Stole the Most Important Thing

In 2002 I met what I thought would be the love of my life in college. Before I met her I really had no post-graduation goals or plans for what I wanted to do with my life. But, she (we’ll call her K) not only helped me find my calling in advertising, but helped me grow from an introverted shy kid to a top dog in my region within a few years. Not a lot of people believed in me or had any expectations in me growing up. K did. I think I will always be thankful for that piece of her despite what she did to me.

A couple months after our wedding in 2006, her first cousin she grew up with wanted to move out to Columbus and go to a culinary school. I thought he was a good 22 year old kid just starting out. Within a month of him moving in, I got in a terrible car accident and broke both of my legs and hurt my neck and took about six months to be back on my feet and through the worst of physical therapy. I was t-boned by a woman having a stroke. However, I thought luck returned to me. Despite us only fooling around a handful of times during this period, my wife became pregnant. We were planning on having kids in a few years, but we were both happy about the idea.

So here comes my daughter Z. With all the hours I work and all the elbows I have to rub and calls I have to make every Saturday night and Sunday was spent with the three of us together. When my daughter was 4, we decided to have another baby. We weren’t so lucky that time around. After a year of trying, I met with a urologist and discovered I was sterile. 100% sterile. My wife and I explained this wasn’t true as we had a daughter. The doctor maintained that aside from a handful of rare diseases, I likely have been sterile since childhood. I didn’t have time to get to the car before the truth came out. As we walked to our car she broke the silence by saying, “So, you going to divorce me now?” For one moment I thought she was joking, but knowing her tone of voice it was more her being inquisitive. I asked her what she meant by that and she just replied she was ‘thinking’.

Midway home I broke the silence this time by saying, “What are you thinking about?” That is when she spilled the beans. Z wasn’t mine. Without me even bringing it up, she included if I wanted a divorce she would be taking half of everything and would not let me see Z anymore since she ‘wasn’t your’s’. She steadfastly refused to tell me who the father was. For two days we didn’t talk. I have to say that the news of Z not being biologically mine did not impact my feelings for her. It only made me hate her mother.

I wasn’t pressing the situation until the next week when I could take a couple weeks away from work and get the ball rolling on what I intended to do. My wife discovered I had ordered divorce papers to be drawn up as we shared the same lawyer. I did not need to ask who the father was because her first cousin confronted me that night when I got home. My wife went to her parents’ home in Pennsylvania with my daughter and said nothing to me. He made it clear that not only would they make my life miserable, but he was the father and would sue to take my daughter Z away. I knew at that moment no judge was going to grant my wife or her cousin custody.

Her stupid cousin even paid for a paternity test without consulting a lawyer and proved Z was his. My lawyer assured me there wasn’t a chance Ohio would remove my name from Z’s birth certificate and put his, especially after raising her for more than 3 years. I am sure my wife was furious with her stupid cousin for exposing he was the one she cheated with when I was recovering as it would hurt her in court.

So fast forward to today. I am legally separated and am looking to go to court in May to finish off the divorce and to settle the custody issue. For a great deal of this year she was refusing to let me see Z, but now the court gave us temporary shared custody. I am hoping to get full custody.
What hurts the most is there was never an apology, an explanation, or even an ‘I love you, can we work through this?’ There was only the threat that if I left she would fleece me in divorce court.

Forgot About His Family

I am 5 months pregnant and just found out that my scumbag boyfriend has been cheating on me with the skank upstairs for the past year. Whenever he said that he was working late or that he had to work on the weekends, he was hauling ass up to the third floor to get it in with the worst kind of girl. I was faithful to this man since we first got together, even though other guys have tried in the past to get me to date them. I moved upstate with him when he took his job and stayed home with his son from a previous relationship (I won’t even get into how crazy his ex is), just like he asked me to. I sacrificed and dedicated my life to him, and what do I get? The loser neighbors laughing behind my back.

