Almost Divorce Part 35- How The Husband became my Sweet Babu

This series is  published no less than once a week on Thursday’s.  Or you can start at the beginning here

A timeline can be found here.

This event was a game changer that came late in the game, the sick twist at the end of the story.

Being lied to at that level of magnitude is life changing.  I  made decisions based on those lies. I took actions based on those lies. I formed opinions, perspective, lived my life all based partially on 22 weeks of  those lies.   I don’t know how, if it wasn’t by the grace of God that I forced the vanishing mere hours before it would of been too late to turn back on being divorced.   It was time to take a step back and do some analysis.  Try to make some sense of everything from start to finish and figure out what I knew about myself and the situation.  I literally had the driving need to revisit every conversation, every thought, every action and re-evaluate it with the new insight.   I also discovered during those initial weeks of grief that I had put the job of dealing with the grief of the divorce on hold because I was distracted dealing with Paul.   He had been partially right, I was using him to fill a hole, but it wasn’t a husband hole per se, it was a me hole. Once I had nothing to distract me, I started to process and deal with the emotions and grief from the divorce itself.   Huge chunks of my time were freed when he vanished.  Rituals were no longer the same, my physical and mental schedule was no longer the same.  It was almost as if I was waking up from the wreckage.  I was waking up broken and shell shocked but getting back up is my specialty.

Here I was alone, with a vanished sociopath behind me;  and a man, the  father of my children, my husband of 10 years,  who still hadn’t given up in front of me.  What to do, what to do?   I was in control of the pace of the divorce, and after we talked we both agreed to put it on hold.  I honestly felt I owed it to my children, our family and myself to really take a look at where we had been and  figure out where I thought we might go. Figure out if I could forgive him for his portion of wrong, trust that he would be able to forgive me and that I could fall in love with him again and be content. I didn’t want to trap myself in something I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get back out of, because there was no fucking way I would be putting my kids through another round of this.   If we  decided to see if it could work it would have to be slow and with no expectations and without telling the kids or many others until we were absolutely sure.  Before I go on I need to take a step back and give you some insight into The Husband and our story.

How The Husband became my Sweet Babu!

I met my Sweet Babu at work, this was the 90’s and we worked at a Computer Reseller that through mergers and acquisitions is now HP. Times were flush and the party was always raging.    Hooking up, coupling, or marrying a co- worker was almost a requirement here.  No one blinked an eye.   Before I met The Husband I had slept with more than one  sales rep, had one sales rep as a boyfriend for a while and been to countless parties held by vendors and co-workers.   I started out as a 23 year old girl with no job and desperately needed one, who barely knew how to use a mouse and by the time I met  Babu I was a traveling “fixer”.  I went in to assess a fucked up situation, determined whose “fault” it was; ours, the sales rep, or the customer’s and  implemented changes and controls to make things better so the customer would stay.  I also gave presentations to potential new customers about what our portion of the organization would be bringing to the package.   Before that I ran our largest account  and a few smaller ones and had a reputation for talking business to the reps. I didn’t take their shit and I didn’t stand for them lying to our customers or setting us up for failure.  I worked with mostly men and cussed like a sailor when needed.  This was not only tolerated but also rewarded.  I was placed in the Northeast Region as my territory and I thrived there. I was known for talking business.  I was young (23-27) and I was pretty, I had a good amount of game, but I didn’t have half the confidence I have now. That came with good mentors, age, maturity,  and self-acceptance.

Part of my job was travel, as in 3 cities in one week covering both coasts sometimes travel.  My desk was often just a pit stop for a day or two before I was out again on the next plane to the next customer.  I spent more time in town cars to and from the airport and in rental cars navigating cities like Memphis, Nashville, Atlanta, DC and surrounding areas, Boston, SFO. I took one of the prettiest drives of my life in Connecticut.    I had some of the best times of my life on that job, met some of the best women who provided amazing mentoring and got to see a lot of our country.   It helped me feel not so trapped and filled with wanderlust to get the heck out of Indiana where I was born, raised, and still live.     The frequent flier miles and Amex perks also paid for something like 3 full vacations for Babu and I, including the one to Fort Myers where I got my turtle tattoo and he burned the tops of his feet.

One day I badged in and started walking through the rows to the back room  of our cube farm where my desk was, when something stopped me.   There was this tall, dark haired dude in dress pants and a white button up standing in one of the team’s rows.  I remember I stopped and looked for more than second and wondered who is that? He is yummy.  We often had reps or vendors visit and more than a handful of them were yummy, so this wasn’t out of the ordinary.  I may have asked around a little bit about who he was but nothing ever came of it.

