Divorce Diaries: Busy mum-of-three’s reaction to husband’s affair

When Sarah first saw the Facebook message from what was clearly a fake account, she immediately dismissed it.

She’d been married to her husband for 15 years and they had three children together. Their eldest was just finishing up his last year at primary school. Their second, who they went through years of IVF treatment to finally have, was about to start primary school.

And their third was just a wee toddler – she’d been a surprise, but very welcome addition to their family – who was still not sleeping through the night. To be fair, Sarah had barely slept the last two years.

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Life was busy. Sarah started work early – Mark did the morning drop-offs, while she left at 2.30pm to do the multiple pick-ups, the shuttling between football practice, karate and ballet classes. She was also the one who most often called in to take a sick day when one – or all – of the kids were unwell.

Her mother had a stroke the year before and had moved into care. She constantly felt guilty that she wasn’t there with her enough. Mark was doing his best to support her though – he’d often get home early so she could go to see her mum, or take the kids out on the weekend.

So, when she got this message out of the blue from a complete stranger, saying that her husband appeared to be having an affair, she almost laughed out loud.

“How?! We have no time!” she says was her immediate thought.

The message was from a woman who said she worked at the same company as Mark. She wanted to stay anonymous. But she’d seen enough to be concerned that Mark was having an affair, and said that if she was ever in Sarah’s position, she’d want to know about it.

Sarah didn’t message back – she thought this woman must have her wires crossed. Or maybe it was a scam? She quickly forgot about it. But that night, when the kids were finally all asleep, it popped back into her head and so she – trying not to laugh – told her husband about it, thinking he’d laugh along with her.

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Instead his face fell and his body stiffened.

“I asked him why he was acting strangely,” says Sarah. “It’s not what I wanted to hear, but I had a bad feeling that maybe he had a bit of a crush on someone at work. That happens and that’s ok and maybe he was feeling weird about it. It would hurt for me to hear too, to be honest.”

But, unfortunately it was a lot more than a crush. Mark blurted out that yes he’d been having an affair. It was serious. He thought he might be in love with her.

Sarah shocked herself by feeling quite calm and clinical about it.

“The first thing I said was, ‘How?'”, she says. “Not in terms of, ‘how could you do this to me?!’ But literally, how was this possible? I knew where he was every second of the day. He wasn’t sneaking out on weekends, or evenings.”

Sarah says it simply didn’t make sense to her – she didn’t believe him.

“It was impossible,” she says. “There wasn’t time for him to have had an affair. I was asking him for proof – it was quite bizarre – but I needed to know how, where, when. How did he have time for this? I didn’t have time to get my hair cut, but he had time for an affair?!”

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Many months down the track now, she still can’t really understand it. When she would think of what an affair was, before all this happened, she imagined couples sneaking out in the night, “working late”, spending a lot of time at the gym, “going on work conferences”, having mysterious things happen on weekends that would mean they’d be gone.

She imagined proof would come from smelling another woman’s perfume on your husband’s shirt – or their makeup on his collar, or long strands of hair on his clothing or in the car, or in their bed. All the cliches.

“I never, ever imagined that an affair could be something like this,” she said. “An affair that didn’t involve a lot of time sneaking around, but involved going for lunches together during the day, spending time talking at work.” Mark said he hadn’t slept with this woman, but there had been some intimacy.

“I was grilling him for every detail,” she says. “He didn’t want to tell me at first but then he said that they’d held hands, they’d kissed. They’d fooled around a bit in a car.” Gradually it began to feel real to Sarah.

“I remember thinking that I wish he’d just slept with someone – this idea that he’d slowly been falling in love with someone he was spending so much time with during the day.” Sarah says it felt like listening to a story of teenage love – these quite chaste interactions, she imagined there being this thrill they were doing something forbidden.

But what was probably the strangest part of that night, say Sarah, was that then – after he told her everything – they brushed their teeth and went to bed.

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“I must have been in shock, or still not believing it was real,” says Sarah, “because I remember thinking our daughter’s first wake up of the night would be in a couple of hours and I get my best sleep before then, so I needed to get to bed.”

The next morning she turned to her husband and said, “Is this real?” And he said, “I’m so sorry, it is.”

“For months I felt like it was almost my fault for bringing it up,” she says. “Like, I somehow made it real and made him realise he was in love and had to make a choice. I felt like if I hadn’t said anything, maybe it might not have turned into anything.”

Now, thankfully, Sarah is more sure that this wasn’t her doing, “I was so ready to blame myself,” she says. “I didn’t get angry enough that he was the one who was in the wrong.”

It’s now been eight months since the pair split, and Sarah says, if she’s honest, it’s been the hardest eight months of her life, by an infinite amount.

“To anyone, anyone, who is hearing this story who is a solo mum or is raising kids alone, you are a super hero,” she says. “I am finding it so, so tough.”

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Sarah says that she has expected things to get easier, but in fact, if anything, they’ve got harder.

“The first couple of months were a blur,” she says, “and that’s when you get help. Friends stepped in and helped out – they’d do pick-ups and drop-offs to help get me through. But after a while, life has to get back to normal and of course, that drops off. Then you realise, you’re really unequipped to do this all. We had three children thinking there would be two of us.”

The older two kids have split their time between the parents for the last few months, but that hasn’t been possible with their youngest daughter.

“She’s gone with him for the occasional day during the weekend, but he can’t do nights – she still wakes up two or three times and I’m the one she screams for. When we were together, he’d go in the room to try to get her back to sleep and she’d just scream for me.

It makes it really hard, particularly with work because I can’t drop her at daycare until 9 – and I used to start work at 7.30. But, at the same time, I’ve been grateful I haven’t had to spend a night alone since he left.”

Sarah says it’s been extremely difficult handing her kids over to her husband, who he believes is now dating the woman he was having an affair with. “It’s gut-wrenching,” she says. “I imagine her being at his new place and them pretending to be a family all together.”

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She’s looking at how she might be able to squeeze in some time to see a therapist, because she thinks it would be helpful, but she’s also worried about the cost.

“Plus, I think I’ve gotten through the worst bit,” she says. “For a long time I figured he was just tired and stressed by our busy life and found the idea of life with this woman exciting. I figured reality would set in at some stage, and then he would come back.”

But now, that’s not what she longs for. “I do long for our life before this happened,” she says.

“But now that feels like a fantasy. Now I don’t actually want him back – what kind of man has an affair and leaves his children and wife like this? He’s not the man I thought he was.”

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