First, let me say that I hope to make this a fun blog. But this first introduction post will be anything but fun. And I'm sorry for that. Truly. But, there has to be a reason that I'm at this point in my life, right? So, here we go.
This story isn't anything new. Many of you have probably been in the same place that I'm in now. But every story has a beginning. And this is where mine begins! I've been in many crazy relationships in my 55 years. And I've been in quite a few where it was my fault that they ended. When you're young and dumb, you don't really seem to care much until you're the one who gets their heart stomped on. And that's happened on more than one occasion, too. I have to say this one thing, though. There was a first love. Through Junior High and High School, there was only one girl I ever wanted. I thought I would marry her. And, honestly, I don't know how I could think that when she had dumped me so many times during that period. But she had my heart. She could have cut my leg off, and I still would have loved her and married her anyway. This story will come back to her, believe it or not. I know, I haven't even gotten there yet, and even I can't believe this circles back to her! But it does.
I met my ex-wife when she was 14. I was 19 at the time. She was my sister's best friend. My Bio-sister's best friend. Back then, I thought she was cute. Had she been older, I would have dated her then. And hindsight being what it is, I wish I had. It would have saved me from 29 years of hell. Anyhow, I crushed on her a little back then. But I was also smart enough to realize that I could have gotten into serious trouble had we gotten together. And I just want to put it out there that orange just isn't my color! Especially now that I've put on weight. I look like the fucking Great Pumpkin with orange on! My dad could see that I was kind of crushing on her some. So, of course, he felt that it was his duty to remind me of the consequences if I hooked up with her at that point in time. And he was right in doing so. Any good father would. But I also reminded him that I was not that dumb, and I didn't want to go to jail. Fast forward about 10 years. I was coming out of another failed relationship with my son's mother. She wasn't really narcissistic, but she was incredibly possessive and jealous. I felt suffocated with her. She was one I had the balls to tell to get lost. Then my sister gets me hooked up with her best friend. Yeah, the 14-year-old from back in the day, except now, she's 22. And I'm 27. She's legal now! So, I get hooked up with her. For a little while, things are great. One day, she takes me to meet her Mom. Her mom was a complete sweetheart. This woman would give you the shirt off her back if you needed it! And that's not even a fucking lie! Not to mention she was one hell of a cook! She's part of the reason I gained weight after meeting my ex-wife. I wish I were kidding. One day, I'm over there with my ex, and she leaves the room to go to the bathroom. While she's in there, her mother tells me I'm making a mistake. I honestly thought she was joking! For two reasons! One, she loved to joke around and play practical jokes. Two, who expects your girlfriend's mother to give you your first warning about what you're getting yourself into! I know I sure didn't! But she wasn't the only one! As time went on, I would get the same warning from her father, her sister, and her aunt! But instead of heeding the warnings and red flags that were being thrown up, I ignored them! I was the product of two parents who ended up divorced after 20 years. I was determined not to end up like that. I was going to make this work, no matter what it took. My determination ended up getting me into trouble.
Two years later, we were married. There were other red flags that I chose to ignore. But my stubbornness forced me to stay where I was. I was NOT going to end up like my parents! In 2005, I was pushing the issue of having kids. I was already 35. And if we were going to have kids, I wasn't wanting to wait until age 40 to do it. Plus, our marriage was really starting to show cracks in the armor. I had friends telling me that what I was experiencing was normal. I couldn't see how. But all of them had been married much longer than I, so they must know what they are talking about. Their wives must start arguments for no apparent reason, too, and blame them for the argument! This was around the time when she was blaming me for our problems. I was always the one starting arguments. I was always the one who took a tone. She never did. And if she did, it was because I took one first. Now, there were plenty of times in those 29 years when that was the case. I'm not perfect, and I never claimed to be. There were a few people during that time who also noticed. But they never said anything, for fear that they would get blamed for our breakup. Truthfully, I wish they had said something. Because I was really starting to think that I was the problem, and that I was going crazy. I must've done something to make her act the way she was acting. But still I kept trying. Talks would turn into arguments, which was also my fault. All I wanted to do was express how I was feeling. Then got accused of making it all about me! I started to believe it. By the end of 2005, she had agreed to start our family. She had gotten pregnant through IVF. It was the only way she could conceive. She had been pregnant twice before, and both ended in ectopic pregnancies. Those pregnancies shredded both fallopian tubes. So IVF was the only option other than adoption or a surrogate mother. She had asked her sister at one point if she would be a surrogate, but her sister said no, because she still wanted to have one more child of her own before she couldn't any longer. So, IVF it was.
