20. Gigi

Hahaha, life is hilarious. Now, I've done seen and heard it all. I'm not gonna lie; I had my last child at thirty-three years old, and it took a toll on my body and mind. Life is unlike the movies, where everything is always sunshine and roses. No one ever tells you about being tired all day, every day, after having four kids.

They never talk about the wear and tear on mind, body, and soul when you try to mesh your life with someone else's. I would never have believed that my life would derail the way it had when I hit my early forties. I had blinders on, and I'd be the first to admit I took things for granted.

I thought that love was all that was needed to survive and keep the home fires burning bright. That's a damn lie. If you neglect that love for too long, something is going to break eventually, and the whole house of cards is going to come crashing down.

I wish I had known that when I was young and in love. I fell in love with Corbin in middle school but never had the courage until my second year in high school to let my feelings be known. It just so happened that he felt the same, and the rest, as they say, is history.

But it wasn't, though. My fairytale lasted until about the time we brought home our first son. Then reality set in. The reality of diapers and midnight feedings, getting up the next day, and going through the motions on no sleep, only to repeat the whole thing all over again.

As a woman, the brunt of it all landed in my lap. Not that Corbin wasn't helpful, he was. But we were young. Fresh out of college, with no real-life experience beyond frat parties and Friday night football.

Everyone wants you to follow a script, but no one ever took the time to write that shit in detail, so you're walking blind. Go to school, graduate, get married, have kids. On paper, it looks very good, but no one seems to realize that these big life moments come with real work.

All the stupid books that talk at people are no help no matter what they say, because each person's experience is different. And because my Mom and the other women around me made it look so easy, I felt like a failure when it wasn't as easy for me.

I didn't know back then that those women were pretending while living in their own hell. I think they should stop. I roll my eyes these days when I see these trad wife bullshit artists on their social media reels pretending that they're super moms. Only to end up in the news at some point for some heinous shit they did to their families.

In my day, way before social media became the highway to hell that it is, it was the country club Moms and the Donna Reed black and white TV shows that my own mother and grandmother cut their teeth on that told the big fat lie.

Now I know that these women were reading from a script and getting paid to lie to the known world about their perfect Leave it to Beaver bullshit. No one has it perfect, and some have it worse than others, but I didn't learn that until it was too late.

When I was sitting on my bathroom floor, stressed the hell out, hating my life and everything in it, then feeling like a monster for my own thoughts and spinning on that cycle time and again, too ashamed to seek help because everyone else had done it before me and wanting to end it all, there was nowhere to turn. Why? Because even my own mother had hidden her hardships from me because it wasn't the right thing to do.

By the time my little Alyssa was born, I was tired to the bone. Four babies in the span of ten years might not seem like a lot, but it was plenty, and I wasn't ready for it. I don't regret giving life to my kids, but I wish someone had prepared me for the reality.

Even with household help, it was never enough. There weren't enough hours in the day to get everything done and still be the perfect twenty-two-year-old who'd gotten married at the country club on that sunny Saturday afternoon.

Shit, that time had been long gone by then. Before you knew it, I was a thirty-something-year-old mother who had given up her dreams of working outside the home to keep on top of things with my husband and kids.

Corbin was making more than enough money to take care of all of us, not to mention I came from money, so finances were never that big of a deal. You'd think that with that burden lifted, life would be a breeze, but it wasn't because money has shit to do with human life.

Beyond paying the bills and buying the latest everything, money didn't help me put a colicky baby to bed on time when I wanted just two minutes with my husband.

It didn't give me more time to do the things that I was being pulled in ten different directions to do. My husband got the precious little princess he wanted after three boys, but my mind and body had paid the price.

Whoever heard of needing a shrink to deal with being a wife and mother? It's only now that the world talks about PPD and all the other horrors that women face as mothers, but back in the day, women were frowned upon and abused if they weren't perfect little housewives.

That abuse didn't come from their husbands, not in all cases anyway, but from the society we live in. I had no one to turn to when my own mind and body betrayed me, so I just walked into the dark one day and let it take over. I was too tired to fight.

What I didn't know and didn't have time to care about back then was the toll it was taking on my marriage. I didn't think about who I had become in the eyes of my husband, who, because he wasn't taught any better, still expected the girl he fell in love with when he walked through the door and not the worn-out, tired-as-hell housewife she had become.

I didn't even realize when I stopped sleeping with my husband. My mind was doing all it could to hang in there, and as for my body, that, too, had betrayed me. I wasn't the thin put together debutante of yesteryear. I was now the thirty pounds heavier mother of four who couldn't lose an ounce if I starved myself for a week.

