I think about being in my twenties. I didn’t have a boyfriend at the time. I was too busy trying out a new job that my older sister helped me get because she was a Supervisor at this vitamin making plant in Hayward, California. One day my mother came home and introduced this guy to me. The guy was “dorky” looking to me and paid him not one iota of attention. My mother thought otherwise. She “proposed” that I “marry him” in “name only” because apparently the guy wanted to stay in the USA.
To make a long story short, I adhered to my mother’s wishes. We got married in Reno, Nevada assumably, “Shot Gun Wedding” because it was done in two weeks (planning and arranging). Would you believe I stayed married to this guy for over eighteen years? Oh, it was a disaster from day one. The first time he hit me was with a tennis racket. We got into a verbal argument and somehow he took the tennis racket and pressed it on my face. I cried and kicked him out of the house. He went into the Army right about then. We hardly saw each other for about three years of our marriage. Once in the while in would come back home. It seems surreal at the time because I kept trying to divorce him but he would not sign the paper work. I felt really stuck. So I just left it alone.
His first real assignment was in Columbus, Georgia. I flew over to join him and we lived in Georgia for over eight months. I didn’t work at the time. I opted to do Secretarial School while he worked. Not too much argument then. Once in a while we would fight but we knew no one there so we only had each other to vent to. Then he received orders to go to Hawaii. That was when I got pregnant with my oldest daughter. I remember being pregnant at six months and we had a bad argument, it was awful. He hit me in the kitchen and I thought for sure I was going to lose the baby. Thankfully I didn’t. It scared me. There were times when he would hold me down and it was scary! He was smart enough to not leave bruises. The verbal attacks were on, “you’re fat, no one would ever want you and so on.”
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