Number 5, part 4 Separation & Divorce

As my son got older, we grew increasingly more concerned as he wasn't talking at all and he was prone to temper tantrums and night terrors.  He would for what appeared to be no reason at all, throw himself on the ground and scream at the top of his lungs.  Nothing we did would calm him and we could never figure out why he did this.  We thought maybe he was autistic, so we had him tested through the county and they pretty much immediately told me he did not because he brought a toy to me to play with him.  We got him into a county program that put him in a sort of pre-school for kids with developmental delays due to his speech (or lack thereof).  This put a huge stress on our marriage as we never knew when our little ticking time-bomb might go off.  Is he going to be good at the grocery store this time or is it going to be another battle?  Eventually he did stop throwing the tantrums and his speech, while he did have difficulty, eventually got better.

As his speech was improving, the relationship between my wife & I was deteriorating rapidly.  She has dermatillomania (a skin picking disorder) and if I ever wanted to be intimate with her I basically had to beg.

Once she graduated and started working as a nurse, she worked nights.  I was very proud of her when she graduated, and I tried to show it but I'm pretty sure she had already made up her mind that our relationship and therefore our marriage was pretty much over at that point.  Once she started working, she basically spent all of her time at home asleep.  This really bothered me, she wouldn't even get up a couple hours before she had to leave for work so she could spend a little time with the kids (my son & step-son) before she left for work.  The only time she would come out was if our son had been acting up and I put him in his room.  He would then scream at the door (his room was right next to ours), this would wake her up and she'd come out and get him and bring him to bed with her.  Essentially counteracting his punishment.  This went on for a while until one evening I had had enough.  When she continually refused to spend any time with the family, but would come out to get him it upset me.  So this time I yelled at her to go back to bed and leave him be.  I believe that was the moment that I realized that I was done.

I talked to her at some point during all of this and asked if we could give it another shot, she said yes we could try.  Nothing really changed after that and I decided to put my thoughts to paper.  I always organized my thoughts better on paper (or a computer screen really as I hate handwriting).  I essentially wrote her an ultimatum of what I wanted and what I was willing to do to get there.  She didn't like it and we had another fight.  She then told me she was going to move out in a couple months.

July of 2009 and she finally moved out.  We agreed that she would get our son for a week and I would get him for a week.  Friday to Friday.  He would be starting Kindergarten in the fall and he went to school based on my address.  Over the next several months a lot of things happened.  I made attempts to try to patch things up between us, but she never seemed interested at all.  I won tickets to go to an air show and plane festival, she agreed to go and bring the boys and then canceled on me at the last minute.  I lost my job in September and ended up having to fight with that employer over unemployment benefits (they tried to say that I didn't deserve them, they lost but not before I went over two months with no paychecks).  I finally started a contract position at the beginning of December that was scheduled to go through February.

I got back on my feet and also decided that I was going to file for divorce.  I called and told her over the phone, and after her being the one to leave and having no interest in any of my attempts to patch things up, she acted upset.  I almost laughed.  The actual divorce didn't end up being filed until March of 2012 and finalized in August of the same year.  Divorce is expensive, whether you agree on everything and are filing yourself or not.  That brings you up to the beginning of 2010, where I posted previously about my second love coming back into my life.

More on that next time.