Just curious......Who was dealing with the A, WS and OP during 9/11/01? How did all of it affect you?

d/d for me was Nov 2000. When 9/11/01 came, it was devastating. The WS was soo in the fog even then. Compassion wasn't high on his list. Only the A. Sad isn't it?

At least it's not so anymore. Still it brings up a lot of hurt and anger. Our company had client's who lost employees, friends and family in that disaster. I recall feeling frustrated and very angry that I couldn't do anything to stop the pain that reverberated all over the world.

The anger of that event is felt even today. The terroristic acts remind me of the selfish beasts who plague our lives. They come in many forms. The one constant thing I see is that those who are bitten with this selfish virus....can't be happy.....not for a minute.

Maybe somewhere in all that misery is the key to unlock the antidote to kill this plague. I think it is a simple key.....one that doesn't cost much to enforce. But it can have deadly consquences on those who try to fight it. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

JMHO,
L.

I was dealing with my WH's strange, detached behaviour. He was grumpy to the kids, indifferent to me. And I was clueless as to why, other than guessing it was his ongoing health issues. I remember thinking that my problems suddenly seemed so small compared to what was going on in NY.

Very soon after, Time Magazine issued a remembrance book with the most graphic photos of 9/11. I bought it for him and gave it to him with a card saying something to the effect that we needed to focus on what really matters, because who knows what tomorrow will bring.

But still it continued, and it was more than 5 months later that I finally found out WHY he was such a knob to live with.


Edited: Just realised Dday was actually Feb 2003, not 2002. The madness was going on for ages before I found out.

My wife and I were about 4 months post D-Day (May 2001) for her first PA when 9/11 happened.

Although I didn't know it at the time, the OM was still attempting to make contact (after 3 mutual post-D-Day contacts between them). He was an absolute pathetic creep who would call her work voice mail and play portions of love songs into it. Yuk.

Anyway, I work in the Intel Community and frequently spend my days at the Pentagon. She knew I was due up there that week, but I had blown off the visit for several days. I would not have been anywhere near the site of the impact anyway.

My wife was a teacher and I later found out was quite upset (crying, etc) that she couldn't get in touch with me. The phone circuits were overloaded, my building was in lock-down, etc.

Her emotional response surprised me. I was still wondering if this woman cared at all for me since she was refusing to go to counseling and seemed to spend all her efforts to "forget it and move on."

It added another element of confusion and distraction to our recovery. I was working extra long hours afterward for several months and found out during all this about the voice mail messages he was leaving. Frankly, other than being wrapped up in the aftermath at work, all of the post-9/11 events were a blur in the background of the insurgency I was fighting in my home.

9/11 is trigger for my BS because it occurred during my A, so it reminds him of the damage done!!

I selfishly cringe everytime they broadcast stuff about it, because I know that the next thought that pops into his head is a painful one!

9-11 was a catalyst for his affair. let me explain. we live real close, in fact we use to be able to see the towers almost everyday. have lots of family and friends who work and live by there. my brother works for united and was supposed to be on flight 93.(he didnt go in so he is fine). anyway, up until that point i think there was just some flirting going on. when 9-11 happened i think hubby went off the deep end. i believe this tragedy brought on a crisis similar to a mid-life crisis in him. he figured what the he//, we may all die tomorrow. by thanksgiving i was planning on leaving him it had gotten so bad....his detatchment and no family involvement. he even went so far as to tell me my oldest son had to get out. took a lot of his anger out on the poor kid. well, after years of neglect and no real intimacy i called a friend and told her i was done and made a plan. she was moving and i was gonna rent her condo for me and the kids and we would take it over in feb. well in december it all blew up and he confessed.

to this day i still cant deal with all the memorials and shows....it hurts for sooooo many reasons.

OMG the luck for your brother! If I may ask--why didnt he go on the flight?

Immediately after 9/11/01, I asked my ex-Husband to leave. I thought that since the world was going to heck in a handbasket, I wanted some happiness in my life. He didn't leave until almost 2 years later, but I'm still damned glad that he's gone.

aeri
Thank you for my first good chuckle of the day!!

Like Nikko's H, 9/11 was a catalyst of sorts for my affair. I was already depressed and in therapy. The day of my first counseling appt was the day Andrea Yates killed her children. When 9/11 happened, I went into frantic survival mode and pretty much went off the deep end. I started building up the food supply, reading about nuclear war, I wanted to dig up the yard for a fallout shelter. H wasn't very receptive to my freaking out. I felt very unsafe and very alone, no one could relate to my panic.

That is when I started looking for something to fill the hole I was creating. I started calling old friends ( in the spirit of making contact and saying final words before WWIII started). I found first love and he fed right into my survivalist mode. We bonded over talks of hoarding animal antibiotics in the event of biological warfare. H had talked about having me committed to a mental institution and FOM thought I was the neatest thing since sliced bread.

9/11 sent me on a tangent. Yesterday I thought alot about the past 5 years and what I would change about the path I have taken.

I don't mean to sound like I am justifying, I truly regret my affair and no there was no reason for me to become an adulterer.

I was a year into recovery. I was still numb.

