Marital Talk

Ok, I tend to get wordy in these situations but my goal is to tell you about me and my husbands (yes  I meant that plural) as well as what I hope to do with the site. *I want to learn and I want to educate.  So, here goes:

My name is Jerri Ann and my husband is Wayne.  We’ve been married 6 years and we have 2 children.  One is 5 and the other is 3.  We have very different parenting strategies and it causes problems in our marriage.  We recently had our first counseling session because this seems to be our main marital challenge.  I will talk more about this I’m sure. 

We met on the internet.  He saw my online ad.  He sent me a message asking me to dinner.  I had a date with someone that I had been out with before but wasn’t sure I really liked.  I told him I already had plans and he immediately said, "what about lunch". 

There really is a point here, I promise. 

We went to lunch.  He asked me about dinner the next night.  I agreed.  But, I stayed out late that night and asked him to just join me at my apartment for pizza and a Braves game the next night.  (Would it be bad here to admit that I know that this was a Monday and a Tuesday but not the exact dates? It was sometime around the first of August.)  He ordered pizza and came over for the game.  He never went home. 

I am not kidding.  That is exactly what happened.  He had to be sent to Florida for business the next week and by Thursday he asked me to join him.  And, I did.  We bought a camper a month later (he worked construction).  I quit my job the next month.  We started trying to have a child the next month.  I got pregnant 2 months later.  I had a miscarriage but by this time we were living in Florida.  We tried again and immediately we were pregnant with our first child. 

At 38 weeks pregnant, I begged him to quit his job and move home with me.  He agreed.  He got a job.  We bought a home.  We had another baby.  And now…..here we are.

So, that was a trip down memory lane.  Now, a few more quick thoughts.  I want you to really know us and where we came from. 

He was freshly divorced when we met.  So fresh that he didn’t even have a copy of the papers from his lawyer.  He agreed to pay alimony and their house payment for five years.  Luckily, two years later, she got married, gave him the house and he was out of the alimony payment.

I…I am not so simple.  I married at 22 to my college sweetheart.  We grew apart.  I can’t say we tried very hard to keep the marriage together.  It ended 18 months later.  I married again 2 years later.  A rebound marriage to an abusive man.  He was verbally and physically abusive.  He wasn’t smart enough to manipulate me emotionally or intellectually. 

Here comes the hard part.  I married again in 1998.  He was abusive.  Not physically, not verbally, but the emotional and intellectual abuse was far worse.  He became addicted or I should say re-addicted to drugs.  He quit coming home from work on Fridays and would only come home when he had no money.  I finally got the nerve to leave him.  I then spent a year hunting him so that I could get a divorce.   I found him.  He was back in jail and currently he is in prison again. 

I told  you that previous part because when Wayne and I first got together, I had serious issues of him going to work and leaving me.  It took a long time (and I mean like over a year and a half) for me to be comfortable with him going somewhere without me. 

So, we’ve not come to this marriage without baggage, without expectations and sometimes the expectations have been negative.  I gave you the one example of me about feeling like I would be abandoned again so now one about Wayne.

For Wayne, his ex-wife gained a lot of weight after he married her.  I don’t mean, like 50 pounds either.  I mean, she gained almost 200 pounds.  He told me honestly when we met (I weighed about 180 pounds, so I wasn’t a little person, he didn’t care though) that he didn’t mean to be so cold but that he would not sit around and watch someone do that again.  He wished he had intervened. 

Trust me, he isn’t all about physical looks.  He hasn’t said a word as my weight shot up to 225 pounds as of late.  He has done his best to help me.  Now that we know I am diabetic and have a thyroid disorder, I’m losing weight.  We have a treadmill and my plan is to get with it on Monday.  (Why Monday?  Because I’ve had mono and my doc told me not to exercise until she checked me, so I waited.  Monday, the treadmill gets to meet me.)

So, as I said in the beginning, I get wordy with these kind of things but I believe it is important for you to know who I am, who my husband is and how we came to be in this marriage that I would say is strained first and foremost by parental strategies and secondly by financial problems but overall, 98% of the time, we are very very happy.  I would say happy enough to make the folks who know us in real life beg to know the secret.  No secret, just mature adults, doing what we have to do. 

*I am going to save this for tomorrow…because, you know, I got wordy.*

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