Carlie Maree is a writer and life coach from Yarra Valley, Australia, who remembers the exact day her life changed forever. On May 22, 2015, she received an email simply titled, “Your Husband,” from a woman who had been carrying on an affair with her spouse for more than a year. In a blog post on the parenting website MamaMia, Maree writes how this woman who reached out to her was out for blood. Going into sordid detail after detail, she wanted to inflict pain.
It all started following the birth of her and her husband’s child in 2013. It’s not an unfamiliar story. Maree was a stay at home mom with a six month old child, and her husband worked long hours. It’s a trying time for any marriage. And at some point, Maree’s husband took solace in a pretty barmaid at his local watering hole. And as Maree writes, that’s when everything fell apart.
Sometimes I wonder how much of it was him trying to find what he had lost in me. I was once a cute blonde in a short skirt behind the bar at his favourite pub. Ten years later I was the mum in the yoga pants with the silver regrowth and bags under her eyes from being up all night with a sick baby. He was supposed to love that version of me too. And he did, but he missed the girl who had nothing but time to dote on him. That’s what you gave him.
Eventually her husband came to his senses and cut things off with the mistress, deciding instead to work on his marriage. The mistress had other plans, however, and decided instead to burn it all to the ground.
Just like the old cliché, you believed he would leave me for you. But he didn’t. He let you down. Our daughter got older, stopped nursing and started sleeping. He began to see the woman he had fallen in love with all those years ago. He wanted to make it work with his wife, with his family. I bet that hurt for you. You had a choice. You could let him move on and try to make his marriage work, or you could take it all from him. You chose option two.
She continues that although she and her husband tried to repair their marriage, in the end they just couldn’t make it work.
We tried hard to put the pieces back together but it just didn’t work. I was different. It was the little details that did it. Those words and images etched into my mind. I think you knew that they would. We are both ok now though, me and him. In fact, in a way we are closer than ever. We have learned so much about each other through this process. Though we have each moved on, we still have love and respect for each other, which has a positive effect on our little girl. No one will ever break that.
In a follow up, Maree told the Daily Mail that she didn’t compose the letter out of revenge for her husband’s mistress, saying, “I wrote it for me, not for her. Writing has been such a massive part of my healing. I don’t wish her any ill-will.” She continues, reasonably, saying that the woman did a really awful thing, “But ultimately she’s just a person who fell in love with someone who was totally wrong for them. And who hasn’t done that?”
Well, let’s hope that she gets the solace she needs out of this.
(Via MamaMia, Daily Mail)