My Biggest Secret

I have no idea if I am married or not. The love of my life was a junkie, and I knew nothing about drugs. He fooled me for a long time. Then he was clean and sober for a long spell, with me helping him go to meetings and do the things legally he had to attend to.

He had to do a year in prison and I still didn't get it. I waited faithfully, working two jobs to fix our home and buy things for him. I am a "fixer" - I didn't believe there was anything so bad I couldn't help him through it. Of course he rarely told me the truth, so I got in way over my head.

I had a rough childhood and worked hard to become an upstanding citizen when I was on my own. No one ever taught me anything. I learned behavior and manners from reading and television. The only thing I had ever seen about drugs was the movie "A Hatful of Rain" That was so foreign to me - it never occurred to me that real people did drugs. Always a real loner, I never had friends who might have helped me wise up.

My first marriage was to a "normal" man. Again, he needed fixing, but it was not drugs, it was dyslexia and his learning disability. That lasted thirteen years and ended badly. I felt I had three children instead of two. The strain on me was terrible. He did work. His father owned a vacuum cleaner franchise, sent him to a special school and someone taught him how to repair vacuums.

However, he was the boss's son and his father was a very powerful man who had many people who owed him their prosperity. So my husband never had to work hard for anything.

I raised my children alone for ten years and then reached age forty and got restless. My children were at the age where they had their own friends and lives and I could look ahead and see the empty life that awaited me. They had gotten closer to their father when they were kids. I was a struggling working mother and did not have the money to buy them things as their father did...

So, a friend in Parents Without Partners introduced me to this man and I fell instantly in love. In my mind I would be with him for the rest of my life. When we are this naïve and unformed, we don't look too closely at reality. I overlooked things that I know now were warning flags.

In the end he relapsed, beat me nearly to death. I lost my home, my career, my pride and my health. We were off and on for five years. Finally he got me to go to North Carolina where his mother lived. He said he would never beat me in his mother's home. That lasted one night! I left, went home to Oregon, called him and he talked me into coming back. I really had no one and nothing, so his familiarity pulled me.

One day he beat me up in a corn field. I went to the house and grabbed what I could and left out the door. He was shouting at me to get back in the house, but I just kept walking, not an idea in the world where I was or which way to go. They lived in a country setting. I must have walked down this road for an hour before some people in a pickup truck stopped to offer me a ride. When they saw I was bruised and bleeding and out of my head they bundled me into the truck and took me to a place where they could call the sheriff.

The deputy who came out seemed to know my husband's family well. It seems the younger brother had been on America's Most Wanted as a suspect in the murder of his child's mother. The deputy took me to a regular hospital and they fixed me up. But because I kept telling them that his brothers would find me and kill me, they thought I was crazy and put me in the state asylum. Although it might have been for my protection, as his second brother had killed three men in New York for beating up on the younger brother.

By the time I absorbed all this, I felt like I WAS crazy. How could I get involved with this? What made me overlook all my morals and standards? How did I go from President of the P.T.A. to running into a family of maniacs?

Of course, after years of therapy and groups, I learned about myself and now I would never be susceptible to that kind of man again. But I do not know if I am married or not. All through our relationship I gave him every cent of money I ever had. I feel I have spent enough money and effort on this evil man and I just don't try to find out.