My daughter is 10. She is such a good child, very respectful and well-behaved, gets good grades, lots of friends, etc. Her, my wife and I have always been a very happy, cohesive family unit. We rarely fight and there has always been so much love and light in the house.
Over the past couple of months though, there’s been a change in her behavior. It might be my fault. Whether or not it is, I have to figure out what to do from here.
The first major change that our family has had is that our daughter is in her first year at a new school. My wife, for the past few years, has been a substitute teacher at a private Christian school. The school has been growing, and they’ve been so impressed with her that they invited her to teach full-time in the elementary school. This also allowed our daughter to start going there without us needing to pay tuition. As an aside, my wife and her family have deep roots in Christianity, and I can say without a doubt they are very good people, not the hypocrites you hear about all the time. That has made it tolerable for me and I even go to church with them sometimes. However, I’m not on the same level and consider myself to be more agnostic than anything.
At first, our daughter was devastated that she would be changing schools and losing friendships. However, a few of the girls in her new class went out of their way to befriend her, and after a few days she went back to her happy, normal self. A change for me in all of this is that I work from home, and have been used to having my wife around a fair amount. The school is a half hour commute each way and many times she works late to do grading or meeting with the other teachers. It’s been lonely, not gonna lie, and I guess that leads me to change number 2.
Some background here before I get into it - I’m a cheater. Yes, I know I’m an awful person. It was especially bad early in our marriage (we’ve been married 11 years). I have deep-seated addiction issues, low self-esteem, low confidence, some abuse in my early days, and for many years found my value in whether or not women wanted to sleep with me. I know all this because I have countless sessions of therapy and counseling under my belt.
I know I said earlier our family has been a happy, cohesive unit but I guess that’s not always true. My wife did find out about the affairs. She found out about one, I came clean about everything, she took some time to process and eventually she (and her parents) forgave me. The therapy and counseling that I enrolled in seemed to help, and I thought I was in the clear.
But then I met this girl and everything changed.
It’s almost like we are the exact same person in different bodies. She’s married, same age, same background of abuse and affairs, we have very similar occupations so we can “talk shop” when it comes to work, we both work from home. Like, it’s crazy. Our compatibility is off the charts and I’ve never felt a connection like this. I’ve had plenty of other affairs and I couldn’t care less about them after. Something about this girl, man. We talk all day since our spouses aren’t around, we talk after they go to bed. She’s all I think about. And her eyes. When we have sex, her eyes almost look as if they transform from brown to black. Like her pupils get so big they overtake her irises. It’s mesmerizing.
You don’t need to hear all the details though. The point is, ever since the new school and the new woman in my life, my kid has been having night terrors. Well, they started off as nightmares early on but they’ve been getting progressively worse. At first it was the usual - had a bad dream about a pet dying, or maybe something involving a scary movie she accidentally saw a preview of on youtube. More recently though, there has been a recurring theme of something more sinister. She can never describe it well, but she keeps seeing “a bad man” coming for her. She wakes up screaming most nights now.
Her bedroom is upstairs and ours is downstairs. When it was the generic nightmares, she would just come down and ask to lay in bed with us. No big deal. As they’ve got worse though, I would hear her screaming all the way upstairs. I’d sprint up there and hold her until she calmed down.
We’ve been letting her sleep on the couch lately since the living room is right next to our bedroom. Hasn’t helped, but at least we can get to her quicker. As the night terrors have got worse though, it has really been affecting her attitude and her personality.
During the day, she’s now very quiet and reserved. She seems almost distant according to her teacher, and she won’t really talk to us at all (me especially). My wife gets more one-on-one time with her on the drive to school and back which she can sometimes coax a few things out, but overall it’s just not the same.
One night, I had enough. I found her in her room and confronted her. At first, she wouldn’t even look me in the eyes. I could see her face glistening with tears in the moonlight peaking through her window.
“He told me everything,” she said.
I had an idea who she was talking about, this person who kept appearing in her nightmares. I have no idea why, but my heart sank. Maybe I had an idea of what was coming.
“You can’t ever see or talk to her again. It might be too late as it is, but maybe….” her voice trailed off.
“Maybe, there’s a chance.”
I stood there in silence, unable to form any words. My heart was pounding and it felt like a drum in my head. All I could do was turn around and walk downstairs, and try to put on a happy face for my wife.