Home Again - and the Unraveling of Everything.

There were a lot of things that happened now. I was learning to be a mother. I was learning who this baby was that now depended on me. I was learning who my husband was.

Kylie was wonderful. Maybe I look back at it with rose-coloured glasses, but she was a pretty great baby. She was (IS!) high maintenance, but she was (IS!) good-tempered. Everything about taking care of her I loved.

Her pediatrician was running a lot of tests on her. His office was walking distance from my apartment, but he lost her blood tests (she needed blood tests?) and they had to be redone, and then he requested more. I was getting nervous. I switched to another pediatrician who confirmed what I had suspected. He liked to run tests for money. I longed for Canada and my family doctor.

My husband was American and I was Canadian with a work permit, but not a Green Card, so we applied when we got engaged. It was right after 9/11, so the process was extremely elongated and confused and nobody knew exactly what was going on with immigration. The name changed from the INS to The Department of Homeland Security, and I jumped through a lot of hoops. We finally received our "Green Card Appointment Notice" 4 years later for a week after Kylie was born at 7am. Pretty early! Thank goodness I had a baby.

A Green Card Appointment is where a married couple is interviewed by someone at the INS/Dept. of HS to confirm the marriage is legit and not for immigration purposes. You have to bring in your bank statements that prove you have joint accounts, joint utility bills (who has joint utility bills?), and photos of your wedding and yourselves together in different casual settings to prove you actually are married. All of our finances were communal.

The night before our Green Card Appointment, my husband didn't come home from work. I knew he had a recruiting event, so I figured he'd be home around 9pm. He didn't show up until 4am actually, and he was drunk. I was confused. He wasn't a drinker. It was very strange behaviour, especially since my mom was still with us helping out. He immediately started going through files to get our paperwork together, and didn't have much to say about where he had been except that "everyone wanted to buy me a drink to celebrate my new daughter's birth." Weird.

We went to the appointment and he reeked of liquor. I was totally confused and kind of upset. Anyway, we did the interview and a few weeks later I got my green card. I guess a slightly tiffed couple is more realistic than a lovey-dovey one after 7 years. Ha!

Stranger things happened, and if I ever write a real memoir, it will have a lot more detail than this blog, but one day he came home and said we should move back to Vancouver as soon as we can. I was surprised. We had a lease, he had a job, we had a new baby - but he went ahead and gave notice and arranged for the apartment to go and told me to set about selling our furniture on craigslist. I did. We packed up and got our plane tickets and it all seemed very surreal and very quick. My husband was planning to come back to Vancouver with us this first time, but he couldn't leave work that soon (again, why are we moving right now?), so he was going to return, work another month and then finally join us for good after that. I was totally confused. But I was also sleep-deprived and taking care of a 1 month old baby.

Around this same time, there was the shoe bomber - remember him? So two days before we were supposed to fly out, the new security measures went into effect. No liquids. No anything. We were moving back to Vancouver with a baby, 2 dogs, 2 cats and all of our things and this was looking pretty difficult. Thankfully, the airline understood, refunded us our tickets and we rented a car.

The drive was awkward and silent. There was something wrong and very strange. I remember driving through Chicago and I can still picture the high rise building I was looking at when he told me, very casually, as if he had already told me, that he'd be coming back to Vancouver in 3 months, at the end of the year. Now I was starting to get angry. I asked him why he didn't tell me that before we left, and why we were moving if he wasn't coming for another 3 months? Didn't he want to see his baby growing up? He was going to miss all of her infanthood. We could've just stayed in New York until he was finished with work. He just stuck to his guns and told me that this was better because he could get a cheap place to stay and bank all the rest of his salary for the transition to Vancouver. It all seemed very odd.

We got to Vancouver, and I was so happy to see my parents and my home! We had what was packed into the car, and my husband was going to go back to NYC and pack up the rest of the furniture and baby gear into a POD which would come to my parents' place in the next month. It was the first week of August, and Kylie was 2 months old. He stayed a week and went back to New York.

I started to get emails from him about staying another year in New York. They were offering him all kinds of benefits and bonuses if he would stay. I told him that Kylie & I should move back there then, and he always refused, saying he could bank more money for us this way and we should stay with my parents. I worried about him missing the first year of his daughter's life. He promised to fly back once a month. It just wasn't right.

I loved being home though. There was grass, and parks. Vancouver in August is fantastic - the weather is gorgeous, the food is amazing, and it was BBQs and reunions and family and comfort. My friends and family threw me a baby shower. I love Kylie's face in this picture - she is really unimpressed by the hat. At 2 months old, she already had personality galore. Kylie was doing well and my family doctor was her doctor now. Things were great - except that we didn't have the 3rd member of our family with us.

He didn't come to visit again until October. And this time, I could tell something was very wrong. He dropped the bomb then. "I'm not in love with you anymore." He went on to tell me that he had met a bartender and he was confused because he wanted to follow through on it. He asked for permission to date other people. I was shell-shocked. And then he was gone, back to New York, without much explanation except that he was confused.

The POD had arrived with our things in it - including our files - so I started to look through them. There were strange charges on the bills, there were phone calls to numbers all over the US, 1-800 numbers and all sorts of strange activity. And then, after some help from friends, conversations with people and conversations with him, it all came to light.

He had been having affairs for quite some time. He was a member of dating services, various other services and the homebody husband that I knew had spent a lot of money at nightclubs, bars, jewelry stores and other establishments. All the time that I had been working on weekends and from 6-12am, he had been partying. All the money was gone from the bank accounts. It was over. And everything was gone.

Almost overnight I went from being a successful actress on Broadway to an unemployed, broke, single-mom living with her parents. Awesome.