I think my husband getting rid of the old broken-down truck that sat in our yard for the
past 16 years or so, should have been one of the biggest red flags for me.
Goodness, no amount of prompting could convince him to do anything about that truck.
It had become a yard decoration.
Some of my boy’s friends had even teased them over the years about our yard looking
like a “junkyard”.
It gave us a good laugh sometimes, but there were also times I looked forward to not
seeing it as part of our country landscape.
It’s why I was so filled with joy when he told me he was having it taken out of our yard.
Looking back, I think maybe I did have a sense that something abnormal was up.
Something in me felt strange that it was all happening at once.
Around this same time, he also announced that he was putting our travel trailer that we
used for family camping up for sale.
A travel trailer was not something that would normally be in our budget, but my
in-laws had bought it for us quite a few years ago and allowed us to use it and told us
to pay them back whenever we could.
It was a Blessing and I loved camping in it.
No more tent camping for this spoiled girl.
Going from tent camping to trailer camping makes you feel as though you transitioned
to royalty.
We had tent camped for part of our honeymoon along the coast.
As much as I enjoyed the feeling of getting back to nature in a tent, as my age
increased, so did my desire to rough it less when I camped.
As a family we gradually went from tents, to a tent trailer and then a travel trailer.
It made camping so much more comfortable, and I was hooked.
I loved sitting in the trailer when it rained.
This happened once when we camped close to the beach and there is something cozy
about being dry in a trailer when you’re camping, and it rains.
Especially since I’ve experienced camping in the rain in a tent.
My husband told our son and I that he had decided it was time to update to a newer
trailer while we could still get good money for the old trailer.
This made sense to me, and I trusted his decision.
My son couldn’t wait to start planning our next camping trip and had been talking
about it..
He asked his Dad what we would do about camping at his favorite place at the
beach-we had planned it prior to the Pandemic hitting and had to put it off.
His Dad reassured him that we would be camping once he got the new trailer.
I remember my son talking about it and he couldn’t wait to start planning for it.
My husband pulled the trailer out of our yard and took it to his parents’ house to sell it,
telling me it was easier this way.
Not long after that, he told my son and I that the trailer was sold and that was the last
we heard of it.
We obviously now know the trailer was sold in preparation for the divorce and that my
husband had no intention of ever replacing it, but it would play a part in a bigger deceit
that I would learn about later.
I can’t help but wonder if he felt anything at all when he was saying things about the
trailer that were not true as he listened to our son talk about camping.
Did any of it cause a twinge of regret in him?
Lying to me feels so much different than including my boys in the lies.
It feels heavier.
I don’t know if it was the divorce that was causing my husband to tell lies or if he had
always told lies and the divorce process just amplified it.
It’s a terrible thing to start looking at somebody like you can’t trust anything they say.
Especially when that person is your person.
Your person that you took vows with.
Your person that you have spent most of your adult life with.
Your person that knows you better than any other person in the world.
Your person that you made 3 babies with.
Having children with someone makes you connected with them forever.
Would I always have trouble looking at him.
Would I always feel that everything he says and does is tainted, dirty and dishonest in some
way.
Once you find out someone lies to you, it changes every single interaction you have
with them.
It changes how you look at them forever.
Whether you want it to or not…