It's Kind of a Long Story... about MY SISTER EXES (Part II)

Lies. Lies. Lies. Yeah.

Several people have asked me what I hope to get out of telling this story. It’s a more than fair question.

I want to get the story up and out of me. I’ve told it to many friends, but it’s still in there. Journaling only goes so far for me. I need what I’ve seen called “community healing.” Getting my ex out of my system has taken longer than I ever thought it would. After last week’s Substack drop, he moved even further to the back burner. I could literally feel a shift.

I figured out with the help of my my therapist (the fourth of five I have seen this year, that’s another story I will be telling) that I was really, really angry that he counted on me not telling his secrets. He would likely not be married to the woman he is, and enjoying the life he has, if I hadn’t. I take keeping a confidence seriously, but this wasn’t with my consent. Men get away with so much because women stay silent. That was eating at me.

The most important thing I want to get out of it is to honor the power of women looking out for each other, validating each other, and supporting each other through some tough shizz. And not just any women, Sister Exes. I want to make Sister Exes a thing.

I’m sort of shocked it’s not. I Googled it and got nuthin' but an obscure punk band. It’s not in the Urban Dictionary either (Yet. I submitted it) and yet it’s such a common phenomenon. Before it happened to me, I had two close friends who connected with Sister Exes and learned their mutual man was a cheating liar. And since the last Substack post, I have heard from many more.

I have also been asked what I ever saw in the guy. It’s also a fair question. What can I tell you? He flipped my switch. We had so much fun together. Went on a date to the museum and after we walked through the exhibit he said, "Let's go back and look at our favorites.” He sent me flowers on the 13th of February because “everyone else will have them on their desks tomorrow, and you’re special.”

The text banter was off the hook. Seriously Noel Coward/Norah Ephron territory. I had been a wife and mom for a very long time. It was very fun to feel like a girlfriend.

He smelled good. He dressed well. He made dinner reservations and planned dates and when we traveled, booked hotels, and researched things to do and see.

There was one night he picked me up from work, we went grocery shopping - it’s cliche, but he made grocery shopping fun - and then we went home and he BBQd and we ate outside and then watched old Little Rascals DVDs and I both thought and said out loud, “I can’t believe I’m having this much fun on a Tuesday.”

I was very overweight my entire life until I lost a lot in my 40s. When he and I met, I looked better and felt better about myself than I ever had. He made me feel smart, funny, and like the prettiest girl in the room for the better part of five years. He was proud to be with me and told me. He held doors and pulled my hair from behind my collar when he helped me with my coat. He was my biggest fan.

He was endlessly interesting. So many good stories and he told them well. At the time, that seemed like a huge plus. I no longer hold his storytelling in high regard.

I absolutely know he wouldn't be everybody's cup of tea. He was mine until he wasn't.

My Sister Exes are smart, savvy, feminist women. We weren't with him for nothing.

And that’s ultimately what this is about. Knowing even smart, savvy, feminist women can be taken in by a smooth talker. That kind of sisterhood is very powerful. It has been incredibly empowering for me.

Please read through to the end. I have a question I’d like to ask you.

New subscribers will want to catch up with Part 1.

I’m so glad you’re here,

-Lara

Bastard Love Child

Short story: 

I thought that my exBF was just an alcoholic. After meeting his exGF, I learned that is the least of his issues. He’s a lying, cheating, narcissist with a history of violence and abuse. She was one of five Sister Exes I would eventually connect with directly and indirectly.

Long story:

“I’m so glad you’re OK”

I wasn’t sure what Susan meant by that at first. I smiled and said, “I’m fine, but I would like to talk to you about him. Would you be open to that?”

She said she would. And she was also a bit distracted and stammering. I of course didn’t blame her. I had practically ambushed her. Certainly had caught her off guard.

The more we talked, the more I understood why she was concerned about me. She said, “I’m so glad you didn’t end up black and blue.” I said, “No, nothing like that ever happened.” She said, “That’s because you didn’t live together. When you live together, he owns you.”

I was chilled and also caught off guard. I was still reeling from just meeting the mythic Susan who loomed so large in my relationship with Cris, and now she was dropping this?

We chatted for a few minutes, she took my number, and we hugged several times. I later told friends it was like we were two veterans of the same war. There was a mutual recognition that we have been through some singular shizz.

We made a plan to talk on the phone a few days later. It was a three-hour phone call.

One of the first things she said was, “He didn’t tell you he owned that house in Santa Barbara, did he?”

He had. He said he bought it with his ex-wife K, sold it in the divorce, didn’t make much money on it, and gave most of it to her because it was “the right thing to do.”

He not only told me that story, he showed me the house when we went to Santa Barbara.

“He never owned that house. He rented it.”

What. The. Hell? Why on earth would he lie about something like that? And the audacity to show it to me. That is a truly sick, next-level lie.

She said he had given her the same story but eventually had to admit he had rented it when something came up with his former landlord. “And,” she said, “property records are public.” Susan is a very good detective.

“Did he tell you he trained in Italy?”

