I Am Getting a Divorce
I got married to my husband when I was 19 and he was 20. We were young, but at the time we thought it was the best decision. He was in the Marines stationed in California and I was living in Texas. Financially, the only way we could be together is if we were married because the Marines would pay for our housing then. Plus, we thought we were madly in love.
7 months after I moved to California my husband was shipped off to Iraq for the first time. He was gone for 10 months. He came back for a few months and then was shipped off again in ’03 for another 8months. Both times I stayed in California, I stayed faithful to him, and I took care of everything while he was gone. When he returned and he was discharged from the Marines, we were able to finally start our lives together. We moved back to Texas, bought a house, he started getting visitation rights to see his daughter. I thought things were going well.
In April of ’07, his grandmother became very ill. She was transported to a hospital about an hour and a half away from where we live. My husband was going to drive there to see here and when I got off work I was going to go home and change and then drive there myself. When I got home, I noticed my laptop was on. My husband had forgotten to log off his MySpace account. As I was poking around I noticed a series of emails back and forth which included some provocative pictures from a girl I had never met. These had been going on since November of the previous year. Devastated, but not wanting to deal with everything over the phone, I drove to the hospital to meet my husband. There I confronted him. He admitted to it. Told me I wasn’t skinny enough, pretty enough, he hadn’t been happy, wasn’t sure he wanted to stay with me…blah, blah, blah. I didn’t eat for weeks. But I stayed by his side while his grandmother was sick up until her death about a month later. We separated for about 6 months. I got my own apartment, he stayed in the house, but he decided that he wanted to work things out and I decided that I could forgive him as long as we went to counseling together.
I moved back into the house in March of this year. Things had been going well. We got full custody of his daughter so I quit my job so I could take care of her. She was failing 1st grade and I worked with her to help her pass and get moved into 2nd. Up to this point I had been having problems with alcohol. I never became violent, never went out to bars or clubs and drank all night. I drank alone, at home most of the time. The problem was I was doing it every night and I was having black outs. So I had gone through treatment at the beginning of the year before I moved back in. Recently I had three relapses and we both agreed that I would go to a 30 day inpatient program, but before I signed up my husband said he wanted to continue to work on us and he would wait for me.
On August 18th I found out two things: My husband has been cheating on me with a mutual friend’s ex wife (before she was his ex) for the past four years, and he is currently seeing another girl. On August 25th, I told my husband he has 30 days (the length of time I will be in rehab) to prepare for a divorce from hell.
I am 26 years old and I am starting over. I have no job, no car, no house, and no husband and I am freaking terrified!