My body had changed, my mind was no longer under my control, and I lost all care about anything and everything. On the other hand, my husband, who didn't have to deal with the changing body of motherhood or the hormones it came with, was just coasting through life.

He'd spend a few hours with them before bed each evening and on the weekends, but he had a life to live as well, and just like his father before him, that life didn't involve spending too much time at home when there were golf games to get to and nights out with the boys.

Because you see, he was living the same black-and-white movie his parents had cut their teeth on as well, so for him, I was supposed to do the heavy lifting where hearth and home were concerned. Don't get me wrong, he spent plenty of time with the kids, and they never went without. But we never stood a chance because we were fed lies and made to believe that life could be a dream.

When he told me about the affair, I think that's the day my world stopped moving one way and went off kilter. That wasn't part of the perfect script. Which part of the love story was that? After the hell that I had been through, fighting my own mind to hang on, he had the nerve to find solace in another woman?

Back then, I couldn't see my own faults; I wanted to blame him for everything. I hated him enough to kill him. He was telling the whole world, our friends and family, that I had failed. My depression got even worse, but no one seemed to notice or know how to help because, as I came to learn, everyone else had their own demons to fight.

I still had my kids to think about, especially little Alyssa, who seemed to be doing even worse than me. It broke my heart to see her like that, but I was too deep in my own dark hell to do much for her.

The first couple of years after the divorce, I was a mess. I cried rivers, begged, pleaded, and made an ass of myself trying to get my husband back and put my family back together. And then, one day, I just stopped. I realized that I had to get use to a new reality because the world was not going to stop for me to get my shit together.

I don't know how to explain it, but it was like something came over me one day, and I was no longer the same person, and in a way, I wasn't. I was a divorced mother of four with a broken heart and no will to go on.

Then I looked at my little girl, the one who seemed more hurt than me, the adult in the situation, and knew that I had to do better. I didn't make a big fuss outwardly, but inwardly, I had taken steps to make changes in my life. I had only one thing motivating me, to do better for my kids.

It wasn't about putting my own needs on the back burner, I never looked at it that way. It was more about getting used to the new normal. It was then I realized how withdrawn my daughter had become. Maybe it was the fact that her last brother had gone off to college, and there were no longer any buffers to keep my notice off of her, but I saw it.

She was about twelve then, which meant it had been four years since my own personal hell began. I didn't even realize so much time had gone by, and the guilt was enough to send me into another downward spiral, but this time, I pulled myself together because of the sadness in my little girl's eyes.

Now, Alyssa was always a Daddy's girl, but the first time I heard her call Corbin Dad instead of Daddy was the day I tapped into just how hard this whole thing was on her. She'd also gone and grown up without me noticing, and I realized how selfish I had been.

I called all my boys and apologized to them; we had a family meeting when Alyssa was out of the house because I had to ask them about the last four years of her life that I had missed. My sons didn't berate me, for which I am eternally grateful, but they didn't sugarcoat how hard it was on them and their sister either.

They were still hurt, still pissed, and they absolutely detested their father's new wife. They blamed her for the affair and the divorce, and it was then I realized that they, too, were victims of the same fairytale bullshit that I had been.

It took a while and lots of self-reflection on my part, but eventually, I was brave enough to tell them the truth that it wasn't just Helen or their Dad that I, too, had a hand in the demise of my marriage.

I decided then and there that I didn't want my babies falling victim to the same shit I had, so I was open and honest with all of them. I didn't hold back anything but was open and blunt to the point that there were no hidden meanings behind anything.

It became an almost weekly thing, but I was still not involving Alyssa in these talks, not yet. Me and the boys would video chat, and it became a kind of therapy for us and a way for all of us to heal together, I guess.

At this point, I had stopped talking to Corbin at all; it was just too hard. I hadn't heard his voice for about three years and made sure the nanny or housekeeper was always the one to answer the door when he came to pick up Alyssa for their weekends together once the boys were gone.

But now, she was twelve, and there was no more nanny, and with everyone else gone, the housekeeper only came three days a week, which was plenty. I remember the first time I saw him, I was hyper-vigilant.

I wanted to assess my feelings to see if anything was still there. I was shocked to find that I was still in love with him and that most of the anger and hatred I'd been carrying around had dulled somewhat. I won't say that I was too pleased with this realization.

I didn't say anything, of course, but it was obvious that he was shocked to see me after all this time. I greeted him politely and said goodbye without asking about him or his life because I really didn't care to know.

For some reason, that first meeting seemed to open the floodgates, and we started talking more and more. That's when he told me that he never stopped loving me and that he and his wife were not intimate, which pissed me off because he fucked her while we were married, and now he was too guilty to have sex with her because of guilt.

