The heartlessness of your treachery and what you and Robert did two Wednesdays ago hurt and made me very angry. It’s not as much what I asked you, but what I pleaded with you not to do. Something that really was nothing to you but a massive thing to me.
You responded with a calculated lack of consideration which I would have spared you if our roles were reversed.Your conduct stunned me.
More specifically, it showed me that though I stupidly still deeply love and care for you, I must stop kidding myself that underneath the deceipt there is any good in you.
I thought I knew you. Of everyone ever in your life, I have (as such) spent the most time with you ( adult time, fully-developed person time) and been closest to you longer than anyone else in your life, including Angela and your mother and father.
That you so cynically masked the real you all that time, is testament to a nauseating acting talent. Yes , I feel truly sick when I think back on the charade you have dragged me through for 14 years (and Angela for 8 of them)
I now face the truth, the things about you which have long been plain for all but me to see. A truth I hate admitting because it makes such a mockery of the years we spent close together as man and wife.
But whatever the future holds for the two of us, it is time to say what I think.This began as a single pager, but grew as my anger distilled. Nor did I need draw on the legion of unsent drafts I've clattered out as I’ve discovered your new lies, but never mailed. This is not a rant.
This is how I feel now.
And if God is any judge, it is the absolute truth, inescapable truth, that will still be truth, after we are both dead, and still true forever after that. Read it, discard it as you will. I’ll keep a copy.
You are a congenital liar and fundamentally dishonest. You are disloyal, unfaithful and untruthful in every fibre. A devious cheat with no honour, who is calculating, manipulative and pitifully transparent. You would not know truth if it was a dagger that jumped up and stabbed you in both eyes.
You lie inherently, are innately secretive yet have no morals. And are so pathologically self-indulgent, you cannot see past your own wants. You are a coward, without the decency, any decency, or the courage to admit the lies which have been scheming away in your heart for years.
Shame on you.
Worse than everything (and that takes some doing for the totally shallow) you have so selfishly put Angela and I in a catastrophic mental and emotional situation. An act which WILL unbalance her emotionally her whole life and has broken me.
How can you be so unspeakably stupid? How could anyone in our family situation act so? Are you mad ?
You are not a good mum. You are a mercenary, self-centred mum who in every way thinks of herself first and last. Always has . Then guilt makes you over-compensate until your grumbles erupt and you lash out at those around you. Your pronouncement that you ‘only want to be a mum to Angela’ is true only as far as it suits you and what you want to do at a particular moment. And until the real you asserts its wants again and takes over. So your sentiment is just another lie only you believe. You never lost the plot as a mother. You never had it.
You are not at peace with yourself. Are not at rest with yourself. Cannot rest in yourself. Can't be at home with yourself. What troubles you is inside. You’ve never known when enough is enough (of anything). Just one of the unhappy habits I compensated for in our family, along with deflecting your anger, your intolerance and intemperance with anyone around you. Including the one you ‘only want to be a good mum to’. Another important role I played in our home was deciphering your moods and diffusing the ill-temper and disharmony you regularly scattered in your wake. Had I known what really was in your heart I might have been rid of you long ago.
You always have to be chasing something , anything to be occupied, anything to distract, anything that might still whatever it is inside that makes you deeply unhappy and restless. You have been following your own mink coat of deceipt along some slimy road since long before we met. I wonder how long you’ll be able to keep the moths of disillusionment from chewing holes in this one?
You despise your own mother but are her daughter to the core, making ironic the despicable, scheming ways in which you have so gliby schooled your own daughter.
I've been wrong about loving you, trusting you, defending you, being protective of you for near on 14 years.
In a word, you are unworthy. Unworthy of my love and care, which you secretly derided, unworthy of Angela, unworthy of all those who for all those years thought you loved them back.
