2008, I made a huge decision to end my first marriage after 8 years. A single friend of ours told me that he couldn’t believe my then-husband and I were breaking up, because we seemed like we had the perfect relationship. Well, sometimes things seem perfect from the outside…
I decided not to leave, and that same friend told me how happy he was to see us work it out.
Fast forward several months, and I finally got the courage to end it. I was a young, single mother, alone for the first time since high school, and this same friend, who was a town cop at the time, stopped in to check on me and my three young boys often, knowing I was scared and alone and adjusting. We talked a lot about life and what we both wanted, and realized that we had a lot of the same goals in mind. I also realized how smart and witty he was, and so driven to someday start a family to provide for. He loved my kids, who had known him already for several years, and eventually, he told me that he’d loved me since he’d met me, and always wished he could find someone like me someday, but he had never imagined that my first marriage would have ended and I would one day be his.
We were married in October of 2009. He raised my boys like his own, and we added a fourth son to the bunch in 2010.
In 2022, as my kids got older, I started my own career in law enforcement. Through shifting dynamics, stress, and a lot of evolution, we fell apart. We tried to fight, individually, but we never really fought together, and we divorced in April of 2024.
Due to life’s circumstances, and my previous experience and rocky relationship with my first ex husband, we decided to stay living together as roommates, since the house was now down to one son as our older boys had gone out on their own, and there was plenty of room for us to live “apart”. We thought it would be easier for our son if both of his parents were still in the same house. It wasn’t. But, it worked as well as it could, and we stayed friends.
Last Christ