I met my husband's girlfriend at his funeral
And other stories I tell while getting my eyebrows waxed
I saw my aesthetician Amy this afternoon, and while she was rearranging the hair on my face and shaping my bush into a perfect triangle, I updated her on all the things happening in my life right now. A good waxing chick is hard to come by, and Amy and I have been going through this routine every 4-6 weeks for the last 12 or so years, so she knows the intricacies of my life as someone I see more frequently than most of my friends.
As a spectator, she loves hearing about my life, but it’s not a one way street. I also love talking and asking about her life and together we’ve laughed and cried through a lot of hot melted wax and stories about kids, parenting, marriage, friendship, mothers, husbands, and therapy. I was shocked that I’d never mentioned my husband’s girlfriend.
We technically had an “open” marriage, which for him meant he would routinely attempt to meet and date women he met on various sites, and I would ask him to please not tell me about his girlfriends. I had online boyfriends, and by 2021 I had given up being unhappy about it and welcomed his side pieces’ presence in our lives.
For the last three or so years of our marriage, he had a steady lady that I heard about constantly but never met. I was grateful for her, mostly because she kept his attention off of me. Whenever I would leave town they would rendezvous, and I frankly felt happy that I knew his location and that he was safe. She’s a lovely woman, kind and caring, thoughtful and sweet. I routinely went through his phone and saw her messages, and she seemed to be someone who genuinely liked him and cared about him, albeit with bendy boundaries and a tendency to always show up in his life carrying a bottle of whiskey to drink together.
When he died, I felt horrible for her. No one in her life had known that she had a secret married boyfriend. She had also been in her own “open marriage” turned divorce, and the relationship she shared with my husband was something private from everyone in her life. I reached out to her via instagram and invited her to come to the memorial service. She was grateful, she had wanted to be there but hadn’t known if that was inappropriate, as we both knew a lot about each other but had never met.I told her of course she should come.
And so at his funeral I met her for the first time. We hugged and she was just as kind and generous in person as she had always seemed in his messages. A friend told me she looks like a B-version of me, a little bit older, a little bit grayer, a little bit plumper. I laughed. He did have a type. We’ve stayed in touch and I added her to my Christmas Card list, I wish her the best in all of her things.