"There we were: your basic American family. My husband loved his job in foreign relations; I worked from home as a writer so I could be there for our kids, a girl and a boy. Yes, we had the usual quarrels over money and time, but we seemed happy enough, with one exception: My husband was content to stop at two children; I wanted more. Every few months, we'd go back and forth about this...and he'd say, 'We have two wonderful children. Why do you want to mess everything up with a baby?'

"I saw his point. Still, I'd look at my kids, thinking about how special each was, and wonder, Who else is waiting to be born? And then, in the space of a few impulsive moments, I stopped wondering and did the unthinkable. 

 "I knew I was ovulating. I had the diaphragm in my hand. But instead of putting it in, I told myself, 'Let's just see what happens. Just this once.' And I quietly put the diaphragm back in the medicine cabinet, knowing my husband was lying in bed waiting for me, knowing that he trusted me completely, that it wouldn't even occur to him that I could deceive him in this way. Afterward I told him that I'd forgotten to use it, and eased his fears with some lame remark like 'probably nothing will happen.'

"What makes an otherwise sane woman do something like this? I can try to ennoble it, to turn myself into Mother of the Year and make my husband out to be the bad guy because he didn't want more kids. But the truth is, I was selfish--selfish enough to think I should have what I wanted and everyone else would have to adjust."

The above quotes are drawn from "Confessions: The big lie I told my husband" (Redbook, Oct. 1998), told by a woman who had two children, lied to her husband about birth control, and then had twins. The full story is below.

I certainly don't condone all of the husband's behavior here, but it is refreshing to see a woman take responsibility for her actions. What she did to her husband, in my humble opinion, is a far bigger betrayal of his trust than what he did to her in retaliation, though both acts are clearly wrong.

A marriage is supposed to be built on trust, but ours was almost wrecked by
my one thoughtless act. And no, it wasn't an affair

By Elizabeth Hume

Redbook, Oct. 1998

I've never cheated on him, nor have I ever faked an orgasm. Still, I betrayed my husband, and for that, we've both paid a very steep price. Of course, at the time of my deception, I had no idea just how far-reaching the consequences would be, or that we'd still be picking up the pieces this many years later.

There we were: your basic American family. My husband loved his job in foreign
relations; I worked from home as a writer so I could be there for our kids, a
girl and a boy. Yes, we had the usual quarrels over money and time, but we
seemed happy enough, with one exception: My husband was content to stop at two
children; I wanted more. Every few months, we'd go back and forth about this.
I'd say, "Why am I in charge of birth control if I'm the one who wants more
kids?" and he'd say, "We have two wonderful children. Why do you want to mess
everything up with a baby?'

I saw his point. Still, I'd look at my kids, thinking about how special each
was, and wonder, Who else is waiting to be born? And then, in the space of a few
impulsive moments, I stopped wondering and did the unthinkable.

I knew I was ovulating. I had the diaphragm in my hand. But instead of putting
it in, I told myself, "Let's just see what happens. Just this once." And I
quietly put the diaphragm back in the medicine cabinet, knowing my husband was
lying in bed waiting for me, knowing that he trusted me completely, that it
wouldn't even occur to him that I could deceive him in this way. Afterward I
told him that I'd forgotten to use it, and eased his fears with some lame remark
like "probably nothing will happen."

What makes an otherwise sane woman do something like this? I car try to ennoble
it, to turn myself into Mother of the Year and make my husband out to be the bad
guy because he didn't want more kids. But the truth is, I was selfish--selfish
enough to think I should have what I wanted and everyone else would have to
adjust.

The cosmic hand of justice

When the pregnancy test was positive, I almost couldn't believe it. Another
baby! Another wonderful addition to our family! Surely my husband would
understand. Surely, once the baby was here, he'd be the wonderful father he
always had been. And as soon as he got used to the idea, I could be honest with
him about the deception, and ease my conscience. But not now. Now just the news
would be enough to deal with.

And, in fact, he took it pretty well. "Wow!" he said as he shook his head in
disbelief. "Three kids!"

"Life is full of surprises," I said, a little too gaily, as I put my arms around
him. I felt the same way I had when, at age 12, I brought a kitten home from the
school fair without asking first. I might have felt guilty, but not guilty
enough to be sorry for what I did. (Maybe if my parents hadn't softened and
allowed me to keep the kitten our third cat acquired that way-I'd have learned a
thing or two about not getting everything you want and more.)

It took him a few days, but soon enough my husband was calling the relatives
with the news, and seemed, while not completely happy, not unhappy either.

At the next appointment, the new doctor seemed to take forever with the
sonogram: He moved the wand over my belly first here, then there, then back
again. Then he gave me a strange look, and asked if I had other children.

"Two," I said apprehensively. Oh, God, I thought. What is wrong? Is the baby
dead?

