My Story. Where I'm Coming From.

My Story Part I:

To begin with, I will tell you a little about myself.  To know where I am coming from you need to know where I have been.  I was born in a small city in the southwest of about 30,000 people.  My father was not practicing any religion and my mother was a Lutheran.  We lived in a very religious community that played its own part in my life that I will discuss later.  My father was already a very successful businessman who owned his own construction company at this point.  However, with the success his addiction to alcohol and drugs grew.

My father took everything from LSD to Meth and drank 151 by the bottle.  He had grown up in an abusive home and this began to come out of him.  He beat the living shit out of my mother and me, but mostly my mom.  She was willing to take any beating in order to prevent my father from harming me and I was too little to do anything about it.  My mom had her ribs broken when my father drop kicked her across the room in front of me after shaking me by the arm and threatened to break it if he didn't find his drugs.  He also put a gun to her head and told her he would shoot her if she ever tried to leave and take his kid away from him.  He would also go get high with his friend who worked at a mortuary and, as a little kid; I would be left in the embalming room with the bodies while they went elsewhere to shoot up.  Because of the friends my dad kept, I was a very isolated child in the religious community we lived in.  Most kids were not allowed to play with me so I usually played with kids who had similar family situations.  I could go on, but I am just trying to paint a picture of where I am coming from so that later posts will make more sense.

That was pretty much life and when I was around four my brother was born.  My brother was born with downs syndrome and a myriad of other health problems.  He had to take numerous trips back to the hospital and stay there rather than at home with us.  The day he was born my father took me to a race instead of being at the hospital with my mother.  Some of you might say that sounds like fun and it should have been, had I not been terrified of my dad.  Eventually my brother was healthy enough to remain home with us.

After some time passed and my father got even worse, my mother decided enough was enough.  By this time, we had moved to a large city in order to be closer to the hospital that could give my brother the care he needed.  My mother decided that we were going to leave my father and in the middle of the night one day, she packed us up in the back of an old jimmy (at that time a newer jimmy).  I still remember her putting my baby brother and me in the back, no car seats no seatbelts.  She was scared and told me to watch my brother and keep our heads down.  As we backed out of our parking space in the apartment complex I remember peeking out through the window of the jimmy and seeing my dad stalking towards us as we left.  My mom saw me and told me to get down again and we left before he could reach us.  We went back to that small city we had moved from.

Later in life, my mom told me she had thought about driving off a cliff that night to kill all of us, because she was afraid my dad would come after us.  She wanted to protect us from him that badly.  Eventually, after he almost died my father chose to check himself into a rehab facility and we started to visit him.  After almost two years, my father finally moved back to the same small city and my parents went through a dating cycle before getting back together, they had never divorced.  My dad was clean at this point, but as will be shown in the continuation of this the abuse never fully stopped.

My Story Part II:

These first few days I will probably give the impression that I will constantly be posting, contradicting my disclaimer.  It is just to get my story out there.

When my parents finally got back together, we moved out of the apartment we had been living in with my mom and into a duplex with my dad.  I changed schools again leaving what friends I did have.  While we lived in this duplex when I was eight my sister was born.  She was born mostly healthy although we did learn as she grew that she needed glasses.  This period of my life, I really do not remember my dad being around much, probably because he worked so much.  Work had become his new addiction and we had very little money.

We lived in the duplex for a little while until my parents had enough money to build a house.  During this time I was also baptized.  My father began going back to church and my mother started going to the same church, but not yet ready to leave the Lutheran church.   We moved into my grandparent's trailer while we were building the house.

Since the house was a general contractor's house, it wasn't finished when we moved in.  My family, on my dad's side has always been big on family get-togethers, although I don't remember any time someone didn't get into a fight in those years.  I remember going to the lake once as a family and my father and his dad got into a fistfight right there on the loading ramp in front of everyone.  I am surprised the cops did not show up, but there were no Domestic Violence laws back then.  We always got together on Christmas and Thanksgiving and now that my parents had a large, enough house they wanted to host those events there.

Since the basement wasn't finished, we had Thanksgiving in the garage and being in the Southwest it wasn't that cold outside so the garage door was propped open.  During this time my dad's brother and sister got into an argument that almost came to blows, but instead ended up with one of them walking around our property screaming "fuck you" and "I should just fucking kill myself" and "You motherfuckers don't care about me".  Naturally, I was shunned again as a child when this was the new neighborhood's introduction to my family.

