On January 17, 1987, I was out broom sweeping a dusting of snow off of my sidewalk as I balanced myself on crutches, when my future husband came along and asked if he could do it for me. I declined his offer since I was finishing up. We talked briefly, then he asked if I'd go out with him that evening--to a basketball game he was videotaping for the team. I was a bit amused, because I already had two dates with two different guys lined up for that weekend--so, I accepted, just so I could say that I'd had three dates with three different guys, all in the same weekend. I was impressed that he talked about attending church regularly. He seemed really nice, and I kissed him goodnight when he brought me home. We began dating regularly soon thereafter. He stood out as different from the others--finally someone I felt comfortable just being me with, rather than trying to mold into whatever the other person wanted me to be. We came from similar backgrounds, had fun together, and my family really liked him.

By April of that year one night after a date, my future husband drove us to a grave yard (of all places) where we parked and talked. He told me the real story about the injury to his arm (rather than the one he tells most people), and my heart really went out to him. When I returned home that evening, I came to believe that I was in love with him. It wasn't long after that night when my future husband and I got too carried away with our necking and were so turned on and curious, that we went ahead and had sex. The guilt afterwards was tremendous--especially since it was on a Sunday afternoon and I was to play the piano for a special Lent service that evening at church.

My future husband graduated from college in May of that year and began working in a metropolitan city in June. He commuted three hours to the town where I was nearly every weekend. Having a long distance relationship was a bit of a strain for both of us. In August we became more committed to our relationship after spending the weekend in a hotel and having a serious discussion about our relationship and where we wanted it to go. A few days before Thanksgiving that year, I had set the scene for a romantic evening with candlelight and a bottle of wine, when my future husband pulled out a little box with an engagement ring inside. We were married on August 20, 1988.

Moving to a metropolitan city following our marriage was a big adjustment for me, especially in terms of the driving having been raised on a farm and subsequently having only lived in a relatively large town (c. 17,000). For several months I felt a mixture of depression and anxiety regarding my new environment, intermingled with the excitement of being newly married. We had financial problems because I wasn't able to find employment for six months.

Ultimately I found employment in a small college. One day a guy came into my office and seemed to do a "double take" when he saw me. I was surprised by the attention because strangely enough I thought guys would no longer be attracted to me once I was married. He was a relatively attractive guy--dark hair and mustache and maybe three years older than I. He and I would talk quite a bit when we'd run into each other. He was coordinating the weekend/evening classes for adults, and after visiting with him about them, I began taking classes part-time working toward a degree in Business Administration. Over time he got to sharing with me about his marital problems. Then one day he said "I want to have an affair, and I think I know who with." It was obvious he meant me, and I wasn't sure how to respond. So I told him that I was sorry that he was having marital problems, but that I was in love with my husband. After that we remained friends and were maybe a little flirty with each other, but it never went beyond that. In May of '90 he quit working at the college and instead became a police officer in our suburb. He'd pull me over if he saw me driving along and we'd talk for awhile. In July of '91 I took a different job that was also in the suburb where we lived, and on occasion he would stop by my office. It wasn't a busy office, and usually it was just him and I there when he'd visit. We'd end our visits with a hug. It was sad moving away from there in July of '93 and saying goodbye to him. We said goodbye with a hug, and didn't keep in touch after that.

In the fall of '92 my husband changed careers to begin working in retail management. Following his training, in the spring of '93 we knew we would likely be relocating. I kept praying about this situation, because I especially did not want to leave my home state or to be located very far from my close family. Late in the spring my husband was told we were being relocated to a different state, 14 hours from my parents. Soon after moving there, it felt like an adventure--an opportunity to explore unchartered waters, so to speak. And over time I came to realize that having greater distance from my family (which resulted in fewer direct interactions) actually had a positive effect due to their prior negative influence on me.

When we relocated in July of '93, I found a part-time job that paid almost as much as my previous full-time jobs had. Within my office there were three desks for the graduate students' use. One guy took advantage of this, and he was there in the office most of the time I was. He was an attractive guy, but a bit on the wild side--slightly long hair, nice mustache and beard on a neat jawline and I was fascinated with his accent. He was seven years older than I. He was intent on orienting me to the state. He was so friendly and welcoming and constantly telling me about places to go and things to do. In time it became evident that he was attracted to me, having noticed the looks he'd give me at times when I'd walk by classrooms he was in. My husband lost his job in January '94 and by February he'd lined up employment with a different retail company. We relocated soon thereafter back to my home state. It was sad saying goodbye to the graduate student--we hugged with tears in our eyes and have not kept in touch since then.