"I don't want to shock you," he said ominously. "But I'm definitely seeing two
babies here."

This was the only time, ever, in my entire life, that I laughed hysterically.
And it wasn't that mirthful laughter you have when you're watching a rerun of
Seinfeld. No, this time, the joke was definitely on me.

"Please stop laughing," said my doctor. "I can't get a clear image when your
belly's shaking." That sent me into even more laughter, which finally subsided
into an eerie calm that I guess you could call shock.

I walked slowly home, trying to make sense of it all. Twins! Was that cosmic
justice or what? Well, I'd wanted more kids, and that's what I was going to get.
Yes, I certainly deserved this. But what about my husband? If I had ever thought
about coming clean about my role in this pregnancy, I shoved that impulse aside.
There was no way I could admit it now.

As soon as I walked in the door, my husband took one look at me and said,

"What's wrong?"

[Photograph]

"It's twins. We're having twins." He literally staggered around the room with
his hands over his face. When I tried to reach out to him, he shook me off.

For months after that, my husband had trouble sleeping and felt understandably
anxious. Comments from joking coworkers ("Hey, buddy, you're going to be behind
the wheel for the rest of your life!") only contributed to his resentment and my
own guilt.

Luckily, the babies-tiny identical boys-were born healthy. In the delivery room
I was beside myself with joy, and even my husband smiled when he held them. Our
two-bedroom house turned into a trauma center. The twins shared a crib set up in
the living room, and neither slept for more than a couple hours at a time. They
say the most important thing in a marriage is communication. But for us, the
lines were down for quite a while. We didn't even argue with each other. If we
had a spare hour, we spent it sleeping. Later, we would pay the price for this.

But in many ways we grew up a lot in that difficult first year or two. And amid
the endless toil, there was also joy, a feeling of great abundance. That was on
good days. On bad days we felt completely overwhelmed. And my husband was still
simmering under the surface, while I refused to acknowledge it. We simply had to
be happy, happy, happy. Soon we moved to a bigger house. Everyone loved the new
neighborhood. While things were certainly not peaceful, they were getting a bit
easier.

The delayed impact

Isn't it always when life starts to settle down after a crisis that the reaction
finally hits? My husband chose the universally acknowledged method of really
socking it to your wife: a relationship with another woman.

I should have known there was something wrong when he called in the middle of a
weeklong business trip. Since he was halfway around the world, we'd agreed: no
phone calls this time-- at $2 a minute for a bad connection, they were expensive
and unsatisfying. But he called anyway-couldn't sleep, wanted to hear my
voice-and seemed more than usually sympathetic when I told him it had been a
hard week, with three out of four children sick.

When he got home a few days later, he brought us a heap of presents. He seemed
relieved to be home, more attentive to everyone. After the kids went to bed, we
made love, and as we lay entwined together afterward, I said,

"So, tell me about your trip. How was it? What did you do?"

"Well," he began hesitantly, "We had kind of a whirlwind schedule, lots of
meetings-"

"Who's 'we'?" I asked. "I thought you went on this trip alone."

"Uh, no, didn't I tell you? Ellen was with me." Ellen was a single, younger
coworker whom I'd never met but had heard a lot about.

"Hmm," I said jokingly, still clueless.

"Did she come on to you, the attractive married man far away from his family?"

He didn't laugh. He didn't say anything. I sat up.

"Did she?"

"Yes," he said in a voice not sounding at all like his.

"Are you attracted to her?" I asked with growing dread. "Did something happen?"
I couldn't believe the turn this conversation had suddenly taken.

"Nothing physical happened."

"Did something emotional happen?"

"I'm so confused!" he suddenly confessed. "Something did happen. We got very
close to each other."

I lay back in the dark. One week, and everything had changed. I tried to think,
I tried to feel-but nothing came through. Tears were running down my cheeks, yet
I felt numb inside. One part of me was denying this, the other acknowledging it.
Nothing like this had ever happened before. My husband had always been
completely trustworthy. And he'd always been mine.

By the next morning I was very much in touch with my feelings. I was hurt,
jealous, enraged, devastated. I felt physically sick. I needed to talk, to
analyze this and figure out why it happened. Naturally, he was reluctant to
share the details. And I wanted to know everything. Knowledge gave me some
power, some control, although that came at a very painful price.

Little by little over the course of the next week, like a prosecuting attorney
cross-examining the defendant, I'd ask the right questions and more information
about his trip would come out. He'd spent an evening with her in her hotel room,
"just talking." (It was after that talk that he'd called me, feeling guilty and
confused.) He'd kissed her impulsively in a park, and they'd held hands, for
after all, they'd been in a place that was far away from anyone who might
recognize them, far away, in fact, from reality in general. And his reality was
me and the kids. Each time a new detail came out, there'd be fresh pain. I'd
never met this woman, this new intruder into my life.

