Craigslist Confessional

by Helena Dea Bala

  She did none of those things. I watched her face for her reaction, and I waited for her to say something, anything, about what I’d just revealed. But I realized that that was it—her reaction. Nothing. It dawned on me that she had known. Of course she had known.

  Sylvie, late forties

  I’ve seen my son, Alex, twice since the divorce five years ago. Once, for his high school graduation; the other, when I pulled up to my ex-husband Evan’s house to drop off Anna, our younger daughter. Alex was mowing the lawn. He saw my Volvo round the corner, and he ran into the house. His reaction was visceral, knee-jerk, like he’d seen a snake in the grass. To see my son respond like that tore my heart apart.

  When things went south, Evan wanted to work on our marriage. At the time, I didn’t. We were high school sweethearts, married for over twenty years. We had started growing apart over the last few years of our marriage. My mother-in-law was part of the problem; she was really controlling and would habitually show up unannounced. She drove a wedge in our marriage, likely because her own was failing. But it’s unfair to put it all on her: we were struggling and had been for a while. We weren’t communicating well—or at all, really. We didn’t spend any quality time together; physical intimacy was nonexistent. Really, we’d become strangers who were living together and happened to share children.

  I was a good wife right until the very end. We were fighting a lot, my ex and I. The kids knew it, too. Alex was old enough to understand; Anna was on the cusp. We were on a family trip when my phone lit up. It was a Facebook friend request notification from Brad, my first love when I was a kid. I hadn’t seen him or heard from him in decades. I told Evan about it, and he said he didn’t care if I spoke to him, which was kind of typical of him, to be so aloof. So I accepted the request. And you know how these things happen—one thing leads to another.

  We were getting ready to sit down to dinner one night. I had been having an affair with Brad for three months by then. I think I was at the sink, washing lettuce for the salad. My phone kept ringing and ringing, but my hands were wet, so I didn’t pick it up. My sister was visiting, and she said something like, “Hey, why aren’t you picking it up?” Of course, Evan picked up the phone, and that was that. In retrospect, I was being so reckless that part of me thinks I wanted to be found out.

  Up to that point, things had been going well with Brad. I was excited by how new and good it was. When everything blew up, I felt—weirdly—special. I was getting a lot of attention from both Brad and Evan. I felt wanted, worth fighting for. But I didn’t have the strength to fight anymore. I wanted out of my marriage. I wanted something new and fresh—I didn’t want to be married for the sake of it. I wanted romance, to feel seen, to be in love again. Should being a parent preclude that? Did I owe it to my kids to forgo a chance at my own happiness? I’m not sure I asked those questions because I wasn’t thinking that I’d be found out, that it would end my marriage. It all happened very quickly.

  During this time, Evan, the kids, and I all continued living together in the same house. Evan moved out of our bedroom and into the office. He became very controlling and narcissistic: everything was about him and what he did for our family—he’d run the littlest errand for the kids, something I’d been doing for years, and then mention it constantly. Or, if I wanted to do something with the kids, for example, he’d make a big deal out of it if I didn’t run it by him first. It had never been like that before. I don’t want to suggest that he’d been an absentee parent—he wasn’t—but the kids simply didn’t take up much of his time or energy. Suddenly, though, it seemed like we were in a competition for parent of the year. The tension in the house was unbearable. It felt like any one of us would go off at any second.

  Our son had just started high school when the family found out about the affair, so the timing was especially bad for him. There’s never a good time for your parents to divorce, but the high school years are already so precarious. We talked about it a lot with him that first week; we were trying to make sure that he was processing what had happened in a healthy way. He said that he understood, and that he didn’t approve of what had happened but that he accepted it. I was so proud of him—he seemed so adult.

  A month later, though, I suggested to him that we could go out to lunch with his friend and his friend’s mom over school break. He said to me, “I don’t want to do anything with you, ever. You’re toxic, Mom. You’re just toxic.” The things that he was saying were things that his father would have said, things that his father had said to me—his mannerisms became similar, even. He was turning into a teenaged version of his dad. Another time, he told me, “You’re sick, Mom. You need help.” I confronted him about it—told him that he sounded like Evan—and he got very angry with me.

  When it became clear that things wouldn’t work out between me and my ex-husband, our lawyers drafted up the divorce papers. Both of us knew that things hadn’t been going well between us even before the affair. Part of me thought that the kids would be relieved that the fighting was over. I remembered how awful it was for me as a child to see my parents constantly going at each other; when they separated, things got better. I always turned to that memory when I thought about my own divorce: maybe it would be better for my kids in the long run, too.

  When I went in to sign the papers, I couldn’t do it. I had a meltdown in my lawyer’s office. I felt physically ill, confused, saddened. Because I couldn’t afford to care for the kids on my own, my husband would get primary custody. I didn’t feel ready to leave my family—the signature felt like my final ousting from the nest I’d helped to build for fifteen-plus years. I didn’t have second thoughts because I still had feelings for Evan—I had second thoughts because of my kids. Maybe it wasn’t too late to fix things for them, to minimize the damage. My lawyer called my husband’s lawyer and told him I had changed my mind. I wanted to work on us.

