I'm one promiscuous poster these days. There's just nobody to talk to late on a Sunday.

After being treated badly by the sparrow on Thursday, hearing today that my WW took OM to her family's cabin for the weekend, and that his W is changing her locks and filing tomorrow, I'm feeling quite hopeless. Plus, I have to contact the sparrow and tell her I feel it's better that she not stay at the house at all this week.

I expect my own WW to file quickly. With the OM's D getting started, I reckon she'll be anxious to become officially available to him as soon as she can.

I see no path that will lead her to sanity. I can plan A until I'm blue in the face, but what will it matter? Once she gets moved out of here she'll avoid all contact with me and she already acts like we're strangers.

I know I have to care for myself, and that this effort is meant to lead me to peace and acceptance should things go to their conclusion. But this powerlessness is a nightmare. I have to sit here and watch calmly while these people tear up the last shreds of the life I had put all my faith, heart, and soul in.

GC

<img border="0" title="" alt="[Frown]" src="images/icons/frown.gif" /> <img border="0" alt="[Teary]" title="" src="graemlins/teary.gif" />

Praying for you graycloud...

Yup, your future is nicely arranged on the shelf. There's our house, the kids we planned, the cottage, our careers, grand kids, retirement etc. etc.

Along comes someone and sweeps it all on the floor and walks away. No remorse, no apology.

Ironically, the one person you can turn to in times of horrific crisis to support, nurture and help heal you is the one that did it.

Feels like your guts just were spilled onto the floor. A piece of you missing. Your mind poisoned.

It goes with the territory. The feeling of helplessness is overwhelming.

Take some advice from here, think, read, and take care of yourself. Keep doing the "right" things, the ones to keep your marriage a viable alternative. Don't burn bridges, and don't be a doormat, though you may feel like one.

Burning bridges is a great temptation. I feel like putting their pictures on a billboard. I want to tell my W's boss (even though OM no longer works with WW), all the sparrow's relatives all the way to her grandmother and her dead father's brother. I want everyone to know and for her to be made ashamed. There's little she fears more than for people to know when she's done wrong.

I want to reveal the information I've gotten from OM's wife (our correspondence is still a secret). I know so much more than the sparrow realizes. She probably still thinks I'm buying her "right now we're just good friends" jive.

Thank you, chackler, for your prayers.

GC

Exposure, done appropriately, is a worthwhile option. It can be done without burning bridges. Read this post: Revealing the affair to the light of day

In my frustration and hopelessness, I'm starting to think seriously about the "scorched earth" reveal.

What I said about the sparrow being terrified of shame is seriously true. Being viewed in a bad light is probably her greatest fear.

Her extended family is quite close. Her mother's three sisters are all great friends. Her father passed away when the sparrow was 16, after a long battle with cancer. This extended family was a lifeline to the sparrow and her mother and sister. I believe if these women all knew she was "having an affair with a married man who has a small child and a pregnant wife" rather than "wants to divorce GC because they have grown apart", they might take some kind of action. One of these sisters, the sparrow's godmother, has stayed with her husband despite his chronic alcoholism and infidelity over the past 30 years.

I hesitate for three reasons. First, it would be a big LB and I would become the bad guy that throughout plan A I have avoided. The sparrow might decide to never forgive me. Second, her 82-year-old grandmother (her dead father's mother), with whom she is quite close, would probably find out. She just lost her brother, who was a very influential Catholic priest. She has had many difficulties in her life. She was abandoned by her own husband and left alone to raise her two children, and she has outlived a son and several siblings. She is devoutly religious and would be extremely disappointed in the sparrow. I would not enjoy letting her find out what her granddaughter is doing. Finally, this revelation would require sharing knowledge that I only have through secret contact with OM's wife.

It may be time for this measure, but if I'm going to do it I need to be sure. And I'm not quite sure. I might talk to MIL, who supports me, and see what she thinks.

GC

Dear graycloud,

I believe I have some understanding of what you're going through, graycloud; there are likenesses about your situation which are haunting me at this very time myself. I feel like someone's torn my heart from me from inside me before I even had a chance to sit down and ready myself. There's no way to describe the hurt adequately, is there? Alot of people will be thinking about you right now, and we are hoping that your path will lead you into the happiness you deserve, that it will be illuminated for you clearly, and that life will embrace you with a perhaps (at this instant) unexpected turn for the better with your struggle, and barring that, a happiness which in some exceptional way will eclipse the sadness you must be feeling. I 'understand' much of what I suppose you would be feeling right now. I will be saying a prayer for you tonight and into the future as well.

Mark,
Vancouver, Canada.

"I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year,
give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.
And he replied, "Go out into the darkness,
and put your hand into the Hand of God.
That shall be better than light, and safer than a known way."

Louise Haskins - Quoted by King Goerge VI in his 1939 Christmas address to the people of England at the beginning of the Second World War.