DEAR EMILY,
I am 53 years old with two daughters, ages 25 and 17. My husband is 54. He and I both work in a private company. Two years ago, I discovered that he was having an affair with a 27-year-old waitress in a restaurant. The affair was already three years old when I discovered it. He got her pregnant last year, which I believe she planned. Her family is not that poor, as she has a brother who is an overseas Filipino worker.
In preparation for filing a case against him under RA 9262, an act defining violence against women and their children, I engaged a private detective to obtain all the details about the woman and the original copy of the child’s birth certificate. My husband signed it, therefore acknowledging the child as his, and is using his surname. I told my eldest daughter the problem, and she was hurt and avoided discussing it. I finished the documents needed to protect my children from any future claims of my husband’s bastard child to property, insurance etc.
My husband said he had already ended his relationship with the waitress, and claims he is not supporting the child, since he already gave her a big amount prior to the child’s birth.
He spends all weekdays and weekends with us. But I had a cell phone tracker that gives me information on his whereabouts. In August 2014, he checked into a motel during lunch break, and again in October 2014. When confronted, he admitted to the August incident, but not the one in October. He said it was a different woman, and claimed it was just a fling.
Although he was sorry again for this, I am continuously hurting and have become paranoid. I always think of my children, and cannot imagine being in a broken marriage. That’s the reason I haven’t filed a case against him. But I still want justice for all the pain he has caused me.
MARIE
Don’t you find it a bit gruesome, worrying about a philandering husband at age 53? Aren’t you degraded by all this? The more you track him down via his mobile phone and spend money on private eyes, the more you will hurt and get paranoid. Snooping around a grown man, who doesn’t care if he’s found out, is too exhausting and counterproductive. Let him loose and give him all the freedom he wants. Life is too short to be huffing and puffing over an errant husband who will do whatever he wants when he wants to, regardless of the man-to-man guarding.
You have a job, and you have two kids who need you and who you can depend on for loyalty. Why not consider having a life of your own, away from your husband’s domain, and truly accept the fact that there are some things you have no control over, like your husband? He is evidently a backslider when it comes to women and will be in and out of affairs, and will ultimately run out of apologies.
Acknowledge that you’re at that stage when any or all aggravations, minute or big, can pile up and eventually wreak havoc on you health. Why make him any happier than he is now with your demise, sooner than later? Pray hard that he lives a long life, so that when the time is ripe, he can savor the fruits of the pain he has wrought—to the hilt.
After consolidating and securing your conjugal assets for the two children, let him go—if not out of your house, then at least out of your mind. It’s apparent there’s nothing worth looking forward to with your husband anymore.
Wouldn’t you rather remove the festering wound you’re harboring now, than live with the pain and that awful paranoia, day in and day out? There are always choices. It’s your call.
E-mail the columnist: emarcelo@inquirer.
com.ph or [email protected]
