Good Morning, and welcome to this episode of Ask A Bitchface.
I want to talk a little bit about what it is that gives me the insight allowing me to “know where it hurts” when I answer questions, or give y’all my 1&¼ cent worth of opinion.
I have a reader who follows my column on Quora and here on Substack. He came to me with two separate issues, one being a wife who was unfaithful while he was in prison. Y’all know how I feel about cheating. I don’t care if the person is imprisoned, if you cannot be faithful, you make that clear to someone. You call them, text them, write them a letter, send a telegraph, send up a smoke signal, whatever it takes to let them know “hey, I am going to move on, so I don’t want to do that until you’re aware that I’m moving in a different direction”. It is the decent thing to do, regardless of the circumstances between yourself and your partner.
If you can come to me with a situation where you should not be honest with the other half of your relationship before you start sleeping with someone else, I encourage you to come to me with it. I welcome the opportunity to completely and totally tear that shit to shreds.
Anyway, back to my point. Gentleman tells me, in an effort to avoid returning to prison, he has taken my advice and removed himself from the wife in question, all those involved with covering and enabling the infidelity, and the whole mix. Smartest thing he can do in my opinion, because I have a short fuse as well (shocker, I know), and I know that I’m the kind of woman that will see the people that were lying and covering for a cheater, and call everyone at the table everything but good Christians.
So, some time goes by, and the gentleman asks me my opinion. He has a young lady who is communicating with him, and he sends me a message from her verbatim. Immediately, I can tell she is looking for something more than companionship. I can tell by the verbiage. Ask me how I now? Oh, I’m so glad you did.
I know, as a woman, when I’m being coy, when I’m being forward, when I’m being manipulative, when I’m being passive-aggressive (I was, once, in the 4th grade), I know what I say and do when I’m searching for a certain result. I know from 20 years behind a bar observing human behavior in all of its’ hits and misses. I know from living the life I have thus far, being married to a narcissist who was married to someone else, and being with that dude with the Grindr app. I know things because, like y’all, I once gave my heart to someone.
In the aftermath of being with some of the men I have made the terrible decisions to be with, I took time to reflect. I wrote a lot. Notebooks and notebooks, I wrote my feelings, I wrote my anger, I wrote my pain so that years later, when I read what I wrote, the feelings were all live and in color to me. I remember the way it felt when I walked into mine and Coreys house and that bitch was in my living room with my husband. I remember the feeling of betrayal, I remember the sound of my own heartbreaking in my chest.
I remember finding that video on Grindrs “other” account, I remember the shame and disgust, and how I got sick on the floor in front of me, and twice more before I could make myself walk to the bathroom. All of the things I felt, they’re all eternalized on paper. At the time, it was in an attempt to fix the pain, to heal the hole in my chest that grew every day and threatened to swallow me.
Now, those very same notebooks are reference books. I am like a physician, flipping through the case studies and reviewing the list of symptoms. I have the answers because I have been lost in the horror and agony of the question at one point or another in my life. I don’t tell you things that I don’t know, and I have no problem saying I really don’t have an answer for this.
But, what I know, it is finite and it is concrete and it is neither their fault or mine. It is simply now a part of what makes me who I am. It is what enables me to sit, in all of my wisdom and well-manicured glory, and tell you “I have an answer, and if you’ll hear me out, I can help you”.
As a final note, the gentleman, he did listen. He thanked me. And say what you will, but there are times in my life and adventures in pit rescue, I really don’t mind that half of my readers are ex-cons. Because there is a time for Boy Scouts and there is a time for convicts, and a truly resourceful woman has both on speed dial.
Thank you, readers, I think it was time I said that again. It’s been too long since I let y’all know, *Ms Macon is blowing all y’all kisses*.