He had. He said the Italian restaurant where he worked sent him to train in Venice and he was basically an “indentured servant” and didn’t see or do much. He ate his pasta with a fork and spoon.

She had looked through his passports that he left behind at her house and there were no stamps for Italy. “Think about it,” she said, “He tells stories about everything and every place. Did he tell you any about Italy?” He hadn’t.

She said his claims to have traveled to India and Brazil were also not backed up by his passport stamps.

I remember him telling me that Susan had accused him of never having been to India. He made it sound crazy. “Why would anyone try to put a timeline of my travels together to prove I hadn’t been to India.” At the time, we joked about a CSI-style bulletin board with red string and pushpins. It did seem ridiculous.

Now? I know that’s exactly what’s needed to make sense of his life of lies.

“Did he tell you he had a ‘love child’ in Thailand?”

He had. Sort of.

On one of our early dates, back in 2017, he said, “I have something I need to tell you. I have a son in Thailand.”

“What? Do you see him?”

“I send money”

“And that’s enough for you?”

I don’t remember any more of the details of what he or I said, because I was reeling. This was an absolute deal-breaker for me. I take parenting very seriously. That Cris didn’t have kids was a plus to me at the time. Less complicated and, if things got serious, less impact on Max. I was his only parent and I did not want him to have to share me as a mother in any way.

I sort of came to when he said, “Lara. What day is it?”

It was April 1. April Fool’s Day.

I laughed and said, “Fuck you!” with a smile.

He laughed, “You should have seen the look on your face. Didn’t you get a clue when I said ‘bastard love child?’”

Had he said that? I laughed it off and said, “I guess I was so taken aback by what you were telling me it didn’t register.”

At the time, I legit thought it was funny. I told people that story as an example of his humor and way with words.

I now know that he was testing me. Seeing what he could get away with. What I would believe. He brought up the “bastard love child” story with a chuckle many times during our relationship.

Susan said he had told her that story too, but without the “April Fools” twist. She was told he sent checks to his son’s mother every month. When she looked at his checkbook, there was no evidence of any monthly checks.

She described the two years they lived together as harrowing. Within the first few weeks, she woke up to find him not in bed. On a hunch, she went to a bar they had been to together and he was there. Drunk on a barstool, about to get into a fight.

Within a month, his car was repossessed from her driveway.

He invited a sketchy friend to stay with them. He got so drunk he peed on the floor of their bedroom (more than once) He ruined her towels one of the few times he did laundry, and rather than replace them, he told her friends she wanted new towels for her birthday.

The “snooping” she supposedly did that was the last straw for him? They had stayed the night in the City, and she dropped him off at work on the way home. He planned to get a ride home with a coworker.

When she got home, she took their bags out of the trunk of the car. Behind the bags was a small open box that had spilled its contents, which included an open box of condoms with one missing.

She didn’t freak out, she said calmly. “We need to talk about this.” He blew up, denied they were his, and had his friend unconvincingly claim them. He moved out about a month later.

When I told her that he had gotten drunk on our trip to Barcelona and stumbled down the hallway drunk in his underwear, she said, “Oh yeah. That’s a Cris special. He did something like that on every trip we went on. In Mendocino, he left me in the room to go to the bar, didn’t have his key, and banged on the door in the middle of the night, ‘Let me in! The bitch locked me out!’” She said they were lucky they didn’t get tossed out.

When the Super Bowl was in San Francisco, his friends L and S visited them to go to the fan events downtown. In a private moment, Susan told them she may not be around for much longer because she was so fed up with his behavior. Both L and S said that he was an asshole in relationships, and no one would blame her for leaving.

Her last straw was when in a blind, drunken rage after a day of watching football and drinking, he grabbed her by the shoulders and she was sure he was about to hit her. She looked him in the eye and calmly said, “Cris, do not hit a woman.” He let her go, kicked the door so hard the interior doorknob made huge hole in the wall, threw a tray table in her direction, stormed out, got in his car, and drove off. He didn’t come back for hours.

Eventually, we got around to talking about the email. She was still a little cagey about acknowledging she had been behind it. I understood. She didn’t know me, didn’t know if she could trust me, and I was bringing up a lot of old feelings and experiences she had successfully, with a lot of time, work, and therapy put behind her.

We made a plan to meet in person the following week. It was a three-hour dinner.

She greeted me outside of the restaurant with a gift. A book about narcissists, and said, “This was very helpful to me.”

At dinner, she acknowledged she knew exactly who I was when she saw me at the cafe but didn’t know how to react. While she had looked me up on Facebook from time to time, she hadn’t in a long time and didn’t know if he and I were still together. She was understandably guarded.

She also acknowledged that she had been behind sending the email. And what prompted it.

A few months before Cris left Susan’s house, she started to search for his ex-wife K. She had a hard time finding her, but she eventually did. At first, K was terrified to connect with Susan. She had been divorced from Cris for several years and gone to great lengths to make herself unfindable. But eventually, in the same spirit of Sister Ex sisterhood, K shared her story with Susan.