"You'd like her," he said once, thoughtlessly. "She's sweet." Oh, but I hated
her. She was evidently a lot like me, or rather, like the person I'd been before
I'd become a wife and mother. Had I really changed that much? I hated my husband
too, and at the same time, loved him passionately and desperately needed to know
that he still loved me and wouldn't leave me. Why, why had he done this? I
realized that my husband must be angry-otherwise why would he do something that
was so obviously hurtful to me, and then tell me about it? But he was so out of
touch with his anger that this other relationship really seemed to take him by
surprise. He promised not to have contact with her again except in a business
situation. But it was obvious he wanted to, and yet, at the same time, felt
awful about hurting me. Months later, after I thought we'd gotten through the
worst of it, I found out he'd resumed seeing her for a while, and their
relationship had progressed to a point where there'd been some "heavy
breathing," but no sex and no nakedness. After this, they'd mutually agreed to
end things. He swears this is all true, that he's not had any contact with her
since, and I believe him now. I have to.

Knots of betrayal

The long and short of it is that he didn't have a full-blown affair. And it was
over. Now we had to pick up the pieces, and try to figure out why this had
happened and what other awful surprises might lurk under the surface.

That's how Mr. and Mrs. Four-Kids-- and-a-House-in-the-Burbs found ourselves
smack-dab in the middle of marriage counseling. Now we had to talk-and boy, did
we have a lot to talk about. Seems his brief "friendship" had been partly fueled
by his resentment at having to provide for four kids instead of two, of having
his Perfect Family Plan blown to smithereens. His revelations. heated up a whole
cauldron of evil feelings on my part: anger that he couldn't just look at how
damn lucky we were to have four healthy, beautiful children; hurt that his
reaction was so immature and so, well, hostile; and last but definitely not
least, the slow burn of jealousy.

But at least we were communicating again about something other than whose diaper
needed changing. Since he was able to relate all the sordid details of his
"virtual affair" (and with a good deal of remorse, I must say), I too was
finally able to make a complete confession. "I didn't forget my diaphragm," I
said quietly. "I did it on purpose." Hearing myself say those words, I was
struck by how much like a child I sounded-a spoiled, petulant child who was mad
she didn't get her own way all the time. Or perhaps I was just hurt and this was
striking back. I might as well have said, "Boy, I sure showed you, didn't I?"
Suddenly I realized that betrayal-any betrayal-is not just an act of
selfishness, it's also an act of anger. My motives for getting pregnant weren't
so pure and simple after all; for perhaps the first time, I was truly taken
aback by what I'd done.

My husband was very angry when I owned up to it all. But strangely, he wasn't
surprised. What does that say about me? About us? We obviously had a long way to
go before we could trust each other again.

One night we lay in bed, having one of the new heart-to-heart talks that seemed
to be more frequent lately.

"What did you see in her?" I had to ask. "What did she give you that I didn't
give you?"

"It was sort of an escape," he replied.

"I just wanted something-I don't know, something simpler. Our lives are so
complicated now. You always expect something from me; I don't even know what it
is half the time. The kids need a lot of attention. This woman expected nothing.
She just listened to me, that's all."

Although I understood the longing for simplicity, that last part-about
listening-made me furious. I've always been truly interested in what he does.
Now to be told that I had never really listened, and that someone else-- someone
thinner and younger-was threatening to take my place...this was a huge slap in
the face. And I'm sure that's exactly what he intended it to be, whether he
realized it or not. What did I say about betrayal and anger?

The road to trust

The next few months were a dance of guilt and absolution, hurt and comfort. One
night we started arguing over who hadn't wiped the kitchen counter and ended up
with me throwing the phone at him and screaming, "Call her if you want someone
to listen to you, you bastard!" After a few hours, we were snuggling on the
sofa. The ups and downs of a marriage in crisis are emotionally exhausting and
strangely exhilarating at the same time. But we got through it, and slowly the
dust settled and life became more routine again. Is that good or bad? I have to
wonder. Probably both.

I'm beginning to think that marriage is always a work in progress, never a final
masterpiece. Just as the people in it are flawed and human, so is the union they
lovingly yet imperfectly create. I cannot say that things will always be swell
between my husband and me. But they are good enough to make us both want to
stay. And there are the children...

One night recently my husband put the twins to bed while I played cards with the
older kids. After a while I realized things were unusually quiet down the hall,
so I went in to check on them. There lay my husband, awake in the dark, the boys
nestled on either side of his chest, fast asleep. He smiled up at me. "Wow," I
said. "Lucky boys, to have such a warm pillow."

"Lucky dad," he said, and held my glance. Just as a betrayal can happen in an
instant, forgiveness can also come in those small moments of life, the ones we
almost miss.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Fathers' Rights/Noncustodial parents' rights, Marriage, Men's rights, Parenting, Glenn's Links, Reproductive Issues. You can trackback from your own site.