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right around the time of the whole dramatic fallout, when he stopped by my house impromptu early one morning, seduced me, literally put it in for one pump

So you knew he was married,and had sex with him. He didn't seduce you. You invited him in.

"someone'shusband

Why the quotation marks? He IS someone's husband. She is not a small detail,to be dismissed.

You're the other woman.

Also..my child is a high school teacher. She works in a predominantly African American area. She is white. She has zero problem controlling the classroom. Some student s get out of hand,but that's because that just happens to every teacher. For the most part, by far, they respect her enormously. Just last week a boy had a fit,and destroyed many things in her classroom. After she walked him to the office,she came back to her students organizing the room,and trying to fix what was broke. They asked if she was ok. They were concerned about her.

So..no. Sorry. Not buying the excuse you're trying to sell everyone..that kids today are uncontrollable because of their parents. If the kids behave that way in your class,it's because you allow it. Period.

You enjoy being a victim. If you were to go to IC, and work on that,your life would change,and you would be a happier person.

[This message edited by HellFire at 7:52 PM, Wednesday, September 21st]

A healthier version of you would not give a loser man the time of day. That version would have more job success and more friends. You wouldn't feel so tired all of the time. Seeking help for feeling like you do is no more shameful than seeking help because you have a physical injury. Plenty of us here have spent quality time in therapy.

This^^^^ 100%.

Your negative self-talk is taking a huge toll on you professionally and personally. Only you can change that.

We have a saying around here: broken attracts broken. When you are not emotionally healthy, you are prey for the manipulative, the less than desireable, the Dicks of this world. When you invest in yourself, you get an invaluable payoff.

I have to ask you: WHY are you so against therapy that might really help you? And I don't want to hear about your parents. You're a grown woman and I'm sure you've done some things that have gone against how your parents would have done them. This is no different.

Cat

TJG,

You're at it again, blaming everyone else for not welcoming you, blaming all the paperwork on your school admin, blaming your lack of control in the classroom on the kids. COMPLAINING ABOUT A CHEATING LYING CRIMINAL TREATING YOU LIKE SHIT.

Also, WTF? Feeling hurt that he fucked off before you could DECIDE to tell him to fuck off? Call the whambulance. I don't have a fiddle small enough to play for you.

What is there to decide?

What planet are you living on where there's a discernment process for whether you should be fucking a LYING CHEATING CRIMINAL?

Also, what HF said, 100%- OBS is not some footnote on your sordid "fling" with "POS" as I shall refer to him.

Are you so attached to your precious "victimhood" that you can't even fathom living without it?

It's so much easier to sit in your misery, blaming everyone else for YOUR pain. Time to grow up, put on your big girl pants and DO SOMETHING about the sorry state you are in.

And this is coming from someone who has been there, done that, been the OW and lived to tell the tale. I also DID THE WORK and GOT OFF MY SORRY ASS and GOT INTO IC! Until you start doing that, you are going to have to wake up to the knowledge that YOU NEED TO START POSTING IN WAYWARD SIDE as you are officially an OTHER PERSON. AN AFFAIR PARTNER. AN UNREMORSEFUL OTHER WOMAN WHO IS PEEVED THAT SHE DIDN'T GET TO DUMP AP FIRST.

Do you realize how fucked up that is? You HATED it when R would make out and go behind your back and treat you like shit. YOU CHOSE to do that SAME THING to another woman. YOU brought that into her life (likely not for the first nor the last time, but...). YOU DECIDED TO CONSPIRE WITH POS TO DESTROY HIS WIFE YET AGAIN.

When are you going to be sick enough of your own self that you're going to get off your ass and do something about it?

Your covert narc behaviors and tendencies are triggering enough to me that I am going to tune out from your posts.

I wish you the best, but until YOU can wish yourself the best, I'm not going to waste my time or energy on you.

I have to ask you: WHY are you so against therapy that might really help you?

She will say she doesn't have time. I don't understand why so much time is spent at school/work. Or doing work at home.

You've been a teacher for so many years. Why can't you re-use previous lessons? Why must there be so many worksheets? The students don't have lined paper to do lessons on?? Maybe another teacher can help me out with this? The teachers I know live full active lives outside of work.

I worry that you won't make it 5 more years.

6 pages is advice and you haven’t followed one bit of it. You can’t understand why life is so hard for you, but you do the exact opposite of what should be done.

