I’ve had almost 3 months to cool off from my latest earth-shattering drama. I mean, “cool off” is quite an understatement, because I’m still incredibly livid. I guess you can say: I don’t know how to start.
For the 2nd time in my life, even before hitting the age of 40, I am going on my possible 2nd divorce.
I knew the move Jorge was making to San Antonio in 2018 was going to destroy us. Either he’d fuck up, or I would. But the money was amazing, he said. The kids would be 100% taken care of, and shit: if things worked out–eventually I could quit my job and we could work together!
I didn’t like the idea from the beginning and I even remember telling him, as he stood with his back against the sink in the kitchen and I stood directly in front of him, that I felt like history was repeating itself. I felt everything that happened with Mario at the end of our marriage was happening to us now. Except for the cheating part, of course, but everything else matched to the “T”.
He said it would be 1 year at least that we’d make these sacrifices and be distant, but we’d get to visit all the time!
That was ok while it lasted; the little weekend trips to San Antonio and to visit the in-laws in Austin. Less than a year later he wasn’t getting paid the way he was supposed to and missing one paycheck and then another and then it was around the 3rd missed/late check that completely screwed us up and turned our bills upside down. It was impossible to catch up after that. He told me to quit paying our credit cards (which were actually MY credit cards since the majority were under my name) and our cars were about 2 months late. My car almost got repo’d once. But we worked together and thanks to his mom and my brother, we were able to stay afloat due to borrowing money from them. Along with money troubles come frustrations and fights, and we had a lot of those. A lot of the fights had to do with how hard/much he worked just to come home and find the house in shambles (I’m sorry if my depression due to my husband being away didn’t exactly make me want to clean and tidy up the house). Or how the kids and I were supposed to wait on him hand and foot just because he did work so hard and he was away from home and had just driven for 4 hours and why the fuck do I come home then?? I heard so much of how mediocre I was that I began to resent him (just like I did with Mario, because he did the same thing). The worst was when he had attitude about the kids–man, that pissed me off.
Refresher: January 6, 2019 is when Jorgie and Justin moved in with us and basically, I became their sole parent since Jorge wasn’t here and they weren’t visiting their mom for a few months. Add to that the stress of basically being a single mom, wanting to start school (because hearing how worthless I was had really taken its toll on my self-worth) and missing Jorge and just feeling overall lonely–and my anxiety and depression skyrocketed.
I had originally gone in February 2019 for a refill for my topical acne medication and to see what else I could do because my cystic acne had come back with a vengeance and my period was on the fritz again. I walked in for acne meds and walked out with anti-depressants and pills to help me sleep because I was once again clamping down on my jaws and teeth from stress.
The meds caused me to become lethargic and I slept every chance I got (which is really unlike me). I stopped running, I stopped my Keto lifestyle because I just didn’t care anymore and gained 20 lbs. in 6 months. Then I started drinking to help me just get through the evening alone after the kids were in bed. My depression got worse, especially while on my period. I started becoming unbearable even at work when I was on my period (snapping at the guys, even if they did deserve it sometimes) and cried randomly when I was on one of my “lows”. The worst part was: once it started it wouldn’t stop.
Jorge started working as the District Manager for a popular restaurant in June of 2019. Only…it wasn’t here at home, or even the same county. It was in San Antonio again. He did his training in the Valley for 2 months and then around August he took off to San Antonio, a couple of weeks earlier than he was to, originally. Again he said it would be for just a while and one day he could transfer.
Jorge would come home for 2-3 days a week at first. Then 2-3 days every two weeks. Then every three weeks. Other times he’d be gone three weeks and he’d say he was going to come home for a whole week because it was so unfair how long and hard he was working and he was going to put his foot down! but he would still only be here 2-3 days and then some emergency would happen and he would leave.
We went from texting our updates to each other throughout the day, talking several times a day, to texting sparsely, to speaking on the phone only once before bed and then…2-5 texts a day and no phone call at night. I knew by then either we’d been apart so long that we’d gotten comfortable with the distance or something was going on. By this time, I’d become so numb and so depressed that I just needed to make it through the day. Go to work, pick kids up from practices, spend time with the kids and make dinner, then watch TV for a bit with them and go to bed, then do it all again.