The only reason I found out is because a friend of mine lives near her and told me she kept seeing my boyfriend up on her floor. That girl is known for whoring around the building, at one point she might have actually been operating as a prostitute from her apartment. So, when you see men who live in the building buzzing around her floor, something’s up. We set up a sort of surveillance. I took my stepson up for a play date with my friend’s son, and we kept watch at her window for him. Sure enough, he went in and stayed for a good 2 hours. I called him during that time and he said he was finishing things up at work and would be home as soon as he could.

So, I left our son inside with my friend and I stood there and waited in the hallway. We he came strolling out and gave the hoe a goodbye peck, I was standing right there. He looked like he had seen a ghost, but really it was just my face, white from shock and wet from the tears. He stood in that hallway and denied, denied, denied. He tried every excuse, telling me that he was upstairs checking out a computer he wanted to buy from her, then saying that he was fixing her television. He used every excuse in the book. When none of that worked, he asked me to go back downstairs so we could talk in private and he could have a chance to break things off with her. I went downstairs and waited 20 minutes. He finally came in, grabbed a pack and threw a few things in it. Then he told me that he needed a few days to decide what he wanted, and that he was going to stay with her for the time being. Never once did he think about or ask about his son and what would happen with him, but that boy is as good as mine and I was already in the process of adopting him, so he is in good hands. This all went down 2 days ago, we haven’t heard from him since, but my friend upstairs has told me that she has seen them coming and going, like they have been together for years and don’t have a care in the world.

The Many Faces

Okay, so I’m not going to act like this relationship defined my teenage years or had a huge effect on who I am today. It was a high school relationship, that did last for quite some time, but just like most others it came to an end. It was the way things happened that I feel is interesting enough to share with everyone.

I started dating Zach in the beginning of sophomore year. We met at a rally team club meeting. It was basically a group of students who supported our sports teams at all of their games. We would wear school colors, paint our faces, yell and scream, and keep the crowd excited. After first meeting, we talked for a few weeks before deciding to make things official. Everything was good between us. We were both doing well in school, having a great time in our extracurricular activities, and really coming into our own. Then the worst thing you could imagine happened…..

One day, I felt sick, and what seemed like a little bug that I could sleep off, turned into me in the ICU within a few days. My doctors put me into an induced coma to try to treat me and get things under control. My parents thought I was going to die, and Zach said he had never been so scared in his life. Over the next couple of weeks, I slowly got better and was finally allowed to go home. The catch was that I went home with an arsenal of medications, including a few steroids. Before long, I was gaining weight and didn’t even look like myself. I literally went from a size 5 to an 8 in 3 months. There was nothing I could do. I needed the medications to stay healthy, but I was putting on weight like crazy. I was so down about things, but good friends, family, and Zach did their best to get me through it.

Every year the Junior class takes a big trip before summer break. It was designed to review everything that you learned that year and offer some bonding time for everyone before senior year. Being in California, that meant a trip to southern Cali for a visit to Disneyland, Seaworld, and the beach. I was so stoked to go because of everything I had been through. Zach was excited for other things. On the first night, I finally gave in to his pressure and lost my virginity to him. I figured it would happen anyway, so there was no better time. As we visited each attraction, Zach made it a point of getting a picture of me, saying that he loved my beautiful smile. I found out the truth soon after we got back from the trip.

Zach was at my house and left a facebook page open. It was a group called The Many Fat Faces of [our school name]. Zach had used an app on his phone and placed animal snouts, ears, and tails on all of the pictures he took of me. It was some sort of challenge, and apparently he had won. I went through previous postings and found that he had posted all sorts of pics of me, including one in my bra that he took. I was humiliated. I confronted him about it, and all he did was play dumb and denied everything, then responded with “I don’t think we are working anymore.” So, I was humiliated, devastated that my illness and meds were causing the weight gain, and dumped. I took the summer to find new meds that worked and lost as much of the fat as I could. I went back to school looking better than ever. Zach came up to me on the first day back and asked for us to get back together. Yea, sure, hold your breath and wait for me in a dark and dangerous alley, jackass!

