I had warning signs before we were married, but I didn't understand. In many ways, I thought we understood each other better than any other ever had or ever would. I felt I had a soul mate. Before we were married he scared me one time, but I thought it was a fluke. I had known him a couple of years already and had never seen anything like it. He asked me to marry him. I said, "no." I was dating someone else at the time, and he and I had been in very loose contact. Then he appears, asks me to marry him, and he's acting odd. He's very full of himself, big plans, big ideas, life is just way too grand. It was weird. When I told him, "no," he wouldn't take "no" for an answer. He scared me, and I can't even explain how. I can just tell you that when I was able to get him out of the house, I made sure all of the doors were locked and the windows were closed. I called a family member and told them what had happened and stayed on the phone until I was sure I was safe.

Two years later, he had gotten saved and was going to church regularly. He seemed to be well grounded, but I heard from his parents that he had gone off the deep end before starting to attend this church. He had given everything away, including a lot of things they felt weren't his to give. The relationship with them had been very rocky during his last couple of years of college. He wanted them to help him, but he avoided any responsibility. His got fired from his first job out of college. He wouldn't follow the rules. I found out later from his parents that he had also been fired from a summer job during college because he broke a jack-hammer. He had finally seemed to settle down and started seeing me again. His parents thought the last few years were finally behind them and life would get better.

Although things were pretty good, there were a few things that made me wonder. He seemed unnaturally worried about my expectations of him. He would say from time to time not to expect flowers or cards. He would expound on expectations in general also. He didn't do it in a humble worried way though. It was almost as if he was trying to put me in my place, but I responded to what he was saying, not my impressions. I tried to calm his fears about my expectations. I now know it would have been wiser if I had addressed what he wasn't saying, even though he would have vehemently denied anything that was not expressly spoken. My impressions were correct. I should have ran, right there and then, but I didn't. For some reason, I felt it was very important to deal with his spoken words instead. I felt it was somehow unfair to react to my impressions to what he wasn't saying. I discounted my own good sense and intuition, a costly mistake.

There was also an episode just a month before our wedding. I almost called it off. I really wanted to. He found out I had sinned. It was before we dated. It was before I gave my heart to the Lord, but he couldn't get past it, even though he had committed the very same sin and was pressing me regularly to commit it again, with him. He was mean. He was cruel. I was dumb-founded. Just when I was about to call if off, he softened. I pressed to make sure this would not be an issue ever again. He promised.

He was very intelligent, graduated from a formidable institute with honors. It was easy to fall into the trap he laid for me that he was smarter than me. I also got brow-beaten regularly over the fact that the husband was the head of the household, and if I ever had a differing opinion, I was a stubborn and rebellious wife. I got upset in our first year of marriage over wild stories he would tell people where I was the buffoon. I told him it hurt my feelings. He told me I had better get over it because he wasn't changing (back to the expectations again.) He also told me I had better toughen up. During this time he also let me know he would never have my back in a dispute or trouble with another individual. He said it wasn't his job. Early on I learned what it would take to make our marriage last, basically I could expect nothing good from him and he could and would expect me to agree with him all the time and tell no one of his "problems." I had made vows that I intended to keep, so I resigned myself to this miserable excuse of a marriage and made the best of it.

After years of his roller-coaster emotions that he denied having or expressing, and five kids, he started his own business. He'd had trouble keeping a job for more than a couple of years, so this looked like his best option. He got along better with customers than bosses. Bosses like to have things their way, and my husband had a difficult time submitting to authority. Although we had had problems keeping finances under control because he couldn't communicate with me very well what our financial status was, or didn't want to, it got much worse while he was working for himself. We never knew when money was going to be coming in. He would tell me to buy groceries with a credit card because money is expected to arrive Monday. Well, the money wouldn't come for two or three weeks, then when it did come, he'd take us all out to eat and a movie to celebrate. Little did I know, the money that arrived had already been spent weeks ago. After about five years, we were getting in very hot water. I had no idea how hot until someone we owed money to approached me and asked if I knew we were three months behind on payments. I didn't. When I got home that afternoon, I went through the bills. We had a lot of bills that were three months behind or more. He had stopped paying them. We didn't have the money. He had recently taken a job with a company that paid weekly; now I knew why. I jumped in and started paying the bills. I set up a budget and started knocking them out. I was shocked at some of the unnecessary expenses we were paying, like three internet services, insurance on a car that had been sitting undriveable for two years, separate companies for home and car insurance. I thought he was so smart. At least he had always told me he was and got mad when I wanted to help with the finances but couldn't understand his complicated method of money management. He had always accused me of being stubborn instead of trying to explain it in a way I could understand. I was beginning to see the truth, and it was scary. He didn't have a good money management plan. He had no budget. It was all lies. Next he tells me I could really "screw him over" in a divorce if I wanted to. With that cheery thought in mind, he began taking steps to protect himself from me "screwing him over." I figured that was what he was doing, but I didn't care. I wasn't going to "screw him over," so what difference did it make. He had always been paranoid. I spent most of my adult years trying to prove to him that his fears were unfounded with me. The odd part of this period was that he said nothing to me about paying the bills. I was on pins and needles worried about his reaction to me "taking over." He said nothing. Weird. When he finally did say something, it was just to find out if the house payment was being made. He didn't want to know anything else. Weird.

