The Day I Checked My Husband’s Phone

It was the best and worst day of my life.

My ex-husband is my ex-husband for many reasons. He’s cheated on me multiple times (too many to count), he wasn’t kind to our children, he wasn’t kind to me, he spent more time working on his physical appearance and chasing women than he did on our family and marriage… the list goes on.

For some reason, I stayed. As it was all happening I rationalized that I was staying for the children but now that on the other side of our divorce I recognize that I stayed out of fear. Fear of being on my own, fear of being single, fear of my ability to survive without a man in my life, fear of failure. I was so afraid of what the word “divorce” represented to me that I put up with and exposed my children to behaviors and arguments that bordered on abuse. They saw him throw a television (not a small one) at me, pin me up against a wall, shove me, call me names, degrade me, threaten my life… all for what? So that I could say that I was “Mrs. Somebody” and have the “security” of a man in my house?

One day we were arguing about his latest extramarital pursuit (a married mother of a teammate on my son’s baseball team that my husband and I managed together). Earlier that morning I had read the texts between the two on his phone and was so shocked at the betrayal from both of them that I had to hide in the bathroom for twenty minutes to gain my composure. My hands were shaking, I was muffling the sound of my crying with toilet paper so the kids wouldn’t hear, my heart was flipping inside my chest. I couldn’t process the brazen attitude the texts conveyed about what they were doing. They both felt entitled to the affair because they weren’t happy in their marriages, like unhappiness was some kind of “Get Out of Your Marital Vows Free Card” in a real-life version of Monopoly.

I went outside to where my husband was with the intention of confronting him. I must have looked like a crazy woman; swollen eyes, wet face, nose running down my chin, hair disheveled from pulling it while I was losing my mind in the bathroom.

When I got to him I didn’t see concern in his eyes, I saw annoyance. He turned and went about the business of gathering wood and with as much emotion as one would use to order a sandwich said, “What?”

“What?” I shoved his phone under his face and repeated louder, “What?!”

Cool as a cucumber he took the phone from me and said, “If you don’t like what you see on my phone then don’t read it.”

When I didn’t immediately respond (only because I was so shocked that this was the direction things were going – NOT, as he assumed, that his response had taken the wind out of my sails) he took the opportunity to “set me straight.”

“You have no business reading my private texts. Who the **ck do you think you are?”

More silence from me. The shock was starting to make me see stars. I could feel the blood in my face moving under my skin and my hands started shaking again. I didn’t know what to say at this point because I knew that no matter what I said it didn’t really matter. He was beyond caring. He was hurting me and he didn’t care. He almost enjoyed it. I saw it in his eyes.

“She’s not even pretty! Her nose is huge and she looks like a man!” was the best I could come back with.

He slowly turned back around to face me and he looked me up and down and calmly and slowly said, “Who the hell are you to talk, Fat Ass?”

Fat Ass. That’s what he called me that day. A precision shot at my life long struggle with my weight. The one thing that I was most sensitive about and after 20 years together, he knew it. He knew it even more after he saw my reaction to being called “Fat Ass.” It was like a cartoon character when you see the tears, white and wavy, stream down their face. That’s how sudden and hard the tears came.

He didn’t flinch. He didn’t reach out to comfort me or to say he was sorry for taking things too far. He didn’t do anything except turn back to his woodpile and continue stacking.

Something inside me changed that day. I gained laser-sharp clarity of how far gone our marriage truly was. It was like my mind had processed our relationship through one of those instruments at the eye doctors where they keep flipping the lens and asking “Better or worse?” The lens flipped for me that day and I saw things so much clearer. The ‘better or worse lens’ eclipsed my ‘for better or worse vows’. It brought a new kind of pain…the pain that comes with knowing for certain that you have to end your marriage.

It would be many months later that I actually filed but file I did. I’m proud that I never stopped fighting for my marriage and family until the day I signed the divorce decree. He, however, officially checked out the day he was served. He said to me, “Now I don’t have to hide it” and proceeded to aggressively pursue any woman in our town (and a few surrounding ones) that would give him the time of day. My only consolation (if it can be called consolation) is that he cheats on his current girlfriend too. Somehow that makes me feel better.

He still hasn’t stopped calling me “Fat Ass” but I’m immune to it now. In an odd way it strengthens me. It reminds me of his character and how lucky I am to have gotten myself and especially my children out of his daily ugliness.

There are still some days when I wake up in the morning and forget that I’m not married to him. I panic. I know whatever time it is I shouldn’t be in bed. I jump out of bed to start whatever tasks my mind thinks I should be doing; making his lunch, warming up his clothes in the dryer, starting his truck so he has a warm place to make the trek to work. Then I remember: he’s not my problem anymore. I crawl back into the warm covers and rest my head on the pillow and thank God for that day by the woodpile.