Traveling Soldier

Two years before I deployed to Iraq I met a college girl outside of the base I was stationed at. I never had a lot of luck with women, but she was sweet, funny, and beautiful. Both of us suffered from ‘ugly duckling syndrome’ where we both grew up heavy and geeky but somewhere in adolescence dropped the weight and became attractive. Yet, we retained a lot of that shyness and self image problem.

Two years of dating, meeting each other’s families, and falling in love, my deployment was eminent and so was her graduation. Already paying out of pocket for an apartment together, we set a wedding date and got married during block leave and went on our honeymoon. I thought the only real problem we had was the amount of time she spent playing World of Warcraft (WoW). Her studies were even suffering as she was missing so much sleep and instead of going out or watching movies together she would be playing WoW. She even was logging on when we got back to the hotel room during our honeymoon to get her fix. I was annoyed by it, but I didn’t want to pull her away from it this close to me leaving. I just wanted to be happy with her before I left.

I was deployed to Iraq in 2007 with my unit during the Surge Campaign (2006-2008). I left in September and we spoke on the phone every other night and since I had wireless on my FOB I could IM any night I wasn’t on mission. Everything seemed fine. So, one day I get an IM from my next door neighbor that was in my unit. He had to stay behind because of a car accident a week before the deployment that shattered his femur.

The gist of the conversation was..
Him: “Hey, man. Sorry about you and Jessica.”
Me: “What do you mean?”
Him: “About the split.”
Me: “Split?”
Him: “You broke up, right?”
Me: “Hell no.”
Him: “….Dude. She said you guys broke up. You know there is a guy living in your house right?”
Me: “Her brother visited two weeks ago on his way to Florida.”
Him: “No. He has been living there for 2 months (since October, I left in September).”
Me: “You sure he is living in my house?”
Him: “Yeah. I see him driving your car and I’m pretty sure wearing your clothes.”
Yes. Turns out this guy was driving around town in my car and wearing my clothes.

I asked her about it on IMs the same night. She didn’t reply. An hour after not replying she blocked my AIM screen name. I know before I used an alternate one to log in and saw her on still. She blocked that too. Our VSAT was down, so I could not call her until the next day before shift. She did not pick up.

So, I am panicking. I try to keep my head on to do mission, but my head isn’t in the game. Thankfully I had a great squad leader I could speak to and they understood and tried to give me a little cool down time. They also switched my mid-tour leave to earlier too so I could deal with this ASAP. They even gave me good advice to check on finances ASAP and made time for me to do it.

Within two days of asking what was going on over IMs my Rear Detachment CSM visited the house on a ‘welfare check’ and confirmed she was there, sounded like somebody else was in the house, and she refused to speak with him about anything except to say she was ‘fine’. So, I check our bank account online and she did a $4,000 withdraw the day after I confronted her. I never checked up on our credit card as I got it a month before the deployment, but there was already $6,000 on it. She maxxed it out on a lot of electronics at BestBuy , Wal-Mart, and $400.00 on what turned out to be sex toys. No joke. The economic damage wasn’t done yet.

I immediately had JAG revoke the general power of attorney I gave her. She still managed to get financing for a used car with it which was a 18 month legal battle after I got home. So, I called my sister to help me handle this. My ex still wasn’t taking my calls or answering messages. She drove 5 hours to Fort Bragg, NC to my home to assess what was going on. I told her where I had a key stashed.

She sat outside that house for hours until they went out at night. The moment they left she went inside the house to see what was going on.
The house was trashed. I lived on post housing and there was dog feces everywhere. We were not allowed to have pets, but she let her boyfriend bring his little rodent sized dog. It also chewed up some new furniture they had just bought with my credit card. The living room had trash everywhere… Energy drink cans and two stations where they played WoW almost non-stop. My sister video recorded the entire house. Pizza boxes, fast food, dirty clothes… It was everywhere. New computers, two flat screens, and in the bedroom used toys including a sex swing they bought.

