Cameron: How to Save Your Family

This little story was inspired by an article that I read online about a man who kept a family secret his entire life and it was only revealed after his death. I'm trying to give it a modern context and I have ignored the COVID pandemic implications going on around the world, as I work from my home, going out only when I need to. This is my escape from reality.

Many of you will see that I've recycled some of the names and places, so be it. Some of you staunch defenders of the humble comma, that commented on my vigorous use of commas in my last story, will be happy that I have worked to ensure that the comma is given its proper place and usage. At least I have tried.

This one is a bit shorter than some of my other offerings, I know that keeping some reader's attention is a task not easily met, thus I have worked to reduce my 'wordiness' as so-called filler. However, some fail to realize that the thoughts of the characters are important to the story being told; psychology and all that complex stuff.

Finally, I want to remind you that not all of you will be in favor of the main characters actions in this story. Some will decry that he is not 'man' enough. But what is a real man? Is a real man a stereotypical character inspired by bad comic book inspired movies? Or is a man someone that makes the hard decisions that puts others needs and welfare before his own? And, can people actually change? That's a big question that I have and have not been able to fully answer.

I leave you to form your own opinions on those questions. You will see my thoughts in the story; but I don't have any conclusions to share.

Enjoy.

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2014

Hello, my name is Cameron Donavan. I'm 34 years old and I live in Albany, New York. I'm married and have three children. I got up this morning thinking that this would be a different day than yesterday. I resolved to do something about a very difficult problem that had been bothering me for a while now. Today I had an appointment to see a lawyer to explore the options that I might have. I knew that there weren't that many options, but I had to have some recourse to deal with this issue. I mean, there has to be way to deal with her.

She's been bothering me now, for a while; and by a while I mean almost a year. That's how long she's been fucking around on me.

You want to know what the hell I'm blabbering-on about. I'm talking about my wife, Brittany. I call her Britt. It seems that she has been having a weekly rendezvous with a boyfriend. Or lover, or whatever the fuck you want to call him. You see, I figured out that Britt was having sex with some other guy quite by accident. A friend told me. Not a good friend, mind you, but someone who I realized was actaully a friend, nonetheless.

I was stunned when she told me. She told me because she was the guy's girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend, now. She came to my office. Was pretty straight-forward in what she said, and then after a brief discussion, whereupon she dumped this avalanche on me, she left. As she was leaving my office, she turned and said that she was done with her boyfriend and then she wished me good luck. I was going to need it. Was I ever.

I had no fucking clue what to do. My brain was in a flat spin. The pilots out there will know what I'm talking about. How to recover from that kind of information was the thing that I needed to figure out. Jesus.

So, I find out that my wife is having sex with some younger guy every week. Now what the fuck do I do? I went home that night not having a clue. My intuition told me to not confront her immediately, but to get a handle on the options open to me. I mean, was the girl that came to my office just a nut-job babbling nonsense, or was she real and credible. I didn't know.

I problem solve at my job. I'm a business consultant. I'm a CMA and CPA. I spend all day, almost every day, trying to figure out complex financial and management issues and organize solutions for multi-million-dollar clients. It pays pretty good and I enjoy the work. Some think that it's boring as dog-shit, but I find it a challenge. I like solving complex problems.

I know what you're thinking. The wimpy accountant is just some boring, balding, ugly fat guy that can't get it up any more and his wife needs to find a real man to satisfy her needs. That my wife is hanging on to me for the money and security that I provide. Well, that's isn't entirely true. I'm an inch shy of six feet tall and have a full head of dark brown hair. I wear glasses. I weigh-in at 185 pound and probaly have a few too many of those pounds around my middle, maybe ten or so, and yes, I suppose I could exercise more. I'm not an ugly asshole, if that's what you're thinking.

So, now I had the mother of all complex problems and it was sitting across the dinner table from me and telling me that the weekend was going to be busy with getting the kids to their activities and we had been invited to go to one of our friends on Saturday night for drinks and finger-foods.