After Christmas 2019 (one of the worst Christmases on record) he came home briefly and left before New Year’s Eve. But not before asking to borrow my Audi, and he would leave me his Mercedes for me to use meanwhile. I told him how going from an SUV to the car made me feel SO paranoid to drive, I didn’t like that I couldn’t connect my Bluetooth correctly, and the seats were messed up and uncomfortable. And what did he want my car for anyway?
He snapped. “It’s my car. I PAY FOR IT. And I want to take it. You’re being really spoiled right now.”
So that was that. Like always, the big man reminded me that I couldn’t afford anything. I conceded and he took the Audi.
Alaethia had just gotten over Flu B over the Christmas holiday and now poor Justin and Jorgie had it. I got out of work on New Year’s Eve and went straight home to pick up the boys and go to the night clinic. My biologicals were with Mario for New Year’s Eve this year, so he picked them up. Jorge was going to come home that evening so we could celebrate the incoming new year together, but excuse after excuse kept coming.:
They were “understaffed”.
They were “swamped”.
They were “getting tons of orders for New Years, WTF??”
“Emergencies” kept happening. And so on.
By 10pm he’s telling me he won’t be home till the next day and he “felt bad” and texted, “Are there any friends you can go out with?” Alarms went off. Typical cheating man thing to say. Mario did that too. I replied, “All of my friends are with their families, nobody is going to meet me to party and I’m not inviting myself anywhere.”
I was supposed to make shrimp cocktail to celebrate the New Year and I’d gotten us some Rancho La Gloria drinks to celebrate together on the patio, the way we used to, just us, when we first moved into the house.
The boys of course were miserable and stayed in bed. I watched TV with Bentley on the sofa. That’s how I brought in the new year: alone.
He doesn’t come home the next day, he comes home on the 2nd. There’s something awkward about him, but I don’t know what. Everything was just off, and he was in a bad mood, as usual. Javi came down, too, and was going to stay with us for a while. I finally make the darn shrimp cocktail, and I made way too much since I’m used to making enough food to feed a small army.
On Saturday morning Jorge and I go for breakfast buffet at Taco Ole. It almost felt like the old days! I’m feeling lovey and giddy. We’re almost done eating and he’s texting on his phone and announces that he’s going to drop me off and get ready to go. I said, “Go? Where?” He said, “I thought I told you, Princess, I could only stay till today. I absolutely have to go back tonight. It’s a Saturday and I have to close. I should have actually left last night.”
I couldn’t believe it. I just stared at him. I almost wanted to just start crying right there in the restaurant in front of everyone. It was so weird and disconcerting that he was just so used to not being home anymore. I always knew he was a hard worker. But this was something else.
He didn’t come home for his birthday on January 13th.
He did stop by on the way back from a meeting with his two co-workers on the 15th and I met them at Rudy’s. Something was weird about his co-worker, Christina. She couldn’t look me in the eye for a while and it was odd. He said, “She’s just weird like that.”
Justin borrowed my car to go see his girlfriend the first weekend of February. On the Monday after that weekend, as the girls and I were getting into the car to start the day, Emily opens the back driver door and says, “Hey, who’s phone is this?”
There’s a burgundy-colored LG phone with a really cracked screen on the seat. I can still turn it on and it says “Aweh Brother Love” and has 2 babies on the lock screen and a Gmail email address that begins with “Sabrina”. I had a weird feeling but I told the girls, “Ahh, Justin must have had a ton of kids in my car. I’ll ask him after school.”
I picked Alaethia up after school and I’d forgotten about the phone until I saw Justin at home. I ask him about it and he says, “Oh, Nailea found the phone in between the seats. She thought it was mine. I don’t know who’s it is so I just threw it back there.” I said, “Seriously? You didn’t have more kids in the car? I automatically thought you had tons of girls in the car.”
So. I text Jorge and ask him if he knows who it belongs to. He calls me immediately and says, “Princessss. Why, when something happens you automatically think it’s me?” I said, “Um, you were the only other person to use my car. Justin already said it’s not his or his friends’.” He said, “I don’t know why it’s there then, doesn’t make sense.” I seriously and irrationally start thinking, what if someone tried breaking into the car and they left it? What if it was a homeless person while he was in San Antonio? I didn’t know what to think anymore and I felt crazy. Justin and I start looking for that email and search through Facebook. There are lots of people with her name. I’m not sure what to look for. Weirdly, Justin gets a Snapchat request from someone with the exact name. He sends a message but never receives anything. I send an email to the email address and never received anything either.
Jorge didn’t come home for Alaethia’s birthday, which is January 24th. He didn’t come home till late on February 11th, on time for Valentine’s Day.
