My ex-wife left me for my best friend, and when I confronted her, he put his hands on me as if I was the one who had done something wrong. I am forty-seven now. She is forty-eight.
She left a year and a half ago for a man who had been married to her high school best friend. Some friend she turned out to be. We had been married for twenty years, and for all of that time I believed we had two children together.
Then I found out that my six-year-old daughter is not biologically mine. She is his. My ex knew it from the first day she learned she was pregnant, and she kept it from me.
My name is still on the birth certificate, and I intend to fight for custody because that document matters. Blood or not, that little girl has been my daughter from the moment I held her. The certificate may say what the law needs it to say, but my heart has known the truth of being her father for six years.
Clearly, the affair had been going on for a long time. Finding out felt like getting kicked in the teeth. When I asked my wife whether it was him or me, she said it was him.
Her reason was shallow and humiliating. She said he could keep up with her physically in a way I could not. That was it.
Intimacy. Nothing about the years I worked two jobs to put her through school. Nothing about the way I kept working so she could stay home and raise our kids while she betrayed me behind my back.
I gave up chasing my dreams. I gave up music, a career I loved, and any future that might have come with it so she could pursue hers and so we could build a family. She and the kids were the number one thing in my life.
I bent myself around them until I hardly recognized the man I used to be. My ex has always been a cold woman. She had been diagnosed with a mood disorder, and life with her was not easy.
Her outbursts and the emotional damage they caused were crushing, but I endured it because I thought she could not help it. It turns out that was not entirely true. She admitted to friends that sometimes she lashed out at me simply because she felt like it or because she was not getting her way.
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