Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about murder.
Tis the season, I guess.
But I’ve been particularly haunted by the stories of husbands who kill their wives, and I’m not talking about those abusive, controlling asshole husbands– the kind where if you were close enough, you might have seen it coming.
No, the ones that disturb me most are the ones no one ever even suspected were capable of evil. The ones that were leading these secret lives, making secret plans, and still coming home and playing the part of loving husband and father until the very last second.
I’m haunted by those women that devoted their lives to their murderers while being so oblivious to the looming monster at their side. The women that praised their partners, shared little acts of love on social media, or blogs about their family adventures, right up until the hands of those men they trusted the most put them underground or underwater.
There’s just something so distinctly horrific about a monster that wears the mask of a good man.
But so many of them do, don’t they?
When my husband left me out of nowhere, it was terrifying. There were a lot of layers to that fear, but the most unnerving aspect was how quickly he changed. It was like he flipped a switch and became a stranger with my husband’s face. Literally overnight.
On his way out the door, he turned the gaslighting on full throttle. Such a classic move–any woman that’s ever been cheated on is going to be familiar with that tactic–but I genuinely thought he was going through some kind of psychosis. That’s how much of a good person I thought he was then. There had to be something really wrong for him to act this way. To do this to me, and our children.
And there was, but I wouldn’t find out about it, her, for a while.
The next time I saw him, there was this coldness there that was completely foreign. He was almost reptilian in how he looked through me. And he was so quick to anger that I had to approach him with caution. If I pushed back on anything he was trying to convince me of, if I didn’t play along with his game of “Everything is Fine, I Just Don’t Sleep At Home Anymore”, he would storm out. The slamming front door and squealing tires would upset our kids, but it made my blood turn to ice.
This man wasn’t my husband…except he was.
He was my husband minus every drop of empathy.
I had to basically make an appointment if I wanted to talk to him about saving our marriage– the one he was suddenly telling me was so broken that he had to leave to have time “alone” to sort out. I would beg him to try and work on these problems together, to not destroy our daughters’ sense of home and safety, to not go down a path he couldn’t come back up from. But he told me that our whole marriage had been bad. That there were “some moments” but most of it was terrible.
And when I asked how he could say that to me, the person there at his side for over a decade who had witnessed how much happiness there had been in him, all the smiles and laughter, and genuinely joyful moments that were not few and far between, but folded in daily, he yelled, yelled, that he’d been wearing a mask.
You know, like serial killers do.
Like Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy. Like Scott Peterson. Like Chris Watts.
Obviously, most men who want to start a new life with their mistress don’t go the murder route. Most find other ways to destroy their marriage and family when they want out. But I think both types wear a similar mask.
I still sometimes think of the cold calm of my husband as he did the things he did, knowing how much it would hurt me. The damage it would cause not only me, but our kids. I shudder now to think of times when he seemed to be so happy and I wonder what was just under the surface of that mask he wore.
Waiting…
Seething...