Regarding Angela, your short-sighted act is so stupid, that if one were to script the very most stupid thing that anyone, anywhere, anytime could do to our family, what you’ve done is exactly that. So shattering another illusion for me, because I’ve always believed you to be so clever. Thoroughly clever is more true. And I have always respected your mind and your opinions, and expressed it. Often to wide-eyed amazement of friends and colleagues.
Did not you feel my love and my respect?
And how anyone (with any motive ?) could do something so patently unintelligent is staggering. And then have the shameless gall to defend it ?
The other incredible thing is that you have never once yet actually admitted anything to me. Not even now.You continue rolling out lies in the same instinctive way you’ve been doing for a decade and a half ? I’m the first to admit I am not ‘pencil-box sharp’, but just how dumb do you think I am ? When you are trying to tee up yet another bullshit decoy event or commitment , your fabrications are so transparent, that if my little heart was not breaking, I’d laugh.
Everything that is now out in the public domain has only come out because I discovered it. Not to this moment, and not once have you ever had yet the decency or the courage to volunteer to tell the fucking truth!
Your response: continue to deny and deny and deny until all the bits are peeled away and finally there you stand alone and unmasked among your revolting falsehoods.
Then you try defend and justify what you’ve done as somehow being ‘right under the circumstances’, how ‘unhappy you’ve been for so long’ etc etc etc. What a thorough-going liar you turned out to be.
But you did not have to be smart to see the obvious consequences on Angela .You have no possible excuse for that . All the while, shameless and undaunted, you try shore the new ‘reality’ you are constructing by fabricating bullshit lies about our marriage.
And as we find out now, for certainly 5 years , you have been telling everyone else about your sad and unhappy life excepting your husband .
Nor , curiously, did you ever tell anyone who might conceivably have mentioned it to your husband ? The one person on earth with the first right to know about everything you were contemplating. Why didn’t you come clean?
Shame, shame, shame on you.
So, after having launched us (Angela will bear the final cost and no mistake) at this catastrophe, you then display even less intelligence by trying to justify it ? Instead of admitting your stupidity and acting to try and halt the damage at that point…while some limitation is still possible.
But yet again you deny, you lie about Robert, and say you are not committed. Does he know you told me you had made no commitment to him? Of course not. You just lie on cue.
Did you tell him you have absolutely ‘no plans to be committed to him?’ Yeah right liar. Does he know when you came back from your last ‘secret getaway’ with him over 8 years ago, you dismissed him as hopeless nothing, a mistake, a selfish someone constantly seeking self-gratification who would die young? At least that’s what you told me. I believed you and look where it has placed me today.
No, I’ll bet he doesn’t, and yet still today you are promising him one thing, telling everyone another, the version that suits what you need them to think, and in the same breath denying reality. Behaviour pattern sound familiar?
You have put yourself first and are now resolutely engineering Angela into the new reality you pursue for you. Bringing her into your deceipt, your lies, your unfaithfulness and calculatedly co-ercing her into participating in it is unforgiveable.
As was using Robert’s neice as a stage prop. You made Angela lie and conceal and withold. The Christmas and other present things really were sick. Very dim. Shame on you both forever.
You involved your mother in your deception, who at sixty years old, at last, still could not tell right from wrong!
Then she actually endorsed your despicable behaviour by colluding in your lengthy conspiracy of lies and pretence.
She knew everything you were doing was wrong, knew about it for a long time and knew that Angela was being told ‘not to talk’ yet still did not have the moral fibre to force you to do the right thing and (at least) tell me. Something she could so easily have done by warning you that if you didn’t talk to me she would.
Shame on her forever too.
Your investment in lies comes with an (awful) dividend you will collect later. Your singular lack of shame bodes ill for Angela who at this young age has been thoroughly grounded in dishonesty. She’ll find these skills useful in her married life. They are after all what has fucked up your mother’s relationships and fucked up this one. And even more impressively, the way a real expert brasses it all out afterwards.Well done again. And tutored in a living example of her mother being unfaithful to her father while she was co-erced over a protracted period into ‘not telling’ the dad she is close to. But a little inconvenience you are working hard at changing.