I looked at her mouth moving and for the love of me can't remember one actual thing that she said. No matter. I'll talk to the kids and they'll tell me where I have to take them to, and when. My youngest, Davey, is the easiest, he pretty much sticks to me like flypaper; he's my pal.

Britt is always on top of the family schedule. Without her organizational talents the kids would be in all the wrong places at all the wrong times. Or so she says.

*********

I met Britt back in university when I was getting an undergraduate degree in business and accounting. I was about to graduate and she was a year behind me studying basket weaving. I call it that, but it was officially a degree in design; not building design but the interiors side of it. We dated, got married, screwed like rabbits and before you know it, we had three kids. Two girls and a boy. Laura is 10, Diane is 8 and David, we all call him Davey, is 5. They're all in school and they all have busier social lives than I ever did. What is up with programming every waking moment of kids' lives these days. When do they get time to play; go out and get dirty and have fun. Something is not right with that. But I digress.

**********

A week later, after the revelation by the very pissed-off young lady that came to see me, I was sitting in my office with my yellow legal pad and making copious notes about my 'problem.' I came up with an outline plan:

Step 1 -- Get a better idea of the scope of the problem.

That meant that I needed more information. That meant that information had to be gathered and sorted. That meant that I needed the right resources and tools. I didn't want to bug my own home or sit in my car trying to catch my own wife, so I hired the best people to do that for me.

I don't have a clue about how to do surveillance, so I made some calls and hired the appropriate person to get me the information that I needed. The agency is one that we use for other tasks from time-to-time but they do this kind of thing as well. Katrin Johnson was a very good investigator. She had been a police investigator for several years and then decided to move on to private enterprise and work for herself.

She came to my office and we spent an hour talking about what it was that I wanted her to do. I gave her a recent photo of Britt and as well told her where she worked. Britt is an interior designer, so is in and out of her office quite a bit. I suppose that gives her a convenient excuse to meet up with her boyfriend whenever she wants.

I told Katrin that I have not ever seen any outward signs that Britt is fucking around. She's always where she needs to be for our family at the right time. She never smells different, looks different or acts different. We have busy lives but we are intimate usually once or twice a week. I work hard to make sure that my wife is the focus of my attention both in our sex lives and everywhere else. My family is VERY important to me. Without my family, I would be a total wreck. Right now, I'm starting to doubt my ability as a husband. Why else would Britt go looking for sex with another man? Clearly, I'm not doing it for her. I guess it's simple. At least it seems that way right now. But I have to put my failings aside for now.

So, I passed over a retainer check for $2500 and asked Katrin to find out what the fuck my wife was doing.

That took two weeks. During that time, I stayed the course and said and did nothing that would tell Britt that I suspected something was wrong. That was an agonizingly tortuous two weeks. Katrin came back with her report. It wasn't good.

She had collected evidence that Britt was meeting up with a guy, once a week, from a wholesale furniture company that her company does business with. She got his name and some basic information about him. Dean Billings. The guy is single and doesn't appear to have a girlfriend to replace the one that ditched him, yet. They meet at his apartment and usually spend two to three hours together. When she leaves his place, she always goes back to her office. She works there until it's time to go home. She doesn't meet up with him on days when it's her turn to pick up the kids from school.

Was Britt in love with this guy? Was she planning to leave her family for this guy? What was her plan? Katrin was able to find out what Britt was doing, not necessarily why she was doing it. That was the harder question. Would I ever be able to get an answer to that question. That started eating at me.

Step 2 -- Get legal advice.

I know lots of lawyers, so I called one that works for our firm to get her recommendation for a family-law lawyer. What I got was the name of a shark. A shark in a blue skirt. Leeann Smith. She is widely known, in legal circles, as being a go-for-the-throat, take-no-prisoners, kind of divorce lawyer. She pretty much always wins for her client. She hates cheating husbands and cheating wives. Seems that her own husband was caught cheating with another woman and is now living in the proverbial refrigerator box under the bridge. Maybe that's an exaggeration, but you get what I mean.