In our new location I came to really enjoy staying at home with our then two year old daughter. It was a great bonding time for us. I decided I wanted to stay at home with our daughter instead of working.

In August of '94 my husband's employment again relocated us to a different state. Ultimately we bought a house there (having previously rented everywhere we'd lived).

All the moving with my husband's retail management careers seemed to cause distance between us, primarily because he'd always be relocated first and we would follow after housing arrangements were made. He distanced himself some after his first relocation--following that move, he lost a lot of interest in our then one-year old daughter. The next move we all made together since he was changing employers. Presumably due to feelings of failure from losing his previous position, he really threw himself into his work, spending less and less time with our daughter and me. When he became a store manager, he was home less and less plus he became involved with the local Chamber of Commerce. I became pregnant with our second daughter in September of '94, and my husband didn't seemed thrilled about it at all. While we lived in that area, he increasingly spent considerable time with two of his female employees. I was deeply depressed throughout the pregnancy, and one day during the last trimester I was sitting on the bed and caught a glimpse of how I looked in the mirror and hated what I saw. I had gained so much weight with the pregnancy and was so disgusted with how fat I looked. I started having thoughts of killing myself--life really sucked and there didn't really seem to be anything to look forward to. But there was the baby - I couldn't kill me, because that would kill her. Two days after our second daughter was born by planned c-section, our older daughter was crying at the hospital that she wanted me to come home. Against the advice of the health professionals at the hospital, I said I wanted to go home. Reluctantly they let me go. My husband was a complete jerk that night. The baby was colicky, I was exhausted, and rather than him staying up and helping me through the night with the baby, he said he was going to bed because he'd hurt his back. He stayed home with us for two days at the most, after which he returned to work--leaving me trying to recover from a c-section while caring for a colicky baby and her very jealous three year old sister. Small wonder that at my six (or eight?) week checkup, my uterus had not returned to normal size because I had not rested adequately. My husband even had the nerve that fall when we were preparing to leave for a Christmas party to compare my body with one of the female employees he spent too much time with--saying, "you look almost as good as Johnna."

In August of '96 my husband's employer relocated him to another state. Because we had purchased the home we'd been living in, I stayed behind with our daughters to try to sell the home--which resulted in three and a half months of separation and his only coming home for a weekend usually every three weeks. It was this separation that really broke our relationship. During his time living alone in a hotel, he became very self-centered and seemed so different by the time we were reunited as a family. He was very short-tempered with the girls, which retriggered old memories of how my father had treated us growing up. It was extremely upsetting to me (strange how while we were dating and during the early years of our marriage I had mistakenly thought he'd make a good father since he'd seemed so fun-loving and gentle-natured). In March of '97 after returning home late with two tired kids, my older daughter was smarting off and delaying getting ready for bed. My husband was arguing with her and somehow she fell on the floor and he kicked her in her back. I was extremely upset about it, and that was the first time I seriously thought about getting a divorce.

For a few years my response to our problems was just to feel depressed about things. But a couple of years ago when my much-loved housecat (whom I'd had for many years) passed away, I had trouble handling everything for quite awhile after that.

I think it was during the fall of '97 that my husband became a volunteer fire fighter. His doing so resulted in his being gone several nights a week for training for a few months. On several occasions he put being on the fire department ahead of our family (i.e., when we're on our way somewhere and his pager goes off). I have found his being on the fire department very irritating.

In February of '98 my husband and I travelled with other of his company's managers and wives to the big island of Hawaii. Although I was interested in seeing Hawaii, I very much did not want to be separated from my kids. But my Mother told me I'd better go or it might hurt my marriage. Funny - going is what hurt the marriage instead. I had agreed to leave the kids with my parents, but my husband's Mother, pushy woman that she is, decided to change that. She decided they would have the kids the first half of the time we were to be gone and my parents could have them the second half. So we were scheduled to fly in and out of an airport not too far away from my parents. The day we left the kids was absolutely horrible and could have been handled so much differently. My kids were screaming for me not to leave them, and it broke my heart. While we were gone, my older daughter acquired the chicken pox from her sister, who had only had a mild case of them soon before we left. Unfortunately she got a very serious case of chicken pox, running a fever of 104 continuously and couldn't keep anything down. I was filled with guilt for not being there to care for her, and she still continues at times now to tell me that it should have been me taking care of her then. When we returned from Hawaii, after flying all night long with little sleep, we were then expected at my Grandma's 90th birthday party. My youngest daughter would have nothing to do with me, and it was crushing.