Your mother made and still makes her choices for herself first. As do you today and as has always been her right. Then spent 30 years justifying them. You have always rubbished her mercilessly, so I'm sorry to tell you, what you’ve done is lower than anything she ever did.
You have provided our child with a close-up, daily,
weekly , monthly role model of deceipt and marital infidelity which you should be shot for. She was innocent until then. And untouched.
Nice one Katherine.
And in whose interest was this ? Hers?
Critically,you have shattered this young child’s perceptions of honesty and integrity in a relationship by your and Robert’s totally unacceptable conduct. Something which will distort the faith and trust she takes into all her adult relationships. They live what they learn. In denying this you are more deluded than usual/
I love Angela in the most special way and am dying without her in my life. She loves me too and it is not an average separation. Are you starting to get a sense of why I'm angry ?
Separation and acrimonious family breakup is bad enough for Angela without condemning her to a gauranteed lifetime of turmoil. Please don’t talk shit to me about ‘kids cope surprisingly well’ or ‘she just wants to get on with it’ That is just your wishful self-talk to gloss over the reality.
But you never can be trusted. Not by her. Not by me. Not by Robert (he will learn). Nor by anyone else. ‘Untrustworthy’ does not relate to an isolated act ( which might be buried) but to the greater state of a person’s being. You are untrustworthy to your soul.
Neither Angela nor I chose to bring Robert into our family circle.
We were not asked. I choose no. You chose for her.
Then began a very deliberate campaign to insinuate him into her life. The secret holiday to Asia about which you lied and made her lie about was an example of incredibly dumb, insensitive non-thinking. You hid it because you knew it was wrong. Knew Angela should not be taken out of school for a week with bullshit excuses so you could shag your boyfriend in front of her. But you had already agreed to go way before— more proof you had already made serious commitments to Robert that you lied did not exist when I found you out.
When were you going to tell me? About the fact someone else had been in the bed we were still sharing ? In my house ? In front of my 8 year-old
daughter who her own mother had bullied into keeping quiet? If I had not found out for myself ? Angela knew I didn’t know!
And your mother knew it too.
Shame on all three of you liars.
Did Robert know Angela’s father (me, this one, this fool here)
had not been told that his wife and daughter were going out of the country with another man of whose presence he was still unaware?
And that the two of you were going to sleep in the room in the same bed in front of her ?
Did Robert know you actually denied you’d be staying in the same room even after I found the booking forms?
He knew Angela was concealing his presence in her life from me, and had been doing for a long time , but did he know you’d still not told me about it and were making Angela lie about the holiday to me?
Shame on you both.
I’ll bet you were lying to him too and I'm not surprised you were tired of all the lies. They were all yours. They lasted for years. The sad bit for you (and Angela) is that you’ll never stop lying because you are a liar.
Angela and I did not seek this situation, you engineered it. Looking back over the years now, and all the bullshit running around you were doing and lying through your teeth about, is it any wonder nothing we did (in our marriage) could ever work ? I was trying, I’d made a covenant with myself to make it work and was prepared to push everything else and everyone aside to do so, but I was the only one. What did I know?
My family and friends (who I pushed into third place) uncompromisingly welcomed, embraced and accepted you. Cast your mind back to Angela’s birth and the first six years of her life. You pissed on that trust too. Shame on you.
I was bending and buckling and compromising and compensating to keep our homelife harmonious. While you were for years trying to disintegrate our family. But you tarried until it suited you and you could try make it look like the break-up was for other reasons. Not for the real reasons which you had already committed to in word and unfaithful deed. Most definitely you never shared with me, never shared your terminal unhappiness with the partner who had been with you through so much, and as events have proved (that is visible now) the person most affected. You OK there Jack?
In fact, you have been unfaithful our whole relationship. Considering how you (being in my life) negatively affected that life, what this show of abject disloyalty says about your personal integrity is shocking.
How absolutely disgraceful is that ?
