She soon realized that her husband's business trips were actually to his second family's home.
Sometimes even the best of marriages could be veiled by deception and deceit. Karen thought she and her husband of five years, Mark, had a happy marriage. They share twins together, and she felt good being a mom and wife. But her perfect world turned upside down when she realized her husband was keeping a huge secret.
Karen knew that Mark's job required him to travel a lot. When their twins were born, the husband spent all his time in Perth, their home. However, soon after the family of two changed to four, Mark's trips became more frequent as he changed his job, according to The Daily Mail.
The mum-of-two says that Mark was a supportive husband who helped her get her own career started. Talking to Honey, she said, "It was pretty good, he was very supportive of me, he always praised me, told me what a great mother I am and when I started my own business from home, writing content for websites and some logo design, he was great. So I felt very supported emotionally and financially."
After one of his so called trips, Karen was trying to help out her hard-working husband when she discovered something so terrible that it broke her heart into a million pieces. "He got home one night quite late and was exhausted, so after spending a short time with me, he went to bed. I still had a bit of work to do, so I stayed up later," she revealed.
Mark had left his luggage unpacked, so Karen thought of helping him by doing it for him. "That’s when I found, stuffed amongst his clothes and toiletries, a small photo frame with a picture of a woman in her mid-30s with a boy aged around 18 months," she added. Shocked by her discovery, at first she thought that his luggage got exchanged, but she soon realized that the other items belonged to him.
"My gut told me something was off so I spent the night on the sofa and in the morning I waited until after I’d taken the girls to pre-school," she continued. Karen knew that the only way she could find an answer to her doubts was to ask him directly. "It was over the breakfast table I confronted him, I literally held up the photo frame with the picture of the woman and boy and said, ‘Who are they and why was this in your suitcase?'” she asked him.
Astounded by the question, Mark had no other choice but to speak the truth. "He looked at me for a few seconds without speaking then he just put his face in his hands and said, 'I’m so sorry. I knew you’d find out one day, I’ve been dreading this moment.'” He then confessed that he had been in a relationship with a woman named Belinda who later gave birth to their son, Max.
Shell-shocked, Karen didn't know how to respond to such a betrayal. "I couldn’t stop crying. I said things like, 'How could you do this to me and the girls?' He told me he never stopped loving me, he just got himself in a situation he couldn’t get himself out of," Karen divulged. She assumed that all those business trips to London or South Africa were to spend time with his second family, but then Mark revealed that his other family lived, "just two suburbs away from us!"
That's when she started piecing everything together. The letters she would find addressed to Mark with a different address of a neighboring suburb was actually the place where his second family resided. When she asked him about it before she knew about the truth, he dismissed it by saying "something about a post office address to make things easier for work."
Not wanting to live with a man who cheated on her and leaving her alone so many times to manage the kids alone, Karen "kicked him out of the house, knowing that he would go straight to his other family. So all those times I would kiss him goodbye when he went to the airport for his overseas meetings, he was just using those work travel trips as an excuse to move into his second family’s house!" recalled the emotional woman.
Mark said that Belinda knew that he had a wife and two girls but Karen refused to believe him because, "I cannot imagine any woman being OK with her partner having a second family. My guess, and I still don’t know for sure, is that Belinda has no idea that me and the girls exist at all," she said.
Karen finally divorced her cheating husband and is grateful that her girls are now adjusted with their dad being a "part-time father." Since the twins are still too young to understand the truth, they only know that their "Daddy is away for work."
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