The bedroom might I add was the nastiest. Between the toys, used condoms, filthy sheets… She did what turned out to be the most helpful thing ever and took the two PC towers and my wife’s laptop. Loaded them into her car and left. So, three weeks of no silence and two days after my sister hijacked their computers I get an IM from my sister on my wife’s account. Since she used Trillian, every message she sent on AIM and MSN were logged. My sister spent two hours one night reading everything and summarized the story for me. Sometime in January she started getting flirty with a guild member in WoW. Eventually they got on IMs and started ‘cybering’. She told him about how she thought I was a nice guy, but couldn’t ‘handle’ her the way she ‘wanted it’ and it led to a bizarre online orgy of cyber sex involving monsters, tentacle beasts, and incest. Really.

Before and during our honeymoon she was talking to him about how sorry she was she was gone and when I left it would make it easier for her to leave. At this point she was telling him I was just a way to get by until they could get a successful business set up after she graduated. They were already making plans for him to move out of his brother’s basement in Kentucky and move in with her when I left. They even sincerely talked about how they wished I would get killed in Iraq so they could get my $400,000 life insurance. My sister thought it fitting to log onto their WoW accounts and delete all their characters. I found it fitting too. At this point I was somewhere between enraged and suicidal. I’m very thankful I had a great team and a good family that cared about me. Three weeks after I left she bought him a ticket with our money to get him out there.
Then they began to live like pigs in our house. When I finally did see her when I got home she had put on 40lbs. But, I’ll get to that confrontation in a minute.

I come home from mid-tour leave and they abandoned the house on post. They left it trashed and took most of the stuff with them that wasn’t trash. Some chewed up furniture and some of my clothes he didn’t want to take with him. I found out they were still in town living with another WoW player they met at a bar. Drove through a bad neighborhood in Fayetteville, NC and chilled out with my sister outside of the house until I saw her come outside. I climbed out of the car and we locked eyes and she just started crying and cursing at me. Out of all the things in the world that could have been said, her white trash WoW nerd boyfriend thought it would be all cute for his gangly self to approach me and get in my face as they both screamed at me for stealing their computers and deleting their characters. Even had the balls to say something about how those characters were worth thousands of dollars.
My sister did bring her video camera because she felt this would go violent. Spoke to me and begged me not to let it get that way. It was extremely hard not to beat him within an inch of his life.

I finally told him if he wanted to be a tough guy and throw down we could go down the street to the big field where nobody would bother us. He turned me down. My ex was still bawling and hollering at me about how I ruined her life and they were going to sue me.
Court finally did roll around 8 months later. She had the guts to call and tell me that she wanted a no fault divorce and even if I did sue her she wouldn’t pay a thing.
She was 45 minutes late for court and showed up with her boyfriend and even cursed at the judge like a moron. This woman even had a paralegal degree.
The judge was real kind about the situation since I kept great records of the entire situation. He gave her the credit card debt, the car debt, the $700 for new carpets at the post housing bill, and declared her $50k in student loans was her burden alone once again as I had assumed it when we married. He also made the judgment I would receive 4k back from our bank account, but I knew I’d never see that money again. I was just happy she walked away with all the debt. The judge also told me something I really needed to hear… That this wasn’t my fault. The icing on the cake? She dared to bring up the WoW characters that got deleted and made excel spreadsheets of each character and the gear they had with a real world monetary value. The judge told her she couldn’t claim property that wasn’t real and she said something nasty to the judge I can’t fully recall that got her removed from the court room.

So, years later I am still in with a wife who loves me and had to take the brunt of my early mistrust in her. I didn’t feel like I could trust any companion at that point as what happened was so out of the dark. Even now looking back to her on the game and IMs I don’t think there is anything I could have noticed. It was common for her to stay up on WoW after I went to sleep. Oh… And, I got to show the video of the trashed house in court with sex toys/sex swing in all.

