When I was 19 years old I married a man I knew for three months. I did not know what love was and I did not love him. I married him because he told me I could stay home with my son. This appealed to this girl as I was working 8-10 hour days at the time to provide for me and my child. i quickly learned some things about who I married.
I learned that he belonged to a family that would be very controlling over our lives. I learned that this family did everything for him. They wrote his checks, they managed his bills. They gave him a spending allowance. His parents did it all for them. Looking back, I am not really sure if he knew what love was but he sure was being controlled by his parents. His mother told me once that they did not think he would ever get married. Over the next few years, I would understand why.
It did not take long for me to see that this man I married was abusive. He would try to push me around when I had my son on my hip. Soon he would do it when I had our daughter on my hip. He was a coward. Who tries to hurt someone when they are holding a child? We would fight a lot. We were young and did not know or were capable of keeping a marriage. We had a second child, another girl and things were getting worse. I do not even know what the fight was about on a certain day but he hit me across the face. I was holding our daughter. He then threw a chair that almost hit our son. I was done. I asked him to leave. It took him some time but he did eventually move out. I had gone from the abuse of my mom to the abuse of a husband. I had a fight in me to protect.
About a year later he would see me on a Sunday and tell me that he was moving back to Louisiana the next day. He did not tell the children, he left that for me to do. The next day he left, he left to go back to his mom and family. That day I found myself in the courthouse filing for divorce. I had three children under the age of five at this time and things had to change.
I would have been married about 6 years to this man who abandoned us. He had no intentions of working on his anger and abuse. He had no intentions of coming back or bringing us to Louisiana. He had no intentions of sending us money to live on. He wanted out of the responsibility and back into the arms of his parents doing everything for him. He got what he wanted.
I struggled for about a year with saying mean things about him to the children. I was angry and young and did what my mom did. I regret saying things about him to the children. When I finally got to a point where I did not speak ill of him anymore, I began my healing. I learned that you do not know anyone after only three months of being with someone. I learned that you should always follow your gut and not your heart. I learned that being young and with a child does not mean you need to compromise your beliefs and values. I learned that being young means you have your whole life ahead of you and that big decisions like marriage should not be made at that time. I learned that I folded into the role of being a mother and that it would forever define me and who I was and would be. I learned to love my children hard and tight as they were all I had and they were solely my responsibility.
Marriage is not for those that have experienced their own divorced parents without some healing. I was not ready to be married. I knew the self sacrifice as I had become a mom at a young age. But I was not ready for the wife role. I was barely understanding the role of mother and trying my best in that area. I was young and naive. I was waiting for someone to rescue me, if I am honest. No one is ever supposed to rescue you. You have the capability to rescue yourself by doing the work and being there for you. Figuring out who I was would have been something I should have worked on. I was lost and only thought about what was happening in the day to day. I had watched my mother rely on my dad far after their divorce and I thought that I would naturally know what do in a marriage. That somehow I would learn how to be a wife. I learned to lose myself for someone else. I lost my identity.
Quiet Intensity 