My Husband's Affair Became the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me (11 page)

I had purchased an ensemble of summer clothing for her birthday that year, and as always Tamara Joy received them with a grateful heart. I wanted to hug her and give her the world, yet I felt afraid to let her too close. I had to protect her from my pain and the truth that she could be losing her father.

I was overwhelmed with grief that I had not been a good enough wife to keep her father for her. I blamed myself. I was so sorry and so sad. I wanted to die, but I didn’t want to die, because I knew she needed me.

Making it through the dinner and cake that night was one of the hardest things I ever did. The heaviness in our home was thick. Brian had agreed to stay at our house until after Tamara’s birthday.

“You can’t let her forever associate her birthday with the day her dad left her,” I told him.

Luckily Grandma didn’t stay too long, and after dinner Tamara and Dustin went off to attend the church youth group, while Danielle left with her boyfriend. It gave us a break from trying to act like everything was normal.

Again, Brian and I sat alone in our living room, the same place where the nightmare began for me, four days earlier. We talked cordially. I asked him about his day and he answered me like a monotone recording. He asked me about my day and I said it was fine, when of course it wasn’t.

We both wanted to talk, but what was there to say? He had made his decision.

I asked him about practical details. Brian planned on staying in a hotel until he and Helen had set up their own home together. I asked if he had met her daughter, and what she thought of the whole thing. He said that she was fine, that she liked him. It didn’t surprise me. Brian was great with kids.

I winced when I thought of him taking his limited energy from his own children to raise the children of a stranger. Helen’s daughter was six, and suffered with diabetes.

He must really love this woman to leave all he had with me and

start raising a young family all over again, I thought. Who was this man sitting across from me, whom I had shared eighteen years of my life with, who only four days ago had been my best friend, and now was leaving me?

The awkwardness of this surreal situation was interrupted by the sound of our phone ringing in the kitchen. I got up and answered it, because Brian didn’t look like he was in the mood to talk to anyone who could be phoning our house.

“Hello, this is the Bercht residence, Anne speaking.”

“Did you say this is the Bercht’s?” a man asked, as if that was exactly who he was trying to reach.

“Yes,” I replied. And with that the caller hung up. I stood there holding the receiver stunned, wondering what that was all about.

Returning to the living room, I told Brian what had happened.

“Dial *69,” he replied. So I did, and after writing down the number, I repeated it to him.

“Shoot! That’s Helen’s number,” he said. “Her husband must’ve been phoning to see if I was home. I bet he’s coming over here to beat me up.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I said as I watched Brian begin to shake, a look of fear growing in his eyes.

“Surely, he wouldn’t go to that extreme,” I said. “What kind of low class people have you been associating with?”

Brian looked at me but didn’t answer.

“Brian, I wouldn’t worry about it, you’re a strong guy. Even if he does come over, you can handle yourself,” I encouraged.

“No. He’s way bigger than me,” Brian responded, without a moment’s hesitation.

So we began to wait hopelessly for this moment of truth. What could we do? Part of me was afraid too, of seeing my husband getting beaten physically. I was sure glad the kids weren’t home. Part of me thought maybe this wasn’t so bad.
Maybe he deserves to get beaten up. Maybe this will be good for him.

I decided to relax. It wasn’t my problem. Whatever was going to happen to Brian was going to happen, and he probably deserved it. It came into perspective for me, just how many people were being hurt here, by the selfish acts of two inconsiderate people.

Brian paced back and forth in the living room of our home, while I watched him. He was sweating, and every two laps across the length of the room, he peeked through the closed draperies and watched the cars on the street. I had never seen my husband act this way. It was useless to try and talk with him right now. His mind was preoccupied.

I wondered what to do with myself. I didn’t feel like doing anything. I was in suspense about what was going to transpire this evening in my formerly peaceful, happy home. Picking up a book, I attempted to read.

“There he is,” Brian said suddenly, after thirty minutes of his pacing routine, as he peered through the curtains on one of his surveillance passes. I looked at him and said nothing. I was scared. Silently to myself, I prayed for God’s help. Brian clenched his fists and seemed to be preparing to meet his assailant head on. I wondered if I was safe. I wondered if our home was safe. I was completely unaccustomed to physical confrontations.

We waited. But for what? I wasn’t sure, the door bell? A long minute passed. Nothing happened. Brian walked back over to the window, and carefully peered through the side of the curtain once again.

“He’s gone!” Brian said.

False alarm, I thought, he’s paranoid. Oh well it’s good for him. He deserves it for acting like such a jerk. What on earth is he thinking? What is Helen thinking? Devastate two spouses, break up two families and we’re all just going to live happily ever after?

Brian decided he must have made a mistake and resumed pacing the living room. After a while, with no more false alarms, he went downstairs to our rec room, although I sensed he was still very much distracted and very tense. Our expected offender never showed up. Or had he indeed shown up, but changed his mind because he also was scared? Had he perhaps turned around after my prayer? Were we still in danger? Danielle came home around nine o’clock. Brian joined me in the living room and told me that he wanted to tell Danielle tonight about his affair and his decision to move out.

“Sit down, Danielle. I have something to tell you.” He spoke without emotion. “Yeah. So I’ve had an affair on your mother and I’m going to be moving out.”

I sat beside Danielle on the sofa and held her, trying to offer some comfort. She sobbed big heaving sobs, while wrestling with this overwhelming information. In her mind it was not her mother he was leaving. It was her personally. Although she was sixteen years old, she was still a young child, and there was really no other way for her to process this information.

I glanced at Brian sitting across from us, and to my astonishment, saw that he was also crying. This was the first time I had ever seen my husband cry. He was raised in a home where it was seen as a weakness to cry. Anger was frequently expressed in his family, but that was the only emotion he was allowed to reveal.

