You know what they say about hindsight

I write THIS blog in hopes of offering resources to kids like mine who didn't have a parent like me and are trying to sort their crap AFTER things went sideways.

I mostly haven't spent time in church. I don't write because I think I'm morally superior to other people and I never know quite how to make that point effectively.

I'm not writing this blog to lecture you or "tell" you how to live your life. I don't think I have any such right.

I really don't.

I write because I had a very private life. I was a homemaker for a lot of years.

After graduating at the top of my high school class and turning down a National Merit Scholarship, I raised kids and cleaned house and cooked meals and did laundry. And frankly stuff like that is often not very mentally engaging.

It gave me time to THINK.

It gave me time to think about my PAST and sort my baggage.

It gave me time to think about my future and try to figure out how to get there from here, in spite of having SO MUCH baggage I used to dream that I was pushing a shopping cart full of luggage and moving it only a few feet at a time so I could go back for the extra stuff that didn't fit in it.

And, no, those were not dreams I had while homeless. Those were dreams I had when I was a homemaker raising children.

And it gave me time to think about the present and how I got here and where this seemed to be going and did I really want it to go there? And if not, how in the hell do I course correct instead of continuing on this path not knowing how I got on it and not knowing how to get off of it?

It gave me time to wonder about small details -- "Why did he say that? What did he mean by that? Is that significant or am I reading too much into it?" -- and try to track down the seeds of destruction before it blew up in my face.

It let me make decisions like "Okay, cool, that guy I had an affair with is not REALLY someone I want to leave my husband for and marry. His wife is an alcoholic and has slept with like TEN TIMES as many men as me but after they got hitched, he got religion and became a minister and then began working on ditching the drug habit, so if he leaves her for me, I know how that will go down. My name will be in the headlines as some whore who ruined the life of a GOOD WOMAN, having NOTHING to do with HER behavior and everything to do with her HUSBAND'S job title, and never mind he is unfaithful, a former drug addict and shouldn't have slept with me because the law says I am his VICTIM, full stop."

And it took me a long, long time to get there. Like years of trying to PLAN a future with the man before concluding "Yeah, this isn't coming together and with GOOD REASON. God, I'm an IDIOT."

Some of the pieces of that are as follows:

Plans to Move to His State

So for background, this man could have gone to jail over me because he was an officer in the same military unit as my husband and for purposes of MORALE it is highly illegal to fuck the wives of the lower ranking personnel. He told me himself that if we got caught, it would make NO DIFFERENCE what I said in his defense, he would be busted down to nothing in terms of rank and average prison sentence was two years, followed by dishonorable discharge.

So his only protection was secrecy. My silence was his only hope because the law is a bit like statutory rape. There is a presumption that I was in NO POSITION to tell a man NO who had the power to LEGALLY order my husband to his DEATH "for national security reasons."

So we had this on again, off again relationship where I sometimes didn't hear from him for a YEAR and he eventually decided he wasn't going to stop contacting me and he didn't want to go jail, so he left the military as his solution to that. And after he left the military, I began looking into moving to where he lived.

He was STILL married. He had left the military and even changed denominations so he could get divorced without being defrocked BUT he was STILL a married minister with dependent children, so that meant I was researching how to get divorced and move myself to his neck of the woods as a single mom with small kids and make my life work entirely on my own with zero support from him. So we could SECRETLY sleep together.

YES, I was STAR Student and a National Merit Scholarship winner. I was one of the SMART KIDS in school and didn't immediately balk at this. Go, me.

In my defense, I have a genetic disorder. I was sick my whole life.

So after researching various nearby cities and colleges and concluding that there were three colleges all an HOUR from where he lived and nothing closer and NONE of those three colleges ACTUALLY had a major I wanted and contemplating this future of moving to the middle of fuck nowhere to have a highly secret relationship to a man I could NOT ADMIT KNOWING because he was a "pillar of the community" I eventually concluded that it made no sense to move to where a man was if I wasn't already married to him.

Years later, I would see women on Metafilter post that they were breaking up with their boyfriend whom they had been living with and he made tons more money and etc. and she had been doing the cooking while he paid rent on a nice apartment far outside her financial reach and now she didn't know what the hell to do.

