All one woman wanted was a day out with her family, but a text message on her partner's phone sent her into a spiral instead. The couple had taken their kids for some "social distanced sightseeing" in their new neighborhood when a photo message came in and revealed that not only was there a mysterious contact in her partner's phone, but also that there was a young child in the picture as well. Now she's wondering, is this her partner's hidden son?
The couple's history has been less than perfect.
Together for more than 15 years, the couple have lived both together and apart throughout their relationship, she explained in a Reddit post on r/breakingmom.
"For my part in this, I have to admit I'm an alcoholic in recovery. I'm definitely not perfect, but I've worked very hard to improve myself, stay sober, and be the best woman and mom I can be," she explained.
While they were separated, her partner had an affair with another woman -- and then lied about it.
Despite being "deeply hurt" about her partner's relationship, she decided to forgive him and move on for the sake of their family.
Today, the couple are together and have just moved to a new town.
But unfortunately, the move happened right before the current health crisis. So now not only is the mom stuck inside the house in a new town, but also she has no way of making friends in her new surroundings.
"I felt like life was really really coming together," she wrote. "After a LOT of searching, I found the perfect house, in a nice neighborhood, a place for a fresh start. I was truly happy, my kids were blossoming, life is really, really good."
Until recently, when the parents tried to do something fun and safe with their kids.
Trying to make their new city feel like home, the parents took their kids "social distancing sightseeing."
"We might not be able to play in our new city, but at least we can see it through the car windows," she wrote.
Of course, they weren't too familiar with where they were driving, so the mom borrowed her partner's phone to try to figure out how to get to their next location.
Then a text came in on her partner's phone -- and she could see the panic spread across his face.
He quickly took his phone back "and I chalk it up to my overactive imagination." But 10 minutes later, she again needed to use her partner's phone "and that's when get the urgent feeling from my brain to push the messages button."
"'Just to look at the top few names' – is what I told myself," she wrote. "I should have just handed the phone back."
And that's when she saw it -- one of her partner's top contacts was a mysterious person called "C."
At first, it seemed innocent. But then, she saw a really concerning message C sent.
"Do we need to pay for school this week?" the message read.
She thought that was weird, until she scrolled up.
"I quickly see a few pictures maybe three to four of a cute kid, I'd estimate 2-ish?" she wrote. She kept scrolling. "Then, as it pauses to load more, I catch the message under a picture of the kid holding a tablet."
"'Thank you, Daddy,'" it read.
She quickly closed her partner's message and handed him back his phone.
But the damage was done. She decided not to freak out because their kids were in the car, but to say she was devastated would be an understatement.
"I thought we were a happy little family, I thought we were in such a good place. I'm currently just broken," she explained.
And now she has nowhere to turn.
With few resources in her new town, she has no escape. And all she really wants to do is read her partner's phone again "to prove to myself one way or the other that it was my imagination or if my nightmare has just begun."
"I don't want to blow up my life if I just read it wrong," she added. "Maybe my life didn't just implode with three words."
Luckily for the mom, other commenters were ready to rally behind her.
"You saw what you saw," one commenter wrote. "Sounds like he's an expert manipulator so I get wanting more evidence but also trust yourself. The truth is the truth no matter how much he denies it. There's a lot you don't know — true enough — but what you saw isn't an illusion."
"I want to add that the part about you being a recovering alcoholic, not perfect, etc. in my opinion, is unrelated to everything else in your post," someone else wrote. "No one is perfect. Your past does NOT mean you deserve this. No one deserves this."
"Hi fellow mum, leave him," someone else suggested. "Hopefully you have money and something else going on other than him and that house. He has a whole other kid and you cannot trust him."
But the update to the post shows that things are so much worse than she could have ever imagined.
After one commenter recommended that the mom perform a public records search, she found out that her partner had cheated — just not with "C."
"He. Was. Married. For years," she wrote. "I was the other woman."
Apparently, her husband was super busy when they broke up.
He wasn't just having an affair when they separated — he was living with his wife.
According to the OP, when she had her relapse in her recovery, she decided to move out of their house while they took a break, and that's when her partner moved his wife into their home. She also learned that while she was away, her partner and his wife lost their home.
"I would not be allowed to return and collect anything," she recalled. "All my keepsakes from my son, my jewelry (mostly inexpensive, except for my engagement ring, just very sentimental), my only photo of my dad, gone."
And that little boy in the photo? That's another woman's child.
After a little digging the OP found out that the boy's mother was not her husband's wife.
"The mother died a little over a year ago," she wrote. "The obituary had very minimal information, so I don't know what happened to her."
From her research, it looked like the boy's maternal family was granted temporary custody — which is why she may have never met him.
"So while I'm not 100 percent sure what the heck is going on currently, I do know clearly I was played for a complete and total fool," she wrote.
The find was painful, but at least it helped clarify to the OP that it was time for her to leave.
Enough was enough.
"I'm currently reeling from all this," she wrote. "My brain has short circuited. Mainly I'm hurting on a deep primal level, not only for me but for my kids, and the other child too. They didn't deserve this."
These stories are based on posts found on Reddit. Reddit is a user-generated social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website where registered members submit content to the site and can up- or down-vote the content. The accuracy and authenticity of each story cannot be confirmed by our staff.