Cris had been horrifically abusive to K. Physically, sexually, emotionally, and verbally. In almost every way imaginable. She replaced innumerable pieces of furniture he destroyed in drunken rages. She suffered multiple miscarriages from abuse and stress.

He told her she was too skinny, so she gained weight. Then he berated her for being fat.

During their divorce, she took out a restraining order against him. I vaguely remember him telling me she had accused him of something that the judge had determined wasn’t true. I’m thinking now this was it. The order was eventually rescinded. K said it was because his lawyer intimidated her.

At one point she sought refuge with Cris’s best friend at the time, D, a lawyer. She fled from her house to D’s. D took her in and… hit on her. He also filed a brief with the court corroborating K's story of abuse.

He had told me that they were “swingers” who sometimes got partners from Craig’s list, and K liked him to watch while she was with other men. I don’t judge that at all. Whatever floats the boat of consenting adults is cool by me. I did let him know that I wasn’t into that sort of thing in the slightest, and if it was something he wanted to explore, I wasn’t the gal for him. He assured me that “nonsense” was all in his past.

Susan told me he and K did go to sex clubs, and stuff like that, but it was because Cris insisted. K had been assaulted as a teenager and was very uncomfortable with all of that, but she did it for him. Susan said Cris had shown her a photo of K dressed up to go to a club and, “She did not look happy. She did not look excited. She looked like someone who didn’t want to be there.”

I didn’t have to take Susan’s word for it. She showed me the emails that K had sent her. What I was reading made me sick. In my mind, I saw a straight line from the horrors I was reading about going through me to my son. Even though by then he was an adult living halfway across the country, and even though I had not seen that kind of behavior from Cris in our relationship, the thought that I had come so close to inviting that kind of ugliness into his orbit was stomach-turning.

I had truly never seen anything like that from him. I asked Susan, “I’m not sure how someone who used to be abusive tells a potential partner?”

She said, “They do it honestly and with humility and after a lot of therapy, introspection, and work on themselves.”

She was right. He had done none of those things. In fact, he had often almost boasted about his lack of introspection. “You gotta understand baby, I’m 25% football, 15% beer, and 60% robots battling monsters.” I thought it was just a funny thing to say. A story he told himself about himself. Because he had a lot of insight about a lot of things. He was able to talk about movies, art, and books with a lot of understanding and empathy. He often said things to me that made me think he really saw, understood, and knew me. If he was just some dumb lunkhead I wouldn't have been interested in him.

He told me at different points in his life he had taken stock and made the decision to become a chef and quit drugs. I later learned that wasn’t exactly true. After a DUI, he was given a choice by a judge of going to community college or jail. That’s how and why he became a chef.

Cris had told me that he and K had spent six months working in Alaska on tourist trains and six months in Thailand for several years during their marriage. It was presented as a big adventure. Now I see that she was severely isolated. No opportunity to make friendships or have a community or for anyone to observe that something was not right.

Now I understood that what Susan had put in the email was true:

“He has a history of being violent towards his ex-wife, who fled, and has for the most part scrubbed her identity from the internet out of fear of him.”

I was still confused about some of the other things in the email. How did she know

 “There is reason to believe he may be hoping to be able to move into your house so he doesn’t have to secure his own housing.”

or

“He is currently sleeping with other women”

The answer? The Housewives.

To be continued…

Know someone who would get something out of that story? Please share.

Lara sez…

Listen!

80s Deep Cut of the Week! Squeeze is my #1 all-time favorite band. If all you know is “Tempted” or “Black Coffee in Bed,” there is so much more to know! It’s really hard to pick a song to share. I love them all! Picadilly is the one that popped into my head, so this is the one I’m going with.

Follow!

Twitter by Design Mom is on Twitter/X so I don’t have to be. The side project of Design Mom Gabrielle Blair is my go-to for legit and informed hot takes on current events. Gabby is a Mormon mom of 6 and a raging liberal who has gone viral for her threads on guns and responsible ejaculation.

Buy!

A Turkish Towel! It’s a towel! It’s a sarong! It’s a scarf! It’s a picnic blanket! I got one for my trip to Mexico because I was going to a BYOT hot springs, only bringing a carry-on, and this would take up less room than terrycloth. I now keep one in the trunk of my car and it has come in handy more than once.

Watch!

Non-schmaltzy family/relationship dramedies like Casual are my jam. Catch it on Hulu.

Eat!

I have been making Ruth Reichel’s Swiss Pumpkin for the November meeting of my book club since we read her memoir Tender at the Bone more than a dozen years ago. It’s what my mom and I call an “easy ohh-ah.” Gorgeous to look at, simple to make, and absolutely delicious. It doesn’t travel well, but if you’re hosting Thanksgiving it’s an excellent side or vegetarian main.

Before I let you go…

Thank you so much for reading to the end! I can’t tell you how much it means to me.

The Sister Ex story is going to take longer than I thought it would to tell. I’m not sure how many parts there will be.

Would you rather I keep going until the end (it’s a pretty cinematic finish) or stagger them with other stories? I’ve got a lot of other good ones in the queue!