Rachel,
In a nutshell:
Married 18 year with 2 kids.
To the best of my knowledge (and my snooping
), A started in April 01. I don't know when EA became PA.
W dropped bomb in August. When asked, she lied about having OM.
I moved out in late September.
In early November, my son got a phone call from W of OM. When confronted, W still denied A. Eventually, she admitted A and a week later, she told me that she broke up with him. Two days later, I got a call from my kids telling me that mom snuck out of the house at 5am to meet with OM.
Within a week, I moved back home.
Two weeks later, W moved out to live with OM, then moved back home two weeks later.
On New Year's Eve, W told me that it was over with OM again and she wanted to try to be a family again. Initially, W was not comfortable sleeping with me and eventually moved into an apartment that we have in our home. At this point, I knew that the A was over, but W was obviously in mourning over the loss. She was in a deep depression. She wasn't able to function fully around the house. Even though she was in the house every day, I was still doing all of the grocery shopping, preparing dinner, making lunch for the kids, cleaning and doing all of the laundry. After dinner, she would get up from the table, go into the den and within ten minutes, fall fast asleep on the sofa. She would wake up at about 11pm, and then go up to her apartment and go to bed. Anytime that there was the slightest confrontation with the kids (13 & 16), she would immediately retreat to her apartment.
Her recovery was slow. She lived in the apartment for two months before she was comfortable moving back in with the family. She slowly began taking on more responsibility around the house. I think that my restoration of trust was as slow as her recovery.
I feel that now, she is pretty much back to normal, and things have been great between us. Every day I think about what happened, so I probably will never trust completely. Don't get me wrong, I trust her now, but it is not blind, naïve trust as it was in the past. However, I think that I now know the signs to look out for, so that history will not repeat itself.
Rachel, I hope that this answers your questions. If you want more detailed info on what I was going through at the time, you should take a look at my threads. I did a lot of journaling when I was at my low.
John