Brian did not cry when he lost his business. He did not cry when his father died. He did not cry when he failed to live up to his own ideals as a husband and a father. Yet tonight he cried.

What was really going on inside my husband’s head?
I wondered. I really didn’t understand how he could be willing to cause his own pain. Why didn’t he just break it off with the other woman, and stay with his family where he belonged, when I was offering to forgive him for his moral failure? It didn’t make any sense.

Unable to cope any longer, Brian retreated to our bedroom, grabbed his gym bag, and packed his things, including the hair gel

I now hated. He had told me recently after getting a hair cut, that the stylist had sold him this new and great hair gel that women were supposed to find irresistible. “Cougar bait” she had called it. I was mad. The stupid stuff worked!
How dare he purchase “cougar bait” hair gel ?
I thought.

It didn’t seem like he packed very thoroughly or thoughtfully, he just seemed in a hurry to escape from the painful realities he faced in our home.

I stayed in the living room while he threw these items together, yet I knew full well what he was doing. I couldn’t bear to see, hear or experience any more. I was on an overdose of pain. I sat numb in my chair, staring as I had on the first night, but now I stared with my arm around my devastated teenager.

There were no words that fit the situation. Our usual non-stop talking was replaced with an eerie silence. The only sound that broke that silence was Danielle’s gentle sobbing.

Brian emerged from the hall looking like an old, worn-out man. He seemed ashamed and desperate. I longed to reach out and comfort him, as I had so many times before, but now he was rejecting me.

“Bye,” he said to the two of us in a factual and numbing way, as if he were merely heading to the corner store for milk. We didn’t answer him. How are you supposed to say good-bye to someone you love, when life doesn’t make any sense, and there is no plausible explanation for the events at hand?

Danielle and I watched his van disappear down the street. With the finality of the moment, her tears subsided. She seemed to be pulling herself together with inner resolve, building a wall around her heart and leaving her father, the one person who had meant more to her than anyone else, shut out on the other side.

I held her hand as we stood and watched the ending of our lives as we had known it. I wasn’t crying. I was trying to be strong, nonetheless I felt a tear trickle down my cheek. Gone was her father, and gone was my husband. We felt abandoned. Permanently.

Danielle: The moment I came home that evening and entered my living room where my parents were seated, I knew something was different. The air in the room felt thick and chilling cold as if you could cut it with a knife, and intuitively I knew it was as if my mother was entertaining a stranger that evening, a man inside my father’s body, but a man we did not know. Up until this day, I had always known that my father loved me, more so than I knew my mother loved me. When I was bad, and that was often, my father always addressed me with a lot of emotion, emotion that told me he loved me. He yelled at me, and I yelled back at him, but that was okay, both of us could relate to that. I always knew the yelling was about love, his love for me. My mother on the other hand dealt with me with unbending calmness. She kept her emotions under control. A lot of the time it seemed that she was operating without emotion, just with facts. No matter how much I argued and provoked my mother, she would not give in, she would not bend. Dealing with my mother felt like dealing with an inanimate brick wall. The lack of emotion made me feel less loved. I always waited for my father to come home, then I knew I could get a response, and usually I could get what I wanted. Not with my mom.

Tonight the stranger who occupied my father’s body spoke without emotion. That’s how I knew it was not my father. His eyes were blank. He said “Sit down I have something to tell you,” as if he were merely a reporter reporting on facts that didn’t matter to me at all. “Yeah, so I’ve had an affair on your mother, and I’m going to be moving out.” The way he said the words so matter of fact, made me think he was just joking. I was waiting for him to say “just kidding” like he had so many times before. My real father was always telling jokes. When I looked into my father’s eyes as he spoke tonight, I felt an evil presence and for a moment I thought I was looking straight at the Devil. I was gripped with fear, and I felt hatred towards this presence inside my father’s body. I wanted to kill. I felt completely neglected, abandoned and despised. What had the last sixteen years been? A big joke! How can you love someone and then just walk out on them?

As soon as the stranger wearing my father’s body left, I phoned my boyfriend. “You have to come and get me,” I said. He told me that he couldn’t because he had to work early the next morning. “Come and get me,” I repeated. The answer “no” was not an option.

When my boyfriend picked me up, we drove around in his truck, and I unloaded the whole mess on his shoulders. We drove to a freeway overpass, up on a hill, which sported a view of the entire valley, and we made plans to kill this stupid woman my father thought he needed to live with. We planned to shoot her. First we were going to harass her, and do it in a way where she never would be able to find out who it was. We wanted to drive by and throw rocks through her windows. We wanted to rob her. We wanted to take sharp metal objects and scrape up her car at night. We wanted to follow her, and accidentally trip her in shopping malls. We wanted to spill burning coffee on her. We wanted to make her life a living nightmare, after all that’s what she was doing to mine.

It comforted me, to talk about plans for justice to be delivered.

Never once in all our talking did I ever think of how hurt my mother must be. I was consumed by my own pain.

CHAPTER 7
The Vision 

DAY FIVE—SATURDAY, MAY 20, 2 00 0

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, The evidence of things not seen.

HEBREWS 11:1, THE BIBLE, KJV

On this day, I started a journal.

Journal entry, May 20, 2000:

This is going to be the story of how our marriage went through death and was restored. I make this statement by faith at a time when it seems like it’s over. But it ain’t over ‘til it’s over. This message was preached at the vision conference in Seattle in February, and Brian should have been there to hear it. He was sick that night and stayed at the hotel while I attended the meeting alone. Today God laid restoration in my heart.