My Story (Part One)

I have been contemplating this post for quite a while now. This is very hard for me to write and I am not even sure that many of my readers can relate to this story. The reason being is that most of you are married.

As I have read and browsed through many blogs, I have come to realize that the majority of them are by women who are married, have children and are stay at home moms.

I am in the minority.

I am divorced.

I never wanted to be. I never asked for it. I never saw it coming. It almost killed me.

I have never shared this story with anyone, except for the people near and dear to me. They have lived through all of this with me before, during and after the fact. However, I felt like blogging about it would be some form of therapy for me, and Lord knows I need any help I can get. To this day, I still have issues.

Let me take you back to the early part of the year 1991. I was 21 years old and just as happy and carefree as anyone that age could be. I worked part-time at a local supermarket, had my own car, and still lived with my parents. My weeks consisted of working and going home everyday and going out and partying every weekend.

Up until this point in my life, I had never had a long relationship with any one guy. The longest I had ever dated anyone was 3 months. That was it, and I didn’t even want to think about anything more than that at this point because I had been hurt one too many times before.

Then I met him. I will refer to him as C . At first, I could not stand him. He was younger than me (big mistake to begin with) and he really just irritated me. I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend, especially not in him. C was a friend of a friend and he knew some guys that I was friends with so it was inevitable that we would meet up every now and again.

After a couple of weeks of seeing C out and about around town, we slowly became friends. He took me and my friend riding in his truck and he blasted his radio for us, showing off his loud speaker system to us and playing it cool. I was starting to feel an attraction to him, but I never thought more of it.

One weekend, a bunch of us went out to a local bar and C came with us. While we were there he asked me to dance, and since I loved to dance, I obliged. He whispered in my ear that he liked me and I ‘fell’ a little more. When we got back to our cars that night, I had a feeling that he wanted to kiss me but I hurriedly drove away, stopping further down the road to talk with him alone. We shared our first kiss and we were both hooked.

It didn’t take long for C and I to become serious and I had my doubts that it would last. Let’s face it, I hadn’t dated anyone longer than 3 months, and I didn’t see it happening with C either. When we got to our one year anniversary, I was amazed at how far we had come together. We were in love and everybody knew it. I thought my life was perfect.

When I met C he was only 18, as I mentioned earlier he was younger than I. A whole 2 years and 10 months to be exact. He had just broken up with a girl and he was on the rebound, no doubt. This girl had not given C a reason as to why she had broken it off, but that reason was she was pregnant. He had no clue, and when he found out, she told him it probably wasn’t his. So he carried on with his life, started a relationship with me and didn’t dwell on it.

Well, later he found out that the child was his, and decided that he wanted nothing to do with the her because of all the drama that his ex girlfriend was causing. He did, however, financially support his daughter, although he had never met her. So our lives went on and I tried to block it out of my mind. Not an easy task. (this is important to the whole story here later on and you’ll see why)

So C and I dated for over 4 years before we got married. November 25, 1995 was the day. It was just a simple wedding, at our home that we had just purchased and only our immediate families attended. Good enough for me.

I always thought that my marriage and my life were great. For the most part, C and I always got along and we rarely fought. We were the best of friends and there was not anything that I wouldn’t do for him. However, his unclaimed daughter haunted me. I thought about it all the time. They lived about 15 minutes from here and his ex girlfriend was also married and to someone who was raising C’s daughter as his own.

C and I had two children together. Two daughters born 3 years and 17 days apart. They made us complete as a married couple and we were a happy family. When my youngest daughter was born, I lost my job at the supermarket that I had been employed at for 11 years. Shortly thereafter, I got a job working part-time as a bank teller. I stayed with this bank for 4 years until C got a great job with benefits and a salary that was unbelievable. The year was 2005. I quit my job so that I could be here for my children and be the stay at home mom I always dreamed of. Life was even better than I thought it could be.

In 2006 we took a big family vacation in the middle of July. This was the biggest trip we had ever taken together and we excitedly talked about making it a yearly tradition, now that we could really afford it. At this point my daughters were 9 and 6 years old.

Little did I know that my life was about to do a 180!

(To be continued....)