When raising my children, I wanted to teach them good examples by living good examples.  But in retrospect, I wasn’t setting a very good example of how marriage should be. Some important aspects in a good marriage are love, trust, and unity. The kids weren’t seeing much of this. My husband was a master manipulator. Therefore, trust was something I can honestly say I never had with him. Shillingstad’s husband was also a habitual liar. He could always put on a super show in front of other people to make himself appear to be a great guy. But behind closed doors it was a different story (Shillingstad). As a result of the absence of trust in my marriage, the love began to fade immensely. When there is no trust and the love starts fading, the unity of the marriage begins to split. These are the things that the kids were seeing. I tried very hard to cover these things up. It’s not that I was purposely trying to hurt them by pretending; actually, I thought I was protecting them at the time.  As it turned out, I realized all of my theories on doing what was better for the kids were inane. What I thought was a good example was actually setting a very bad example of what a marriage should be like.

            My children were not the only people that I concealed events of my bad marriage from. My siblings, parents, friends, and clients all got the same kind of lies and cover-ups about what was really going on. Stevens told me that she also hid everything from family and friends. She even took blame for things in order to make it appear that things were her fault instead of his. In addition, she poured herself into her work so that she did not have to be home. Although our situations were a little different, I also worked very long hours at my salon, did some volunteer work, and spent a lot of time with my siblings and close friends. Stevens stayed away so she didn’t have to be home with her husband (Stevens), whereas I stayed away in order to pass time so that I wasn’t sitting at home waiting to see if he was going to come home or not. Some nights I thought I would literally go crazy waiting for him to come home. I don’t think I even heard half of what the kids said to me on those nights.  Maybe my family and friends all knew what was really going on, but I thought that I was hiding it well.

             Another, and probably the most serious, consequence of staying in my bad marriage is the emotional toll it took on me. Stevens claims that her marital troubles led to unhealthy emotional problems for her as well. There were times that she actually feared for her life. On one occasion, she told her husband to just go ahead and kill her (Stevens). Shillingstad was tormented by physical abuse as well. On one occasion, she had to call the police for protection (Shillingstad). In contrast, I was not being physically abused and fearing for my life, but even so, there were so many times during my marriage that I wished I were dead. Then I would feel terrible because there was no way that I wanted to leave my children or for them to lose their mother. That’s when I started thinking that we would all be better off if my husband would just get in a car accident and die. These thoughts were so awful that I could not believe they were coming out of my mind. I thought that I was a good person and a good Christian. But how could I be if I was thinking like this? This is how messed up the spouses of the abusers get.  Also, my religious belief that divorce was a sin was another key factor in staying as long as I did. I knew that I needed to get out and never look back, but I had this cloud above my head with all kinds of thoughts. What would God think? Would he forgive me? Would I still be a Christian? I got so depressed and plagued with anxiety that I felt like I was sinking farther into the hell-hole of life. These problems led to insomnia and very poor eating habits. Trying to work full time, raise the kids, and keep the salon and home running while my health was failing really were taking its toll on me. The emotional stress was now turning into very serious physical problems as well. It got so bad that I ended up in the doctor’s office almost every other day.  My doctors told me that I needed to get rid of the stress in my life before it killed me. I knew that they were right, but I felt that I needed to be tough and suck it up.

            Then one day my body and mind both gave up. I was no longer able to carry on the charade anymore. I couldn’t take care of myself, let alone my family, anymore. I was not eating at all and I was only getting about two to three hours of sleeps a night.  It took a lot of hospitalization and therapy to get me back to myself.

            For many people that have stayed in a bad marriage, destructive feelings have developed, and children have been harmed. They put on a facade of their marriage. They have a lifetime of physical as well as emotional scars that they will carry around. I have given ample evidence of this. No one will ever be able to convince me now that staying in my marriage as long as I did was a good idea.

Work Cited

Stevens, Brooklyn. Personal Interview. 12 August 2005.

Abby, Shillingstad. Personal Interview. 15 August 2005.