My parents both became active in the church while we lived in this community and expected the same from me.  However, by this time I had just reached the early teens and with everything that had happened in life it began to take its toll.  I did participate in scouts and earn my Eagle Scout award.  I was also able to participate in football and was introduced to weightlifting.  I also started martial arts training in Kenpo Karate.  Altogether, this was definitely a better chapter in my life.  The physical abuse had all but stopped.  There was one time that stands out where my dad clocked me in the face and bloodied my nose over a video game, but that was about as violent as it got.

The emotional and verbal abuse continued though.  If I was not in school and not participating in an extracurricular activity, I was expected to go to work.  I began actually working on construction jobs at about the age of 13.  My first driving lesson, at the age of 14, was on a backhoe tractor and my dad said, "This is the brake, this is the clutch, and this is the gas.  This is how you shift from 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th.  Follow me."  That was all the instruction I had.  I didn't have any experience shifting gears or driving, but I knew if I screwed up, I would get it from my dad.  The fear was that he would beat me or I would hear a tirade of how stupid I was and how he couldn't believe his son would screw up like that.  The result of this driving lesson was that I got it into 2nd gear and didn't dare shift anymore because I knew enough about it to know I could hurt the transmission.  I made sure the gears didn't grind or anything, but I was slower than my dad thought I should be.  So when we got to where we were picking up dirt for the house I thought I had obtained some success, but my dad thought I was wasting his time.  I heard about how slow I had been going and how that wasn't the way to get work done.  There were some expletives thrown in and my dad's favorite insults to me "dummyfart" and "moron".

That was pretty much how anything I did with my dad went.  He would expect me to do it perfect, fast and correctly, whether it was my first time or not.  I had a recurring dream back then that always involved my dad or a vehicle with an attachment to my dad.  I would be in it and it would start going out of control usually down a hill and then off a cliff.  One Christmas during my early teenage years, my dad bought a couple of four-wheelers.  We went out into the desert riding the four-wheelers and my dad actually, in his way, taught me to drive one.  After we had been out for a while, my dad said we needed to go back out, but I suddenly had this bad feeling come over me.  I begged my dad not to make me go back out, without disclosing my feelings because that would not have been tolerated and I would have been berated for being a coward "and no son of mine is gonna be a wimp".  The result was we went back out with me driving.  As we went up a hill near a cliff, the wheels hit a rock in the road and turned towards the cliff.  I instantly turned away from the cliff, or I at least turned the handlebars away from the cliff, but the wheels stayed the direction they were in.  I couldn't understand with my limited experience why we were still headed that way, I thought well I had seen how my dad used more power after turning to make the four-wheeler whip around so I tried that and we went off the cliff.  The four-wheeler had a couple dents, but was fine other than that.  I was berated, yelled at, humiliated, and banned from the four-wheelers.  It wasn't until next summer that we were on a camping trip with family that someone else almost went off the cliff on the same four-wheeler.  They were able to stop and they, with my dad, assessed the four-wheeler.  They discovered the cotter pins were missing and realized that was the problem with the four-wheeler.  I was never given an apology and was never told I was allowed to ride the four-wheelers now that they realized it was not my fault.

My Story Part III:

That last post was long winded but there is going to be a fair amount of word vomit with me getting this story out.  I have told very few people about these events, which did not help me deal with it.  I would like to take a moment to say that I am glad I learned the value of hard work and I know that my dad was struggling with some of his own childhood issues in trying to be a parent.

My actual teenage years were capitalized by a growing rift between my father and me.  Once I got my license, I was expected to work almost all the time.  I enjoyed learning to work and learning to build houses.  I also enjoyed having more money than any of my other peers except for the rich kids whose parents just gave them money.  However, I dreaded working for my dad.  If he showed up on a job, I knew he was going to find something about my work to tear me down about.  There was always something.  My work was too sloppy I didn't do it right, so I would slow down to try to make it perfect.  Then I was too slow and still didn't do it right.  It was always the way things went.

My dad finally told me he thought football and my other extracurricular activities were a waste of time.  He went to a handful of my games in my sophomore year and even if we won, all he had to say about the game was to belittle me for the mistakes he thought I made.  I let that guy go past me, "dad I was supposed to let him by it was a screen pass", and stuff like that.  No matter what I did there was always something wrong with it.  I was actually glad when my dad told me that he could no longer come to my football games because work was getting too busy.

