Mar 17
SETTING A NEW LOW IN STANDARD IN DEVIATIONS
Libraries: The Newest Cheater’s Hot-Spot — Statistically Speaking
My husband met another woman every day right under my nose.
Have you ever had one of those lightbulb moments where the revelation is so jarring it leaves you knocked over, short-circuited, and smoking for a while?
I have.
One fall day, after my husband had been gone a while, I had a long-overdue ‘aha!’ moment.
Duh! Where had I been?!
I realized that for a couple of years before he left, he’d had open dalliances — right under my nose — and I was too dumb to notice.
Go To the Head Of the Class(less)
Dear Hubs was in the process of getting yet another degree at age 50+. He told me that while I was busy at work during the day, he planned to be at a nearby library ‘studying.’
He reasoned that studying was easier to do there than at home. I remember thinking this was odd, seeing as he was the only one home from 9 am to 7 pm.
However, I shrugged it off and went on.
He later told me that he left each morning schlepping his book bag because he was ‘tutoring’ a fellow student in mathematics at the said library.
I never asked who the said student was.
As it turned out, the ‘fellow student’ was a beer-swilling, recently-widowed, upper-middle-class Stepford wife around our same age.
We’ll call her Mrs. Jones — not her real name.
So man damsels, so little time.
Awww, poor Mrs. Jones — she was struggling with statistics. My husband, the knight in shining armor, had to step up and help her.
She was at a critical point in her curriculum.
Too low a final grade in statistics would most certainly get her booted from the nursing program, and she already had a tenuous cumulative GPA.
Poor thing. How would she support herself if she failed to graduate from the nursing program and sit for her RN licensure?
Furthermore, how could anyone with a beating heart expect my husband to sit idly by and not respond to the siren call of a damsel in distress like this?
Her well-paid professional husband had recently died.
Who else could she turn to for help? Her friends? Her professionally-degreed neighbors? Her family members? Her daughter with a Master’s Degree in Business working in the financial sector?
No, she didn’t need to turn to these folks; her ‘help’ was right there.
My Johnny-on-the-spot (Summa Cumm Laude, times two) husband promptly arrived at nine o’clock sharp each morning to assist her.
And the band played on.
I took his explanation at face value. I trusted him explicitly. Why wouldn’t I?
I loved him; I had no frame of reference to think he would be unfaithful — at least then.
Even though this Real-Housewife-of-Orange-County-type widow was not the woman my husband eventually ran away with, no one will ever convince me that this so-called ‘tutoring relationship’ was ever on the up-and-up.
Experience and pain have both done their much-needed work to help me catch a few clues and wise up.
“Dummy up!”
This was a phrase Dear Hubs used to condescendingly snark at those less savvy and not as intelligent as he deemed himself to be.
I see now that I topped that list.
I’m sure he thought — and no doubt still thinks— that I am as dumb as a box of rocks.
He is wrong. I simply trusted when I didn’t know better.
We live. We learn. We motor on.