That night, as we got into bed, we actually had a serious talk. I told him how distant I felt us and how I felt like we were falling apart. He held me as I pathetically cried and promised me that we were fine, I was his best friend and his family was my family. That he loved me and we were great. I told him it didn’t feel like it lately.
Javi and Jorge picked me up from work for lunch at Kumori on Valentine’s Day. He brought me flowers and some succulents. He asked me what I wanted to do for dinner, but I just felt off, so instead of going out we got some tequila and ordered Palenque and stayed at home with Javi..
Fast forward to March 2020. Mary (my ex-mother-in-law) wanted to get a head-start on Alaethia’s Quinceanera stuff so we’d started going to Expos and Open Houses, etc. We were on our 4th event by March 4th and we (Mary, Mario, Alaethia, Emily and I) walked into the hall, sat down and it wasn’t long before they were serving us the sample plates. Suddenly, I get a call from Jorge–which is extremely odd because it’s 6:30 p.m. and he hardly EVER called during the day anymore. I answer and tell him they just served us and he says he HAS to talk to me, it’s important.
I go outside to take the call and he tells me he just got into a car accident. Now, this will be the FOURTH time he either crashes or has the car side-swiped. So I go through the usual motions and questions: Are you ok? How bad is it? Was it your fault?
He’s oddly calm and says he’s ok. That it was his fault; he was trying to turn and the driver in another car let him through, but then another car didn’t see him and hit him. The entire driver’s side was crushed and an airbag popped in the center pillar. He said he was lucky that the driver door airbag didn’t pop. He chuckles and says, “That car is cursed!” I dryly say, “Yeah, or it could be the driver.” He says, “Que suerte! And it happened just down the street from my mom’s!”
Women’s intuition is a strange thing, isn’t it? I felt it in my bones that he was lying. That something about that conversation was very off and it was strange that the photos he sent me were sent almost an hour later and were SCREENSHOTS. I finished the rest of the dinner feeling uneasy and having to slap a smile on my face.
Skip forward to Monday, March 9th. I get out of work and go straight to pick up Alaethia from practice, like I usually do. I park in the parking lot to wait for her and I get a call from an Austin 512 area code. I never answer calls from numbers I don’t have saved (they’re usually bill collectors), but something told me to pick up. The person on the other line is a man named Frank, and he was calling from an attorney’s office in Austin, Texas and was inquiring about the accident I was in last week. I’m trying to slowly process the info and ask, “Accident last week? I haven’t been in an accident?”
He says, “I’m calling about the 2012 Mercedes Benz.” I say, “Oh! That was my husband, yes. That’s his vehicle. He had an accident last week.” He says, “Ok, what is your relation to Sabrina R.?” And then I remember the email address on the phone and everything just comes swirling back in and starts making sense. I tell Frank, “Well, maybe you should be asking my husband about Sabrina, because obviously I have no idea what he’s doing in Austin and San Antonio.” Frank is very apologetic, and I give him Jorge’s number. I hang up and think, Dammit!! I should have gotten a copy of the police report!
I call Frank back and ask him for a copy of the police report. He quickly obliges and apologizes again. He says he’s been calling my husband but he doesn’t answer. I say, “Oh yeah, I have been, too.”
Alaethia gets in the car and sits silently as she’s listening to my conversation. She asks to go to the mall and I tell her I’ve got some stuff to figure out, to ask one of her brothers, please.
I immediately get on our family chat with his mom, sister, brother, him, and his uncle. “So who wants to tell me who the fuck Sabrina R. is??” Everyone sees the message, but of course, no one answers.
Alaethia gets a text back from Justin that says, “You should go home. Now’s not a good time.”
She shows me the text and I feel irrationally angry. The first thought that pops into my head is, “Holy shit, he knows??”
We get home and the house is quiet. The boys are both not here and neither is Javi. I feel like everyone knew and I feel stupid and hatred to my core. It’s at this point that I lose my shit and scream. I couldn’t believe what was happening.
Briana finally answers in the family chat and says, “Sis, call me.” I very dramatically say, “No thanks. I know where I stand with this family.” She calls me immediately and I’m crying and angry and say, “What do you want??” She starts explaining that she wanted him to tell me right away when he took her to the apartment after the accident. He went and picked her up from the hospital and took her to the apartment and kept her there the next day while she recovered and he and his mom went to see another car for Justin. That was the reason for them being over there: Dinah was going to buy Justin a car. Briana said she was against it and was pissed off when she saw her just hanging out and watching TV as if she belonged there the next day. I said, “WHAT?? They stayed together at the apartment overnight??”
