Someone Always Gets Hurt
And that’s the thing about illicit affairs.
I never saw myself as a person who would have an affair. I suppose no one really does. You don’t speak the vows of marriage and say, ‘Until cheating do us part’. We seek happily ever afters that may simply not exist.
My mother cheated on my father and if there was anything in this world I never wanted to become — it was anything like my mother. The woman who had abused me for my entire life — was not a goal. She was the antithesis of my personality. My ethos. My life structure. I would do nothing she would ever do. I would become nothing she would ever be. I’d fight my genetics if it killed me.
She’d met him before she met my father. Circumstances had broken them apart. They never stopped loving each other, they simply stopped being together. She settled for my father. She had the son she wanted and then accidentally brought into the world a daughter she despised. In the middle, the man she originally loved had returned — single again and wanting her back. She resisted him until I was two. And then the affair began.
My parents were divorced when I was twelve. A decade-long affair turned into a second marriage (technically, third for my mother), the ceremony for which took place in the house that my father bought and was no longer welcome in. I hated my…
