Four months after walking out on our twenty two year
marriage for another woman, my husband Gary appeared on my front porch carrying two suitcases and his golf clubs. He had the nerve to act completely normal and casually ask what I was preparing for dinner. He completely ignored the reality that abandoning your family for a sudden fresh start meant you forfeited the right to just stroll back inside when things went wrong. I stood in the doorway looking at the man I had loved for over two decades and felt a strange sense of calm wash over me instead of the devastation I had endured during those first few weeks alone. Gary confidently explained that his girlfriend had thrown him out and he was simply coming home because she called him selfish. He expected me to offer sympathy and help him drag his bags into the house. Instead I informed him that he would be eating dinner wherever his next address happened to be. He treated my resistance like a joke while claiming he had learned his lesson during his brief three and a half month absence from our shared life.