Then you put a spin on it all and peddle some ‘version’ to people ?
Not the same version to each though.
But not once have you had the courage or the respect to stand before your faithful and loyal husband of 14 years and tell him to his face you wanted out?
How contemptous is that? Calling you disrespectful is an insult to disrespectful people. You now continue to show this disrespect by declining to give me an answer to a simple question I have been asking you for weeks. Do you think you have that right? What gives it to you? Are you going to teach our daughter the new standard of “fuck you” manners you have now acquired? Or always had and now let slip?
And now your relationship (and its implication for Angela ) has slithered into view, the sheer audacity of you shrugging it off with a : ‘Well it’s done and there’s nothing I can do about it’ or ‘Robert and I are a couple and you’d better get used to it’ is astounding in its arrogance.
Shame on you both.
And your mother’s: ‘ Well it’s all out in the open now, so it’s OK now and for Angela’s sake everyone needs to be adult about it’ is bewildering in its base lack of any moral condition.
It’s as if I fell in love with your father’s daughter but now find I married your mother’s daughter.
Nothing you have spouted will ever make what you’ve done right.
It isn't. Wasn’t . Can never be. Nor will you piling more lies on top of lies ever change the truth. I know that won't stop you trying.
[Incidentally, I've since looked at philosophy’s take on lies, trying to understand why it is you persist in doing it and why you always choose to lie and lie even when a truth stands ready, available for you to use. Curiously they say that it is inherent ( in the majority of human nature ) that fundamentally honest people always to incline to reveal secrets rather than keep them. It is only a small minority and the habitual liars that always choose to lie, or to exaggerate themselves, and their acheivements to try find some self-esteem. I figured you always choose to lie to me because of the guilt you harbour, but there are many times you just lie to me because its deep in your nature to secret things away. Think about it. Does this behaviour pattern remind you of anyone?] Your guilt makes you lie and because you are guilty to the roots of your hair you will always lie. Good pretence about the polo by the way.What an adaptive piece of work you turned out to be.
You are such a liar and such a discredit to those who have loved you. But especially to your husband. Do you seriously think what you have done to me and Angela (and more how heartlessly you have done it), could ever be OK for me?
You have no concept of what your actions have meant to my life. Because you have shut your heart and your eyes you will never feel the grief you have brought my world. Because you are so intensely selfish and obssessed with getting what you want , you are incapable of knowing the upheaval you have wrought. If the damage could be measured in financial terms you’d never stop paying . How could you?
From so long ago, your interminable dishonesty, lies and faithlessness have hurt so badly. This last betrayal cut beyond words. The best (but inadequate) description I can manage is: ‘a dark pool of depression and sadness in which I’ve drowned. While you shamelessly swan around ( I was the devoted half of that pair… ‘life-long’ mate ! ) tossing me crumbs of fading love from Angela.’
You lied and misrepresented our return to our homeland. Us being up here was as deft a piece of cunning as any husband ever saw. You set it all up so sweetly. I liked the place on cue and said so. You two must have laughed yourselves sick. What a thoroughly devious pair you are. And what scheming and cheating was already in play the year before ? When we travelled here together as a family?
Did your mother already know at that time you and Robert had been in touch for years? How did you live with your betrayal and with me all those years? What did you do when you came here ? Get smoked up and forget what you were doing ? Do none of the friends you use for alibis love you enough to tell you the truth? That doing the right thing was the only thing? Or at worst you could have been honest afterwards. And I wondered why you were behaving so oddly when I collected you and Angela from the airport? Others wondered why you lost so much weight before you left. I didn’t. I trusted you implicitly and you pissed on it. One despicable pretence from end to end, just like you. How could you do it?
Getting me out of our family home was as deft a piece of womanly engineering as any husband ever saw. I still do not know how you did it. And that magnificent show of heartbreak for Angela on the day? What a piece of work.You and Robert must have been laughing like drains. All your Chritmases come at once?
