Personal Narrative Essay: The End Of A Marriage

The End of a Marriage The end of marriage is never easy, but sometimes it just has to be done. The end of my marriage was something I struggled with for years. The relationship was on and off life support for more years than it was healthy. If I am honest, it was a problem before it even began. I did not want to accept that I had failed at marriage. I believed that if I only worked harder and wanted it more, it would succeed. Admitting that I was not able to save this union was not an easy task, in the end it was my husband that walked out on our family. Finally, after years of lies and chaos, I filed for divorced ending my marriage and my second life began. Beginnings are fun, that rush of butterflies and ache at the same moment. We began …show more content…
My family handled it well, much better than I had anticipated. I had been so anxious to tell them. But the birth went well, and we had everything we needed due to a generous baby shower; well attended by both families. We brought our newborn baby home from the hospital, barely adults ourselves and he was surrounded by love. Gary seemed to adapt quickly to being a father. He fed, changed, and bathed, all the parental duties well in those first weeks; with the exception of finance. I lived at home and did not have a job. I had come from my first year of college seven months pregnant, and no one would hire me. Gary was working at a tire place and spent all his money on food and beer, as most teenagers do. Now we had a child who needed things. We started to argue, often, about things Nick needed. One night, Gary looked at me and then at his son, he said “You love him more than you love me”. “Of course” I said, he is my son. Gary started skipping a day or two of visits with his son. I was 19 with a baby. It was very overwhelming. One day while I had run to the store and left Nick home with my mother, he spiked a fever and my mother rushed him to the hospital. I was only gone an hour, what the hell happened! I drove frantically to Frankford Torresdale Hospital. When I arrived, they were prepping to give my baby a spinal to see if he had meningitis. I think I was in shock when I consented to the …show more content…
But I still go back to this and wonder, "What was I thinking"? We would have another daughter, get married, and have another son, break up and get back together more times than I can count, every time I would tell myself, this time will be different. Some months, even a few years, would go along ok, distracted by the daily life of a family with kids. Other months and years would be exhausting, arrests, DHS investigations, infidelity, domestic abuse, many of these run together to which I am no longer able to remember all the details. Or perhaps I blocked it out? What I can look back now and see is that from 1988 until 2008, I married a man who was incapable of love or truth. I lived my life under a black cloud of never-ending torment. And then, almost like magic, he walked out the door in January 2008. For the first time in our lives, I did not beg him to return, proclaim that his children needed him, promise we could work things out, I just let him go. From that day on, the sun returned, and the black cloud lifted. I had to work out the details, separate myself financially, divorce and claim Chapter7, all of which took about a year. In 2009, I was free from the marriage, the debt, the daily worry of Gary. We are forever linked, due to the kids, and there is always still the drama that follows Gary, but it no longer haunts