His wife

I have just read Mei Del's post here about lovers of married men and contact between the lover and the wife. This got me thinking about the unexpected telephone call I had from the wife of the man I was madly in love with when I was 22. This affair and everything that happened had a devastating effect on me which lasted 20 years. I thought I would write a post about this phone call but before doing so I checked to see if I had already posted about it when I first began blogging. I had done so here as part of a post about the man I loved so much that it put me off love, this in turn led to me marrying a man I didn't love.
The conversation went something like this.....I will probably not be totally accurate as this happened some 24 years ago.

Hello LIR?

Speaking.... who is this?

Sandy...............I am C's wife (to me she sounded like an old lady)

What do you mean your his wife (I thought this was someone playing tricks on me) he isn't married anymore.

Yes he is he's married to me.

How did you find this number, no one knows I am here except my family

There was a piece of paper in C's case with your phone numbers at home and work with a list of days and times (that was the days I was free so he could phone me, I worked part time as a barmaid in the evenings.) I phoned your home and your brother said you were at your grandparents. I told him it was about C so he gave me the number. (my brother later said that she had been crying and as she sounded older he thought it was C's mother and something had happened to him).

I don't remember how the rest of the conversation went, I was in shock. I was beside myself with all kinds of emotions, the next 2 days until I could speak to C seemed to last forever. The previous time I had seen him he had said that he wanted me to have his child. In my naivety I thought that was his way of saying that he wanted to marry me. this made the phone call from Sandy even more of a shock. Now I am older and wiser I realise that what he really wanted was not another wife but another child. His first wife had taken his daughter away and he never saw her. His second wife, Sandy had two daughters who were now grown up with babies of their own. What C wanted was to be a daddy. At the time I was too blind to see this. I was in love with him and that was all that mattered. This new revelation that he was still married was a shock but I soon came to the conclusion that I loved him too much to give him up.

He convinced me that he didn't love Sandy, that he had rescued her from an abusive husband, taken her and her girls in. She had wanted to get married so he married her because he felt sorry for her. He told me about all the times she tried to harm herself, either cutting her wrists or taking overdoses. Each time they had a row she would do something to get herself put in hospital, he would get a call from the hospital so he would have to go and play the doting husband, he hated it.

Not long after the call, they had another row and he turned up on my doorstep some 80+ miles from his home. He couldn't stay at my parents home so we found a B & B for the night. The next day he got the call to say she was in hospital so off he went again........this went on for a few months. He would leave her, come to me she would injure herself he would go back to her I would hear nothing until the next time. I don't know how I got through these months, even when I wasn't seeing him because he was back with her I was still getting the hate calls from her and her elder daughter Liz. Some of them at 2am, it was affecting my whole family. At least at work all calls came through the switchboard and I was friends with the receptionist, so she screened my calls as much as she could. In January 1985 he came to me this time it was all over he was never going back. we found a bedsit to rent for 3 months and moved in there a few days later. It was 5 minutes walk from my work. It was the first time I had lived away from home, although I had been collecting bits and pieces for years so I had pretty much everything we needed. We had a small kitchenette in our room but had to share the bathroom across the hall. To me it was heaven to be living with the man I loved, our little love nest. It was ok for me as I was working all day but C was bored. So he went off to find work. he didn't return for 11 months. 11 months that saw me on the verge of a breakdown because I kept everything inside, I refused to get upset until I heard from him.

When eventally he did come back he told me that he had had a call from the hospital, he went to visit, but she persuaded him to stay, He hadn't been able to bring himself to tell me he had gone back to Sandy. It took until August 1986 for that episode in my life to be over.

Those two years had taught me that if you love someone you get hurt, so I opted out, I didn't ever want to get hurt so badly again. It was only after I had my Cancer that I realised I had spent twenty years just letting life pass me by. Now I intend to live my life and that includes the risk of getting hurt