So this weekend was a tough one. REALLY TOUGH.

The kids and B flew out to CA for a diving competition. It was great to see the kids and it makes missing them all the harder. When I touch them it is like touching velvet…smooth, soft and lush. I don’t remember this exact feeling when I was living with them but now being with them is rare and precious…like touching fluffy clouds in the sky.

We spent the afternoon at Mission Beach. I walked the beach with Gracie holding her hand (mom, this is weird…humor me please honey) picking up sand dollars that had washed up onto the talc-like sand. Paul was glad to be with me and hugged me constantly while Andre…well he drew. It was a lovely time and dinner together was spent laughing around the table…something I sorely miss.

That night B and I went to the hotel lobby to try to figure out a way to split our assets and it got ugly very fast. On the way down in the elevator he told me he was going to marry his mistress and that he would do what it took to keep the kids with him…stating that he would go to court and in essence lie to keep them. Needless to say, I was shocked and felt intimidated. This was a side of him that I had rarely seen and the coolness with which he delivered his words scared me.

After emerging from the elevator he said he had to use the bath room so I went to the woman’s room. While in there I decided it would be best to try to act like none of that had just happened…to let what he said go and try to figure out where he was going with all of his threatening talk. Things started off well but as our discussion progressed it got uglier with me saying things I wish I had not as a total reaction to what he had said in the elevator. Based on his almost canned responses I began to wonder if he was recording our conversation and asked him and he said “No’ but I don’t believe him. What I do believe is this: he set me up int he elevator to be worried, concerned and angry and with his threats against me and knew that I would make some of my own comments. AND I do think he recorded us… him having the advantage of knowing that he was recording so he was responding in canned ways.

I am not sure why I trusted that this would go well and why I wasn’t more on guard. Why do I still trust that this man won’t hurt me when all he has done for the past five years is lie and be deceitful? When he wanted to have two families and tried to figure out how to manage it? Who looked into a fiance visa before I ever knew he had a mistress? Why do I still give the benefit of the doubt to someone who has uprooted our family twice promising that he would never contact the mistress and yet he did. Why did I temporarily move to Texas on a trail bases when I was already separated from B only to find that he brought me there for the purpose of trying to get a Texas divorce which would be better for him? Why do I trust a man who 18 hours after meeting his mistress…with me taking their picture on the steps of a palace…turn to her and tell her that she would be his second wife?

Why?

Sometimes I wonder if it is because if I admit all this then I have to admit my entire 32 years with him was a fabricated life? A fairy tale. And so what does that make me? Naive? Stupid? Gullible? Why was I so willing to believe?

Now that we are divorcing one of my friends told me that they went out to coffee twice and he told her it was a secret. What else was happening under my nose? I feel like such an old fool.

But I digress. The next day I called him and told him that I did not want to end our 32 year marriage like this with both of us expressing ourselves in ways there were hurtful and not who we really were. He said he agreed and that he was sorry. But here is the thing? How do you ever believe even the apology of a liar who has no conscious and has proven that day in and out for the past five years? How do you even begin to craft a life for yourself when you have to deal with such a conniving person at least until your children are grown? How do you protect yourself from someone whose intentions have been deceitful while yours have been pure?

Does anyone out that have a suit of armor? I need to borrow it.