My mom was my main advocate through all of this and I am very grateful for her.  She was the one who realized I needed an outlet and made sure that my activities were still paid for.  My mom had been baptized into the Mormon religion by this time and both her and my dad were very active.  As a teenager, I naturally had strong rebellious tendencies that were amplified by the struggle that was occurring within me due to the past.  I became violent and turned towards drugs.  If it hadn't been for the football, martial arts, boxing, and weightlifting, I would have been in more fights and more trouble.  I stayed away from the hard drugs such as heroin and meth and I never took any drugs intravenously I was mostly used prescription pills.  I began drinking and sleeping with girls.  In truth, I have no idea how my dad felt about this, but I know I put my mom through hell.  I began cutting to feel alive and eventually started entertaining suicidal thoughts.

After one particularly dark night, I finally knew I needed some help.  I talked to some friends and then my mom.  When it was time to tell my dad about it so I could find a psychiatrist he said (this is an almost exact quote), "It wouldn't affect me if you killed yourself, you would be ruining your life".  To hear those words at this juncture of my life from the person who was supposed to be my father was the last straw.  It took a few days, but I eventually adopted the attitude of "fuck it".  The psychiatrist just wanted to categorize me and we didn't mesh well, she honestly may be a good counselor.  After one visit, I told her to fuck off and went my own way.

Having the fuck it attitude for a while is not something I recommend, but it is what I did and it brought tremendous clarity into my life.  I didn't stop using drugs or the teenage sex, but the suicidal thoughts were gone.  I honestly felt like maybe I should just become a scourge to the Earth, a thorn in everyone's side to bring them down.  I guess I felt I should get revenge for my life rather than kill myself.  It is not a path I recommend anyone take and I only explain this here to show the level I had mentally gone to and bad or good, right or wrong, I truly feel it was something that helped me cope with the feelings inside of me at that time.  

My Story Part IV:

As the teenage chapter in my life came to a close, there were many things for me to consider.  I think a large part of me was scared to end up working for my dad as an adult.  I turned to the military through the guidance of a friend.  Initially I was working with a Marine recruiter, but since I was only 17, I needed parental permission to enlist.  My mom was "all for it", meaning naturally as my mother she was afraid of me going into the military, but as a patriot, she knew she couldn't teach me the value of those who have served before yet tell me I couldn't serve.  My dad on the other hand was very upset about the whole thing.  He told me he wouldn't sign the permission slip unless I talked to the local National Guard recruiter first.  I did and since I was interested in blowing things up a National Guard unit that was artillery was right up my alley.  Sometimes in hindsight I feel like I should have taken the recruiter's advice and gone into nuclear engineering for the Navy, I had the ASVAB scores for it, but my life would likely have turned out differently and I don't regret where I am today.

My parent's signed the permission slip and I enlisted.  After high school was done, I was scheduled to go to basic training and AIT at the end of summer.  My ship date sucked because it was 1 week before the AC/DC concert that I had a ticket for, c’est la vie.  While I was in basic training, a Drill Sergeant called me into the Captain’s office one day.  The Captain told me I needed to call my mother immediately and handed me his phone.

When my mom answered, I could tell she was crying.  She told me that my father and sister were on a daddy daughter bike ride and there had been an accident.  Someone had run a stop sign in front of my dad and he had crashed into them.  Props to my dad he was able to throw my sister off the bike backwards and away before the bike laid down and went under the truck that ran the stop sign.  She was uninjured, except some trauma.  My father was in a coma in intensive care and it was unknown if he was going to live.  My family survived off the income from my father's construction business and as the oldest, I instantly felt the compelling urge to take on that responsibility.  My mom and I discussed a plan.  The military would only grant me a 3-day hardship leave, which was not enough to do anything, and it could potentially prolong my training.  I was going to stay with my training and finish it out so I could come home.  When I got to AIT, I learned that they were understaffed and I would be waiting for a few months before they could get me into a class.  I was turned into a split op, which allowed me to break my training into two separate sessions.  I was able to go home and wait for a class to open up instead of sitting around the base waiting for them to find busy work for me.

