'I'd been married five months when my husband left me for a mum he met at the school gates.'

Are any other husbands out there sleeping with school mums? Is this an actual thing now?

Apparently there’s more than just activewear and bitchiness going on at the school gate – there are affairs.

Families are being destroyed in a place where families should be safe. I know, because it happened to me in the most brutal, humiliating way possible.

After almost 14 years together, and three amazing sons, we married.

But just three weeks later, he started to pull away from me.

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I didn’t understand what was happening. I was terrified and I didn’t tell a single person. I just wanted my family to stay together; I never imagined it would end the way it did.

Fast-forward five months, unbeknown to me, rumours had started about my husband and a mum from the school.

Eventually, he told me. Actually, he yelled it at me, with all the aggression in the world. He told me bits and pieces, lies and at times complete fabrications, minimising everything to protect himself, which ultimately caused me so much more pain later on. The pain, urgh, it was indescribable. It still is.

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Over the next few months the truth slowly came out. It was a mum who I knew, a mum who was in the same circle of friends as me, a mum I trusted. He left me, and is still with her to this day.

She isn’t pretty, or intelligent, or rich, or kind. She is impudent and disrespectful towards me and others, she has no morals or values. I can’t articulate my disgust for this woman, for what she has done to me and my children. Being betrayed within your own community, at your children’s school – a place where we should have been safe and protected – is a violation that tears you apart.

I went from being just a typical mum, to the mum whose husband had an affair with another mum. My life was on display, and everyone had something to say about it. Going to school each day, I felt physical pain and crippling anxiety – it was unbearable. I started having daily, sometimes hourly, panic attacks about going to school. The stares, the gossip, the absolute fear of bumping into her, it all got too much. I thought, if I don’t die from the pain, I’ll die from the panic. I was barely alive anyway so it didn’t matter.

I was in a haze of Valium by day and Vodka by night for the first six months. Survival mode. All the vices, all the time. I was a mess. Trying to be there for my boys while they tried to process the sudden abandonment of their father is almost impossible. Sharing my children with my ex-husband and his affair partner is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I ache for my boys every second they are gone. I grieve that there is a new family and I am not a part of it.

The pain of losing my husband, the betrayal and the public humiliation hasn’t started to fade yet. The two of them continue to disrespect me, hurt me and parade around their new life like they’ve won an Olympic gold medal. I am merely a speed bump in their quest for this new life that I do not understand. I feel small and worthless and pathetic and replaceable, every second of the day. I question what I did wrong, why he chose her over me, why I was never enough.

It seems I am moving forward, I am rebuilding a life for me and my children, and to some degree I am. But to be honest, I’m just as broken inside as the day he left. I have a billion pieces to put back together, and I don’t even know where to start. I am still the mum crying in her car at school pickup, having panic attacks about walking through the school gates. I am still just so, so sad.

Have you been cheated on? How did you manage? Tell us in the comments. 

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