In the eight months since D-Day, I have dived deep into affair recovery materials. Books, YouTube videos, Reddit, and other affair support websites. I spent eight to ten hours a day immersed in it. As my mind sometimes does, one day I idly reviewed my family's history through the lens of this new information, and it set off a nuclear bomb in my head.
For whatever reason, blind trust in adults, my autism, who knows, I believed them when they told me that my father was a philanderer and was kicked out of the family, that my mother was an innocent victim of his infidelity, that when my drunk father phoned the house that day 50 years ago and thought I was my older brother and said I was no son of his after identifying myself, I dismissed his ravings as drunk words rather than truth. I had learned to gaslight myself. I was naive and believed all of that bullshit well into late adulthood, as in until a little over a month ago, but there were problems with the narrative.
When he left, my mother scrambled to get his next paycheck before he did. Somehow, she managed to get it. She took me with her (I was six years old) to pick up his check and to cash it at the bank. She didn't even know how to drive a car, but managed to do it that day without incident. Mom had to scramble to get a license to drive. She scrambled to find a job. We had to sell our house because we had no money for the mortgage. I was to believe that, with no plan at all, my mother kicked him out of the house without a fight and put the entire family in danger of homelessness. That seemed odd to me.
He moved to an apartment about three miles from where we lived and had almost no contact with me until the drunk phone call when I was about 15. There were three instances of contact with him after he moved out. The first was when the younger of my two older brothers and I visited him on a Saturday. He got drunk and verbally abusive toward me, but not my brother, and with no provocation. We left and walked home at that point. The next was a fishing trip he wanted to take my brother on. My mom insisted I go along as well. My father was verbally abusive toward me the whole day. After that there were no more visits and no more contact until his drunk phone call.
I wondered why my oldest brother was not named after our father, but his next son was, and I reasoned that if he knew she was sleeping with other men, he wouldn't want to give his name to her "love child". I know I wouldn't. That was in 1951. In 1958, she got pregnant with me, and all seemed normal for a few years. I have a picture taken in 1961 of him holding me and smiling at me while on a family vacation, clearly unaware that I wasn't his. That all changed by 1965, a year after buying a new house in a new neighborhood. By then I was no son of his, either because he found evidence of it or because she confessed. I will never know, as everyone who could confirm any of this is either dead, or because we no longer have a relationship.
My relationship with my mother was always strained. She didn't show me affection. When she said "I love you" to me, it always felt forced. She lived the rest of her life in unexplained shame. She never felt like she deserved happiness or success. Mom ran her own business and never celebrated that as a success, but rather treated it like penance. The rest of the family cut me out of their lives one by one, quietly ghosting me after I became an adult. I had to chase my relationships with them with no reciprocation on their end, until I had had enough of the one-sided nature of those relationships. Letters that were never answered. Emails that were ignored. Not being told when siblings flew into town for family visits. Being asked for my phone number repeatedly when it hadn't changed, and never receiving any phone calls from them anyway.
The identity I carried my whole life was a fabrication. I wasn't who I thought I was, and this is added to the false image I had of the woman who cheated on me, who I called my wife. My marriage is a sham, as is my life as a whole. I'm tired. I've been trying to hold the debris of my marriage together. It looks more and more like it will fail, as she has little interest in working on anything other than her job.
Before her affair(s), I carried a lot of resentment and anger over the trajectory of my life and the relationships that turned out to be fictitious. Strangely, when I looked at all of it from this new perspective, my rage and anger disappeared. I'm alone in all of this, and it sucks, but at least I feel like now I have something real to hold on to.
