How to Survive Divorce Without Really Trying

Christmas, 2008, was not fun.  Neither was New Year's Eve 2009, my birthday a month later, my husband's birthday a couple of days away, or Valentine's Day the next week.  A pretty nice, mostly thoughtful guy had become Donald Trump( arrogant but better hair!) and Woody Allen( snippy and depressed but taller!) and Attila the Hun (can't tell them apart any longer!) all rolled into one. By the first of March , 2009,  I was beginning to believe that either I had died and gone to hell or a solution would be for my husband to do just that.  Either way, something definitely was wrong.  The last week of March we went to North Georgia to buy what I expected to be our retirement/vacation home.  That trip wasn't fun either.    My husband, soon to be ex, and I walked out of the closing, having just signed mortgage papers, tying us to each other and the bank for 30 years, taking the down payment from my investment accounts, he told me he needed a break and that he was leaving and heading to South Alabama.  He may have been thinking "break" for weeks, but he had certainly voiced his opinion on the house 'we' were purchasing. He had gone to the inspection, checked the attic, rattled pipes and shown up for the closing.  Now he kissed me goodbye and left me standing in the parking lot in a town where I knew no one, didn't have a friend in sight and wasn't even sure where to buy the bottle of wine I intended to finish off sitting in my new empty house where I would sleep on the floor and sit and wait for the delivery of my sofa that the same soon to be ex husband had purchased with me three days before.  He actually had sat on it and bounced a little.  Little did I know that was the only time he intended to sit on it. Little did I know, period.  The next few days are still a blur for me.  I know I drove back to Alabama, sometime.  Took my husband to the airport a couple of days later, sending him off to his reason for the break.  I got a mover and took the things I had intended to put into our "vacation home" and sat and worried.  There's a old saying about evil that it can not hide in the Light and as Easter descended on the South, the lights began to come on for me and as I sang "I was blind but now I see" on Easter Sunday, I did.  One good thing or bad about the Internet is that anything you put out there, its out there. Its not a message you can erase or a letter you can burn.  Do it, say it, email it.  It is now history and someone can and will find you out. If you doubt that you are going to get caught, if you think you can get away with it, if you tell yourself, she/he will never know, oh, Lordy, just think again. I was blind but now i see! One thing I have learned about people, we are creatures of habit.  You may create a new email address, like TheRealStud@hotmail  but you use the dang same ole' password.  It took me about 20 minutes to read the emails that would completely change my life, forever. My "loving and devoted", faithful like an old dog, soon to be ex-husband, 62 years old, can't hardly get off the sofa, had a 22 year old "I thought she was 25" girlfriend. Or in his words "hot girlfriend".  And he was promising marriage, and  "I know I will never retire but its OK" and I will help you raise your 5 year old illegitimate child and be the father he never had ( let alone the father and grandfather you probably didn't have), and so will my wonderful and devoted adult children love you and be there for you as we all move to South Alabama and become a "family".  The fact that I was never mentioned wasn't a shock.  After all, she didn't know I existed, at least until she got my email.