  The call back wasn’t what I had expected: my ex didn’t want to work it out anymore. He wanted the divorce. It felt a bit like poetic justice.

  I know I made a mistake, a really big one. I shouldn’t have had an affair. I should have ended our marriage decently, with a civil conversation or a nice handshake. But that’s not how things played out. I’m not perfect. I feel really intense guilt about how things happened. But while I regret the circumstances, I know that I’m not just a parent. I’m a person. I need to feel loved and valued, too. I may not have always been a great wife, but I was always a great mom.

  I’m afraid my kids won’t remember that. I left my career behind to take care of Anna and Alex. I gave myself to them completely. And even after things ended between their father and me, I thought only about them. Maybe it was a mistake, losing myself in them. But I just never thought that my own child would hate me.

  I can’t understand what happened to us. I thought that Alex would get better—that maybe, with time, he would come to see that people in happy marriages don’t cheat on each other. He would understand that my actions stemmed from a very deep unhappiness—and that I could not keep punishing myself for wanting to be happy again. But it got worse and worse. Every time I reached out, he screamed at me to leave him alone. Every text I sent only reopened our wounds. I can hear my ex saying the words that my son’s written to me: “You had an affair with some guy while married to Dad. You acted like an insufferable psychotic jackass during the divorce process, dragging everyone down with you for nearly a year.” Alex has told me that he’s never had a girlfriend because of me—because he can’t trust anyone.

  I was watching a program on TV one night when someone said something about parental alienation, that often one parent will make the children feel that the ousted parent is either dangerous or sick. Some stranger was talking about my life—and it felt like being punched in the gut.

  It seems that Evan has managed to turn Alex completely against me. He makes Alex feel that my ex is a victim and that he needs to be taken care of. I’ve gotten glimpses of how my ex spoke about me to Alex. While
we were going through the separation, I overheard him and Alex talking one night. Alex was probably still fifteen. And my ex said to him: “Let’s play a game; let’s go around the room and figure out all the things your mother’s going to take in the divorce.” I didn’t take a thing. I let my ex keep the house, and the kids stayed with him so that the disruption to their routine was minimal. They were surrounded by their things, their dog, and their friends.

  Anna is different. She told me the other day, “Dad makes me feel like I have to be loyal to him.” I speak to her four times a week, and she’s very open with me. I can understand what it’s like, being young, impressionable, rightfully angry, and wanting to make your father proud of you. It’s been five years since the divorce, and parts of us have moved on, but parts of us still live with the sadness accumulated during those years. So much has changed in my life. I’ve gone back to school. I’ve started my own successful business. And I just got married—to Brad. My ex recently got engaged, too, to a woman who has a lot of money. My son is in college now. He’s attending a small community school instead of the state school he’d wanted. Somehow, that also became my fault—apparently, he couldn’t go because I couldn’t afford to help him pay for it. The last time I spoke to him, he told me that I’d shattered our family to bits.

  I sent Alex a text a little while ago. It said: “I love you, I will continue to love you, no matter what you say or how you feel.”

  His response: “I’m sure you will, I’m familiar with that sentiment. Now, for the final time you need to Leave. Me. Alone. That is the best thing you can do for me.”

  David, late fifties

  I grew up on an island off the coast of South Carolina at the tail end of the civil rights era. My grandfather was a prominent figure in the civil rights movement. He was a lovely and incredibly intelligent man, even though he only had a fourth-grade education. He kept all his children and grandchildren close; we lived in an all-black community. All of us kids learned from an early age to use family as a support network because we didn’t have that in society. Due to my grandfather’s work, we sometimes weren’t received well by our own, and definitely not by the white community, either. The white families lived separately from us, and our engagements were extremely limited. Jim Crow, de facto, was alive and well. Is alive and well, to some extent.

  I remember as a kid we used to switch cars every day, and I thought that was really cool. I found out later that we did that to set decoys for the KKK, because they were after my grandpa. I remember hearing, too, that within a week after he took part in the bus boycott, all my grandfather’s children lost their jobs. So everyone had to look for employment outside of Charleston. But that generation did this work without accolades or fanfare; they educated people. They challenged the establishment. They understood that it wasn’t enough to want fair; you had to get out there and make it fair.

  Now that I’m a father myself, I’ve become very wary of authority’s response to us as black men—about the rhetoric used to advance racist agendas. I can’t help the anger I feel about the things that I’ve witnessed over a lifetime. For instance, growing up in Low Country, I knew that there were streets, communities, and plantation properties that are named after the white families who owned us. Most people also don’t know what it’s like to not have their true names—my entire lineage is down in Charleston, and it goes back to three brothers who were brought there during the slave trade. Between the three of them, they all were given different names because they were bought by different families. But I don’t give it any weight. I’ve never presented my resentments as anger; part of the reason is that the archetypal angry black man is scary to people; they’re taught to fear him. Another big part is that anger, however justified, is also counterproductive.

