April 26, 2021
The hardest part in all of this became the need to tell selected people what had transpired at our home that April morning. Who do you tell this? How do you tell something of this magnitude?
My counselor had made half an hour available to me, so I took it. We got back to the house about 15 minutes before I needed to be there, and the girls were old enough that me being gone for the grand total of 45 minutes for that wouldn't be a big deal. I told them I wasn't going to make them go to school for a whopping two and a half hours. We were all still reeling from the morning's events. I'd call it a family emergency when I wrote the excuse out for school. They got lunch; I drove to the counselor's a whole 7 minutes away.
I've been seeing my counselor since 2015. We have a long and established relationship and an excellent rapport. But she was still in just as much shock as she'd been in when I first emailed her. This was mind-boggling. I used the half hour to process as much as I could with her, and drove home.
I stood in the kitchen and faced reality. I needed to call Special Edition. I needed to call my mother. I ... I needed support. I'd have to get a full-time job. There was no way my work at the grocery store where I was employed part-time (I worked maybe 12 hours a week) would carry us through, and I couldn't hack 8-10 hours a day on my feet full-time there. I would have to tell my boss.
Everything was falling to me now.
The enormity of that was overwhelming.
First things first.
I called Special Edition. She was on the phone with her BFF, whom I adore, but when I only offered a curt apology for interrupting their call and didn't say Special could just call me back later, Special dropped the call with her BFF and came back on the line with me.
"What's wrong, Momma?"
So I told her. "Dad was arrested today on counts of possession and distribution of child pornography."
There was a hasty conversation between her and her fiance, Mr. Nurse, and before the day was out, Special Edition came home for an extended stay.
I got a text. "How are you doing, neighbor?" I almost cried. One of my pastors lives in my neighborhood, and he walks his kids to the school right across the street from my house. There was no missing the activity at our place this morning. The text was from him. I texted him back, asking if he might be home that afternoon so I could bend his ear. We agreed to meet at 4.
I called my mother. I can't even remember how long we were on the phone. She was shocked and devastated.
I met with my pastor. I felt somewhat better, knowing I had that support.
I got on Facebook Messenger, swallowed my pride, and messaged SnarkyDad, who is one of my closest friends. We've known each other for decades. Not only would he let me tell the story again and process it out the way it had happened, he would listen with sympathy. And he did, while being flabbergasted that I was telling him any of this.
The next day, I spoke with Hubby's court-appointed attorney. The charges, she advised me, were so serious they meant an automatic not-guilty plea would be filed when he was formally arraigned later in the week. And it would take time to come to court, with all the motions and counter-motions and discovery and the ongoing investigation.
"So this could take a year?"
"Yes, ma'am."
Oy.
The best he could hope for was about five years, she said. I struggled to wrap my mind around that being good news.
I learned quickly that the prison system--at least our county prison system here--is quite a racket. I had to sign up for all sorts of stuff to be able to communicate with my husband, who I still trusted. Sort of. Letters were a cheap form of communication, but thanks to Forever stamps, nobody knows how much a stamp is anymore. But I'd have to pay for my stamp and his, by depositing money into his commissary account. Which was different from his tablet account, where he was able to send and receive instant messages for 10 cents apiece. That was by far the cheapest form of communication. All that was different from the phone account, which was what enabled him to call me. Phone calls cost 22 cents a minute, and we could talk for 15 minutes at a time, when he was given free time to talk on the phone.
Yeah.
It didn't take long before I preferred the tablet's instant messages.
May 25ish, 2021
We'd just finished dinner but the conversation was still flowing. As it often had in the last month, the subject turned to Hubby and the case that we didn't talk about with him on the phone. And the way life had changed. But what started coming out of my girls' mouths was shocking.
I'd never heard any of this before.
Things my husband had said and done to the girls.
Ways he'd made them uncomfortable.
Boundaries he'd pushed. In some cases, flat-out violated.
My stomach churned as I listened to them talk.
"Where was I?" I asked them, wanting to know. Needing to know.
"Mom, you were gone. At work. Or at Waffle's. Or at group. Or having a migraine."
"Did he ever do any of this in front of me?"
"When he'd try, you would shut him down."
Well, that's something.
Dinner was cleared, and the girls shifted off to do their own things. I retreated to the room I was slowly turning into my library, and pulled up Messenger again. I messaged SnarkyDad. We talked almost daily these days, God bless his wife. I told him what I'd learned from the girls. All of them, for Special Edition had confirmed what the younger ones were saying.
"Auntie Jlwrites, that is grooming!" he wrote back to me.
Yeah, that's what I'd been afraid of. It was exactly as bad as I'd feared.
The next night I talked to each of the girls in turn, one at a time, and asked them one simple question: What would you think if I told you I was going to divorce your father?
The reaction was unanimous. They were in favor, very much so. With a certainty that left me breathless.
But also very sure of my next move.
I was going to be filing for divorce. And my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary was in two months.
