The moment that lit the spark that began bringing to light the reality that things were
being hidden from me happened even before I was told by my husband that he was
divorcing me.
I think perhaps this was partly why I was so confused by it.
It was a day that started out like any other day.
But it would end up being the day that I would continue to look back on as when I
began to realize that lies and deceit were a part of my marriage.
And it would lead me down an endless path of wondering how many lies had I been
told during my marriage, how many things had been hidden from me?
Lies do this to people’s minds.
I was sitting in my living room when my son came in to ask about re-ordering an item
we had gotten previously on Amazon.
I told him I would go ahead and re-order it.
When I went into the Amazon cart to look for the item, I noticed $1000’s of dollars
worth of items that had been ordered on our account and were awaiting delivery.
I was shocked.
None of it looked familiar as anything for our family.
A year or so before we had one of our credit cards used for fraudulent charges and this
is immediately where my mind jumped to.
I thought somebody must be using our Amazon account to make fraudulent orders.
I jumped up and ran into my husband’s home office and knocked on the door.
He told me to come in and I feverishly began to tell him about the charges and how
somebody must have hacked into our Amazon account.
I was breathless as I told him about my discovery.
We better hurry and alert Amazon, I said to him, proud of myself for saving us from
this fraud.
He stared at me for a bit.
I thought maybe he was as shocked as I was.
I waited for him to start bellowing out how much he hated thieves and grab his phone
to call Amazon and our bank to take care of the problem.
After a few minutes of just staring at me, he told me that the charges were for his
brother.
I was so relieved that we hadn’t been hacked and I said, “oh thank goodness” and went
about my day.
It wasn’t until towards the end of the day that I realized that in all the excitement of
the morning and the worry about our Amazon account being hacked, I had forgotten to
go back online and re-order the item for my son.
So, I went back into our Amazon account to place the item in the cart.
The $1000’s of dollars in charges were gone.
I can’t explain this moment with adequate words.
A bad feeling started coming over me.
Something felt weird.
Something felt off.
I wondered why the charges that were there this morning were now missing.
I’m not that familiar with Amazon.
The most I do is look for things that are needed (mostly for my boys or my animals)
and place them in the cart.
That’s really the extent of my Amazon use and knowledge.
But that day, a cloud started forming in my mind about these charges and I wasn’t
really sure why.
I made myself look over the site and educate myself about it.
Something I wouldn’t have normally taken the time to do, but a small little voice in me
seemed to be whispering “look and see, look and see”.
I searched around to see why I would no longer see the charges that had been there
earlier in the day.
In my search of the site, I learned that there are different places you can place your
orders.
There are even places you could put orders so they couldn’t be viewed.
This is where I now found the charges.
But this didn’t make sense to me.
Why would my husband now put the items where I couldn’t view them?
Why would he want to hide them from my view-especially if I had already seen them?
My heart sank.
I walked to his office and casually asked him why the items were moved after I had
spoken with him about them.
Surely there was a good explanation.
Once again, he stared at me.
He appeared shocked that I was bringing it up again.
He seemed to stumble with his words and told me that he had originally put them in
the wrong place and since they are for his brother he now has them in the right place.
I told him “Oh ok” and left his office but something continued to feel off.
Throughout the rest of the day thoughts started coming into my head and I couldn’t
shake them.
Wait a minute-surely his brother had his own Amazon-why would he need to place
orders for his brother on our account?
And why had he never placed orders for his brother before?
But most importantly, why would he need to hide the orders?
It felt so silly and yet so dark at the same time.
While lying in bed that night my mind started flashing back to some of the items I had
seen in the order.
They didn’t seem to be something his brother would order.
Dang it, why wouldn’t thoughts about this order leave me alone I wondered.
For the next few days, the clouds continued to linger.
Something was off and it felt really bad.
I just didn’t understand why my husband would need to lie to me about anything
financial including an Amazon order so nothing made sense.
I approached him again and told him that something felt off and asked if this was really
his order and not his brothers.
I asked him to please just be honest with me about it because it was making me feel
strange and I would rather everything just be out in the open.
He became angry with me and told me the order was his brothers and I needed to let it
go.
I approached him about 4 times in those few days almost begging him to please set
things straight as something felt off and I really wanted to just clear the air on it.
I told him I didn’t care about the orders-I just cared about how strange everything felt
about it.
Each time I approached him he got more and more irritated with me and continued to
insist that the orders were for his brother, and he would scream that I was the one with the
problem, not him.
The angrier he got about it, the more I felt like something really bad was going on.
You can’t understand the feeling unless you have experienced it.
I had never thought him to be dishonest with me about something before.
Was it all in my head?
Something told me it wasn’t.
By the morning of the 3rd or 4th day, I was standing in our dining room and he walked
up to me and stood before me in silence looking at me.
He hesitated a bit, cleared his throat and then told me that he had been lying to me
about the orders.
He said they were his.
I stood there quietly and listened to him.
He said he had no real explanation as to why he had lied about it, but if I had anything
I wanted to say about it I needed to say it then and there and then he didn’t want it
talked about again.
I continued to stand there and look at him.
After all the lying he had been doing for the past few days and all the finger pointing
at me being the one with a problem-I was numb and had nothing to say.
I said nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
I just continued to look at him.
He looked at me, turned and walked away and that is the last we ever talked about it.
When I look back on that day, I am acutely aware of just how much something greater
than me played a part in me finding those orders.
He had meant for me to never know about them.
He was in shock when I discovered them.
Had it not been for this moment in our life, I may never have realized he hid things from
me.
I may never have realized that he lied to me.
We certainly had other problems in our marriage like everyone does.
But I had always viewed him as an honest person.
He had told me on more than one occasion that he hated liars.
I believed him.
I know that they say when someone is caught doing something it is most likely not the
first time they are doing it-it is just the first time they are caught.
I realized that this was most likely my reality.
I wondered just how much he had been hiding from me when it came to our finances
and I would come to learn some of it during the divorce process.
But even aside from financial things, finding out that someone lies to you makes you
start to wonder about every single thing in your relationship with them.
How much had he hidden from me during all our years together?
How much had he lied to me during all our years together?
It made me wonder about every single thing.
It made me doubt every single thing.
Divorce.
Divorce sucks.
Divorce that involves lying and deceit sucks even more…