The Affair

[Anna Herrington]

(When someone wrote this, I had to respond....it got me writing, anyway!)

Her name is Isabel. I’ve known about her my entire life; she is the neighbor who slept with my father over and over again when I was a baby. Isabel was also married, they were good friends of my parents. There still are so many photos of the whole crowd, at picnics by the river, at cocktail parties, neighborhood gatherings.

I felt responsible for this affair my entire childhood. I must have cried a lot. I was in the way. I made my mother unappealing….

I am 55 now. I know I am not responsible for my father’s affair with the neighbor, carried out… 55 years ago, now. But still. I know her name, I think of her, I wonder about her.

The mark she and my father left on our family has been indelible.

I’ve always known the story:

Mom finds out Dad is sleeping with the neighbor (Who told? How did Mom find out?), confronts my father, tells him to stop it now or she is “outta’ here.” Mom then marches over to Isabel’s house, confronts her — and her husband, I guess — tells her to leave our family alone.

My siblings, then ages 7, 10, 15, and me, the 6 month-old, are all sat down and told the whole story (this part I heard from my aunt — she knew — I’ve never quite understood this aspect of my parents’ openness towards the children, but….it’s just part of our history, now).

The specter of Isabel has followed me ever since, it seems, although Isabel is still alive, in her nineties now, living in another state than the one we lived in during their affair.

Isabel. What can happen to a marriage when you’re not looking, when you’re busy, when someone else wants to feel safe, or alive with excitement, or just doesn’t care your family exists. Isabel. When someone decides to cross the boundary of marriage for their own interest.

Isabel.

I know she was pretty. There are still photos around. I know nothing else about her. What she was like, what made her laugh, what intrigued her…. other than my father.

That’s the legacy she left in our family, that’s all that has lasted of her in our story: she’s the woman who took Dad’s attention while I, in my infancy, was taking my mother’s time.

In our family, Isabel has been reduced all the way down to this: she is The Affair.

Some vestigial child’s part of my mind still thinks I must have been part of the problem, even though I really do know better than to blame myself, by now. The useless thoughts still arrive, albeit rarely at this point. Only when reading assertions that someone else’s affairs are ‘okay’ (and I’ve had my own moments as an adult, I get it), or, when hearing that someone finds benefit in crossing another marriage’s line: reassuring themselves, justifying to themselves, it’s not their problem, the marriage, The Other One. What they don’t know can’t hurt, right?

So many do know, though. They find out. The kids learn. Respect disappears. Was self-respect ever there?

I still sometimes wonder if Isabel is the reason my first memory is of crying endlessly in my crib and no one ever comes (Was Mom crying, too? Was I just a mistake? One big mistake?), so I give up crying and watch the sunlight play across the wall. The shadow of the window frame moves from one corner of the wall to the next before someone comes in to take me out of my crib.

These memories have lingered, have been shoved away, yet they wander back.

When Mom was in hospice dying, forty-plus years after the affair between Isabel and my father ended, I joked with my aunt, the irreverent one, that Mom would die in ten days, on Isabel’s birthday, and finally get her revenge. That Isabel took up space in any of my thoughts while my mother was dying I still find rather sad.

It became my one prophetic moment: ten days later, on Isabel’s birthday, my mother died.

Today when I went to look (why?), to see if Isabel was still alive (her husband died a couple years ago, I see), I noticed for the first time a listing for her relative, must be her daughter, a woman two years older than I. Isabel’s daughter. She would have been two, then, during the affair. A toddler.

Does she know?

Was she just another troublesome child who got in the way?

Has my father’s existence followed her around, like a ghost that won’t leave, all of her life? Does she have a full and complicated pile of baggage dragging along behind her that is encapsulated in just one name, too?

For some reason that creates a tiny smile on my face, I feel less alone — less ashamed — knowing about Isabel’s daughter, only a couple years older than me.

I begin imagining one day I might find an article written with just one name as title, an article about a long ago affair that must have been rather thoughtless, had to have been rather selfish, one that left its mark for a lifetime on another little girl. A story titled: Woody.

[Jonathan Wolfman]

Hell of a thing to live with.

[Zanelle]

This is what writing is for... such thoughts get in our heads and need to come out.     My mother tells of many couples in the fifties who strayed.  It wasn't for her and dad but seemed to be a neighborhood thing.   Now with the internet the world just opened up to everyone but I can see it hurt you and I am sorry.   I just don't have a jealous bone and love free love as a child of the sixties.  I just can understand how some people just want more than monogamy.  I'm so sorry you felt like part of the blame was on you.  I blame the social system.  Thanks for writing!

[alsoknownas]

As children we get mixed up about some imagined role we play in family dynamics.

It can fester until it seems like something that belongs, when it's really something that should be cleansed away and forgotten.

Easier said than done.

[JMac1949 Today]

This much is clear to me: None of it was in any way shape or form any fault of yours. You bear no responsibility for what happened.

For whatever it is worth, I never understood sexual jealousy...but I did understand the value of a promise and so despite the opportunities to cheat I was faithful through the duration of both of my marriages.  Now the idea of a sexual encounter seems to be more trouble than it's worth.  I guess that happens when you get old. ;-)

[koshersalaami]

It's a hard thing to accept that the only things you are responsible for are the things you can control. No one sane can hold you responsible for existing. I have no idea if your existence was used as an excuse. I have a very good idea as to whether or not it should have been. 