I went home and was instantly handed the business cell phone and put to work.  The verdict on my father was that he was alive but paralyzed.  He is somewhere between a paraplegic and a quadriplegic.  A very close family friend and employee had been running the business, but because he knew how my father was all too well he was more than happy to hand over the responsibility.  It was a steep learning curve and with my dad's expectations, I constantly heard how much I was fucking up.  Let me explain, I was given the responsibility and the charge to manage the business, but very little authority to actually make decisions.  I would bust my ass 14-18 hours a day trying to make things work and all I heard when I got home was what I did wrong and how stupid I was.  I was glad when my time to go back to military training came around.

I finished my military training and returned home, back to running the business.  For solace, I turned to drugs and the wrong kind of girls yet again.  I worked long hours again and then because I could not stand to be home I stayed at whatever girl's house I was dating at the time.  My schedule was get up, go to work, bust my ass, take a pill combination to make me more productive, get off work, get yelled at,  go to the gym, take another pill combination to relax and have fun with my girlfriend, and go to sleep.  Wake up and repeat.  Eventually we got a bunch of long-term jobs in the mountains working on some cabins.  This proved to be a turning point in my life.

My Story Part V:

I have always enjoyed being in the mountains and nature.  For me, I have always felt more at peace, more balanced within.  When I was heavy into the martial arts training, I would love to just go up to a mountaintop or a lake and just sit and watch nature.  So when the jobs to work on several cabins in the mountains came along it was a definitely a blessing in disguise for me.  For one thing, it was a much farther drive for my dad to come to the jobsite, which meant he was less likely to show up on regular occasions.  Secondly, when you weren’t running a generator there wasn’t another unnatural sound around you.  I would often use my lunch break as a chance to meditate and clear my mind.  If the work being done that day was something I was already very familiar with, I could do the job without thinking while the rest of my mind was free to wander.  I could talk aloud to myself and actually hear what I was saying without worrying about people around me thinking I had gone crazy.  

It was also nice to have a friend who understood everything with me occasionally.  The family friend/employee that had been running the business while I was gone is actually a distant relative.  He has been around my family for years and knows a lot about the dynamics involved.  I would often be paired up with him to work on these cabins, which gave us a chance to talk.  He would always ask me why I was doing construction and not using the military to go to college for something in mathematics and science.  Tooting my own horn, I have always excelled at those two subjects. 

This period helped to clear a lot of the daily noise out of my life.  I began coming to terms with the fact that I would never have my dad’s approval and may never feel like he was fully my father.  In fact, sometimes I wonder if I am adopted and that is why he shows so much anger toward me.  I realized that I didn’t need to have this fuck it attitude all the time and began to understand a few things about myself.  I stopped using drugs during this time as well.  It was during this period of clarity that I decided to go on a mission for the Mormon Church.  It was more of a personal revelation than anything.  It was a cool, clear, crisp, fall morning.  The weather was cold enough that morning when I got up the mountain to start a fire at the jobsite.  Elk were bugling across the valley and the sun was just starting to crest above the peaks of the mountains.  There wasn’t a single sound other than me and any animals that chose to make noise.  There were no other cars driving in the area and no people.  As I climbed the ladder to finish up a piece of the metal roof we had put on I had a bird’s eye view across the valley.  Suddenly, and very strongly, I felt that I should go on a mission.  I had told countless people from my parent’s church that there was no way in hell I was going on a mission.  How could I leave for two years when my parents needed me at home to help run the business? 

Furthermore, I was someone who could stand up to my dad now and try to protect my family.  You see, now that he was paralyzed the raging abusive asshole he had been before returned full force.  During the first year and a half after the accident, he threatened suicide on a regular basis.  He would try to hit my sister.  He yelled and belittled everyone.  One of the only cards he could play on me to get more work out of me was my mom.  Here is how a conversation with my dad would often go to get more work out of me. 

It’s 7:30 p.m. and I am on my way home from work, the phone rings.  After expressing disappointment for how much, excuse me how little, I had accomplished that day he would ask me to go measure up a job on my way home or to go move a trailer from one job to another.  I would ask if I could just do it first thing in the morning since I was really tired from working for 14 straight hours and I still have to drive back to town from the mountain.  My dad would then say “that’s all right I’ll just have your mom go do it tonight.”  Of course, I give in at that point, because part of the reason I worked so hard for this asshole was because I thought if I could run the company well enough and accomplish enough work then he would lighten up on my mom.  I mean I can’t pull the man out of his wheelchair and beat the shit out of him for fuck’s sake, he’s paralyzed, I would go to jail. 