Things had gotten a little bit better once our girls were born. I was relieved! What I was hoping for was happening! But it didn't last long. Within about 6 to 8 months, things were already starting to go back to what they had been before the girls were born. It seemed that no matter what I did, I couldn't change things. We tried Therapy twice. And each time, things would be okay for a while, but then quickly go back to the way things were. I was stuck. I didn't know what else to do. Still, I stayed with it in hopes that one day, things would get better, and we could save our marriage. 29 years later, here I am. 55 and divorced. I've answered the same question 20 times since I left her. Why did I stay as long as I did? And my answer is always the same. At first, I didn't want to end up like my parents. And once the girls were born, I didn't want them to grow up without me there, and I sure didn't want them to have to deal with their mother on their own. From the time they were born until they turned 18, I stayed to be that buffer between them and their mother. Two years before they turned 18, I was already planning how I would divorce her. But divorce, in some weird way, is almost like having kids. You can plan all you want, but things don't always go according to plan. Last June, I was laying the groundwork for the divorce. I was doing what I could to not trigger her. I was doing the whole "yes, dear, whatever you say, dear" thing. I couldn't let things get out of hand before I was ready. Well, that plan didn't go as planned either. Remember me telling you about my first love? Yeah, well, I found her on Facebook around the middle of June. Once I found her, we talked damn near every day on Facebook Messenger. Sometimes we'd video chat when I could manage it. I had told her about my marriage and my plan. I probably should have held off on that. But, I didn't. Not a smart move, I know. We would only talk over Facebook Messenger. I could delete those conversations, and my ex couldn't get to them because they were not through Verizon Messenger. I have to say, I was pretty proud of the fact that I was making damn sure that those messages were deleted. Even if there had been anything incriminating in them, my ex wouldn't have seen them. I changed the lock code for my phone as well. Hell, my ex never gave me her passcode, why the hell should she have had mine! She was always getting into my phone and checking up on me. If I even dared to do that same thing to her, she'd throw a fit because it was an invasion of her privacy. Evidently, I wasn't entitled to privacy. So, I changed my passcode. At one point, we were doing something on my phone, I had to pull Facebook Messenger up, and my ex noticed the icon there for my first love. Yes, she knew who she was. I had told her about my first love many times and even showed her what she looked like. But never in a million years did I ever expect to get back in contact with her. So, of course, my ex sees the icon and questions it. Of course, I deny that anything is going on. Which was not a lie. She lets it go. Briefly. Two nights later, I can't sleep. I suffer from Generalized Anxiety, Insomnia and Severe Depression. All of which started way before my ex and I had ever gotten together, but over our 29 years of marriage, it all had gotten progressively worse. She wasn't all of it either. about 45% of it was also my job at the time. It really jacked with my anxiety too! Both combined escalated it beyond anything I could ever have imagined though. So, I'm laying awake in bed that night, and I get this very uneasy feeling. One I hadn't had since the night before my dad passed away. It was a nagging feeling, and it wasn't going away. About two o'clock that morning, I see the door open to the bedroom as I'm laying in bed. It's my ex of course, and she goes to the bathroom in our master bathroom. Nothing unusual. But then, once she's finished, she walks over to the bathroom counter where my phone is charging, grabs my phone and takes it back out to the living room, which is just off of our bedroom. That uneasy feeling I told you about? Yeah, at the moment, it gets progressively worse! She had left the bedroom door cracked. I got up to go to the bathroom. Nothing out of the ordinary. I usually get up once or twice to go. She knows this and probably thought I would go back to bed. Instead, I stood in the doorway and watched her go through my phone with one of my daughters sitting next to her going through it with her! My daughter was scrolling through the phone, and my ex would tell her to stop in a certain spot so she could take a picture of it! And don't ask me how the hell she figured out the lock code for the phone either! Because, as far as I'm concerned, the code that was set, she shouldn't have been able to figure out! But she did!