I grew up in a tradition that does not hold with original sin. Maybe that's a bigger advantage than i think. 

There was a time in my life when most of my close friends near my own age had had sex with married people. At that point I accepted that this was more common than I had realized, even though it is not something I could understand or relate to. 

For this and other reasons, I find the Pina Colada song nauseating.

I'm so sorry you had to put up with this feeling for so many years and also what your first memory is. That's a very bad foundation. 

I don't think you'd want to talk to Isabel. You don't know what drove the affair from her end. 

I've seen this dynamic before, though. A guy gets married and sees his wife at her worst and so many of their interactions are mundane and about problems. Another woman is in his life, perhaps a neighbor, perhaps at work, and she is always put together, and their interactions are more limited and more interesting, less tired, more appealing. It isn't a function of the difference between the two women, it's a function of the different circumstances under which each woman is seen. And some people just aren't attentive enough to understand what the differences are really attributable to. 

I don't make excuses for affairs. They're wrong. In many respects, they're fundamentally mean. The idea of deeply hurting my wife for the sake of my own pleasure or appetite is too repulsive to consider, and being repulsive to yourself is the worst. 

A question: If you have/had these older siblings, why do you feel alone in this? 

[nerd cred]

This took my breath away. Not Isabel and your father - there's no one to blame there but your father, to my way of thinking.

This: my first memory is of crying endlessly in my crib and no one ever comes ... I give up crying and watch the sunlight play across the wall.

Could it have been just one day - a nap when you were outgrowing them? Back then we were supposed to let kids cry it out. An hour might seem endless to a tiny kid.

But I put it on your mother, not your father or Isabel. No one could rival my mother for wallowing in suffering and magnifying it as much as humanly possible and then more but she wouldn't have done that. Unlike your mother, she was a freak for babies. (That's why she had so damn many.)

I hope your sibs were in school at the time because even in my family, which felt so unhappy, with kids at their ages - 7, 10, 15 - that wouldn't have happened. One of the kids would have rescued you but by 10, certainly, we were used to taking care of babies and were as much crazed for them as mom was.

I have nothing to say helpful except have you talked to your sibs about it? (If that had happened in my family there would have been physical violence - mom would have whupped Isabel. She was big and strong.)

But people do things. It affects the kids but isn't caused by them. I had a friend whose mother moved her lover in with the family. The dad just moved to a different bedroom and mom and dad picked up where they left off after the lover died.

[Alysa Salzberg]

This is such a strong, complex piece - like love, lust, marriage, parenting, themselves.  It makes me think of so many things - memories, would -have-beens, what-ifs.  And I love how, at the end, you find a sort of solidarity with Isabel's daughter.  That's beautiful and also so complex.

This piece is just....it hits so many chords with me, for so many reasons, and you write it so well, so honestly and beuatifully - this is one of my favorite things you've ever written - and that's coming from a big fan.

Thank you for sharing this - I think it can help people work through so many different emotions and experiences. I know it's been a helpful read for me, even though it also pains me to read that you still feel a sense of guilt about the affair.  

[Cindy]

Winnie, a name I shall never forget.  Guilt, but for other reasons.  After my fathers early death I found a letter in his briefcase.  A letter to his Winnie speaking of love and sadness.  He met her while picking out Christmas bikes for his girls, he loved her so but would not be with her, would not leave and hurt his girls.  He stayed with my mother, the shrew, for us.  I left the letter there for my mother to find.  Hoping it hurt her, hoping she felt some bit of his pain.  I wish I could find her now, thank her for giving him love. At 34 he had so little of it and then he was gone.

[Anna Herrington]

Hi guys -- this was written all at once, and minimally edited, in response to this other woman's post about how wonderful her affair with a married man is -- and I just thought how little does anyone think about what goes on for the children, what lasts for some children, so I posted one 'child's' experience.

Many children wouldn't have the same response, maybe most wouldn't have parents who sat their kids down to tell them all. My parents weren't into secrets. I guess I've raised my children similarly, same with my husband and I.

On re-reading, I see how it's more my child's mind writing -- my adult mind gets it, how affairs happen, how they work for some, how children take on responsibility for adult actions, inappropriately. That for some, it's an open arrangement. In this case, open was not part of the promise of their marriage.

I do understand affairs of the heart better than I do affairs of the flesh, personally, but that's just me.

What stuck out for me in the beginning - on reading this other woman's post what my mind went to - was how much Isabel lost her personhood in my family by having this affair with my father. She literally became The Affair. Isabel the woman was reduced entirely to this phrase. ( ... although she wasn't the only one, so much so, that anyone who looks remotely the right age and was born in the sales territory of my father's, I look at them a little closer (are you my sibling??) ha! ridiculous, pointless, maybe... but so my mind goes.

Will respond individually asap, how cool to check in and see all your thoughts and comments!!

thank you : )

[anna1liese]

Sending love to the little girl ... who ... carries all of this ... still ...