Several months after I found out my husband had repeatedly been unfaithful, I still didn’t know whether I’d stay or go. I didn’t even know if the new throw pillow on my couch would stay or go. I was a terribly indecisive woman. When I told the counselor at my kids’ school how uncertain I felt, she said, “It’s not hard decisions that mess up kids, it’s indecision. Your kids need to know which way this is going to go.”
I said, “Well, they can’t know until I know.”
She said, “You need to figure out how to know.”
Back then, the only way I knew how to know was to poll and research. I began polling. I called each of my friends, hoping that they would know what I should do. Next I began my research. I read every article I could find about infidelity, divorce, and children, hoping the experts would know what I should do. My polling and research results were maddeningly inconclusive.
Finally, I turned to the World Wide Web to see if an invisible conglomeration of strangers, trolls, and bots knew what I should do with my one wild and precious life. That is how I found myself in bed at 3:00 A.M., shoveling Ben & Jerry’s into my mouth, typing into my Google search bar:
What should I do if my husband is a cheater but also an amazing dad?
My seventeen-year-old son, Chase, and his friends are in the family room watching a movie. I’ve been trying to leave them alone, but it’s hard for me. I understand that most teenagers think their moms are uncool, but I am certain I’m the exception.
I stand at the door and peek inside. The boys are draped all over the couch. The girls have arranged themselves in tiny, tidy roly-poly piles on the floor. My young daughters are perched at the feet of the older girls, quietly worshipping.
My son looks over at me and half smiles. “Hi, Mom.”
I need an excuse to be there, so I ask, “Anybody hungry?”
What comes next seems to unfold in slow motion.
Every single boy keeps his eyes on the TV and says, “YES!”
The girls are silent at first. Then each girl diverts her eyes from the television screen and scans the faces of the other girls. Each looks to a friend’s face to discover if she herself is hungry. Some kind of telepathy is happening among them. They are polling. They are researching. They are gathering consensus, permission, or denial.
Somehow the collective silently appoints a French-braided, freckle-nosed spokesgirl.
She looks away from the faces of her friends and over at me. She smiles politely and says, “We’re fine, thank you.”
The boys looked inside themselves. The girls looked outside themselves.
We forgot how to know when we learned how to please.
This is why we live hungry.