  I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, and he said to me, “We’ve got to stop responding like we’re victims.” And I understand that, but we can’t deny or forget the period of time during which we were victimized. I can trace back my lineage directly to slavery. My last name isn’t African—the family that owned us gave it to us. I mean, think about that: it goes back to Genesis—naming things gives you ownership over them. My family was owned.

  And still today, in what is often touted as a “post-racial world,” color matters. It matters even in the black community. My son went to an HBCU and he was shocked at the importance placed on being light-skinned there. People who are darker-skinned are viewed as lower—lighter-skinned black people, on the other hand, are viewed as smarter, more artistic. So are people with natural hair, or people with light eyes—any feature that’s distinctive, anything that mimics white features.

  At the same time, beauty ideals have changed. Twenty years ago, the curvaceous body types that are idolized now were definitely not then. Now our clothes, our hairstyles, and even our bodies are subject to cultural appropriation. But looking black stops short of being black—people take the parts of our identity that are convenient and fashionable, but the conversation seldom broaches how dangerous it still is to be us.

  I raised my three sons on my own, and when they were growing up, I feared so much passing on that chip on the shoulder to them. Is it etched in our DNA, our past? Or is it taught to us over and over again, socialized when we’re children? I was so protective of them, but I also knew that there were things I could not control. As a single parent, though, I’ve always felt that I had to keep them within hand’s reach. So maybe I was overprotective. Maybe I protected them so much that I made the world seem kinder than it is.

  My sons were raised in a predominantly white neighborhood, and a lot of our family friends are white. Not to make them wary of their white friends, I put off having the “race” conversation with them. But then they witnessed their uncle handcuffed and arrested on the pavement in front of our house—because he was parked too far away from the curb!—and I decided that this is just the reality of the world that we live in, and I could never really hide that from them. Unwarranted violence against black men is a part of our daily lives. So I told them to be careful, to realize that their skin color scares people, to not open themselves up to situations that could put them in hot water. But no matter how much I want to protect my kids, I can’t change the world they live in.

  One time, they had been at the mall with some friends. They were in middle school—just kids—and some cops stopped and questioned them about shoplifting. Apparently, a shopkeeper had claimed that he’d seen some black kids steal. They found nothing on them, of course, and let them go, but not before detaining them and scaring them half to death. Another time, when they were teenagers, the three of them got into a car to meet their friends at a restaurant five miles away from home. I knew their friends and where they were going. I’d done my due diligence. But they got there early, and they were sitting outside the restaurant, waiting in the parking lot, which I guess was a red flag to some people. So the police were called. That’s all it takes, for people in positions of authority to say to these kids with their actions, “Hey, we see you, and this is your place in our society.”

  There is a power paradigm that tells black men to never get too comfortable in public, to never let their guard down, to never not be watching, careful, afraid, aware. Even if they aren’t arrested, they’re still harassed. And these are the types of things that the average black parent worries about, that just because their kids are in a group of young black men, they’ll be targeted unfairly. But the cost of that is high—incredibly high. They could lose their lives.

  I’ve always believed that if I raise my kids right, if I educate them, if I open up the world to them—that’s the biggest and best thing I can do. That’s the only thing I can control. My investment was in my children and in the generations to come—in posterity. I taught them to worry about their own actions and make sure they were on the straight and narrow, regardless of what happened around them. But I feel like we’re traveling back in time when it comes to race relations, so I don’t know if that
was good advice. The only difference between now and the 1960s is that the photos are in color.

  I remember the Charleston church shooting back in 2015, when Dylann Roof killed nine people in cold blood in hopes of igniting a race war. That happened in my backyard. Then, just a couple of years later, a car drove through a crowd of good people in Charlottesville, Virginia—people who were protesting against the KKK, against white supremacists who want to legitimize hatred and honor dark figures in our nation’s history—figures who, had they won, would have made me and my boys slaves today. The KKK and neo-Nazis are a cancer on our society that’s always been there, but the second you give them airtime, you empower them. It’s disheartening, what’s happening in our world today. There are so many people who aren’t hard-hearted and evil, but they get caught up in this wave of demagoguery, and they become desensitized to hatred. I ask myself, What is next?

  I can’t help but think what would have happened had it been a black man who died under that car in Charlottesville. Is one life worth more than another to the media? It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but precedent tells me they would have investigated him first, before reporting on the story. They would have asked: Does he have a record? They would have made him a victim twice. I’ve always thought that people want to sing our blues, but they don’t want to live our blues.

  And our president, instead of condemning racism unilaterally, got on the bully pulpit and told us that we need to preserve history and culture—that taking down pieces of history selectively is a slippery slope, and soon the likes of Washington and Jefferson will go down, too. But I have trouble seeing that: I have trouble seeing how bringing down statues that were put up during the Jim Crow and civil rights eras as a protest to black emancipation is a regressive thing for us, as a country. Shame is what’s missing from our society. Shame for what was done to black people. Shame for what’s still being done. I’m not worried about the men with swastika tattoos or the skinheads; I’m worried about the man walking down the street who won’t look me in the eye anymore because our president has legitimized his hatred. We’ve allowed too much to go unchallenged.