Down and Across the Aisle

My curious and meticulous nature lends itself well to my career. In a nutshell, I find information for people. Personally, I hate to be at sea on any particular topic. If I lack understanding of something, I will scour all the available literature on the subject to bring myself up to speed. I’m a professional.

Often, the particular subject is me. I’ve found a fair bit of comfort the past couple years reading the trials and solutions of others who have experienced a similar upheaval as I. Alas, my situation doesn’t lend itself well to wide-spread examination.

When it became clear my marriage was ending, I became a regular self help bookworm. Books on why, books on what to do now, books on rehab-ing my inner self. Some resonated. Others were useless. And the exact nature of my situation—wife cheats, leaves, moves in with guy she cheated with—was never explored in any depth. Sure, there were tomes about overcoming infidelity, but those assumed that we were working it out. Yes, I found chapters dealing with an ex’s new boyfriend, but those usually angled toward some space between divorce and resumption of dating. I found dozens of books about how to behave with, and around the children, but not a single one offered advice on how to deal with what I keenly felt to be an interloper in my son’s life, someone who was the catalyst for the destruction of my family, who now spent as much time with AJ as I, and more than he spent with his own kids.

All these books preached detente, everybody coming together for the good of the boy, kumbaya, happy crappy b.s., ideas that I couldn’t entertain because of my, it must be said, intense hatred for this other man and how he robbed me of my life, my wife and, I naturally figured, was gunning to take my son, too.

That was emotion. The pain of the breakup; the absolute unfairness of it all. I was aware enough to shield my hurt, my anger, from AJ. I never brought him into that, never once bad-mouthed his mother or the boyfriend.

There were times when I literally bit my tongue bloody. But I knew it was right.

What was not right, according to everything I read, according to our divorce mediator, was the two of them cohabitating in such quick order, as well as some other behavior that can only be described as disgraceful (a point on which my ex would now agree). Purposefully or not, their actions marginalized my role as AJ’s father, and I felt that acutely. In my mind, it was not a short walk from infidelity to excising me from AJ’s life entirely. If she could commit the first, there was nothing stopping her from the latter. So I became hawkish, meticulously (there’s that word again) searching for missteps in her behavior and I found plenty, real and perceived. This blocked my ability to deal with everything, extended the time I needed to come to grips with this other adult male figure in my son’s life.