They say, take what you need and leave the rest, well you have left 6 pages of advice and then knowingly slept with a married man, a slap in face to all of us here on SI.

Count me in as another who for the life of me can’t understand why you have to spend every waking hour working. I have friends who are teachers. My sibling is a teacher. NONE of them need to stay after school until the janitors lock up the building, or pull all-nighters at home to get their work done. And it’s REALLY puzzling that you’ve been teaching for 25 years and you still haven’t figured out how to accomplish your workload within reasonable working hours.

Teacherjoggergirl, I hate to say it but I thought your OP was bad news, from jump. Even without the wife and the criminal record, this dude sounds like a loser. I'm going to italicize the parts of your OP where he comes off sounding like a total creep with no respect for commonplace boundaries. And then I'll bold the part where you make excuses for the fact that this guy had already ghosted you once.

He probably lost interest because I didn't have any free time to see him again. We did chat on the phone a few times after that, but then he fell out of contact. (again, understandably so. If I was a guy, I would think someone like me was disinterested or too busy too) Thankfully, I had my second chance when he happened to be driving by while I was out jogging AGAIN! He remembered me and stopped to talk, like he did before. This led to him taking me out that same week to a wonderfully amazing little Italian restaurant! But before we went out, haha he actually showed up at my house unexpected the next morning shortly before lunch, to visit, and well...we ended up getting intimate with each other.

I'm not even going to go into the stuff your buddy found out, because none of that even matters. If a man doesn't respect you, nothing else matters.
(fwiw, imo, I don't feel bad for his wife. She's a grown adult who must have a pHd in rose-colored glasses or maybe a fetish for creeps. I have no idea how any woman could somehow wind up married to this guy.)

She will say she doesn't have time. I don't understand why so much time is spent at school/work. Or doing work at home.

You've been a teacher for so many years. Why can't you re-use previous lessons? Why must there be so many worksheets? The students don't have lined paper to do lessons on?? Maybe another teacher can help me out with this? duh The teachers I know live full active lives outside of work.

I worry that you won't make it 5 more years.

You're right, I haven't had any time. It seems that nobody quite understands what exactly I have on my plate right now. I feel like even some teachers don't understand my workload. It is obvious that many people here and elsewhere are not teachers, or at least aren't currently teachers in these times, if they claim that it's so easy to stay on top of all the paperwork and manage overloaded classes with over 40 students each in a small classroom.

Yes, I've been teaching for many years. And it used to be a much easier job, much more manageable timewise. Unfortunately, I was not able to take advantage of the time savings for many of those easier years, because I had what felt like in essence a second full-time job (unpaid), taking care of my elderly then-living ill parents. Even in those days, I was still one of the last to leave, just not THE last to leave. I would leave each day by 4:30 (about an hour and a half after school let out), and there was this one teacher who stayed every night until at least 7 or 8pm. She would literally bring her TV Dinner with her to work each day, and be walking with it to the microwave in the photocopy room as I was finishing up the last of my photocopies and on my way out the door. She was middle aged but no husband and no kids, seemed to put her whole life into that teaching job. I used to tell myself how thankful I was that I wasn't that teacher, only to end up being that teacher, but worse, because unlike her, I never got promoted to department head (nor would I want to, honestly) nor did I ever get a much higher paying, plush teaching job in the suburbs eventually the way she did. I would reuse lessons except they keep updating the curriculum to keep on pace with the standardized tests and they also keep changing around the classes I teach. Especially this year, being in a new school with different classes to teach. I have 4, yes 4, different lesson plans this year. Supposedly the union rules say teachers can't have anymore than 3, which is tough enough, but I have 4. The school claims that "it's only 3 different subjects" but the problem is, one of the subjects has two different course formats, one running single periods all year and the other running double periods for half the year, so it's still a totally different pacing and therefore different assignments and lesson plans.

It seems even my colleague friend doesn't understand anymore. She was the one I felt understood me best. Like me, she also stayed late after school (but not as late as me, mostly because she had to leave to pick up her young son from childcare) and devoted her weekends and any hours her son was asleep to getting caught up on grading papers and entering grades on the online grade portal. She used to vent about the immense workload too. She also got shafted with the force transfer to another, more difficult school with multiple different lesson plans. But it seems that ever since she quit teaching last spring and started working her 9-5 office temp job, she too forgets how much work it is to teach in the city these days. She keeps asking me to hang out and then acting offended or mad when I tell her I'm just too busy to have any semblance of a life right now. The stress of feeling like I'm offending her is compounding the stress I already have from all of this extra schoolwork.

