Marriage

The Odyssey Begins and Ends

Well, before you get divorced you’ve gotta get married right? So that’s just what I did. I got married. When I was 18. To the man I met when I was 15, who was 5 years older than me. Who had sex with me when I was 16. Who asked me to marry him when I was 17. Who my Mother hated. Who my Father hated. Who flew me to Panama City, Florida weeks after my 18^th Birthday and eloped with me. Who was in the military. Who I was never really friends with first. Who I couldn’t have known who, because I was 15, then 16, then 17, then barely 18. Who cheated on me before we got married. Who my Mother hated. Who my Father hated. Who I married anyway! And, who was gone over half of our 7 year marriage fighting wars in foreign countries. Who tried to get me to attend an officer’s wives military etiquette class. Me. Me who had a fight with a priest on a bus from Seoul to Camp Long, when I was 18 (shortly after I became married).

Needless to say, I didn’t take the etiquette class. Maybe needless to say that I never learned to be his friend or he mine. Our marriage was more like a sexual contract. And that sex part worked out for a while. But, it wasn’t enough. He left again for Somalia and I worked on becoming an Attorney. I was in law school while he fought wars. The summer before I graduated, I was granted an internship for JAG, the Army Attorneys. During that summer, I developed “feelings” for a fellow attorney. My husband, as it turned out, had begun to “feel up” one of his co-officers. By the time he got back, he had developed PTSD and I was on the verge of a JD. We were barely recognizable to one another.

By this time, I had taken to driving up the Flat Irons in Boulder, Colorado to pray to God that I could have a divorce. The catch was, I didn’t want to be the bad guy, so God had to figure out another way to get me this divorce. Within a week of my first Flat Iron Talks with God, I found out about my husband and his co-officer’s “feelings.” I confronted my husband and asked him to leave our house. He did.

A few months later, as a student divorce lawyer, I would be filing my first divorce case. My own.