I remember feeling jealous of all those widows/widowers. All of the stories they recounted about losing their "rock... the love of their lives made me envious I wished I could have traded places with them. I remember wondering if what they saying was really true. Were all of those widows/widowers really happy before Sept 11th? Were any of them going through what I was going through on Sept. 10th. How many of them were but didn`t know it. Yeah...I had very dark thoughts.

Those thoughts were all over the place though...I wasn`t thinking that all the time. I went from feeling grateful that my firefighter H was safe beside me to feeling that I would have prefered to have been a 9/11 widow than to have been betrayed.

Obvioulsy I got over that and thank my lucky stars that I am not a widow now.

I wonder if I would have reacted differently overall to 9/11 had I not already been somewhat numb and already feeling groundless.

I recovered my M but I haven`t recovered from 9/11 yet.

>Compassion wasn't high on his list.

This was the Wookie. He had just begun the A with that tart.

Yesterday was he11 for me.

me too D----

in response to why my brother didnt work his shift....he had gotten hurt previously. a bevarage cart got away from one of the other attendants on another flight and he got slammed by it. screwed up his back pretty good. he was hurting that day and called out. however we(his family) didnt know this. it was hours before we found out he wasnt on the flight. it was ******.

Kimmy,

My H freaked out more then I did too. He literally became physically ill at work. He was still with the fire dept at that point and working another job as well. Had we not already been in recovery I do believe that my H would have chosen that moment to have an A too.

I am sure that you have heard about all those firefighters who survived only to wind up having affairs and even leaving their wives for OW/firefighter widows. There were so many men who did just that Oprah did a show on it. I have been wondering how things turned out for all those couples. Are the ones that left their wives still with the OW widows? Were any of them able to recover their M`s? Do those men now five years later regret what they did?

I wish Oprah would gather those men together now and do a show about how it all turned out.

I've thought about this the last few days...wondered if I should post but since I haven't posted in soo long I didn't do it.

Our d-day (#3) was 9-10 first thing in the morning. H moved out that night and 9-11 was the next day. He called me and said look at the T.V. something weird is happening etc. I was getting kids off to school and my world was shattered. I couldn't comprehend what was happening in N.Y. It didn't register how big it was.

I was so numb and so dead for days...didn't tell anyone what I was going through...the pain was horrific. It took until that thursday to have my meltdown and I remember telling H that my body and my guts felt like the world trade center! Total collapse and destruction.

It was a long time before the magnitude of 9-11 sank in for me.

Today is my 25th anniversary. We are together. D-day was 2 days before our 20th and we were separated then. Not good.

I am reflecting a bit today. Writing this is painful but I'm glad I did.

I may add more later...

He was in the first A during 9/11. He was so detached and cold. I remember so clearly standing in the paint store picking out colors to paint our living room wondering why we even cared what colors I chose! After all she was his "soul mate" and he was gonna leave me anyway. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/rolleyes.gif" alt="" /> It was just over a month later that I exposed to OWH. I wish I had MB back then. I could have nipped this thing in the bud before it went PA. I wante to expose and had people convince me it was vengeful to do. She worked for the state government and was using state computers to communicate with my H. grrr... I had her at the time. Exposing to her H did indeed kill the A though they eventually D'd anyway.

Yesterday was painful. I thought the first A was pretty far behind me. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/frown.gif" alt="" />

Yesterday sucked on toast...with the images of the towers and the field and the Pentagon, then then images of me going to the Wookie and wanting him to hold me and not understanding how he could be so cool and detached at the time.

I was a mess by 9 pm last night.

Mess.

My STBXH was about 3-4 years into his "friendship" when 9/11 hit. Our son was at his school and my girlfriend phoned me, in tears, announcing "We're at war. They hit the World Trade Center in New York." I thought it was the end of the world, possibly. Drove over to son's school and picked him up. If we were to die, I wanted to be able to comfort him.
H called from work. He wanted to keep working. They closed his building and he was forced to leave.
When he came home he went for a walk with his cell phone.
The girlfreind who had announced the war to me saw him talking on the phone. She didn't hail him because she assumed it was something to do with work. She later mentioned that she had seen him and what she thought. I didn't correct her.

I knew that all of the phones were shut down, that no business was going on AT ALL and who else would he have been talking to but the OW?

Yesterday I pushed the memories away from my mind about that phone call. Of course, he was cold to me. Didn't want to talk. No comfort. No warmth, no touch, no affection. It all went to that woman.

Divorce pending after much indecision. Pain is different now.

{{{Bellevue}}}

This is my first post, I have been lurking off and on for a while. This topic hits waaaay too close to home. D-day (#1) was 9/15/01. I am a native NYer, my brother had an office in WTC, but was out of town visiting our other brother who was dying of cancer.

When I discovered the A, the turmoil of the world seemed to pale in comparison to the turmoil in my home. I am guessing that most of you will understand that feeling.

9/11 this year was particularly bad because I learned a few weeks ago that WH was having an EA with a different OW. He is military, just transferred overseas. I have to decide whether or not to join him.

Sometimes life is just hard.

Peeksy
BS 47
WH 46
married 23 years, 2 DDs: 20 & 17
D-day #1 (PA/EA) 9/15/01
D-day #2 (EA) 8/14/06

Peesky,

Welcome to MB. I am sorry for what you are dealing with. It has been going on for a while?

Have you read any of the books from here? How can we help you?

Hugz,
L.