This was no problem for me because I knew he would still be out to sea a great deal of the time, but soon he notified me by mail he was getting out of the Navy. He was not retiring, he’d had enough at eighteen years and was simply getting out. I was devastated. My psychosis returned quickly and strongly. Since we had no children and very little bills, we lived a nice lifestyle between his income and my jobs. But this came to a screeching halt when I learned he was coming home to stay. My returned illness made it impossible for me to continue working. I sold all of our belongings and moved to a small apartment before he returned home. I don’t know what I was thinking, why I did it, I simply did it. I deliberately sold all our belongings at ridiculously low prices in the local paper, it all sold quickly. I watched the furniture leave our home one piece at a time and counted my stash of money. I say that sarcastically because there wasn’t much money, but it was mine and I intended to hide it from him when he returned home. Again, I don’t know why. I had no plans to leave him, no plans to purchase anything, just hide it from him.
On October 31, 1994 he came home to a sparse apartment after being gone for six months. I tried to be an obedient wife in every way and our first daughter was conceived that night.
After several months he finally got a job doing telemarketing. He hated it but had to stick with it because he could find nothing else. He was a genius with computers and could have started his own company, but he didn’t want to work that hard. He said he’d worked hard for eighteen years, he was done with it. So I got a part time job as a cashier at a thrift store and worked as long as I could through my pregnancy. By the beginning of the fourth month I was in pre term labor and was taken off of work and put in bed for the remainder of my pregnancy. My husband was furious and took it out on me every chance he got. My daughter was born after thirty-eight hours of non-medicated labor on August 2, 1995.