The moment I see my daughter sitting there with her, it pisses me off more at that moment. How dare she get our daughters involved like that! The one thing we both swore we'd never do if our marriage ever ended, and she did it anyway! Another way for her to discredit me to the kids. That behavior was nothing new for her. She tried to do that with any little thing she could over the last few years of our marriage. The girls just learned to tone it out, though. But this! This was different! She now had their full attention! She now could tell them, and have a solid case, their father is a cheater! To my credit though, my first love lived over 500 miles away. Physically, it was impossible to cheat that way. And if I had left town for any reason prior, she probably would have had a genuinely solid case. Now, there were some words spoken between me and my first love, but nothing sexual in any way. I had told her that if anything was going to happen between us, I wanted my divorce to at least be filed beforehand. That, at least, rang true. We didn't do anything until the divorce was filed.
Anyhow, I look at my daughter and tell her she needs to get to bed. She goes. My ex gets up, hands me my phone, and says, Here! Your girlfriend wants to know if you're okay, you'd better answer her! SHIT! I glanced at the phone briefly and noticed that my first love had tried to video call me. Why would she do that? She knows better. I quickly close the phone and look at my ex and tell her we need to talk. She didn't want to talk. So, I got myself ready for work, made my lunch, walked back to the bedroom, and told her that when she was ready to talk, to call me. She told me that I could come back to bed and get a few more hours of sleep. Um, hell no! I'm basically letting you know at this point that we are done, and you want me to get back into bed with you to sleep a few more hours??? I'm crazy, yes! But not dumb! At that point, I leave. It's 3:30 AM. I don't start work until 7:00 AM. I drive around for a while. Keep in mind, I haven't slept a wink! The first thing I do when I leave the neighborhood is call on video chat to talk to my first love to let her know that I am okay. Although at first, I couldn't figure out what would make her ask that to begin with. She then proceeds to tell me that my ex had tried to video call her with my phone, but every time she would answer, my ex would end the call. My ex had done that twice. That's when my first love knew something was wrong. And that it wasn't me who was calling. I talked to her all the way up until I needed to be at work. She knew I was going to be driving a forklift that day, and said that I should probably call in sick for my safety and my coworkers because I hadn't slept, and I was completely exhausted. I had no business behind the wheel of a forklift truck that day. So I called in. She then asked if I had someplace I could go to get some sleep. I said yes, I could go to my stepmom's house for a little while. So I did. After I woke up there. I explained to my mom what had happened and what had led up to it all. And it wasn't just my first love. There was so much more to the story. My mom asked if I had anywhere to go. I said I had some friends I could probably stay with for a bit. She told me then that she had talked to her husband, and he had told her to give me a key to their house, and I could stay there as long as it took me to get back on my feet and get an apartment. By the end of October of last year, I was officially divorced. By the end of November, I had an apartment about 4 minutes from work, and I started to put my life back together. So, here I am! 55 and single, trying to figure things out again. And trying to find out who this new me is, exactly. There's a lot to unpack mentally to do that, though. I've been going to therapy. They started me on three different meds. Two are antipsychotics, and one is used to help me sleep at night. And because I had been dealing with all of this well before my ex and I were together, everything had gotten more severe. I pretty much knew I had anxiety and would get periodic attacks. I knew I was suffering from Depression as well, long before my dad had passed. The Panic Disorder was new. That just started rearing its ugly head over the last 4 years or so. They were surprised I hadn't been on meds long before now. But I was born during a time when they were just starting to get these types of issues figured out. A time when we were just taught to deal with it. Especially men. For centuries, men have been told to never show signs of weakness. It wasn't the manly thing to do. We had to keep things bottled up and hope that we could keep it all together and take those issues to our graves with us. The problem is, those issues were sending a lot of us to early graves. Either by heart attack, or by self-inflicted means to end everything. And we didn't dare talk about it! Have I had thoughts of ending it all? Oh, you bet I have! As recently as last year! And it came to a head as I was going through the divorce! Not only was I going through that, but my first love ended up doing to me what she always did in the past. And then she stopped calling. So, it was at that point that I knew I had to get help. Otherwise, I wasn't going to be around much longer. I hadn't planned anything out to end it all, but I didn't want to get to that point either. Thankfully, I got lucky and ended up with a damn good GP and an excellent Therapist. They have no idea how grateful I am for them. If it wasn't for them, I don't know where I'd be right now, if I would even still be here at all. Thanks to them, I can be 55 and single, and figuring things out to get things back to something that at least resembles a bit of normal. And so, my new chapter begins!
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