He was very rude and obnoxious to me, and I made so many excuses for him. He cried a lot because of his divorce and my heart went out to him. He did not have money for rent, I provided it a few times. He even told me one time when he was drunk that he hated my child, I am so stupid! But I blew that off as a drunk "didn't really mean it" statement.
My husband went into therapy a little during his divorce. His therapist told him that it would not be a good idea to get into another relationship for a little while until he worked through some things in his life. For a 24-year old, I sure was dumb. I really had no clue what this meant until the last few years....
After about a year, we visited his friends in a small city 4+ hours north of south Florida. We found a small house and he found someone he could work with. He wanted to get away, all I thought is how much he would miss his daughter. We agreed on this house, so I put a downpayment on the house. Then he tried to get me to bow out and let him go alone.... taking advantage more and more as we went along. He said he could come and stay with me when he came to visit. I did not want a long distance relationship. I told him that if we did not go together, just let it go.
So we moved together. What happened over the next few years is he isolated himself from me on purpose. He would not walk next to me. He would not go anywhere with me. He would not do anything for me. He did whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. After I got a job, he paid nothing. I paid for the bills, his truck payment, his visa payment, his tires, the furniture payment. He made loads of decisions about what to purchase, but i was always the one making the payments. He told his ex-wife that she was not supposed to rely on child support from him, that she should view it as extra. In other words, what he was saying is it was not his job to financially take care of his kid, it was hers. I even made his child support payment after she took it to court and won. It kept him out of trouble. He did not file any taxes during the time he was working, so he kept all his money and guess who is still paying his taxes... ME!
He refused to pick up my daughter from day care when I got into a car accident, and he yelled at me. When he got ticked off, he would call me at work and yell at me. He even found a girl friend while he was leaching off of me.
OHHHH IF I COULD GO BACK!!!!! But I have my 4 beautiful children from him... but, but, but,
My husband believed that everything was my responsibility, including coming to him sexually to please him. And he would dismiss me just as easily. I was so pathetic. PATHETIC!
Of course, birth control was my job, too. But I had too many problems with birth control and family issues ran in my family. So I was afraid to take them. Several people recommended that he get "cut" but he was worried about his manliness. Honestly, he did not have much manliness. he had lots of issues in that arena, but he did a lot of PORN viewing and a lot of self-gratification. He also made sure he insulted me a lot in that arena.
I ended up pregnant, he asked me to have an abortion. His first wife had so many abortions that she could not conceive any more. She kept losing the babies. Good thing for him and any possible other babies really.
You have no idea how many times over the next few years he said to me that I should have aborted, that I gave him no choice, that I chose his direction in life for him, that I was the one who decided to have the chidren and gave him no choice so I should be the one who takes care of them, that I trapped him over and over again. I often wonder what kind of prize he thinks he is. Is that the kind of prize that people leave in a brown bag on your front porch and light it on fire so you run outside and stomp on it???
He seemed to be very upset at our current landlord, who was also his boss. He also seemed to want to live on a farm with cows. So, I was making pretty good money and I found a 7-acre farm. So we moved out there. It had a very small trailer on it, but my husband loved the acreage. We moved out there.
He never did decide to help send my daughter off to school. She was in the 3rd grade and had to walk down a very dark road to the bus stop. Thank God for a friend down the road, she sat with them at their house till the bus came. I had to ask other people to help me with things that a spouse should be helping with. I realize we were not "legally" married yet, but he was reaping all the benefits of my income. He had several part time jobs. I was working two jobs. I asked him about staying home a month or so with the baby. He said he would beef up his jobs when the baby was born so that I could. Wouldn't you know, as soon as I had the baby, he quit every one of them. I lost my car, not his truck, my car. So, I begged my 2nd job to let me work more hours. They did. Then they offered me a job in Atlanta, GA for what they said was 100,000 a year salary. Two days after my baby was born, I went back to work. Shortly thereafter, I went to Georgia to stay for two weeks and tried very hurriedly to find a house for my family. I missed them and I cried several times.
I asked him to come up there for help to find an appropriate house, he had the truck. He would not come.