How is it that you sunk so low after my 14 years of absolute openess about money and standing bare financially before you— that you could actually stomach yourself? And LIE TO ME about money you were hiding away from me? Everything I had was always yours. You knew it and to the end you still lied about our money and tried to withhold knowledge of it from me! And you the spendthrift you’ve always been ? See a pattern here?
I wish you and whatever (if any) new child you ever bear, get to experience some version of the subtle cruelty you visited on my son Mark, your stepson and the pain I might have at least saved him if you weren't the abominable pretender you are. You rant about your step Mum? Compared to you she is a babe in the woods.
I have already told you for all reasons, I can never accept Robert. (You have earned the opposite.) That you expect me to, is another astonishingly unintelligent misjudgement. I must accept you are contemptous of me and what I represent, (which makes the depth and length of your pretence all the more abhorrent), but ponder as I might in Angela’s name, I cannot fathom how you could be so clearly unthinking and selfish as to actually seek him out? With no reference to me? You have to be fucking mad. There is no other explanation.
You and Robert deserve each other, but Angela deserves neither of you. Nor do I. Neither do I deserve the hurt you’ve inflicted or the irreplaceable years you have stolen with your disgusting charade. I gave, I gave, I gave and you took. Some say they could see this but I could not. I trusted and admired you. My love has been pure and patient and I am sorry I ever met you and wish I could hate you. Keep going as you are and I suppose hate will come, but in my case I believe you know it will be incapable of appeasement.
You’ve no senses left to come to, but pathetically, I still hope I’m wrong about you. And wonder how anyone I’ve loved so well and so long and who pretended so to love me back, could be so rotten to the core?
There are 3 ultimate (these already irrevocable, I'm afraid) ironies. Though I've no doubt the pair of you are still hiding more uglies somewhere and will reveal them when you feel you have sufficiently diminished her ‘need’ for me:
1. If you unexpectedly die anytime in the next 65 months you have put Angela into the centre of a conflict between Robert and I.
2. If you split up with (or antagonise) Robert anytime in the next 13 years, you’ve set our child up for a 3-way conflict.
3. If both you and I were to die anytime soon, our child is off to G-Town for her upbringing.
Well done, you.
You say you shouldn’t have married me. Right. Why did you not say what was in your grubby heart? There were so many opportunities, so many crossroads, where we stood together, where you could have said something. Pretending to people now that you EVER DID is just another of your lies. You had so many points at which you could have revealed what you chose to keep hidden in your heart. (Hidden from me that is. You seem to have told a lot of other people, never me. )
Points at which I made life-defining, destiny deciding decisions wrapped around you. Things you let me do over 14 years while you deliberately and calculatingly lied and hid the betrayal you were acting out. You never did love me and looking back on your total fraud, and the cost of my precious years (they are more costly than yours because of my age) lost to your pretence, is as hard for me to swallow as it must have been tiresome for you to give us all the performance.
Perfidious? Shallow? Can you see why I’m angry yet? Am I ‘over-reacting’? Your feigned bemusement at my ‘unreasonable’ reaction to all this is as hollow as you are. I am where I am because of you and all this wreckage you have created—there is no other reason and you so know that too. And if you pretend you can't already see the changes this has so far wrought in Angela , more fool you.
It is clear you are a thoroughly unworthy human, and now clear you would have engineered a replacement source of ‘corporate funding’ sooner or later. I was warned, but was as blinded by love as I have ever been. Knowing what I know now I wish it could have been sooner. If it wasn’t for Angela it wouldn’t matter too much either.
Your relationship with Robert unbalances my status with her, prejudices me and puts me at a massive disadvantage which you both know damn fine! The platitudes mouthed about ‘keeping me in her life’ have been made from the smug position you believe you have contrived, and would not have been made if you seriously thought you might be called upon to deliver on them.
Not that anyone can take your word for anything anyway , given your startling record of dishonesty. I pray though all other reason has clearly deserted you, you are not so imbecelic as to seriously think throwing a pregnancy into this mess will actually ‘be good for Angela’.