We started going to therapy together behind everyone's back; that was my idea. I needed to know if he was being honest with me, and we needed to know where we went wrong. We were never intimate because he was a married man, and I was not about to become my husband's mistress.

When he told me back then that we were going to be together again one day, I believed him. But I'm a devious bitch. I wanted to make her suffer while I was working on myself. You'd have to live in my head to understand my mindset.

I knew I had a lot of work to do on myself, and I wasn't about to rush shit just to end up back at the same place. Besides, there were kids involved, mine and hers. My kids hate her daughter, but as an adult, I saw her as a child whose mother had turned her life upside down as well.

The first thing Corbin and I did was get him on these pills that lower libido in men. I wanted to make sure that he never slept with that bitch ever again. Now see, my thinking was that I had gone without sex for the last eight years of my marriage because of my own trauma from childbirth, and she'd fucked my husband behind my back.

As for his part, he'd dipped his dick in crazy just because. In all fairness, we were both wrong, but she had no place in our lives and should have stayed her ass off my husband's dick. So, for the past eleven years, at least, I was a hundred percent sure that he wasn't sleeping with her. It took a while for me to believe that he hadn't been all along, but that's another story.

He wasn't allowed to sleep in the same bed as her, and he couldn't do shit for her that he wasn't doing for me. So, for the last eleven years, nobody was having sex. I still wasn't ready and still had a lot of work to do on myself, but really, my whole focus was on my daughter, who was still at home, the last of the litter.

My plan, and his, was to wait until Alyssa's life had been squared away to deal with our own shit. I know it sounds bonkers now, but it is what it is. I wanted to make Corbin pay for cheating on me; that's the deal with the no-sex thing, and I wanted Helen to live in the hell of her husband not wanting her.

The bitch had no problem doing that shit to me. Now, both our daughters were grown, and mine was now married, so it was time to get the ball rolling, and that brings me to now. I didn't expect this weekend to go the way it did.

For one, Helen was supposed to be here, but she didn't show up for whatever reason. In the last eleven years, Corbin and I had been on vacation together which no one knows about. He'd be away on business and I would meet him wherever when I felt like it.

We stayed in the same bed, but I never let him touch me, which he didn't want to anyway because those pills worked like a charm; but for me, it was knowing that I was taking something from the woman who had scarred me that mattered more than anything. Twisted, I know, but this is me.

Everything she got from him she had to beg and threaten to get, and ten minutes after she got whatever it was, I got the same or the equivalent because her taste is shit. I had access to all his personal shit and things she didn't even know about.

He's been paying me alimony all this time because I had no interest in getting married to anyone else. Part of the reason I never so much as dated was because I never wanted my kids' affection to be split. That, and the fact that I knew how much it grated Helen that she wasn't invited into my in-law's space and I still was.

She was never accepted by anyone in our family, and to this day, it drives her crazy. It used to eat her alive when Corbin would have to be in attendance with the kids and me and she wasn't allowed. She'd fought for years to change that but I didn't budge, and neither did his family and mine.

She's been an outsider in her own family for the past fifteen years at my behest because I could've put an end to it at any time, but why would I? Corbin was well aware that he was making them both pay for betraying me. I had an ax to grind and it took me fifteen years to get my satisfaction.

Well, the first four years don't count because I was still in my head back then, but the last eleven, I have been actively punishing him and her for their shit. But now, with menopause behind me and all the crazy out of my system, I've decided that I am ready for a new chapter in my life.

That's where we are right now, and that is the reason for me laughing to myself this morning as I take a bath in my ex-husband's hotel room while he sees about breakfast.

You see, I just got a call from one of their neighbors that Helen seems to have lost her mind. She's been screaming and running around her house, according to the neighbor, and no one has seen her in days.

This neighbor was on high alert because she and her husband had been asked to watch the house this weekend because everyone was supposed to be here, so she was shocked when she saw lights on in the house. When she rang the doorbell, Helen had screamed at her to get the fuck away from her house without even opening the door, and that's why she started paying close attention from her place across the street.

She could see the movement through the windows and didn't know what the hell was going on, so she took a video on her phone and sent it to us. I don't know what the hell is going on, but Helen has been running around waving her arms and screaming before retching all over the place.

Now Corbin is convinced she's nuts and wants to give the video to the divorce attorney he plans to meet with when we get back home first thing. Maybe this will make things easier because my libido after menopause is like a teenager in heat, and I don't know how much longer I can wait. Twenty years is a long time to go without dick.