A letter to….

I have heard it said that men cheat because they can. In case you don’t get it, it’s because there’s always some woman available to take up the offer or to offer themselves before the man even makes a move. Which category do you fall into? Did you see my husband in his depressed state, in the midst of a midlife crisis looking around and restless, and decide you would fit perfectly? Do you have so little respect for yourself, your mother, your sister, your friends and the sisterhood that you had no qualms about having sex with someone you knew was married and had been married for more than 20 years with children around the same age as you?

What would make you do that? Was it a challenge? The thrill of the chase? Did you stop to think how you would feel if this was your father running around? How your mother would feel?

Maybe he approached you. Or maybe it just happened in the course of work, of being friendly, and the attraction grew, but you still knew he wasn’t free; he wasn’t available. You have stolen the time, energy, attention and protection of my husband.

What have I ever done to you that would make you think it’s OK to know me and yet have sex with my husband? Was I unpleasant to you, or do you have such little regard for a fellow human being that you gave no thought to the harm you were doing me? You give women a bad name; make us look weak and desperate, and make men feel they can do anything with us and to us. Divide and conquer: women won’t stick together so the men win. Win the right to sleep around, to tell you lies and keep you on the side with their wives.

Why would you lower yourself like that? He told you he loved you? He told me he loved me for 20-odd years. He kissed you? He’s been kissing me for ever, and up to yesterday. He told you he needed you? Well, he hasn’t told me that in a while, but he started out that way, every day for years.

So what happens when he doesn’t need you any more? Do you understand that if it wasn’t you, it would be someone else? It isn’t love. Even if our marriage were the most dysfunctional, it still doesn’t give you the right to step into the midst of it.

You should not be a part of our story, and for your own sense of self you should see that. You should have your own story. You should value yourself enough to want someone who is free because, make no mistake, even if my husband leaves me for you, he’s not free. I’m wrapped in his head, his mind, his thoughts and his spirit. I’ll always be a part of him, even if it’s a part he is trying to forget.

So what is it that makes you disloyal to your own kind? Why have you chosen to become the worst sort of woman there is … the other woman? How can you lie on my sheets surrounded by my perfume? How can you sleep with him, knowing he’s sleeping with me? Men couldn’t cheat if there was no one to cheat with. His wife

I have lived with a difficult guilt for many years; I’m writing to you both about that time when you were two and three and your father was at home dying of cancer. I think I failed you – perhaps one more than the other – in that I could not talk about him, and I now see this has given you a degree of suffering. I suppose I’m looking for understanding and perhaps forgiveness.

The years with your father were – at that time – my happiest ever and when you girls were born life was perfect. Then suddenly it came to an abrupt end.

Aged 30, I understood the finality of death, although for years I could not bear it and was consumed by a selfish grief. As small children, you could not know of this finality and so my prime task, while your father was at home with us, became to help you with his permanent absence. From Easter to June of 1970 I kept a log on the natural world around us, recording the wildlife we saw each day as we walked along our country lane to the bus stop – noting especially any signs of death. One day we saw a worm had been flattened by a car tyre, which, unlike the worms in the wormery at play group, I pointed out, no longer wriggled – as in the nursery song you liked to sing. We even saw how it gradually became dust on the road until one day it had vanished.

At night we drew these things in the notebook and talked about them and by June found that these things now applied to your father, and just as we had buried some creatures, so we now stood over your father’s grave.

You won’t remember any of this.

It was a gloriously sunny summer and family and friends visited throughout; you enjoyed their company, one happy day following another, mostly at the beach, until the last of your older cousins had to leave and return home for the new school year. One September morning, we stood together on the pavement and waved them goodbye; the car drew away and we were suddenly alone for the first time in nearly three months. As they faded from sight, you, S, immediately said, as if to the world, “Daddy’s dead, isn’t he?” Your words cut into me like a knife. It was hard to believe, in that you were just four and had voiced what was uppermost in my mind too: such a void.

I barely coped with my loss and lost all sight of yours. I couldn’t talk about your father or mention his name. It was easier that way for me – but not for you, especially you, N, for you had no memories at all, while your sister had one or two.

It was when you were in your 20s and a relative was visiting and spoke casually of some trait of your father’s, that you, N, accusingly said that I had never told you anything about him. Your wound was visible. I had let you down.

Unfortunately, things could not have been any different; grief and loss had eaten into me so much that four years after he died I was hospitalised when the pain reached the surface. For those four years people would say to me: “It’s good you have the children.”

This may have been true, but it didn’t feel like it at the time; you were too young for me to share my inner feelings with. My appearance of coping, while not doing so, took too many years out of your lives. I always thought we’d come through, but I begin to think that for one of you, this may not be the case.

Evidently you are in some kind of turmoil, which troubles me. I can’t help but feel that the roots of this lie deep in the loss of your father and never having known him. With you as toddlers, I dwelt on the physical finality of death – it seemed the most important thing at the time – while, perhaps more importantly, I neglected to bring to you your father who lived and who loved you beyond measure. If there could be even a partial remedy all these years on, by us talking, then I would love to try, though even today it would give rise to many tearful hours. But I’m more than willing.

Anonymous