At that moment, I start getting a call from Jorge. I tell her and we hang up. I ask him, “What do you want, you piece of shit? Have enough time to get your story straight?!”
Of course he starts asking what’s wrong with ME. Why am *I* writing those things in the family chat? He says Sabrina is just a co-worker and she was just helping him take the car to Austin because, how was he going to drive Justin’s car back on his own? I said, “Really? She was the only option? Nate or Art couldn’t help you?” It turns into a yelling match and he denies, denies, denies until I can’t stop screaming and he finally admits it. He says she was a huge mistake. That he couldn’t get out of it once it started. (I *STILL* don’t understand what the fuck that means.) That she was all drama. I told him to come home tonight to explain and get his shit and of course he says he only has 2 people working, plus himself, and he can’t leave till the morning. Typical story. I’m sure he warned her and gave her ample time to get her shit together, because I find out from her ex-baby daddy (oh yes, I tracked him down that same evening) that she’s a drug addict and he was trying to get custody of their son, she was homeless, didn’t have a car and that every time she had visitation that she arrived in either my Mercedes or my Audi (later on Justin told me he always had a hard time getting her red or blue hair out of the carpet in the Mercedes when he’d clean it). I ask baby-daddy if he knew how long she and Jorge were together. He said she started arriving in my vehicles around September/October. (WOW) Baby-daddy said he was with her, then she cheated with a 19-year-old kid who would supply her with drugs, then around September, when Jorge started working at the restaurant she worked at, they started talking. I was livid. I start putting two and two together and realize that all the time we were having money troubles he was shacking up with her at hotels. Then they started LIVING together at his AirBnB in January when he got it. The AirBnB I had just given him $500 for to pay for the month of March. I can’t believe it.
The boys came back that day and said they went to their mom’s (whom they hadn’t seen for a while) because they didn’t know where else they were supposed to go. That broke my heart again. I told them that no matter what, this was their house and nobody was going to uproot their lives.
Javi got here a little later and said he had no idea what was going on until he went over the messages. He didn’t know. I believe him.
To make an already long story short. He got home the next day and I wanted all the details. He admitted that yes, when he was renting hotels she was with him. He admitted that they did in fact live together at the AirBnB but that he was only with her since after his birthday, not September/October. That that was a huge lie, and whomever told me that was wrong. I said I didn’t care, he could live with her for a week, A DAY, and I didn’t give a fuck. What was done, was done.
I told him to get all his shit and leave.
I did what a typical woman scorned would do: I put Sabrina and Jorge on blast on Facebook. I blocked him on all social media. I also sent her an email, a message on Facebook and Instagram and she NEVER replied. Typical cowardly home wrecker. I didn’t care how petty it made me look, either.
I didn’t know what I was going to do. Like he’d said so many times: I couldn’t afford the bills on my own. But I was going to figure it out and he owed it to me and the kids to help me.
On March 21st my mom went into diabetic keto-acidosis and she had a bad case of para-influenza, which in turn caused her to have a heart attack. I was the only relative to a patient allowed in the entire ER due to Coronavirus, and only because she was in such shock when she arrived that her mental state seemed completely abnormal. My grief went from mourning the end of my marriage to praying that my mother would make it through the weekend.
I was…emotionally exhausted.
He wanted to work things out. Make things up to me. But I just felt so…disgusted. He kept coming and going and with Covid-19 on the rise I finally allowed him to stay here, but on the couch.
I received flowers and cards daily for a couple of weeks and was brought breakfast in bed, he took me lunch while he was on leave, dinners I wanted and he even cooked almost every day and cleaned without me asking him to.
(That lasted 2 months).
I still don’t know what I’m going to do. Everything triggers me. He stayed for a while and then I kicked him out again because I found their receipts from their outings together and her drug test forms that she kept in the glove compartment of the Mercedes. I guess she left them in there for me to find a little sooner than I did. And I also found out more things he lied about.
Then he came back, again.
Jesus. Writing things out makes me feel even more dumb and more lost. But I’ll figure it out. Eventually. For now, I’m concentrating my energy on the kids, my mom and losing the additional 10 lbs. I gained the month of March, after I found out. Now I have 30 to lose 😡 .
