I carry a tremendous amount guilt for giving people more chances than they deserve. I have always believed in the good in everyone, and everyone deserves a second chance.
Why did I continue to give my husband chance after chance? For what? To prove he loved me? Why did I need that to be proven to me? That wasn’t fair to him. He didn’t love me after all, so why was I expecting him to, suddenly?
Some say that insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result each time. Others believe it refers to a mental illness or madness. For me, insanity was a state of mind, or the state of my life in this case…
Much of my childhood was spent in chaos. There seemed to be more drama in our family than the soap operas I watched with Mamaw and Granny after school. Nothing could have prepared me for the Hollywood movie scene I would be living during this time. I prefer a very low-key existence. I am rarely the center of attention, and I most definitely am not the type to enjoy the spotlight. However, I was beginning to feel like my life was the center of an episode of “Punk’d”. I kept waiting for Ashton Kutcher to jump out at any moment…sadly that never happened.
Have you ever heard the old saying, “Believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see”? That statement precisely depicted what was going on in my life. I knew what I was living, yet everyone around me believed something entirely different. I also knew exactly what I was seeing, yet perception is rarely ever reality. Sometimes we only see what we want to see…
They say Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned…and scorned I was.
I had been scorned by a man not once, not twice, but what felt like a thousand times. I always bit my tongue - to the best of my ability - and gave second chances out as if they were raffle tickets at the state fair. Just when I thought I had hit a breaking point; I was faced with another mountain. Not this time! No, this time I hit a breaking point of mental abuse that rattled my decently educated brain to the point of utter confusion. Some days I would wake up and not even be able to tell you who I was or where I was at. My world felt like a blur, nothing made sense. I’ve never done hallucinogenic drugs, but I imagine an acid trip to be exactly like what I was feeling.
Many say that money is the root of all evil. I have a different opinion. I strongly believe that the root of all evil lies in the expectations that we set for ourselves. It is not my belief that anyone gets married with the intention of anything other than forever, for always, no matter what. I also do not believe that anyone is equipped with some magical crystal ball that can predict what the future holds. People change. Paths are taken, and sometimes those paths do not lead down the same road. My path has led me down a very bumpy road – a road filled with potholes and craters large enough to swallow a T-Rex in one gulp. It is not to say that I wanted all the chaos that life handed me, but choices were made, and consequences were handed out.
When I made the decision to leave our marriage, it was a decision that we had both come to mutually. It made no sense for me to stay in a town where I knew no one and would not be able to find a career that would financially support myself and my children. So, the only logical solution was for me to move home to Georgia. I dreaded that thought nearly as much as John did, but we had no choice. We needed to cut things off before they got worse. Little did we know that they could get worse…and they were about to.
On a warm July night, we decided that we were going to celebrate Independence Day a little early. Roy was being stationed in Japan and would not be home for the holiday. As we began getting things set up for the big lights show, I was asked to knock on our neighbor’s door to provide them the common courtesy of letting them know what we were doing. Being as painfully shy and introverted as I am, I reluctantly walked over and rang their doorbell. They had barely been living next door to us for a month. I had only seen them in passing and never formally introduced myself. The woman, young and beautiful, seemed very full of energy and always had a smile on her face. I would see her leave and return home, but that was the extent of my interaction.
When I met your husband, he was broken…we both were. At the time, we were not aware of the truly dark place we were in. After a while, that brokenness rose to the surface. He had an expectation for his life. He imagined that he would be married to you, the mother of his children, for the rest of his life. If that had been the case, I would not be writing this letter. It was very hard for him to come back from the hurt that you both endured throughout your marriage.
I never could have pictured you, because for me you were never supposed to exist. You were never in “our” happily ever after. When we said our vows, you were not in them. When our first child was born, you were not a part of this new creation. And when we moved into our first home, the memories we were going to make did not have you in them.
We’ve all heard that the first year of marriage is the hardest. In my opinion, for couples on their second marriage this is even more true. The second round of marriage, for myself, gave that statement a whole new meaning. The beginning of my marriage felt much like an ending. I began my post nuptial life in a state of regret, and fight or flight. I felt like I was going through the motions every day. I was married to a man who I felt was more distant with me than he had been when stationed halfway around the world while deployed to a combat zone. “Were we even in love?” I asked myself that question every single day, and yet every single night we would crack open a bottle of Jack Daniels and drink until some sort of passion or tolerance was ignited. Doesn’t sound like much of a marriage to me, what do you think? If you had been around us during this time, or had seen us out with friends, you would have never even known we were married. We were strangers, simply playing house in an unfamiliar world.
We all make mistakes, make bad choices, and miss judgement calls. If we didn’t, how else would we learn and grow? The affair I had with a much older man when I was 21, impacted my life and my perspective on love forever thereafter. It was a judgement call that I am only now speaking about publicly. I aim to be as transparent as possible, and in telling the story of John and I, there is no way around the truth of how we met, fell “in love”, and grew our family. The way in which we began our love story foreshadows the events that followed into our marriage and divorce.
After eight very long and traumatic years of marriage, and one week after my divorce was final, I thought it only appropriate to get married again. Don’t judge me just yet, there will be plenty of time for that later.
Yes, I got married one week after my first divorce was final. In my defense, we had been legally separated for three years. I cannot recall why it took us that long to get a divorce. If I am being honest, we may not have even been able to afford the divorce, or we were just stubborn and not willing to give in to the requests of the other party. I know for certain that it was not because either of us wanted to or thought we would ever get back together.
I was stupid. I was not enough. I was unlovable and destined for this nightmare…Those are only a few things I would tell myself during my first marriage. I was a child-bride; not in the “my parents arranged my marriage to a much older man” kind of way. It was in the “I was the OG Teen Mom so it was the right thing to do” scenario. We can all laugh about it now because we know that it was not in God’s plan for my first husband and I to be each other’s forever. We were meant to create two beautiful, amazing daughters, then run as far away from each other as humanly possible.
Your 20’s can be a scary and confusing time in life. You are unsure of what your future will look like or what you really want out of life. This is the decade of finding out who you are and who you hope to become. Some of us go to college right out of high school and have a concentration we are set on. Some of us will change our minds several times and maybe even change schools before landing the perfect fit. Some of us start our careers and gain life experience learning a trade or trying out different fields. Then, for some of us, marriage and starting a family come first. One thing I learned about this decade of life is there is no wrong or right order in which to do things.
I was born to a single, teenage mother. My mom is one of the strongest women I know and is responsible for molding me into the strong woman I am today! My mom married my dad before I was two and gave birth to my amazing sister shortly after. The earliest childhood memory I can recall is around 4 years old. My mom, dad, sister, and I lived in South Carolina. I started Kindergarten and finished first grade there. Looking back, there are not very many happy memories I have during that time.
I grew up a child and product of divorce. In today’s society, divorce has become the norm. However, 30 years ago it was still considered taboo and a rather frowned upon “choice”. In the case of my biological parents, it was the only option. My father and mother were married for only a few short years before they decided to divorce. A decision that I can confidently say we are all grateful for. They dated in their very early 20’s for a brief time and found themselves pregnant with me. They quickly got married and 17 months later had my little brother. Their relationship was rushed, volatile, and reached a point where lives were going to be imminently affected if they did not end things.