I booked an initial appointment with her to tell her my story and discuss my options to deal with Britt. I took the investigators report with me. What I got was a fast tutorial on divorce law in New York.

The courts of the state are very concerned with the welfare of children, as they should be, and the courts usually give custody to the mothers unless there is a compelling reason not to. A compelling reason might be that the mother is unfit by way of illness or disability, is incarcerated, or is basically a bad mother (i.e., a crack whore), and it's well documented.

So, with that foundation poured in place, that means in the majority of cases the father is the one to ante-up a big part of his income to support his family, in the style to which they are normally accustomed. That means the father will be forking over lots of money for many years. My kids are little so I could anticipate paying for a very long time.

It seems that adultery is not really a consideration in family law, so far as the courts are concerned. A marriage certificate is really just a glorified contract that says that you agree to be tied to each other, until the court says that you are un-tied by way of the Dissolution of Marriage decree.

Marriage now is really just an agreement that two people will combine their efforts and resources to the betterment of the two of them and any children that may came along. Emotions, love, and those kinds of feelings are not really part of the marriage business anymore.

Who you have sex with is really of no concern of the court, as long as it is with someone of legal age and is consensual. So, the fact that my wife is having sex with someone other than me, every week, is not an issue that the court will take into effect. So sad, too bad. Where does that leave me?

Well, Britt would get both child support and some spousal maintenance; a.k.a alimony. I would get very little time with the kids, likely every other weekend and probably a few weeks in the summer. That's not being a father. I'm not sure how to describe that, but for me that would be hell. I love my children. I was part of the planning process to create them and I fully intend to remain committed to their full-time welfare and lives. Certainly not every other weekend and two fucking miserable weeks in the summer. Nope. Not going to happen.

Were Britt and I to separate or divorce right now, the best I could hope for would be shared custody, which meant the kids would essentially live in two homes; each about fifty-percent of the time. That's not good for the kids.

In addition, I'd be paying the lion's share of the mortgage on the house and of course, the cost of another place for me to live. If Britt and I do share custody, the place where I will need to live will have to be big enough to accommodate the four of us. I could kiss goodbye to any concept of retiring before I turned seventy.

Besides the overarching concerns of the State and the Courts regarding family breakdown, what it all meant was that Britt would really get paid by me to continue having sex with other men, even more often, and in my house, probably while my children were not far away in their beds. No fucking way was I going to let that happen.

As you can now surmise the biggest concern I had was for my children. How their mothers need for extra-marital sex impacted them was the greatest issue I had right then. I had done some initial research on the internet to get an idea of the impact that infidelity has on children. It's a lot. I wanted to do whatever I had to do to insulate them from the fallout of Britts affair.

Leeann was pretty stark in her assessment of the impact of family law in NY State. Was it unfair? I seemed to me that it was skewed in favour of women, in marriages with children. If there weren't any children then it became a much more equitable concept. Mostly just the splitting of assets, 50-50, and then everyone goes their separate ways, marriage is done. Easy-Peasy.

After I left my lawyers office, I went back to my own office, closed the door and started to think about what I was going to do. What did I want? I sat for two hours looking at my yellow notepad and all my scribbles. It was all I could do to not feel like my world was ending. It seemed like it was. A wave of hopelessness rolled over me. I took a lot of very deep breaths and held them until I had to let them out. Just before I left to go home, I wrote down at the bottom of my notepad, and circled it: Protect the kids - at all cost!!

That's what I was going to do. I would have to eventually confront Britt if her actions got to the point where it was having an impact on the kids. It had already had an impact on me; but right now, I didn't matter.

That meant that I had to pretend that I didn't know what she was doing.

