9TH GRADE ORIENTATION
Hello, ladies and gents. My name is Barbara, but except on legal documents, I almost never use the full name. I've always just gone by Barb, so that's the name I'll be using in this story. I have straight blonde hair, am fit and thin, and tall. As in over six feet tall. Six foot three, to be exact. I definitely stand out in a crowd.
When I was a teenager, it was horribly awkward. I played basketball, and do you want to know why? Just to avoid having to answer the question, "Why don't you play basketball?" five times a day. Ok, that's a bit of an exaggeration. But not much. I learned to rebound and block shots pretty well, but never did develop a jump shot which was at all effective. So, my biggest fear, standing out and not fitting in, haunted me even in the one place where other tall girls often find refuge--in athletics. I was also born about a decade too early. Nowadays, the 6-foot-plus girls excel in volleyball, which I love. But in my high school, in Massachusetts, in my generation, class of 1994, girls Volleyball wasn't offered as a sport. So I sucked it up, played 4 years of mediocre high school basketball, and got as far away from my hometown as I could. I went to the University of Nebraska, to study accounting.
I went to college running away from my teenage awkwardness, but I had accidentally stumbled into the best situation for me, for two reasons. The first reason was college football. Tom Osborne was at the peak of his coaching career, and won National Champioships my freshman year in 1994 and my senior year in 1997. I'll never forget making the trip to Miami for New Year's 1995 to watch us win in the Orange Bowl. I have so many memories from those falls in Lincoln, wearing red, and cheering for the Huskers. Part of the joy was genuine, but part was a manifestation of my awkwardness. I enjoyed those football Saturdays, partly, because I could lose myself in a crowd. Even though my head was above most people in the crowd, I stood out, but not too much. And even if someone did a double take and stared, it wasn't in an awkward way. I blended in, sort of, and that was good enough.
The second unintentional reason college turned out to be a good fit was that I had found one of the places in the country where people genuinely go to college to meet a spouse. Especially in 1997-1998, you could see the anxiety setting in with coeds who hadn't found a serious boyfriend yet. Proposals started happening fast and furious the winter and spring leading up to graduation, and a sizable chunk of the girls getting diplomas on a sunny May afternoon in 1998 had engagement rings on. I know, because I was one of them.
Even though I loved Ron, my fiance and later my husband, I got married for the wrong reason. I got married out of fear. Fear of going into the real world and dating. Because of my height. I had an exaggerated fear that men only want to date a woman shorter than them, which meant less than 3% of men would even flirt with me. My 41 year old self, today, can recognize that rule to be partially true, but only partially. When you're 22, you can't properly weigh risks and opportunities when it comes to dating, so you make the wrong choices. Marrying Ron, a 5'10" guy willing to pair up with a woman 5 inches taller than himself, was a sub-optimal choice.
Don't get me wrong--the first 5 years of my marriage with Ron was amazing. At the time, Nicole Kidman was married to Tom Cruise, and there were pictures all over magazines and TV of her towering over him, both of them smiling and clearly in love. Those images let me finally shed my awkwardness, outside of the bedroom and in, and Ron loved every inch of the new me. We got married, moved to Chicago, had a great support network of Nebraska alums to get us grounded, and I got a great job (I thought--more on that later) at Arthur Andersen. I decided to become a CFA instead of a CPA, and began passing exams. We were a bit surprised, but not in a bad way, when a baby, a son, came in 1999. But since I was making way more money than Ron, I went back to work right away, and Ron took care of our infant son.
I said my preganancy was just "a bit" surprising because even though Ron and I were using condoms, we were having a lot of sex. I'm talking, three times a day, 21 times a week. We were obsessed. And so it was just a matter of time till one of the condoms didn't work. I got smart after that and got on the pill. But Ron's and my sex life was highly satisfying--we were very compatible in that area. Very. It felt too good to be true, that it must end soon--and it did.
In 2002, Arthur Andersen blew up. We were the auditors for Enron, one of the biggest financial frauds in history. They went down, and took us with them. 99% of Andersen's employees were fired. I was young enough to land on my feet in another job at a bank, but the whole experience was unsettling. Our son headed to preschool, and suddenly Ron being at home felt like he was freeloading off of me, instead of doing me a favor. Our three-a-day sex pace proved unsustainable, and even though at one a day we were doing better than our other married friends, there was a "the thrill is gone" stench in our downtown apartment.
Ah, downtown. Those of you that have lived in Chicagoland know that downtown is all well and good when you don't have kids--the shows, the food, the bars. But as kindegarten approaches, you buy a house in the suburbs. It's just part of the cycle of life. In the spring of 2004, Ron and I found a place in Woodstock, the deep, deep, Northwest suburbs. Still on the Metra line, which I would take into the city everyday, while Ron supervised the kindegarten career of our son. The farmy surroundings also reminded Ron of his Nebraska roots. Things got a little bit better, until they got worse.
The long commute, 105 minutes both ways everyday, was very difficult on me. I was missing out on the childhood of our son, who was asleep when I left for work in the morning and by the time I got home at night. We were together as a family on weekends, but rarely ate a meal as a family all week. I was lonely. But my salary kept growing, and we needed the money. So we kept doing what we were doing.
While in the office in the city, I reconnected with some Nebraska alumni--we'd have coffee together at Starbucks or lunch at Chipotle. One day in spring 2009, when our son was in 4th grade, they introduced me to the world of Facebook. They showed me how to connect with friends. And then how to "spy" on people. They asked me if I wanted to spy on Ron. "But he's not on Facebook," I chirped. Boy, did I look like an ass. "Yes, he is. Look," I was told.
That bastard. An entire Facebook profile. With 55 "friends". 45 of them women. It was the "being on Facebook" which infuriated me. It was the "not telling me" part.
Hell ya, show me how you spy on someone.
Those of you who have found a spouse secretly on Facebook already know how this ends. I just need to fill in the details. One of his "friends" was an old Nebraska high school classmate of his named Colleen. I had tucked Colleen away in a little drawer in my brain for two reasons. The first was that in Ron's high school yearbook, Colleen had written a simple message--"3/14/92", which clearly implied they had done something memorably intimate on that day. The second was that Colleen was one of the very few of his high school classmates not to attend our wedding or at least send us a bridal, then baby, gift. I had a funny feeling Colleen would come up somehow someday, and now in 2009 she had.
My friends taught me how to snoop on Facebook. It took some work--Colleen had hidden herself pretty well--but I cracked the case of where Colleen was now living.
Shit.
In Woodstock, Illinois.
And she's divorced.
I did what any jealous wife would do. The next morning, instead of driving to the train station, I drove to Colleen's address. I waited until it looked like there was activity in the house. I walked up to the front door and knocked.
"Do you know who I am? And why I'm here?"
<<<<Guilty, 'oh shit' look on Colleen's face. Colleen is taller than she looked in the yearbook, and on Facebook--5'10" maybe 5'11". I'm glad--what I'm about to do isn't picking on someone too much smaller than me.>>>
"Yes. Hello, Barb. Come in--we should talk."
I go in. We shut the door. "I didn't come here to talk." I've never done anything like this, and yet it feels totally natural.
"I see. Does Ron know you're here?"
"Nope. Nobody does. Why?" <<<<<Shit, I shouldn't have told her that. What if she has a gun?
"Just curious. So, how do you want to do this?"
"You tell me. Didn't you think I'd find out? Didn't you know it would come to this?" <<<<I can feel my heart pounding.>>>
"I should warn you. I love him. I'm not afraid to do this."
"Neither. Am. I."
To be continued......
