This is my plan. I am sending the emails jackass wrote back and forth with his girlfriend to his mother AFTER the divorce is final. No sense in mucking the process up. Here is my 1st draft. I actually feel a little better after writing it all down.
Dear Soon-to-be Ex-Mother-in-Law,
Enclosed you will find 16 pages of emails that I discovered back in March 2005. These emails are what got this whole divorce ball rolling. I’ve highlighted pertinent information**.
In December of 2003, I received a phone call from an anonymous girl. She knew my name, she knew where I lived, she knew jackass. She told me she’d been sleeping with him since before we got married. Jackass of course denied it. The emails attached, however, confirm that he knew all about this girl. And that he lied. The funny part is (if you can call a pained expression of denial funny) he never had any intentions of telling me about any of this, over or not. It was the one thing, and I quote, he would go to his grave with.
Your son didn’t want to be married. I don’t know if it was specifically not to me or just in general. His recreational activities were always more important than me. There wasn’t any “we” between us. He made sure to keep his things separate from me. We did not have anything joint between us.
I have a theory. The day of our wedding, the day he went in for an emergency root canal, I think one possibility of you and he being late coming back was that he panicked and didn’t want to go through with it. And you might have talked him in to it. I don’t know. I could be wrong. I was certainly wrong about him.
I do know that he made me feel crazy. Crazy for thinking he was cheating on me when my gut instinct was that he was cheating. I went to a therapist and she put me on anti-depressants which made me numb. I didn’t feel anything.
And then six months in, he came home one day and said he was miserable at home, he was miserable at work. He wanted out, he wanted an annulment. Somehow that didn’t happen. But it probably should have. All this happened concurrently with the attached emails.
I also know that he’s probably fed you some story that you believe to be true because he is your son. But you should know that he’s also a liar, a cheat and unworthy of being loved by anyone because he’s not capable of giving it back.
I thought at random moments during our brief marriage that maybe he did love me. But the masturbating in the bathroom while I was in the next room would shake me back to reality. And the weekends he was actually home he spent with his friends flying airplanes made me realize I wasn’t a priority. Ever. And I never would be.
Do you know what he said he loved about me during one of the phone calls jackass and I had after I left? The fact that I cooked, stayed home and was home when he got there. It wasn’t that we had fun together, or cooked together, or that I was smart, or a good writer. It wasn’t anything that made me “me”, they were things that benefited him.
The credit cards were his way of holding on to something I had done wrong so that he didn’t have to fess up to what he’d done. He made it his excuse for cheating on me. He believes the credit card debt and his cheating are equal. And in his mind, they are. But talk to anyone with common sense, and you know this to be wrong. I didn’t leave and then run up the bills. The debt was already there. And he’s partly responsible for it. Every time he changed jobs, credit cards had to be used to get by. I shopped to fill the void he left when he decided his friends were more important. I couldn’t tell him not to go with them. That was his decision to make.
I just thought you should know. Yes, I’m sending this partly for vindication, partly to set the record straight and partly because I really wasn’t your daughter-in-law. If I was, I might have actually heard from you after the separation.
**all 16 pages will be highlighted