By this time in my life, I realized that it didn’t matter what I did.  No matter how much I accomplished in one day he was always going to find something else for my mom to do.  He was always going to manipulate someone I was trying to protect into doing more than they should have to.  Moreover, as much as I love my mom, until she was fully standing up to him there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot I could do about any of it.  There really aren’t any laws out there to combat the manipulation and the mental abuse that happens, and even if there were, you would fully have to have the victims’ cooperation to prove it. 

So that was it, my decision was final, and no matter your religious point of view I think it was a definitive point in my life that was paramount to my recovery.  In a way, I felt that I was making my family sink or swim.  I felt my dad despised me and didn’t care if I lived or died, but before he was paralyzed he actually had a pretty good relationship with my sister and he seemed to be trying much harder to treat my mom better.  I thought that meant there was hope, but I still felt as though I was throwing my mother, brother, and sister to the wolves. 

My Story Part VI:

I spent two years in West Africa for my mission.  Two years without being able to talk to my family through any other means than mail except for phone calls on Mother's day and Christmas.  It was a very good experience for me there because I was so isolated from the influence of my father.  Naturally I was always concerned about them and wondered how they were doing.  However, I was in a place that was much simpler and as far as my responsibilities went they were considerably less.  This helped a lot to quiet the noise within me and the lack of influence of my father helped me to continue coming to terms with who I was and what had happened in my life.  It helped me to start establishing my own identity away from my father's manipulations and degradation.  I also became close friends with another missionary over there.  He was from the same area as me and for his own reasons struggling with some of the same demons I was.  We became very close.

When I returned home I went back to work for my father helping to run the business.  However, something had happened while I was away.  My father realized that he could run the business from a wheelchair.  I no longer had to shoulder the responsibility of the entire business without being able to make decisions.  I still held a supervisory position something akin to a manager or a foreman, but it was less stress than before.  I still wound up working a lot of hours, but it wasn't quite as bad as before.  At this time my dad and I had very little of a relationship other than business.  Even when we got together for a family function that was about all he wanted to discuss with me.  However, this period of time was short lived. I got engaged and then shortly after getting engaged I got deployment orders to go to Iraq for OEF/OIF.

Our orders were for an 18 month deployment with a 6 month mobilization period and 12 months in country.  War was its own traumatizing event in itself.  No matter how you train for it until you get there and the bullets fly past you or the explosion goes off near you, it is something unexpected.  I remember the first morning we were there.  We stayed in large concrete barracks that had been a part of Saddam's facilities.  I heard they were once barracks for his soldiers or maybe once prisoner holding facilities, who knows.  All the windows had sandbags and plywood in them and the first morning I woke to explosions and sand falling off the window onto my face.  Our barracks had been targeted with mortars, luckily no casualties.  To be brief about this time in my life war sucks, but it becomes what you make it.  For me I was with my brother's, all five of us.  Not biological brother's but that is how we feel about each other.  We like to say, "Blood makes you related, loyalty makes you family."  We were able to be teamed up for almost the entire war.  All of us had demons in our past that we had to deal with.  We were "tortured souls" so to speak and this served to strengthen the bond between us.

There are events that occurred in war that I am sure affected me, but I will not spend any time on them at this point.  I will say I did not have the worst experience in war, others went through far worse.  Yes I have been shot at and yes I have been close to IED's, rockets and mortars.

While I was in Iraq one day my fiancé did a 180 on me.  One day I called her and everything seemed fine.  The next time I called her there was an instant different feeling to the conversation.  Long story short I learned she had cheated on me. While I was over there we decided to postpone the wedding and I had my leave changed so we could work on the relationship when I got home and decide if we were going to continue.  She had moved into my house, the one I bought not my parents, and I was supporting her while she was going to pharmacy tech school.

