First Love

 I miss my first love. I’ve missed him since he left the family years ago. I never blamed him, even though I know it was partly his fault. I stopped blaming myself a long time ago. 

Back to missing him…

We met when I was 21 and he was 19. We were inseparable, when hunting season came along, I missed him so much. He was kind and sweet and we spent all our free time together. 

I got pregnant with our oldest, he wanted to get married and I loved him so…..

He was working for a lawn care company up north but the guy was a small business and offered no benefits, which included no unemployment in the winter so he started looking for a better job. All I could find was babysitting, which was good because I could take my baby with me so I didn’t have to pay a babysitter. 

He did find a job with a big landcare company, we packed up our things and our at the time, 2 year old and moved where the job was. 

We soon added another baby to the family and we were more in love than ever. We moved from our first apartment to a bigger one because on of my family members moved in with us. Soon came baby number three. Then we were a family of 5. 

We eventually got very tired of apartment living and decided to buy a manufactured home. We lived there 20 years. In those 20 years we had our last baby and a miscarriage. Then our marriage, I don’t know what happened, but it all unraveled. Lies, cheating….

I honestly didn’t see it. He’d always been a workaholic and worked late. I was blind and naïve. 

On our 25th wedding anniversary, he was fired from his job. A company he’d worked his way up to manager at. He was making really good money and had great benefits. 

Hindsight is a bitch. After he left I started to see the things. I mean really see things. 

I do blame her. She was horrible to me. She’d gotten my phone number from his phone and sent me horrible messages. I blocked her. Then she started emailing me more lies and awful messages. She emailed me a picture of an ultrasound saying she was pregnant with my husband’s daughter. My youngest did a photo search and found the picture on a woman’s blog. I blocked her email and warned my husband I’d charge her with stalking if she contacted me again. I had talked to the police because I’d told her stop before and she didn’t and that’s why I blocked her. 

I fell apart. My heart broke, my marriage was over. My sweet man was leaving me. 

The kids were my life savers, my older son said we’ll be okay. 

I didn’t know how, I just didn’t know how. 

My older son ended up quitting college before graduating. She is just two classes shy of a bachelors degree and that bothers me a lot. He could’ve finished it at a time in these past eight years but he chose not to. He does make very good money doing what he does but I don’t know how long he will want to do that. Time will tell. My son stayed with us until my daughter found a good job and we could make it on our road without him.

Sweet revenge? Karma? She cheated on him. He came home from work one day and found her in their bed with someone else. So he left her. He tried coming back home but our youngest hadn’t seen him in over four years and did not want him to come in so my older son went outside to talk to him. He’d been drinking and my son offered to drive him somewhere but he refused. 

Honestly, if he’d come back sooner I might have taken him back but at this point, I was done.  The day of my divorce when the judge looked at me in disgust and said 29 years and you can’t fix this? You file for divorce with a minor child? I felt two inches high. Thank God my daughter went with me. 

He died this past fall of Covid pneumonia. If he hadn’t left he may still be alive and that is sad to me. I would have made him get vaccinated and that could have possibly saved his life. We will never know now. I say this because he was a follower, he would have done what the rest of us did. 

He was living in the same apartment complex as our oldest, they were finally getting to know each other again. 

We had just gotten to be friends again through texting and then he was gone. I knew I could never trust him again but I could be his friend for our kid’s sake. 

Now he’s gone and I miss him. 

Alcohol is not a good thing, it can ruin marriages, cause a person to do things they normally wouldn’t do. When we cleaned out his apartment, there were 50 cans of beer in the fridge and five semi full bottles of whisky, fireball and other hard liquors. 

This is a bit choppy but I just had a lot on my mind.