of me losing all control the minute he turned on the camera after he called me a cunt/fucking bitch/dyke/whore. I’m sure you bought into it just as I would have. I bet you believed that our love was loveless, and that I was the dirge of all women.

As I sat home waiting for him nearly every night, I rarely wondered where he was. I only wondered when he was coming back. Life in our home was not life. It was survival. It was existence. He told me he spent his time with “friends” working in a pot grow for free weed — this is the only part of his story I believe: He wanted free weed. I welcomed this hobby because he was mean as a snake in our presence. He haunted the house with the misery he rained on us. His time outside our home was the only time we could exhale. We got used to this roller coaster. I was as addicted to this cycle as he was to pot, and whatever that residue I found in the burnt glass pipe in his car. A car that resembled the dwelling of someone who was homeless….only he wasn’t homeless. He had a wife, kids, a dog and a big house in the suburbs. He had the “American Dream” and yet he wanted to be around others who shared his love for being free. He claimed he only used drugs to ease his chronic pain. Pain that shifted from his back to his leg to his shoulder and back around. There was pain in his pelvic floor too. I’m sure that’s where the sex with other people came into play. He needed to cure that pain too — and of course I was the cause of that particular ache. Oh, no he’s not an addict. No one can be addicted to marijuana. He hurts. Oh no, he isn’t paranoid — his delusions are real. I’m sure he has you believing it all too. Every feeling he has is a fact. When our nine-year-old daughter found a Tinder app on his phone that wasn’t what it seemed to be either. Just a harmless app he found to get himself some friends because he was so lonely being married to me. It was an app for friendship, that’s all. And the pictures of the woman in a negligee on his computer were his assistant’s photos back when he had a job and he let him use his laptop. He had no idea what I was even talking about…and I chose to believe that for a long time because my kids were young and I had no where else to go. He had isolated us in a city where we had no other family a long, long time ago.

While he was picking fights with me so he could have an excuse to leave for days to stay with you, I was suffering. He would chase me around the house calling me a cunt and a cheater and a liar without so much as “a look” his way. One day he grabbed my phone out of my hand and hit me with it “on accident” because I chased him to grab it back. He hit me so hard in the temple it gave me a black eye. I had to go to work and I told everyone that I ran into a tree branch while mowing the lawn. One person asked me why I had to mow the lawn in the first place…didn’t even dawn on me that someone else in the house might mow besides me. He grabbed my phone and created more problems and more chaos so he could go see you, and then I mowed the fucking lawn. Now THAT’S love.

The drop of water that spilled the bucket for me happened when our son was nearly killed in a car accident and I couldn’t reach “your man” for twelve hours. I assume he was with you. I found the receipt from one of your Sundays watching football. A $50 party platter that he bought in a town an hour away from me. I also found the receipt for the sex toys that he said were for me, but had misplaced somewhere along the way. He was with you every weekend and most of the week by that time. Our son was in the hospital awaiting surgery asking for his dad all night long. “Is he on his way? Did you tell him what happened?” The next day he showed up at home and our daughter had to tell him we were at the hospital. He hadn’t checked his texts, his email, or his voicemail at all. When he came strolling into the hospital room our son was being wheeled into surgery. I hated myself so much in that moment. But I hated your dude even more. It was in that moment that he became yours forever.

I made my mind up that day. Told myself it would only be another year until our beautiful daughter would go off to college and I could offload him onto you. I let him continue to think he had the upper hand and that he was somehow in control. It was the only way I could survive this time and get my mind and my assets together. I put a lock on one of the bedroom doors and hid away. He hated that I had made a place for myself, in my home, to hide from him — my panic room.

He told me I couldn’t stay at his parents home for Thanksgiving so I stayed at a hotel and enjoyed the holiday at my sister’s house, while he took our kids and stayed with his family. It was the best Thanksgiving I’ve had in years.

My mom had open heart surgery the week before Christmas so I had the best excuse in the world not to be with him. The love of your life…your “man”…got mad at me for “changing plans” when my mom almost slipped away from sepsis the day after Christmas and had to be airlifted back to the hospital she had surgery at four hours away. He genuinely didn’t care if she was alive or dead. That was classic.

While I was still away with my mom, your man was with you. He left our daughter at home with a temperature of 102 and Achille’s tendons that were so tight from the flu that she couldn’t drive a car to get herself medicine at the store. She called me in tears. She told me he had just left — to see you of course. I was still taking care of my mom and couldn’t be in two places at once no matter how hard I tried. I called him and told him to turn his ass around and take care of his daughter. He got angry with her for not telling him how sick she was and asking him to stay herself. I told him he had trained her not to need him or ask for his help. She had to call me four states away for help. He could resume his rendezvous with you when I returned from caring for my mom. For the first time in a long time he actually did the right thing.

When I arrived back at home, exhausted from being nurse to my mom for weeks, I was home alone taking care of our sick kid all day. He was with you. And I told him he could stay with you. The thought of him coming back to my house made me sick after three weeks of not having to be around him. I texted him asking…no, telling him…I needed a divorce. I tried so hard, but I couldn’t wait it out for another year — or another minute.

I went through your man’s stuff that night. Something I never, ever did for fear of what I might find — and I found your name on a boarding pass, folded with a matching one in his name. You sat side by side in seats made just for you. The clandestine international “work trip” he took in early November with you. I also found out where you live, and that your birthday is one day before mine and that you’re six years younger than me. I hope you had fun. We never went on a trip together. Now that’s REAL love…

Then COVID-19 hit. I think the universe spared me the misery of yet another year in a home of abuse and sadness at your hands. For many, Covid has been a nightmare. For us, it’s been a quiet time for home and family, without the fear of his presence and his pain in our lives. And for the record, my house is much nicer than where the two of you are living now. Thankfully, I got to keep the home I bought in the divorce — but had to give up my 401k because he had nothing to leave me except debt, and a dearth of humanity.

The divorce was final in early July. I saw him last week for the first time in four months and he had lost at least thirty pounds and looked about ten years older. I have to admit that I felt some concern for the man who will never be happy. I am guessing by the way that he looks, that he’s not very happy with you anymore either. I can hear him blaming you for luring him away from his children who are having a hard time relating to his decision to abandon us, first emotionally, then physically, to spend the rest of his days with you.

The two of you broke up within a year, after a five year affair. I guess the fantasy was better than the reality.

And there was a light at the end of the tunnel for me. That light was you.