When I got home from leave, from war, I didn't get a kiss, a hug, or even a hand to hold.  She was cold and indifferent.  After four days of her treating me like she was unhappy I was home and not letting me near her phone ever I began to suspect the truth.  We had a big argument and she blew up at me.  She went to her hometown a half hour away to "visit her mom", or as I found out hang out with guys.  When I found out I went with another brother of mine, someone whom I am very close to but was not in the military, to another nearby town with a night club.  Little did I know but my friend had been chosen by my other non-military friends to break the news to me.  They had seen her at a party while I was gone and knew she was cheating on me.  Needless to say when I woke up the next day at home we had another big argument in which I finally got her to admit what she had done.  I admit I was devastated.  She threw the ring at my head and started packing her shit.  She had access to my banking account and it was basically empty despite the budget I had outlined that allowed her ample spending money for each month.  When I went through the account later I found Victoria Secret's and Frederick's of Hollywood purchases along with large payments at bars and night clubs.  I can only assume she was buying everyone drinks on me.  I had to go back to work for my dad while I was home on leave in order to make the payments on my bills.  She moved out of my house taking almost everything, and I mean everything.

Her grandmother had looked at the house when she moved in and decided a lot of the appliances weren't good enough for her granddaughter.  They all had a 1 year warranty on them, but grandma spent $10,000 on new appliances and some furnishings.  They took those out of the house as well when she moved.  She left me a toaster, some dishes, a couple of towels, a lamp, and a nightstand. Because her step-dad disagreed with the whole thing he told them he wasn't removing the microwave/hood over the oven so that got to stay with me.  But I had no bed no couches, no table, no fridge, dishwasher, oven, washer, or dryer.  She took everything. To be fair my parents, through the help of my mom, went to bat for me and told grandma she had to at least supply enough money to cover the appliances she had removed when she bought the new ones.  Since my dad was a contractor we were able to buy some new appliances for the house at a reasonable price and made the $1200 grandma had given us stretch out.

I was happy as hell to go back to war.  My brothers were there at the base I flew into to pick me up.  I didn't care if we got attacked on our way back to our FOB, I knew I was with people who had my back.  This becomes important later on so remember how important my brother's had become to me.

My Story Part VII:

I returned home from war and one of my brothers, I will call him R, moved in with me.  R had gone on leave after I did and while he was back home, he had gone to check out my house to see if he wanted to move in.  R took a picture of the toaster and sent it to me.  I used it as a profile picture for the longest time and it became an inside joke for us. 

I went back to work and my brothers and I partied hard.  We didn’t become alcoholics, but you would have thought we were.  For us, drinking became a way to get to sleep and to calm down, it became a crutch.  It wasn’t the healthiest way to handle coming home from war but we did it.  Through R I met my wife.  R and my wife had grown up near each other when they were kids and had some common friends.  R had called one of those friends one night to hang out and my wife was with them.  Eventually we started dating although both of us had come out of bad relationships so we didn’t want to get serious, but we did.  My wife’s ex brought additional challenges into the mix, which we have handled pretty well.  My wife also had a child from her previous marriage so when we got married it was a “ready-made family”. 

It was good for me to have a wife and a kid to take care of now because it drowned out the noise of my father somewhat.  In addition, my wife brought an outside perspective on my relationship with my dad.  There were some growing pains, manifested as arguments, but we worked through them and still do.  Almost a year after we were married my wife was pregnant with our first child.  Then three days after Christmas that same year, I was working on a job and fell 30’ off a ladder.  I broke my right arm, shattered my right wrist, and fractured some of my vertebrae and hip.  The doctors said I was lucky to be alive.  I will never forget the moments that passed as I fell; it did seem I had time to think while falling that far.  Time slowed down, or rather my conscious sped up, as happens in stressful situations.  I actually accepted that I might die before I hit the ground.  After I hit I was glad to realize I could still move my legs.  I was able to pick myself up and find someone on the other side of the house to call 911 for me.  Several months and two surgeries later I was back to work. 

Falling like that had shaken something loose in me.  I stopped taking as many risks at work; after all, I had almost died and thought during those moments that I would never see my own child born.  In addition, I now had some aches and pains constantly and construction work is hard on your body.  After a year passed from my injury, the economy began to slow down, although our company didn’t feel it.  I had begun to look at ways to start my own company and get out of my dad’s company.  Due to the economy, that was not an option.  Then one morning I had an epiphany, or revelation.  I woke up with my arm hurting and was dreading going to work.  Then this thought came to me, but it was as if someone else had said something.  I needed to become a cop.  I had never wanted to be a cop, but I decided to look into it.  I knew I couldn’t continue to work for my dad, but I had put everything on hold while I helped run the company.  I had tried at one point to start using my college from the military, but when I talked to my dad about working my schedule around night classes his response was, “Well, we’re starting to get a lot of out of town jobs so I can’t guarantee that you will be in town to go to school”.  To me that meant he would make sure I wasn’t able to attend school.  You see although I didn’t really have a relationship with my dad I felt stuck where I was.  I couldn’t get a raise, I didn’t feel like I was skilled enough to get another job and because of how I was treated going up I didn’t think I could change my career.  The revelation to become a cop seemed to be beyond my grasp.

