The Secret Life...

This was not how it was supposed to be. I was supposed to be smarter than this…ready to go out and grab life by the horns. I considered myself to be a pretty intelligent girl: straight A’s in school, head of the cheerleading squad, class president, prom queen…nobody would ever have guessed the secret misery that I lived…but I guess I didn’t fully believe it either.
Mr. Wrong and I started dating in high school. I was a sophomore, and he had graduated a couple years prior, so he was four years my senior. Of course, I thought I was way cool to be dating an older guy. He got along really well with all my friends, and despite the initial shock of the age difference, which I may or may not have shaved a few years off, my parents really seemed to like him. Yep…he was a real charmer. He had a promising job, in which he was sent to seminars and training and received licenses for. He attended one semester of college, coincidentally at the same college that I later earned my bachelors degree from, but he “had to drop out” because he “became very ill” and was hospitalized during the week of final exams and was not able to make them up, thus nullifying a whole semester of classes, only I think his “illness” was over partying and drug-induced. But for what I knew at the time, he seemed to have really big plans for his future and I really thought he would be going places.
As I graduated high school and set off for college, we continued dating, and yes, we partied and had lots of good times, as college students will do. The thing is, as the years went by, his “partying” became more and more heavy and frequent and I began to see a habit of him “partying” by himself! I shrugged this off. We were both still young, and I thought as soon as we were married and started a family, he would sober up and grow up. He was raised by his grandparents and did not have the best situation growing up, and seemed adamant to be the parent that his never were….perhaps another red-flag in hindsight!
We truly had the “fairy tale” wedding. I mean, it LOOKED like a fairy tale…my father dressed as a king, the bridesmaids had fairy wings, the groomsmen dressed as knights, and we even had a ring bearer dressed as a dragon! The wedding did not go off without a hitch! He broke his promise to me that he would not get drunk with his friends at the wedding. I cried in the bathroom and then drove my drunken groom home so he could pass out.
About 9 months later, my beautiful daughter was born! She was the epitome of everything that was perfect! For as long as I could remember, I wanted to get married and start a family. And here I was…I made it! So why did I have this sinking feeling in my gut? I began getting suspicious of his every move. He always had to run out and get “something”. And simple ten-minute trips to the store for milk were taking well over an hour. He said he “ran into people” and was just talking, often not coming back with what he went to get in the first place. And shamefully, I started sifting through his closet and bags and started finding drug paraphernalia, and empty liquor bottles. Instead of confronting him, I simply disposed of everything I found like he wouldn’t even notice. I began giving him a hard time about his drinking, the drinking he let me see anyway.
When my daughter was about 11 months old, everything blew up. I was fulfilling a long-term sub position as a Kindergarten teacher, when I received a phone call from my husband’s Aunt WHILE I was at school. There was a lot of concerned talk, ranting, something about stolen jewelry, his uncle, blaming each other, and my husband taking off in the vehicle drunk. That was it, I packed a bag for myself and my daughter went to my sister’s house and notified him that I would not be coming home until he checked himself into rehab and got some help.
Well, with the help of his Aunt, that is exactly what he did. He completed a 28-day stay in an inpatient rehabilitation center, and when he got out, he started attending local AA meetings. Hmmm, maybe people can change after all, or so the naïve-me thought. Well, he started skipping meetings, and acting like his usual shady self again. The fighting got worse, the drinking became more frequent and the abuse started. The last and final straw was on Christmas Eve when I was loading my daughter into the car to go to my sister’s house to make “Reindeer Food” and a police car pulled into my driveway and informed me that I needed to come to the station for questioning! Are you kidding me!? So off I went, with my 1 ½ year old daughter on Christmas Eve to the police station. They questioned me about his involvement with a “prescription drug ring”, and the presence of my car at a residence they had been watching. Of course, I had no idea, but believe me, I was the LAST person in the world that was going to defend him at that point. When I was free to leave, I confronted him, told him he needed to look for a new place. Of course he dragged his feet looking for a new place, and I was nice enough to let him stay for the time being, but held my ground that we were over.
On my birthday, March 16th, I went out with my sister right around the corner from my apartment. He stayed home with my daughter. He assured me that this was OK and he had never to my knowledge hurt her or put her in any danger, and I really believed that he never would. Well, I guess he couldn’t stand the thought of me being out and “single” without him, because he called the bar several times asking when I was coming home, saying our daughter was having trouble falling asleep. Finally, he actually came to the bar and made me leave! After the short ride back to our apartment, I went to get my daughter out of the car and he pushed me down into the snow bank a couple times and grabbed my arm. Luckily, and by some miracle, the police pulled into the driveway and I asked to press charges. I got my daughter and went up stairs, all the while, trying to frantically call anyone who would pick up the phone at that hour of night! I later found out from the police report that he was driving with our daughter in the car and had a .36 BAC…4 times the legal limit!! Needless to say, he was slapped with a restraining order, and endangering the welfare of a child. He was out of my apartment and I NEVER looked back! (Except for the occasional “if I only knew then what I know now!”)
I met my boyfriend a couple months later and the rest is history! He is amazing in every way, and despite everything I went through, I trust him with my whole heart. I guess it’s true that we all make mistakes, have momentary lapses in judgment, and maybe, love really is blind…but I know this girl emerged much “smarter” and will never make that mistake again! Throughout my previous relationship, there were so many doubts, so many things that I didn’t let even my closet friends and family know, and keeping those secrets was shameful and debilitating to who I am as a person. I don’t even know what I was thinking! I used to be really angry and bitter about the things he did to me, and I used to try to salvage his relationship with his daughter, thinking I owed it to her to keep her father in her life, but holding onto all that resentment and trying to arrange HIS relationship with his daughter was just exhausting! I made a New Year’s Resolution this year to just let it all go, not to let him get to me, and just focus on my daughter and the wonderful road I have ahead of me…and it seems to be working for me!