            A lot of things died. Marriage is supposed to be the beginning of new life, a life that is excited and enhanced by the unity between a husband and wife. To my surprise, my marriage was the beginning of a new life, all right. My dream marriage became one of my worst nightmares. Eventually, my soul began to die. Staying in a bad marriage is worse than getting a divorce because a bad marriage eventually creates destructive feelings, is bad for the children, gives a bad example of marriage, and results in hiding things and lying to family and friends in order to make things appear ok. In addition, staying builds emotional scars, which result in major problems in both a person’s emotional and physical health.

            Feelings of inadequacy, resentment, and bitterness are very common when a person is in a bad marriage and tries to keep everything together and make the marriage work. I felt that I could fix everything when needed. I thought that if I was a good wife and mother, created a beautiful home, and had a great career, then my husband wouldn’t want or need to continue the lifestyle that he had been leading anymore. Boy, was I wrong! Nothing I was doing made a difference. It didn’t matter how hard I tried. I just couldn’t change him. I began to feel very inadequate, as do other people with the same marital situations. Brooklyn Stevens, whom I had a personal interview with, felt some of these very same emotions. Stevens was living with both mental and physical abuse from her husband, and I was living with my husband’s addiction to alcohol and drugs. In another personal interview with Abby Shillingstad, I found that she was also a victim of emotional and physical abuse. Her husband was a very controlling man. From the clothes she wore to the color of her hair, he made the decisions. He told her that she was too fat, which left her feeling inadequate and self-conscious. In addition, for a long time, Stevens’ husband convinced her that she would be nothing without him, and she needed his money to survive (Shillingstad). We were all living a life that we did not want. I would ask God if I had done something to deserve this kind of a marriage. It took a long time for me to wake up and smell the coffee. By that time, I was so bitter at my husband for the things that he was doing to destroy our marriage that I would say things to try to make him feel like a loser, or at least bad enough that he wouldn’t want to continue to abuse alcohol and drugs. He would always promise that it would never happen again. Unfortunately, that was a promise that he never kept. I resented him and his actions deeply.

            I always believed that staying together for the children’s sake was the right thing to do. Whatever gave me that idea?  In hindsight, that was the worst thing I could have done for them. Shillingstad admitted that she stayed in her bad marriage for her children as well. But something good did come out of her marriage, and that was having all of her children. For that gift, she is thankful. However, she does admit that her oldest daughter has also recently become a victim of her husband’s controlling abuse. This angers Abby (Shillingstad). Stevens thought that having children would have made things better in her marriage. She didn’t end up having children and is very thankful for that now (Stevens). In my situation, allowing my children to see the things that their father was doing and then watch my reactions to them scared them and made them feel like their family and home were no longer secure or stable. But I thought that I was hiding everything well. For example, on many occasions when my husband would go on a binge, he would not come home at night, sometimes for two or three days at a time. I would get up early and set a cereal bowl on the counter, put a little bit of milk in it with a spoon, and open up the newspaper, so when the kids got up it would look like their dad had been home. Then I would tell them that he had already left for work. Sometimes I would tell them that Dad was working out of town, so he had to spend the night somewhere else. I would just keep making up lies as needed to cover up what was really going on. The kids got older and started to really question what was happening. I still continued to cover up everything. They were probably thinking if Dad was just working really long hours, then why was Mom so furious with him and not speaking to him when he got home?

            If I had ended the marriage when the kids were younger, it would have been easier for the kids to adjust. I could have explained what the problems were and why things needed to change. Children are much more forgiving when they are younger than when they become teenagers. By doing it when they were young, I could have prevented many lies. Because of all the cover-ups, my kids thought that I was divorcing a saint. I don’t regret never bad-mouthing their dad, but it really gave them a false image of him.  Now as teenagers, there are so many more issues for them to deal with, such as being embarrassed to tell their friends, thinking they need to choose sides, threatening to move out of the house if I didn’t let Dad come back, and not trusting me after I told them that I had been covering everything up. They said if I was lying then, how did they know I wasn’t lying now? In different ways and through different eyes, I realized that the divorce was worse now than it would have been when they were toddlers.