One day before our seventh wedding anniversary, and six weeks after our first child was born, my husband told me he was having an affair. (The tense matters: having, not had.)
As his confession reverberated in my ears, I rocked our daughter, asleep after her 10th (11th?) nursing session of the day. My nipples ached, my body trembled, my heart shattered.
Tears landed on her H & M onesie, the first item I purchased when I found out I was pregnant after our frozen embryo transfer. I held her steady despite my pain, shifting into the instinctual protective mode of a mother.
“She cannot know I’m crying,” I thought as I stared at my husband in shock. My cheeks were wet, but no sound escaped my lips. There wasn’t anger. Not yet. Only questions: With whom? When? How many times?
In several ways, my story is nothing new. My husband — a J. Crew-wearing, annoyingly nice school administrator — had an affair with a colleague. I was pregnant, tired and focused on preparing for our baby. She was focused on him: flirting on Slack, in his office and during lunch breaks.
I later discovered that other colleagues were suspicious of the affair. When I met her, I had a bad feeling, too. Even our marriage counselor, whom we started seeing after his confession, thought it was odd that the other woman had invited my husband to her house to fix her kitchen cabinets soon after being hired. Not your typical office favor, but it was her first move in a series of intimacy-building actions that created the opportunity for infidelity.