A couple of months into my bill paying year, I found out he had gotten paid for a job that he had never done. It involved a government office and everyone was quite upset, had given him ample opportunity and was now taking him/us to small claims court. They wanted their money back, now with court costs added. It was about $500. I managed to come up with it and get them in touch with another professional, that I knew from my past career, who got the job done. Just when I felt a sigh of relief over that near catastrophe, he announced to me that last year's taxes had not been paid. It was almost $6000. We didn't have it, so he just didn't turn in anything. He didn't call anybody, made no arrangements, nothing. Thankfully, that was the year of the big stimulus payment. That covered our debt to the government. Again, I am able to breathe again, just in time for him to write nearly $700 in bad checks in one weekend for a car registration that was late (with a late fee) and baseball registrations for our kids. Our lives were not on a roller-coaster anymore; it had become a runaway train. Our credit was maxed out. Our credit line was maxed out. We had nothing anywhere to pull his butt out of the fire this time. I went to his parents. They helped, but I was realistically concerned about being rescued again only to have him keep pulling this. I was afraid it would not stop. Then he got mad because I had opened another checking account to pay bills out of. I did this to keep him from spending the money I had paid bills with. This lead to our demise. He hated me for that. He began telling people I wouldn't let him have his own money. I had asked him how much he needed and put that in the budget, but he always used more than he said he was going to. I couldn't keep enough money in his account. We were supposed to share that money. There were six of us and one of him, and he used more than we did. It was so out of control. I began calling professional people for help, asking them what I could or should do. I was scared. He was getting more and more hateful, telling everyone the wildest things, even our own children. They knew much of what he was saying was not true, but I'm sure they didn't know what to do with what he was saying. He was trying to get them on his side. He was positioning for battle, but I didn't want to battle. I found out from my neighbors that he was telling people I was going to divorce him, and he didn't know what was taking me so long. He had threatened to leave me or divorce every couple of years since we got married and now he was telling people that I was divorcing him. I was at a loss. The last time he threatened to divorce me was in the new checking account conversation. For the first time, I finally said, "fine, if that's what it takes." The thing I had been so scared of, being divorced, seemed like the only way to stop the train. Oddly enough, with my consent to letting him divorce me, he suddenly back-peddled and decided it would take a stick of dynamite to get him out of there. It got very, very scary then. I don't know if it was deliberate, or not, but he scared me so badly, I couldn't sleep at night. I thought he would smother me in my sleep. My memory started getting very bad, and I was having a hard time keeping my thoughts organized. I was so tired. He would be up creeping around in the dark, or in his closet doing who knows what when I would wake from restless sleep. He had always kept strange hours, but he used to have lights on while he was doing whatever he was doing. Not anymore. I was scared. I knew that he could kill me, make it look like an accident and never loose any sleep over it, thinking that even if he got caught, he could justify it in his own mind, where it really mattered. I had heard these things for over twenty years. I knew how he thought. I also knew he was a ticking bomb. I had to get the kids and I away from him.

I filed for divorce in October. I would have taken the kids and gone to a shelter, but I was concerned about the oldest girl causing problems. Her dad had made her the golden child. She could do no wrong, and the others could do little right. I didn't want to leave her, and I didn't feel safe telling her of my plans, so I stayed. We shared that house of hatred until the middle of February. I felt so sorry for the kids. I just didn't know what else to do. I didn't want to lose my oldest girl, but the others were on the verge of various types of breakdowns. One of my sons developed a full blown anxiety disorder that manifested during this time. I've had them all see counselors with varying success.

He still tells them I am the one that divorced him and ruined our family. The girls have a harder time getting past that without letting it become a part of their thinking. I don't want to keep reminding them why I divorced him, but I don't want to lie either or have them thinking it was just some kind of silly misunderstanding. This divorce didn't come about easily or without weighing many options. It came down to a decision to preserve my own life or risk losing it and him raising the kids or getting sent to jail and who know who raising our kids. The only responsible thing to do was to protect myself in order to insure their future as much as possible.

They want to believe the best. I am past that. I've been cured, at least as far as he is concerned. Even his parents seem schizophrenic about him. They want to support him, which is a whole lot easier when he's not living with you, but they also know him and what he's capable of. His own mother was scared he was going to get arrested for abusing the children. She saw the bruises on them over and over. She begged me to stop him, like there was anything I could say or do to stop it. I told him not to use the belt. He didn't like being told what not to do. It was only after a neighbor threatened to turn him in to child protective services that he cut back at all. My words never had any effect. It wasn't until he got turned in to CPS that he actually cut back significantly. I understand from the kids that he hardly ever strikes them anymore.

Since the divorce, I have been relearning what "normal" is. I had forgotten so much. Life with someone in his condition had taken a toll on my ability to function. I had developed so many fears about not measuring up, never being good enough. I was a nervous wreck when someone was watching me do anything. I didn't feel I could learn new tasks quickly enough to satisfy a boss. I was scared of making any kind of mistake. It has been difficult re-entering the workforce, but thankfully, I have finally found a place that is patient and helpful.

Friends have a lifeline, and my faith has been an anchor. He still tries to stir up havoc, but is less and less successful. I am creating a haven for the kids and I here in this new place where we can stand any way we want to. We can say what we think, if it's done respectfully. We can even dislike something or file a complaint, respectfully. There are rules and expectations, but they are not arbitrary. They are solid and easy to work with. Life here is simpler and stable. Thank God.