If you get NOTHING else from my writing, do yourself a favor and never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever shack up with someone with more money than you on the theory they will pay your rent while you cook and clean. It's de facto making you their chattel property with zero rights.

If someone wants you to play second fiddle and do their cooking and cleaning and yadda, make them MARRY YOU. And if they won't, then get a ROOMMATE you aren't FUCKING who needs your half of the rent as much as you need theirs.

It is my personal policy that I will NEVER shack up with a man. Ever. For ANY reason. Sleep with him? Maybe. Live with him? Not without a RING, as they say.

It made sense to follow my HUSBAND'S military career all over the fucking place, no matter where it took us. He was paying my bills. I could meet his friends and coworkers. He could admit I existed. I could have a LIFE.

And something clicked and I wish I knew how to explain this to other people and I don't. It's what "old women" say to young gals with jobs who think the "old woman" is too conservative and a prude and the rules are different now because the younger gals have paid jobs. They aren't JUST housewives.

Cool. And if you make 2/3 what your man makes, sit down, honey, because it sounds much worse if you flip that around and explain it as "He makes FIFTY PERCENT MORE THAN YOU DO."

And we have no cheap rentals and shit. There's only so much you can downsize and still survive.

College Dreams

So this guy -- this married minister -- was constantly telling me he would "support" my desire to go back to school and get my bachelor's degree. He said that because he knew it was a sorepoint in my marriage that I felt suffocated and trapped and like he didn't want me to go to school.

So he would tell me "You can get your bachelor's while I pursue my PhD and we can study together!" Oh -- AND -- he "WILL" totally support my college aspirations "IF we both leave our spouses and get married."

And then I met a guy who was like "You want to go to college? Daaaaang. I had to MAKE my wife go to school. A beautiful woman who WANTS an education. What could POSSIBLY be hotter than that? You should GO, girl." and he didn't even ever sleep with me.

So I was soon back in school because I met someone who was GENUINELY emotionally supportive in the here and now. He wasn't giving me bullshit promises of support "someday" conditional upon him first getting to marry me.

That eventually led to me and the married minister parting ways.

I don't regret sleeping with him or keeping his secrets. It helped me get over being a victim of something so ugly I don't usually use the word for this ugliness.

It helped me recover from incest.

Saying I was molested and raped as a child IS the nicey-nice, cleaned up, presentable in public version of what happened to me. That IS me being PC and polite, not some drama queen who likes shocking people. The real truth is uglier.

But I did EVENTUALLY conclude "Oh. Those laws are written that way for GOOD REASONS. God, I'm STUPID." and figured out how high a price I paid for his help.

I had far more privacy than most people have to try to sort my problems without dealing with gossip and the grapevine or it being splashed across the headlines. I had time to think and go "OH. GOD. I'm an IDIOT. If I don't stop this, it will be in the headlines and truth be damned, I will be smeared as the worst person in this ugly little debacle. No one will care that I was molested as a kid, boo hoo hoo, and I'm the victim here. They will only care that I am a HOMEWRECKER and HE is a MINISTER, so the wronged woman is a MINISTER'S WIFE."

I could not claim "victim" status -- "Look, look! The LAW says HE shouldn't have slept with me! It's ALL HIS FAULT!" -- and ALSO marry him. That was NOT going to fly as a narrative and I wouldn't have done it anyway because he did help me heal and I did feel I MADE A CHOICE and I take responsibility for it. So it never crossed my mind to even TRY that because it would have been a lie in my eyes and I'm excessively honest.

Eventually I decided "This isn't love. If he really loved me, he wouldn't put me in this position to begin with." And I stopped having Big Feels and telling myself I NEEDED him and etc.

And I made other plans. I started over.

I write not because I think "You are stupid and morally depraved and let me tell you how to live your life." I write because I figure this stuff sneaks up on people and the world can be very unforgiving and even if everyone has SYMPATHY, it doesn't actually make it better if you have defacto flushed your life down the toilet.

It's a blog, not a Bible. If it helps you, coolios. If it doesn't, laugh and move on and stop wasting your time reading my crap.

I have no power to MAKE you do ANYTHING. At best, I can maybe be thought provoking and get you to put your brain in gear and maybe put the brakes on something stupid before it's too late, not because you are necessarily "morally depraved" but because you didn't see it coming or you did but had no idea how the hell to stop it or whatever.