5Feb2018
I was 7 hours away from taking potentially the most critical test I've ever had and couldn't sleep a wink. I was beginning a new career as an airline pilot following my retirement from the US Army. Throughout that career I had taken many tests and was well accustomed to the stress associated with them. This test was a little different though, it was 1 week into our ground school and was a test on the emergency procedures and limitations of the regional jet we were about to learn to fly. There was no room for error, it was either 100% or a 0. A zero could be a potential career ender before it even started.
I was tossing and turning in my hotel room more than 4000 miles and 6 time zones away from my family. Their day was already starting, the older two were already off to school, the next oldest was probably getting ready for kindergarten and the youngest, merely 1 at the time, was probably enjoying his morning milk. I tried and tried to get some sleep but finally caved and called my wife for a little emotional support. No answer. I wrote to her briefly on our chat program to let her know that I couldn't sleep and needed to hear her voice. no reply. This was not normal for her as she pretty much lived with her phone in her hand and everything revolved around social media. After a few more tries, I finally got a reply that simply stated "busy with Harry" (our youngest son, I won't use real names for obvious reasons). No problem at all, I'll wait. after another 35 additional minutes of her not responding but visibly doing other things on her social media accounts, I began to worry. At first just a worry about my son, if she is busy with him, what's wrong? Is he sick? at the ER? I had not idea but the silence was killing me. I tried calling the house but she wouldn't answer. I wrote to her that I was worried about Harry and was going to call her mother to see if I could get an answer since this has now been almost 2 hours.
I guess she finally realized she didn't want to hide things any longer and called me to tell me she had been cheating on me. WOW, absolute heartbreak! I did not see this coming at all and had no idea how to handle it. I hung up on her and laid on my hotel bed crying.
After I was able to calm down a little, and I do mean only a little, I called a friend of mine who is a lawyer for a little guidance. We didn't chat long and he didn't waste much time trying to comfort me, he got straight to the point with some important advice. He told me to stay away from recording my conversations since that is illegal in most cases and he didn't know the law for Germany. He did recommend I document every one of them though as accurately as I can, basically create a transcript for future use. Although this was difficult at times, I was able to do it for virtually every phone call for the next 8 months or so.
When I was ready, I called her back. The hard part this time was not the reality that my wife had cheated on me, it was how cold an emotionless she was. She didn't seem to feel bad about hurting me at all. At this point, I still didn't know her intentions, I didn't know what she wanted or how far things had already progressed. That all became very clear over the next few painful days and sleepless nights.
As the night ended, I was forced to pull myself together and head to work. It was time to take that test and start figuring out what I wanted to do. That was officially the end of toughest night of my life, or so I thought.
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