Fast forward and one day my friend Dr. M tells me a new guy is going to be moving into our cube row.  Dr. M is a TSE, a technical rep for one of the teams and the new guy is getting assigned to a team that doesn’t have a spot for him in their row, so he has to sit over by Dr. M and I.   He’s young, Dr. M tells me. Be nice to him, he laughs.  Babu shows up and he’s fine, but I don’t recognize him as the dude from the cube row in the button up b/c our dress code is business casual and he takes that to the lowest level possible.  He sits there for several months and as I travel in and out of my cube we get to know each other. Mostly this is via him marveling at my business talk and being ever so slightly afraid of me.  I am actually a very sweet and nice person and since there are just 4 of us in our cube row; me, Dr. M,  the other fixer in my area who is also young and pretty and can talk business, and Babu.    I’ve always shared my business pretty openly,  Babu and I get to be coworker friends who  talk about our lives a little and give each other shit.  One day he comes back from lunch and brings me a big bag of Chili Cheese Fritos, these are my favorite kind.  I don’t take this as a move, I was fairly oblivious to his feelings and I was also embroiled in my own boy drama at the time.  He is also about 4 years younger than me, which puts him out of my scope because at the time I liked older, more established, better dressed and spoken dudes.  I was in the process of having a bit of a  dating life crisis though and starting to realize that maybe these types of guys and this checklist of things I was looking for were not really  the best answer to finding a lifelong mate.   I had just recently decided that I would go out at least once with anyone that asked and see where it went.   Part of giving each other shit involved me relentlessly chiding Babu about his footwear and clothing. He had zero style.   One day I am sitting at my desk and in walks Babu. He is dressed in dress pants, a button up and dress shoes.  I laugh because I think he is doing this to be funny and prove a point and I respond  “Oh, my Sweet Babu you look so nice!”  This was the first time I ever called him that and in my head it is what Sally from Charlie Brown called Linus.   Later in the day Dr. M turns to me and says “Hey, you know he did that FOR YOU, don’t you? He is into you…”.  Wait..what??? Seriously? He has a girlfriend he hardly ever mentions  in any way, but TJ  ( the other fixer) and I know she exists.   I start to ponder what this means and little things start to click into place; the Fritos, the breakfasts out, etc.  So he is way too young in my book, and he has a girlfriend. But I have just been told he is into me and he is in a band and he also has a tongue ring and these brown eyes with these lashes that my son got in the DNA pool.  Plus he is tall dark and hairy.  I’m 27, he has a tongue ring, he is into me. I do what any 27 year old horny slut would do in my situation, I start flirting with him more voraciously via the IM system we have at work.    Now part of that was voicing my concern about his age.  But somehow it works out that on  Friday night he is going to come over to my apartment and we are going to hook up.

He gets there and he is a nervous shaking wreck.  He is WAY out of his element and is not capable of the walk in and start sexing me plans that were hanging in the air.  It is actually quite sweet. So we sit on my couch and I am leaning against his big, I don’t it’s hairy yet, chest and we talk for a really long time.   Eventually this leads to our first kiss and some third base action on my couch and floor and he leaves.  He had told his GF  he was helping another co-worker, who ended up standing up in our wedding, move.   There are no discussions about what this means or doing this again, he just leaves. As far as I was concerned it was probably just a hook up and I’ll see him at the office when I get back in on Wednesday.

Tuesday night comes and I’m standing at the airport getting ready to catch the town car home when my phone rings. It’s Babu. He broke up with his girlfriend while I was gone.   Oh holy crap, I just stole someone’s boyfriend.  I’ve messed around with more than a few boyfriends in my time, but never actually stolen one.   Wow, I tell him, that was a pretty bold move.  I’m happy he did it  I tell him, but he should probably plan on seeing other people besides just me since they were together for something like 2 years, basically lived together and I’m not really looking for anything super serious right now.  That’s cool he says.

He then  proceeds to ignore me and not date anyone else, and neither do I.   We start out slowly and pick up speed pretty quickly. We hooked up in the beginning of August and by the time Labor Day rolls around we go away on our first weekend trip together.  I get home from that and I tell him standing in my bed room,  I just want you to know that I love you, I’m not expecting that you have to say it back right now but I just wanted you to know how I am feeling.  I love you too,   he says.  The next week I started a merger rotation where I had to travel out to DC every week and stay Mon-Fri for almost 6 months.  I was out there with a team of two other guys and we were ALL overwhelmed.  I’m so exhausted and emotionally spent at the end of any given day that I don’t even have the energy to hold up my end of a proper conversation with Babu.  While I was gone he was staying at my apartment and dog/cat sitting for me, then picking me up at the airport every Friday night when we landed and we would spend the entire weekend together.  Every once in a while I’d need  some alone time or want some time with my girlfriends but by the end of December we had the,  I’d like to maybe consider making a life with you (too) conversation. We proceeded to do just that, started building a house together and got engaged on Good Friday, roughly 8 months into our relationship.  We got married a year later after roughly 18 months of knowing each other. I was 29 and he was 25.

When we were starting this romance I was unsure. He wasn’t as educated as I was, he wasn’t as high on the food chain as I was, he was 4 years younger than I was.    But being with him was easy.  There was never any drama or games, there were no huge fights, he treated me like a queen and was wonderful in so many ways.  Being with him was emotional salve,  he said and did all the right things and backed it up with his actions.  He was soothing my time and trips around the block battered heart and soul and I was growing him up. He became a man while he was with me and I was firmly attaching my heart, soul and life to him.   Some small greedy part of me always wondered if I’d settled.   I don’t feel that way anymore, but it took this ruin paves the way for transformation experience of Almost Divorce to land me here.

More to come soon Lovies.