Dropped Off the Face of the Earth

A few years ago I had a friend with benefits, Jake, but we lost touch after a few months because he started a relationship with someone else. No big deal. A few years later he finds me on Facebook and we start talking again. He had moved across the country with the same girl he was with 5 years ago. A few months later they break up and he & I start talking more regularly, become friends, flirt a bit and after a few months realize we have feelings for each other.

We decided to do the long distance thing and everything was great! We talked for hours everyday and I even flew out to visit him for an AMAZING week together. I was happier than I had ever been even though we were so far apart. He had plans to move back home in a few months and we could be together for real.

A few weeks after I got home from my visit, things started to get weird, he was more distant and we were talking less and less. I got the hint and ended things before he could. He said he was devastated, couldn’t imagine not having me in his life and begged me to give it another shot. I figured my doubts were merely paranoia and agreed to try again.

Then I find out I’m pregnant & Jake doesn’t take the news well at first. I end up breaking up with him again because he was acting like a child. He said he still wanted to be friends though. Then I had a miscarriage. He offered to fly out to be with me. I told him that wasn’t necessary so he tells me he’ll talk to me on the phone every night until I feel better and sing me lullabyes to get me to sleep.

The next night I called him and we talked for 20 minutes before he said he had to go. Then I didn’t hear from him for 5 days until he sent me a text saying he had been placed on a 72 psychiatric hold at the hospital for depression. He desperately needed to talk to me so I called him when I got home from work. He answered and said he couldn’t talk because his ex was over, hung up on me and I never heard from him again. He never answered another phone call or text from me.

Even though I technically broke up with him I still feel like I got dumped. And it still hurts 4 months later & I still think about him everyday.

Baby on Board

So I’ll make this as to the point as I can…. When I was 16 I met “Randy” who was 19. When we met you wouldn’t have called him the bring home to meet your parents type. “Randy” was a serious drug user and dealer, but there was something about him that made me feel so safe and happy. After a few months of dating I knew that I loved him, and asked him to stop all the stupid sh*t. He was very compliant as he didn’t want to lose me. Even though “Randy” had quit the drugs he started heavily drinking. About 4 months into our relationship he started becoming very physically abusive, but at that age you just don’t use your head. A few months had gone by and he was still heavily drinking, he got drunk and beat the hell out of me, and my 14 year old sister had to pull a gun on him, he left my house and went on a crazy drunk rampage, found an ex of mine and tried to stab him, then proceeded to go to a party with a gun and fired off several rounds. My birthday was the following week and he had apologized and cried for forgiveness so my childish way of thinking took him back. Well come to find out the ex of mine he tried to stop was dating the chief of police’s daughter in our town and decided to file charges. The day of my birthday “Randy” and I were driving to my parent’s for my party. As we were coming into town we knew he had a warrant out for his arrest so we attempted to take the back roads to my mom’s, needless to say that didnt work. We were pulled over, guns to our heads and cuffs were placed on him and he went to jail. We were engaged at this point and I had been saving money for our wedding, well in order to get him out of jail I had to use $2,000.00 of my savings for his bond. He swore he’d pay me back, but I should have known better. Fast forward to the next year. It was the beginning of February and he had started to act different. I thought nothing of it and carried on. On Valentine’s day he called me on his way home from work and told me he was picking up dinner because he was tired and it was late, that was perfectly fine with me. When he got home everything changed. He came in with our food, tossed it on the counter, and went to our room and started packing his things. I was so confused, I asked him what he was doing and he accused me of cheating and that he needed some space and some time to think. Now mind you our wedding is less than 5 months away. The next day came and I told him I was going to go out. He told me he loved me, to have fun, and to call him later if I wanted to. I called his phone around midnight, and some slut answered and told me that he was busy f*cking her friend and that he’d have to call me back….she wasn’t lying. “Randy” and I broke up the next day…come to find out the girl he was with the night before was 3 month pregnant with his baby. They have now been married for 4 years and have a son. Talk about being crushed. He never paid me back for his bond either. What a piece of sh*t!!!!