Personal Childhood And Past Trauma Stories:
The Fall of My Old Marriage
It’s 2015
My husband and I had been married since 2008. He was the first person I ever truly called a soulmate. We were astrologically compatible—like, all the charts. We loved the same music. The same movies. We laughed. We created. We had a house, a backyard, a kid, and a cat. We were best friends. Until 2012.
That’s when a friend introduced him to synthetic drugs. Basically opiates in disguise. And because he was already walking around with ten years of guilt from a car accident in 2002 —where his best friend died in the passenger seat— that feeling of freedom the drugs gave him? It swallowed him whole.
Lies started stacking. Secrets multiplied. He disappeared in front of me. A shell of the man I loved.
But in one moment of sobriety— he convinced me to have another child. That child was born in 2013. By 2015, my newborn is almost a year old.
And my husband? He’s passing out mid-conversation. He’s leaving the front door open on a busy street. He’s sneaking out in the middle of the night.
I don’t feel safe. Not for me. Not for my babies.
He finally goes to rehab. While he’s in treatment, I find out something that breaks the rest of me: His stepdad had been abusing our oldest. While I was working 80 hours a week, trying to hold everything up. Trying to pay off his growing credit card debt. Trying to survive.
He leaves rehab to be with us through the aftermath. And for a while,
it looks like things are finally healing.
We get him a car. A license. A good job.
I become a stay-at-home mom, Numb and shocked from everything we’ve just been through.
Then he decides: he deserves a night out. The next morning, I get a phone call. He’s in jail. He’ll serve three years.
I go to the impound lot, clean vomit off the seats of my car, and drive it home.
It took me another full year— of silence, and reliving every detail— to realize that this…
and everything that came before it… was my sign. It was time. Time for a divorce.
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