Background On My Marriage

2005-06-03T18:37:00.000-05:00

My husband and I have only been married for 8 months. We've been together for 4 years and 7 months. I found out 4 years ago that I was pregnant for the first time. About a month later, we moved in together. Up until that point, things were good. I was a senior in high school, so when we were together, he was (usually) attentive and sweet. I hadn't really been interested in a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship when we started dating, but after about 4 months, I felt like I was falling in love. After we moved in together, that all changed. He went out with his friends everyday, for hours at a time. He rarely ever told me when/where he was going or even how long he'd be gone, when he would be back, etc. When he was home, so were 3 or 4 of his friends. He blew most of our money on cigarrettes and alcohol. I was an emotional wreck. I cried probably 6 out of 7 days each week. Nothing I said or did seemed to make a difference. He would even get mad at me, just for being upset that he said he never wanted to get married, which he knew was very important to me. I took care of the house, I took care of him, and I took care of our child inside of me. He promised that when the baby was born, he'd be a different man. The day we brought our 1st daughter home from the hospital, he dropped us off, and went to visit his friends (the same thing he did while we were in the hospital, even though he called into work to be with "us"). Nothing changed. It might possibly have even gotten worse. Five months later, right before he left for his two weeks of annual military training, I got pregnant again. I am not a believer that having children does anything to save a relationship, so I was fairly upset that my birth control hadn't really controlled anything. Yet, there was life within me again, so I stuck it out, had another girl, and spent even less time with my boyfriend. At this time, he also lost his job, and since we had agreed that I would stay home with the kids, we were more than broke. We moved in with his mother (a known crack addict and alcoholic, self-proclaimed to be sober and clean). He did nothing to obtain a job the entire 5 months we lived there together. I, on the other hand, put in applications around town, and worked a month straight with my Army Reserve unit. We both decided to go back to school, which was disasterous for my grades. We missed school so frequently because of our crappy car and sometimes just because of my boyfriend's lack of motivation. And the whole time he was driving 45 minutes both ways to go see his friends at least 5 out of 7 days each week. We had about $500 saved up that we're pretty sure his mom stole from us about 2 days after she flipped out and went on a screaming rampage after she had started using crack again. One Sunday night I came home from working with the Reserves and he gave me as shitty a look as anyone could, walked out the door, and didn't return until 3 a.m. I cried the whole next day, missed quite a few classes at school, and finally asked my mom to help me get away. By the next weekend (our 3 year anniversary of our first date), I had all of my stuff moved out. My mother and stepfather helped me get set up in an apartment. It was maybe a month before the kids' crying about missing their daddy before I let him move back in. A week later, I found out I was pregnant again. I had been on a stronger form of birth control, and had no physical symptoms of pregnancy, but there it was. I was already feeling a baby kick inside me before I knew I was pregnant. This was December, and I was due in April. We tried to make things work, he went out less, and I continued to go to school. After the baby was born, a family member was vacating her home to live with her new husband and asked if we would like to live there and only pay her what we were already paying for rent. I got a job at the same time, and was just able to cover rent with what I made. Three months later, I got a call on a Thursday saying that I was to be on a plane to deploy on Monday. I wasn't supposed to be back from this deployment (although I was non-deployable; the rest of my Reserve unit was already in Iraq) until after my boyfriend was to be deployed himself. I also found out that same day that the family member who we were renting from was moving back in (her new husband decided to go back to his ex-wife). So, we did what we needed to do for insurance and childcare purposes, and we got married on Saturday. Neither of us ended up deploying, and it still took my (now) husband another 2 months to get a job. Things weren't really going any better. He woke up angry at the world, took it out on everyone in the house, and still went out when he could. Another 5 months and we finally got into a house, were making enough money to afford some small pleasures (satellite tv, internet), and things were looking up. One month later, he quits his job. We are now at 5 weeks later, and just today he starts a new job, while I'm trying to hold down a job, a driving paper route, and taking care of our 3 children and household. Oh yes, and I built and am maintaining an internet-based business. Things seem to be going better, but we had house guests for a couple weeks who seemed to point out that things still hadn't changed, I had just started to give up the fight. And here we are.

Marriage and relationships

Background On My Marriage