During '98 I became increasingly depressed about the marriage. In early fall during my annual exam with my doctor, she asked me how my life was going, and I broke down and cried, and we talked for quite awhile. She suggested a counselor and the possibility of putting me on anti-depressants, both of which I declined at that time. However, a few weeks later I presented the idea to my husband of our getting family counseling because of problems we were having dealing with my older daughter. We went maybe six times, but my husband was very negative about it and questioned whether counseling was ever helpful to anyone.

In time my husband and I started arguing about just about everything and it seemed to go on and on without stopping--triggering hurt memories from the past of all the arguing my parents had done.

During the fall of '99 my life had become very challenging due to the marital problems. We had gotten the internet, and in my confusion about how despairing my life had become and what best to do about it, I went into "Love @ AOL" and met a few men. Two that I met I corresponded with for a few months. The one who was a psychologist got me more oriented to the internet, and had me download AOL Instant Messenger, which we used a LOT. In some ways I needed the excitement that our interactions gave me during the two months that we interacted so frequently, especially because it was during a time when my husband's presence at home was almost non-existent--with his firefighter training and obligations, his helping out a farmer friend with his harvesting, and his church committee meetings. This guy helped me to feel like a woman again, when I had retreated to just being a mom in recent years. Because I wanted to look good for him (although we never met), I lost weight (14 lbs.), joined the fitness center and worked out nearly daily for quite awhile, and began tanning again (which previously I'd done post-college, before marriage). So, even though the end of the romantic component of our relationship hurt (as he met someone special who really was available to pursue a relationship), interacting with him did serve some worthwhile purposes. His interest in me had helped to re-boost my self-esteem.

Although I wasn't all that interested in the other guy I met, he seemed taken with me and we corresponded for a few months.

After seven years of progressively intensifying marital problems, my husband became involved in a flirtatious relationship over a period of several months with one of his female subordinates who is 18 years younger than I. On December 2, 2000, my husband had oral sex with her in his office after hours. His unfaithfulness led to my putting myself down again--feelings of not being good enough to hold on to a man, all the old put-downs resurfacing. Funny how ingrained others' comments can become in your mind. If I'd had a source of income at that time (I've been a stay-at-home mom since March '94), I would have left my husband shortly after his confession. What fragment of love was left at that time, was destroyed the night of his confession. I have grappled with such a wide array of feelings since that time--periods of very deep depression, ponderings of what divorce would mean for the kids, etc., and thoughts of returning to office work (my only relevant work experience) just to be able to try to support myself and my kids. It would be a tough road to take. The "right" decision is not obvious to me at all. And so for now I stay--feeling trapped and resentful and angry and depressed. And, unfortunately, without the emotional support from anyone in my family. My father's comment on the phone after their receiving my letter that in limited detail told them of my husband's affair, was "I will not support you in a divorce. The only ones who win in a divorce are Satan and the lawyers. Amd my mother phoned a couple of weeks after I wrote them about my husband's affair and told me, in relation to whether I could find decent employment to support myself should I divorce, that she was disappointed that I hadn't ever completed my college degree--that it had been her goal for all of her kids to complete a college degree (my two sisters have completed master's degrees and my brother completed his bachelor's degree). Just what I needed when I was already so low was a further put-down by my mother!

The hardest part of staying with my husband has been times when I have felt obligated to have sex with him. It is horrible sharing yourself when you don't want to, with someone you don't want to share yourself with. On several occasions I have cried afterwards.

I have wanted, needed and yearned for a door to open for me to get out of this marriage in a way that I can feel okay about in relation to raising my kids. It is my firm belief that children should be raised by their mothers being at home with them--not by their being in daycare environments. I do not believe that their needs are adequately met in daycare settings and affects who and what they become as adults. I do not want to return to office work, to having a boss, to working regular hours, to sitting around on my butt in an office all day. I want to find a way to make income from home--to be my own boss, to utilize my talents, and to be at home with my kids when they need me. I continue to pray about all of this. I need out of this marriage--it is a negative shadow that needs removed. But I can't see clearly how best to do that. And I want to find a new and better relationship soon. I need so badly to believe that love can last forever--that I am worthy of the commitment to be loved forever by someone that I really want to love me. I need that more than anything.