My Story - Part 2 in A day in the life...

So where did I leave off? That’s right....I was living in Illinois in a tiny apartment, working and taking care of my son.

So I lasted in Illinois for almost a year. Yes, my mom and stepdad were there, but good grief is it expensive to live there, especially when it’s not far from Chicago! I took a week’s vacation and went and visited some friends who lived in Minnesota. They came and picked me and Josh up since I didn’t have a car and took me back to Minnesota to stay with them for a week. I fell in love with Minnesota! It wasn’t so hectic, it was quieter, there were more trees and more grass and…I don’t know, I just really liked it there. So when my friends took me back home I put in my two week’s notice at work, gave notice to my landlord, and packed me and Josh up. My friends drove back down to Illinois and moved me up to Minnesota, where I stayed with them for a while. I got a job at the hospital and life was good.

When my friends came to Illinois to help me move they brought a friend of theirs named Jason to help. Jason ended up becoming my second husband. I’m embarrassed to admit this, and I feel like an asshole, but I was never in love with Jason. What I was in love with was his family and how they treated me and Josh, and how Jason treated Josh. Jason is the man my son calls dad, because he’s the only dad he’s ever known. Josh knows about his biological father, but since he left when Josh was six weeks old he’s never known him. Jason is his dad.

Jason wasn’t a bad person, just very immature. He pouted when he didn’t get his way or would throw a tantrum. Honestly, sometimes it was like having two kids instead of a husband and one kid. Another thing I’ll be honest about....I don’t think Jason was ever really in love with me. I was Jason’s first, if you know what I mean, and I think he confused lust with love. I think we’ve all done that at least once in our lives, right?

After Jason and I had been married for a year (by this time I had lived in Minnesota for three years) we moved to Indiana. I was really missing my family. So we packed up and hit the road. We both got jobs and Josh started kindergarten. At first we rented a place and then my dad and stepmom bought a house and we paid the mortgage on it. It was a cute house.

After we moved down there I reconnected with an old friend of mine that I had gone to grade school with, Mary. Jason and I started hanging out with Mary and her husband Anthony pretty much every weekend. We always had such a good time with them. But after a while it was glaringly obvious that Jason had a huge crush on Mary. He would actually giggle, GIGGLE, whenever she was around. It was fucking embarrassing! But the worst thing was that her husband Anthony, who had been sober for two years, started drinking again and turned into a different person. He was awful! He became physically and verbally and emotionally abusive not only to Mary but to their kids as well. He became mean....very mean. He wanted nothing to do with Jason anymore either. Part of me felt so bad for Jason because he really liked Anthony and now Anthony was treating him like shit.

Things got pretty bad between me and Jason as well. He paid zero attention to me and hardly any to Josh. I remember sitting in the couch, crying and begging him to talk to me, and he sat there and stared at the TV and acted like I wasn’t even there. The only time he paid attention to me was when he wanted sex. I felt like a prostitute, only I wasn’t even getting paid for it!

So being lonely, I turned to the internet. At the time long distance phone calls still cost money and my best friend lived in Illinois and another very close friend, Misty, lived in Oklahoma, so I found a chat room and told them about it and we would find each other there most nights and talk. It was fun! But then I started chatting with another guy. It started out innocently enough…he was also from Oklahoma so he and Misty were talking about that and I joined in on the conversation. After that every time I went into the chat room I’d find him or he’d find me and we’d chat for hours. I know this sounds stupid, but he was giving me what my husband wasn’t....attention.

I was falling for this guy, I’ll call him B, in a big way, but I decided to give my marriage one more desperate shot. I asked Jason to go to counseling and he refused. He said I was the one with the problem, not him. So a few weeks later I kicked him out of the house. Of course, after I did that he wanted to go to counseling, so I made an appointment and we went. But it was too late. The whole time we were sitting there talking to the counselor I just kept thinking, why am I doing this? I felt nothing....absolutely nothing. And that’s how I knew it was over.

I divorced Jason, and Josh and I moved down to Oklahoma. Yes, I moved in with the guy I had met on the internet. Stupid, I know, but I thought what we had was love. What a fucking joke. What we had was great sex and that was about it. I knew before I moved down there that he had a daughter who was a year and a half older than Josh, but I didn’t know she had some serious behavioral issues. Her mom was in an out of jail for different things....drugs, prostitution, DUI, you name it. B had sole custody of his daughter so she was with us all the time except for the occasional weekend she went to stay with her mom (if she was out of jail). She was a handful! I know she was just a child, but my God she was a mean child! I came home from work one day and my son, my skinny son who was about a foot shorter than she was and weighed probably 40 pounds less than she did, had a huge bruise across his cheek. I asked him what happened and it turned out that B’s daughter had slapped him across the face so hard that she bruised him. I was fucking furious! Never in my life have I ever wanted to beat the crap out of someone so badly! But don’t worry, I didn’t touch her. But that’s when I knew things would never work out between me and B, because he never did anything to discipline his daughter. The last straw came when I woke up one morning feeling sore in places I shouldn’t have felt sore. I was telling B about it and he started laughing and said yeah, that’s because I drugged your Coke last night. WTF? And he thought it was funny! Game over.

I drove to Misty’s house, about 4 hours away from where B lived, and called Jason and had him come and get Josh. Jason and his brother drove all the way down to Oklahoma from Minnesota (Jason had moved back to Minnesota after we divorced) and got Josh and took him back to Minnesota so Josh could get enrolled in school there. I stayed in Oklahoma for a month after that and had the mother of all nervous breakdowns. Misty saw me through that whole mess and when I felt stronger I moved back to Minnesota as well. I missed my son something fierce! When I got there he was asleep on the couch, waiting for me. Picking him up and holding him in my arms after a month was the best feeling in the world. Later, after we all went to bed (and Josh literally slept on top of me), and after everyone was asleep, I cried myself to sleep while whispering I’m sorry over and over to Josh. I felt like the ultimate failure as a mother.

So Jason and I stayed together for another two years. We moved into an apartment, I got a job, and we tried to make a go of it again. Well, I tried. We went to counseling for quite a while, but when the counselor (who was a Catholic priest) told Jason that his treatment of me was awful and that he didn’t understand why I was still there, putting up with it, Jason refused to go back. See, Jason had acted so happy to have me back, but deep down in his heart he had never forgiven me for leaving him and taking Josh away from him, so he was making me pay by treating me worse than you’d treat something you stepped in. After two years I looked at Josh one day and thought, my son is going to grow up thinking this is how a man treats a woman who he says he loves…and I can’t have that. It was over between me and Jason…for good this time.

So I moved back to Illinois, where Josh and I stayed with my dad and stepmom for six months. Then they bought a condo around the corner from where they lived and I paid them rent to live there. It was perfect for me and Josh. I got a job at a law firm in a town called Vernon Hills, then transferred to a firm in downtown Chicago. Josh was doing well in school and making friends, I was loving my job, making friends at work and church, and we were happy.

Why did I have to go and screw it all up?

More later.