**********

In the short term I was successful to a point, and then the whole problem started to eat away at me. I was depressed when I thought about Britt with another man. My self-esteem was taking a hit. I was feeling like a failure and it was starting to show. In small ways. I was going through bouts of feeling alone, feeling betrayed and feeling confused. I had to remind myself every morning and every night that I was doing this for my children. I know that I was drinking more. I normally have about two beers a week and lately that's been up to six or eight: I know, a lot. My mental health is suffering. I've been feeling depressed and sad without the ability to get myself out of it. I was feeling anxious all the time.

I went to my doctor for a checkup and he recommended that I get out and exercise more. He was right. I was becoming a slug. That had to be fixed.

So, I started running again. I started going out first thing in the morning, about 5:30. It was for two miles to start off with and over about three months I worked up to about five miles. I started to feel much better. My attitude about myself improved and my anxiety level dropped a lot. My self-confidence level was slowly improving.

I joined a running club. We met one night a week and on Sunday mornings. The idea is that we all take turns leading the run and showing new strategies for improving performance. It meant having to think about running and how to improve. It's a lot of fun. It means that Britt has to do a bit more parenting during those times, if the kids have things scheduled, but that's the price she has to pay. She just doesn't realize why at this point.

I keep looking for a time to confront Britt about her affair. I think that there will come a day when I have to do it. I'll have no choice in the matter. For now, it has to be my secret to keep; that's going to be a very hard job. Trying to act normal is taking a lot of work. I'm not sure how long I can do it, unless I get evidence that something has changed. If Britt gives up her lover, then maybe things can truly be normal. If she gets more involved then I won't have a choice; I'll have to act. We'll see.

**********

Britt

Dean told me that he wants to spend a night with me. I told him that that wasn't going to happen. I reminded him that this was just recreational, nothing more. But I know that he's starting to push more; becoming a bit more demanding. He wants to go out to dinner together. But that's not going to happen either.

We have a good thing going. I get to have my needs met away from my husband and family and I get to go home to my husband and children and enjoy them. I'm not about to complicate that by going out in public with another man and risk discovery. That would be disastrous.

I'm running a big enough risk having sex with Dean without condoms. I'm on birth control but lurking in the shadows there is the risk of an STD. Dean swears up and down that I'm the only woman that he's having sex with right now so he's safe. Dean wants more time with me because he says that Cam has the most time with me so he wants more to even the tally a bit. He wants to spend more time lingering in bed after we have sex. He wants more than just sex, he wants intimacy. I never have alcohol with him and I always shower and use a douche. The last thing I need to take home is evidence of Dean.

So far I've been very successful at keeping my little secret from Cam. I intend to keep it that way.

**********

2015

Cam

The last year had been a big challenge for me. It's not easy accepting that your wife finds you less than what she wants. When you think about it, it can slowly crush your soul. I had to work to not let Britt's affair do that to me. I had to own that I wasn't the prince charming that she wanted now. But dammit, I wasn't going to go down without a fight.

Britt still did all the things that a wife and mother of three growing kids does and she worked a challenging career. She was good, I give her that. We still had a sex life, albeit a very reduced one. Too many things got in the way, but that was a high priority for me to work on. I had to find out if she still wanted me or was sex with me just a necessary duty on her part. But, fuck, when I looked at her I still wanted her. I saw the woman that I fell in love with and married and made three kids with. This other woman, the cheater, she was...an imposter, not the real Britt.

I went to a family counselor. I wanted to find out if there were strategies that I could use with my kids to lessen the impact of their mother's affair. Up until now, it really didn't have an impact on them. They didn't know that anything was different. They just saw her as the same mom that she had always been. And don't get me wrong, she was a good mother; she wasn't Cruella deVille. She was never mean-spirited, cross or angry with the kids, or even me. I give Britt credit, she worked very hard to make sure that things looked just like always. She never missed any of the kids' activities or events. She was always the totally supportive mother involved with school things and doing her share of the work.