Wow, I find out my husband is cheating. 17 years of marriage is suddenly gone in a poof of smoke. I was dumbfounded. It was so surreal. This really couldn't be happening, but it was. As it started to sink in I wanted to be alone. I wanted to curl up in a corner and not do anything. I wanted not responsibility. I didn't get it. I wanted to take time to get my bearings, but with a home I wanted to keep and kids to feed I didn't get that. I blabbed my story to everyone. I told them what a rotten cheater he was. I stopped eating and lost a lot of weight. For my sense of humor I would tell my cleints I was on the divorce diet with a high dose of adultry. I started to party a lot and became the kind of mother I would talk bad about. I knew it wasn't what was best for my kids, but I couldn't focus on them. I could only think of how deserpate, financially and mentally I was. I was a wreck. I would go through the motions at home, but really I was a Zombie. Good thing time heals. It takes lots of time, but it does heal. At five months post seperation I did something with the kids, I don't even remember what it was, but I enjoyed it. It made me cry. I also decided I needed to start enforcing the rules again. My oldest was taking advantage of my time away. She was having friends over and drinking and having her boyfriend over. That was my first signifigant step back to my old self. The next year and a half I would praise myself for baby steps, because that was all I could make when it came to managing my family. With my work taking up so much of my time I was hard to get homework done as I should. It was hard to keep the house up and chores done. I felt like a hamster on a wheel that I could not get off. Always so much to do with so little time.After almost two years, I agreed to marry my boyfriend. We haven't done it yet. We bought the house and I am waiting for him to buy the ring.

The marriage. . . I am sure if my ex were to read this he would think I have it all wrong. It is funny how we all view things differently. We met when I was 18 and he was 19. We were both stationed in Stuttgart Germany and MP's in the US Army. I remember the first time I saw him. He had a presence about him. He was so handsome and I knew I wanted to get to know him right away. We had our ups and downs and on and offs until I became pregnant and then I agreed to marry him. He had been asking me, but I was scared. Funny how some things never change. We ended up tying the knot and it wasn't until my first anniversary that I actually thought we had a chance. We moved to N. Carolina, then Washington state where we spent 10 years. He became an officer in the military and I was so proud of all of his accomplishments. I was a stay at home mom having baby after baby. I loved living a traditional life. Then while in Washington he started having problems with his vision. We knew that he had an untreatable eye disease called Retinitis Pigmentosa. It was starting to affect him. He had difficulty going from outside to a room. His eyes would not adjust. It wasn't long after that he started to hit his head and shins on things. This in my oponion was the beginning of the end. I didn't know it at the time. I thought we would have a few bad years and we would adjust. That didn't happen. He got medically retired from the military and we moved to Arizona. It was a great move. The sunshine was wonderful. I never looked back and missed all the rain and overcast days. But moving to a nice sunny state did not help our situation, nor Tom's out of control temper and sadness that usually displayed itself as anger. He became very non trusting. We would have to take a friend of his to pick out wheels for our vehicle, because he didn't trust my judgement. I had always handled finances, and quite well, but he wanted to sit down and pay bills with me. I kept up hope that it would all get better, but after 6 years of this I began to lose hope. We made it another couple of years, miserably, before he started having an affair. You might wonder how that could have happened since he could not drive and depended on me so much. I wondered the same. In fact, when my 16 year old daughter told me about a conversation she overheard I pretty much laughed it off, thinking that I didn't have to worry about such things at this point in our relationship. I was wrong. It took a day to get all the details, but my whole world came tumbling down when I found out he had been seeing someone for two weeks that he had met at a blind conference that I had dropped him off at.

Well, my sis blogs here all the time, so I visit the site often. I figured with six kids, being divorced in the last two years, starting a new rlationship I would take the time to put some of my thoughts into words.
My on and off again boyfriend of 18 months and I decided to buy a home together the last time we got back together. I had been putting him through the ringer with breaking up all the time. In hindsite I can honestly say that it was unaviodable a few times. We started dating when he was only seperated from a 19 year marriage three weeks and I was seperated 3 months from a 18 year marriage. Neither of us were over our spouses and that was fine in the beginning, but as time went on I started to get my feelings hurt when he would do things showing his ex he still loved her, hence a couple of break-ups. We got past those things only for me to discover that having been married at 19 I really needed, for myself, time to date others. That was hard for him, because by that point, he knew he was happy with me and wanted only me.
Anyway, we made a commitment in January, that we would move forward with this relationship and so we have. We bought a 4200 sq. ft baesment home and I have moved myself and five of my six children in and he is here with his two. It has been exciting and scary.
We are two weeks into it and he has had several days where he was very upset because the house was not clean enough. I spent several nights wanting to cry, because I want us to be happy, and we have so much at stake and it didn't seem to be going so well. I no longer had the thought in my mind that we will be fine forever, since I had thought that in my first marriage and that was all shot to hell when I found out my husband (ex) was having an affair.
I will save the details of that for my next blog. Sorry, Deana if you read, since you know the details very well as I cried my eyes out for the first year after my seperation.