I picked the first house I could find that was big enough. It had a lot of issues that I did not know about. All my "husband" did was complain and yell. I was working 12 hour days and had 1-hour trip each way. My daughter called me at work, now in the 4th grade, she was sick. He would not feed her. He would not take care of her. The school called me, she had pneumonia. He said that was not his problem, it was mine. STUPID WOMAN! He got into his second violent attack, although he said it was because of undercooked chicken that he felt so sick. He chased me down. I had my daughter hiding behind me and my baby in my arms to keep him from hurting them. He threw me to the ground and got on top of me and said to me that all it would take is one punch in the right place and we would never have to worry about it again. He threatened my life. He said he did not. The next day, I took my kids to work, we got a UHaul and moved back. I dropped him and all his crap into a storage unit in Central Florida and I left for Ft Lauderdale to my mom.
That should have been it. But two weeks later, he called and found a place for us to stay. I moved back to Central Florida. He never even looked for a job. I got one finally. All those neighboring the house kept telling me about how rude he was being to my daughter, how stoned he was all the time, how he talked about me and my daughter, how lazy he was. We often went to a friends house to visit, and my husband started talking trash about his friends and the people we were living with. They went and told them. We had to leave immediately. My daughter was in 5th grade, and my other daughter was about 6 months old and was sick with a fever. We were in the process of getting a house, we only had two weeks to go.
One of my friends let us stay with her. My husband still did not have a job. We stayed with her almost two weeks when they said they saw my husband abusing the children. He would not enter that house again. He slept in the truck.
We moved into the house that we were waiting for. He was still just watching the baby. But he was complaining. I was not financially organized and I never gave him money. I just provided a roof for our head. We never should have had the financial troubles that we had. But remember how I said he made a lot of financial decisions, and I ended up paying for them.... still true. He just never realized it. He was screwing up any ability to budget by throwing out requests.
I got my hours changed so I was working 4am to Noon, and my husband was able to get a job. I got him a truck and me a car. But he did not work. He ended up trying to talk me into letting him deal and grow pot with his buddy. NO WAY! By the way, this buddy and his wife absolutely knew how useless my husband was being. They kept telling me all about it. He did not enforce a nap, schedule or anything. He took naps, he stayed up all night, he slept in, he did not feed them half the time, and he certainly did not cook or clean. He did that in the trailer and in Georgia some. But not since. His buddy used to make remarks all the time about how useless my husband was, and he was his best friend. His wife worked while he stayed home, but he cooked and cleaned, picked up the kids from school, etc etc etc.
This was about the time that my husband blew his wig and punched me three times. My life would never be the same. My baby was about 1, maybe 2. My older daughter was in the 6th grade. I was completely afraid from that point on.
Punched me in the back of the head and told me, after I fell, that if I got back up he would do it again. This happened two more times that night. I was holding my 2 year old for fear that he might toss her across the room. My 11 year old was smart enough to be in another room. He laid on the ground in the yard in front of my car as I tried to leave. I should not have backed up, I should have just kept going. This was the 3rd physical offense he had taken against me and each one was progressively worse. This doesn't count the literal millions of verbal and emotional offenses.
The much harder part: He stayed home with my baby and sent my 11-year old to school (not really, she was not his daughter so he assumed no responsibility for her). I was the one who worked and provided for the family.
I was never supported by my husband. He did not help me when I was working away. I still had to take care of the house for the most part, and as soon as I got home from being at work about 10-12 hours (depending on traffic), I had to deal with a severely messy house, a very cranky unnapped 2 year old, an 11 year old who needed me, cooking dinner, baths, bed, etc. I was abandoned as my "husband" went outside. We were not married yet.
About a year after being hit, he knew I was on the verge of calling it quits. He asked me to marry him. I really began going to church and was crying out to God daily. I was changing and it was evident.
Through all of the hatred, physical and emotional abuse, I wanted to leave but did not want to bring up another child without a father. I did not want to send that message to my children. Plus, I was totally confused about God's will. When Mary was betrothed to Joseph, and the Holy Spirit came upon her, Joseph was going to divorce her quietly. In those days, you did not have to have a ceremony to be considered married. I don't believe you do in God's eyes. We had a child together, so to me we were married in God's eyes. And divorce was explicitly prohibited, or so I thought.
When my 2nd daughter was 2, I had enough of working and not getting to take care of my kids. I was going to lose another daughter to circumstances, and I was not having it. I tried to talk to Roland about me starting a business from home. He is not a doer. So, when my Van broke down again and I did not have the money to fix it, I decided to quit my job.
I quit my career and tried to work from home. But my husband did not support this either. I tried to write software in the wee hours of the morning, in the afternoon while my 2-year old slept.