Having said that, you have been so obviously and calculatedly pursuing a course of action to exclude me (and substitute Robert) to diminish my importance in Angela’s life. Trying to disengage me wherever possible and employing every means possible to fast-track Robert into her life. Please don’t deny it. The puppy thing was straight out of Eastenders. I shudder to think of the two of you stage-managing and manipulating her perceptions until she thinks the way you want her to, to fit your plan.
No-one will argue your right to happiness, but you have to do it right, not fuck everyone’s lives up then blag your way out like a common tart caught giving the postman a blowjob. Everyone expected better of you whether they nod as you sell them your story or not. I respected you more so expected more of you. I'm sure Angela does too. Do you feel no shame?
Where is it written that I , who have been in her life for her whole life must now, because you’ve decided you are fucking someone else, be out of her life except at your whim? been central to her life, how does that translate to the scraps? For years I have been worrying myself SICK about US! While you have been worrying about you, and you getting what you want. Shame on you.
The last 10 weeks or so, I've spent a lot of time trying to deny what you are. Trying to deny what you are doing. Trying to make excuses for you. Although obviously , your mother’s influence on you as a child was devastating. Not in leaving home per se, but what you must have learnt from the experience. You suffered truth deprivation maybe? What else could explain the sweet, vulnerable girl I’ve loved so sore, behaving with such amoral, self-interested dishonesty? I look at her and I see you, I listen to her, I hear you.
But the final explanation is the one I hate most, though the one I have come to. [When reason eliminates all the possibles, one is compelled to accept the impossible. And when should one stop blaming someone else and look at you?]
The fact and the evidence is that you are inherently deceitful.
Reality is, that somehow, wiles, wilfulness and wickedness all combined in you to produce the perfect deceipt machine. A female device to produce mistruth in so polished a format. Poor you. And whose lies have resulted in so much wrong and hurt and pain. How cruel. How unkind. What a truly horrible, dishonourable thing to do.
I keep longing for a knock on the door , to see you there, with Angela, to tell me this is all just a long, terrible, nightmare. I can get over death easier than this. I miss you both so much in my everyday life. I miss talking to you as we always did and so often.Did I just imagine all that closeness all those years? When all the time you were guiltily cheating in your lying heart and physically every chance you got?
Shame on you.
I don’t know how much of you is due to the trauma of your mother’s separation. I’m praying for our own daughter’s future character’s sake that that trauma did not contribute too much to your compulsion for lying.
Whatever the cause of your own illness is , you are a liar and will never be forgiven for teaching your own 8 year-old to lie. Let alone expose her to your own example of how people of integrity behave. Now she has to carry it with her for the rest of her life. The same as you (thirty-nine years on) wear the hangover of your mother’s own shame— whether you admit to it or not.You have no excuse today, nor can you ever have. Although if you take care of yourself you’ve got another 40 years or so to make one up . But just know this is the truth and time (not even 3 x 40 years ) will ever change it.
Katherine — nobody with an iota of intelligence can ever argue that what you’ve done is in anyone’s interest except YOURS. It is actively harmful to Angela, but you do still have time to act .
This catastrophe is about you and you can still alter its course. Despite the knowledge I am certain you’ve already made a massive commitment on every level despite your trademark lies protesting exactly the opposite.
If only you could just be honest with yourself. And do think about Angela. Just once.
I have begged you once on my knees and I beg you now.
If you persist with your course of action you are going to turn her world (already broken) more upside down, shatter it, tear it apart and hurt her little heart and mind so much! Please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, don’t!
If you cannot see this or think whatever you have promised Robert is worth how you are going to hurt her then you are in criminal denial. And deliberately going ahead and doing it anyway will be a crime against her!
Please don’t!
Katherine, there is still this one pain you can save our daughter during her childhood. Think of her.
Some wife. Some husband. Some fool.