I worry too about how I'll survive the next 5 years, especially if I'm stuck staying at this school for all of that time. I really hate it here. I thought it was miserable at my last school, but this one is so much worse. My worst nightmare has come true, unfortunately. I question if even the ghetto schools on the opposite side of the city would be any worse. Oh well, I suppose I can be thankful I don't have that long of a commute. It's a few minutes longer than my last school, which was a dream being only 7 minutes away from my house, but I guess I should be thankful I'm not driving over an hour away across city like my colleague friend, who burned through clutches and many expensive car repairs because of how rough the commute was on each of her cars?

And this is coming from someone who has been there, done that, been the OW and lived to tell the tale. I also DID THE WORK and GOT OFF MY SORRY ASS and GOT INTO IC! Until you start doing that, you are going to have to wake up to the knowledge that YOU NEED TO START POSTING IN WAYWARD SIDE as you are officially an OTHER PERSON. AN AFFAIR PARTNER. AN UNREMORSEFUL OTHER WOMAN WHO IS PEEVED THAT SHE DIDN'T GET TO DUMP AP FIRST.

Do you realize how fucked up that is? You HATED it when R would make out and go behind your back and treat you like shit. YOU CHOSE to do that SAME THING to another woman. YOU brought that into her life (likely not for the first nor the last time, but...). YOU DECIDED TO CONSPIRE WITH POS TO DESTROY HIS WIFE YET AGAIN.

I honestly had no clue he was married until my former colleague friend started saying stuff, and then eventually I gave her the green light to investigate him online as it seems she loves doing to people. I don't feel good about myself knowing he was married. I don't want to be an "OW" as you call it. I am officially permanently done with K and will not make any attempts whatsoever to contact him or even return his contact now. And I mean it. You are right, it was wrong for me to continue answering his calls in the days after I learned from my colleague friend's Facebook screenshots that he was married. I remember how my sister-in-law felt when she found out my brother had his affair on her, and how she got triggered months later when she was in the Hallmark store and saw that Valentine's Day card "to my one and only" while realizing that she was no longer her husband's/my brother's one and only sex partner anymore (they saved themselves for each other on their wedding night). You are right, and maybe I'm a bad person. I also feel like an idiot for not suspecting things earlier. This weighs on me a lot.

When are you going to be sick enough of your own self that you're going to get off your ass and do something about it?

Actually, I already kind of hate myself, honestly. Yes, I have low self esteem, from the way people have treated me at my job and also from the way men have treated me recently. I really have no choice right now because I have no life due to having such an overwhelming amount of work coming in. I have bigger classes than ever, with one class having FORTY-TWO students on roster, which is 8 students above the max cap that the union supposedly has set for teachers to have in a given class. In fact, every single one of my five classes has above the 34-student max limit. The extra behavior problems has resulted in literally HOURS of extra work each night, with all of the write-ups, phone calls home, make-up work each day that we're required to create for students who don't complete the classwork, and logs documenting write-ups and phone calls.

don't want to be an "OW" as you call it.

Let's see. You found out he was married. You continued to take his calls,you continued to let him in the house, and you continued to have sex with him.

HE IS MARRIED!

WTH do you mean, "as you call it"??

You are a woman who had sex with a married man,knowing full well he was married.

You are the other woman.

You continue to minimize his wife,his marriage,and your role in the affairs.

You may not have started out knowing he was married..though the red flags were there. But you continued the affairs after you knew. You are the OW.

I see we are continuing the victim narrative.

Bluntly, you are no longer a victim--you are now a volunteer. By not working to make a better work-life balance, by ignoring all of the helpful advice you've been given, you're continuing to blame everything else in this world for your lot in life. You've allowed a lot of resentment (your parents, your family, your schools your career) to fester and that's where you fix your blame.

Guess what is a common factor in everything you've said?

YOU.

Until YOU determine that YOU are going to be an agent of change, you'll continue to be unhappy and unsuccessful in all of your endeavors.

Time management, classroom management and balance seem to elude you. You had the summer to shore up these skills, get a mentor, get some help.

But you didn't. Why?

I *know* there are professional development resources out there. I've worked in educational publishing for the last 10 years for two of the "big three." I'm very familiar with what is offered for professional development. But you're convinced you're not the problem.

I guess you're not at the point where the pain of staying where you are outweighs the pain of change. And that's sad.

Cat