Eventually after 1 year and half of trying, many departments were on a hiring freeze, I was hired in the Pacific Northwest and we moved our family.  At the same time I was hired, my wife gave birth to our second and final child, making three altogether with my stepdaughter.  This is where more stress began to pile on.  I know some of you may look at my past and be concerned or surprised that I became a cop.  Not all cops were angels before they were hired and there had been over 10 years since I had done anything illegal.  Not even a traffic ticket.  As I said before I had hit a fork in the road and made a huge change in my life.  I went through a rigorous background and psychological evaluation.

When we first moved to the Northwest, we went through an investigation for my stepdaughter.  She disclosed some information that concerned us about her relationship with her dad.  As a result, when he found out he served us with a “retaliation” suit to take us to court.  That was an expensive lawyer bill.

We got past that although it was a lot of stress trying to get the proper agencies to help us investigate it, but it was a huge relief when we learned that he hadn’t done anything.  It should be noted that I was in police academy for this time so my wife had to handle it mostly by herself.  I was only able to come home for the weekend.  Huge props to my wife. 

After I made it through the training process, I had a huge boost of confidence.  I couldn’t believe that I had moved my family to a completely different state and started a new career.  I had been at the top of the hiring list.  Things were actually going good for us.  We were able to offload the house we owned back in our hometown and we started looking for a house in the northwest. 

My Story Part VIII: The downward spiral.

I'm going to say I won't spend too much time on this part because it brings us to current events, but I will probably say more than is needed.

A few months before we found a house my wife’s grandmother died.  Her grandfather had passed away about the same time we met, so this wasn’t entirely unexpected.  However, my wife was very close to her grandparent’s so this was hard for her.  We went back to our home state for the funeral, it was November.  Shortly after we returned home my wife’s aunt died of complications from a surgery.  Since we had just travelled back for her grandmother’s funeral we couldn’t travel back for this one.  I didn’t have the time off to spend and we didn’t have the money, we were paying for the lawyer.

Over the next couple of months, my wife had a few acquaintances that died in accidents or suicides.  Some of them were people she had been friends with once so this took its toll.  Then in February, I learned my friend from my mission in West Africa had died form an overdose.  We had lost touch when I was deployed because he left the country to do tours on some islands in the Pacific.  I was worried about him because he had been struggling when we last talked.  I learned he had hurt his back while doing tours and they put him on painkillers.  When they took him off painkillers, he was addicted.  He got some heroin for his fix and overdosed the first time.  The funeral had already taken place. 

Two months later, we found a house to buy and because of the economy, we got a good deal.  We were able to get a house with some acreage outside city limits.  It is sort of our own little paradise, which has helped a lot since I get to be in nature a lot of the time.  

The day after we signed the papers to close on the house I got a phone call from one of my military brother's, who I will call S.  As soon as I heard S on the phone I knew something was wrong.  He told me that R was dead.  I couldn't handle it; I dropped to my knees suddenly unable to stand. 

R had married a girl I disagreed with, and I’m pretty sure she knew it.  She didn’t like me from the first time we met and made sure we knew it.  She never liked R hanging out with me, even though I never once said anything to him about her.  I knew he wouldn’t listen and I would likely piss him off.  R always wanted kids and he had many conversations about it because I was the only one of our group of brothers who had kids at this time.  I knew how much having kids of my own had helped me heal from war and we would talk about it.  I will admit, and I’m not ashamed, we even cried about it.  It wasn’t the first time we had seen each other cry.  As I said, these men were my brothers and we didn’t have any secrets between each other. 

The story goes, from what we learned from the police, R’s wife and he had gotten into an argument.  R was struggling with some pill addiction because he had gone through a knee surgery after coming back from a second deployment.  To R the military was his life.  He had tried to become a cop as well, but because of his past heroin use, he wasn’t able to.  R’s wife was always using something, usually having kids against him.  She would tell him they couldn’t have kids until he bought her a new car, got her a boob job, and paid for some Lasik surgery.  She cheated on him during his second deployment, and he still stayed with her, even though she treated him that way.  However, you couldn’t talk him out of it.  Every time he would meet a demand, she would have a new one. 

