Why Women Cheat
I know, because I did it.
I mean, I don’t know why all women cheat. But I know why I did. And it had nothing to do with my husband.
I didn’t know myself as well as I thought I did.
I was a teenage mother, and sometimes I think that when I got pregnant at 17 I pressed pause on every other part of my brain. I think that I was on some kind of autopilot through the studying and the parenting and the first years of being married. Not that I wasn’t present, not that I didn’t enjoy my life, not that I wasn’t aware of its privilege and of my own good fortune. Just that I had so little time really to think. This is, I know, common to all parents, but in my case I hadn’t had a life to know or miss before my identity as a mother took over. I went into adulthood blind and when I finally had any time to sit back and look at who I was, I was already ten years older than my brain felt I should be.
I met my husband when I was 21, and I already had a toddler. So my husband and I, we didn’t get to have dates, or weekends away, or lazy lie-ins with newspapers and croissants. We went straight into a full-throttle family life and pretty soon, we had a couple more babies. It was a chaotic, skint, lovely time, but I didn’t have any time to think about anything beyond the day to day.
