Chapter 1

Hello, if you’re reading this, thank you. After the events of my life that have unfolded the past month, I realized I let personal trauma and my overall attitude get in the way of being the husband I could have been and the parent I should be. I want to detail my journey as well as I can, but I feel in order to do so, I need to chronicle the events that brought me to where I am today. I will start out detailing how my ex wife and I met and some of the events that transpired throughout our relationship because these are things that I look back on and know created the issues that caused my marriage to end.

I wish I could tell you sitting here without the person I thought I’d spend the rest of my life hurts, it’s devastating. I got out of a previous marriage that was unhealthy 7 years ago, and things didn’t end well, and I’ll get into those issues along the way. Those events would end up having lasting effects on my that I wasn’t fully aware of until it was too late. While waiting for the divorce to run its course, I met someone new. I vowed I wouldn’t marry again, and at this point in my life, I wasn’t looking for a relationship. I was wandering life trying to figure out the things I wasn’t ready to discover while in my marriage. Looking back, I held resentments because of my situation, and felt trapped in the relationship. That should have been the first sign to part ways, but I haven’t had the healthiest examples of how to be in a relationship from my parents. Nothing against them at all, but their romantic lives weren’t exactly the stuff from fairy tales. All I knew was that I wanted remain married.

The new woman I met was a bit younger, she lived far away, and I worked with her. Those violated all my personal dating guidelines, I wanted to find someone I had things in common with, and found at a certain age and younger, there wasn’t much there. I wanted to avoid the pratfalls of dating someone you have to work with (even if it’s remotely). I also was not interested in maintaining a long distance relationship. I was having a hard enough time wanting to commit to somebody I was dating locally, there was no way I wanted to date someone that lived far away. Somehow, the more I got to know her, the more I wanted to know about her. I still was nervous because I had 3 kids, and was still holding on to more emotion than I was aware at the time. Things progressed fast, and before I knew it, she was flying to me to meet in person and for her to meet my kids. At this point, we had strong feelings for each other and this was the best way to explore how we were in person together, and see if the physical chemistry was there.

Here I am at the airport with my children, excited and nervous at the same time. I see her walking down the catwalk, and then running towards me. I caught her in my arms, and this was the embrace you see in any romantic movie, except it was better. The 3 day weekend we spent together went fast, she and my kids bonded (which was a great sign) and it felt as though my soul was tied to this person. We dreaded saying goodbye, and the following week was torture. My kids saw me hurt for the first time like I did after their mother kicked me out of the house for another man. They knew I loved this new woman, I knew it too.