The day of the argument, no one actually knows what they were arguing about, but she left the house.  When she left the house, she called 911 to say she had been in an argument with her husband and he had shot at her.  Because of his military training and what she reported, the police responded in force.  As a police officer, I understand that is the tactic.  When the police arrived, R told them he didn’t want anyone to come in and locked all the doors.  It was now a standoff.  Because I know him so well I know what was likely going through his mind.  He probably thought his career with the military was over, the one thing he had that had made such a difference in his life.  He was drinking and taking his pills.  After a long standoff, the police no longer had any contact with R so they sent in a robot.  They learned he had taken his own life.  The investigation uncovered that only one shot had ever been fired, the one he fired at himself.  He had never shot at his wife. 

R’s wife banned everyone from the house or coming near R’s stuff, including R’s mom.  R’s wife even called the police to say that she was afraid for her life because of us and had R’s mother removed from the house.  R’s wife wouldn’t let anyone get so much as a picture from R’s stuff, even a digital copy.  It just so happens that R was just that guy.  He was the one in our group who always took pictures of things.  He had most of the pictures of all our accolades together. 

We travelled back to our home state for R’s funeral.  I took work off; I was too compromised to be any help out on the street.  On the day of the funeral, it was all I could do to look R’s wife in the face, I wanted to yell at her and tell her what I thought.  On the other hand, the rest of my brothers were there and that helped.  I was also able to talk to R’s parents and tell them some things they didn’t know about their son. 

Despite whatever opinion you have formed of R at this point let me tell you a little bit.  He was a caring person; he would give you the shirt off his back.  He was the type of guy who would make time if you needed him.  You were in a bind and needed someone to come help you, R would show up snow or shine (I know it’s rain or shine) to help.  He was also someone you could always go to if you needed to talk.  He had great relationships with all of his younger siblings.  He was also the only one of our group that I would see pray every night before we went to bed.  There I was the only one of our band of brothers that had been on a religious mission and I wasn’t even saying my prayers, but there was R saying his every day.  Because of that, I started saying mine again.  I was able to share this with R’s parents. 

On the negative side, R’s wife banned my brothers and me by performing any extra ceremonies or rituals at the funeral.  Unknowing to her we had some of our friends in the unit create a screen while we dropped a flag with the symbol on it us brothers had come up with while in country.  I also heard R’s wife complain that the funeral service was interfering with her Lasik appointment.  I wanted to tell her to leave the fucking funeral and let us actually honor him, but she probably would have had me kicked out of the funeral.  I just walked away and haven’t looked at her or spoken to her since. 

Because of the type of person R was he touched the lives of many people.  His death had a domino effect on my brothers and some of the people in our unit.  Within days of R’s death one of our friend’s in the unit tried to kill himself.  There were a couple of other people who went through this and then on the anniversary of R’s death, which was last April, one of my other brothers tried to kill himself.  This brother I will call L.  L and R used to use drugs together and it was through the military that they were able to get clean.  L’s dad died shortly before R killed himself and he turned back to drugs.  On the anniversary of R’s death L took a dose of drugs that should have killed him.  He didn’t die and realized he needed help.  L was able to check himself in a VA center and get the help he needed. Over the past couple years our group of five brothers had grown to seven.  I didn’t hear about L’s attempt until a few months later when I couldn’t get ahold of him.  There were two of them I had been worried about since R’s death; I feared that one of them would try to commit suicide.  It was tough to not be there in the same state to help.  I felt guilty, just like I did when R died.  Since then L has made vast strides and I can tell by talking to him that he is doing better. 

Despite trying to help my brothers, I shut my feelings away.  The day before I came back from R’s funeral, I remember compartmentalizing my feelings, literally.  Because of my childhood, I think I had learned to deal with traumatic things by compartmentalizing them to buffer myself from them.  By this time in my life it was second nature.  I knew I had to go back to work to a dangerous job where I couldn’t be compromised.  I couldn’t fall apart while working on the street and I had little kids that needed a dad.  I stopped dealing with R’s death that day and put the emotions away. 

I will stop my story here and continue in blogs.  This is where I will lead into the aftermath that followed and how I have begun my road to healing.