I've been pretty vague on here as to WHY I am getting divorced. There's a reason for that, too. When everything got started, my husband's dad told me not to tell anyone what was going on. He didn't say anything about a consequence if I did tell, but I still felt kind of threatened. That guy gets an inhuman quality about him when he's angry, and it's sincerely frightening.
Well, they've made up an incomprehensible lie about the goings on, so I guess they're prepared to combat my side of the story, which I will only partially tell in a public forum (unless I somehow get amazingly famous and write a tell-all book or have a movie made about me with Jennifer Aniston playing the leading role). So, as I reveal some information, feel free to skip the next paragraph if you think it might be too much for you. I will spare you almost all the details, but it's still pretty crazy.
The truth is that my husband was very abusive in just about every way you can think of, and in some ways you probably can't. Even I didn't realize how abusive he was until I had hindsight. He made my life completely miserable, and I reached my lowest ever point of depression. However, he had some kind of weird control over me, and he knew it. He knew that, even though I would try to talk to him about problems I felt we had in our marriage, I wasn't going anywhere. Then something happened. Right after he left for boot camp, I found out that the "happily married" facade the two of us put on was a cover for him to go do very non-Mormon things with other women. After having a text conversation and finding several emails from an account I hadn't known existed, I started to connect some other dots as well. The fact that I found all this when he was away from home is the only thing that made it possible for me to leave.
My husband has told his family, and they apparently believe, that I made everything up. I fabricated the emails and was apparently texting myself. I'm flattered that they think I'm intelligent enough to think up such an elaborate plan, but, if I had, I would have waited until he got back from boot camp so I could use the extra $3000 a month that he was making while he was too busy to spend it.
Unfortunately, cases like mine have given people like my attorney a bad impression of our religion. She said to me, "I'm sorry, but I just don't like the way Mormons treat women. I've had too many cases like yours."
I looked right at her and said, "This isn't the way Mormons treat women. Not good Mormons."
We only talked briefly about how the Church teaches that women should be treated, but it really made me sad to think that the only exposure she had to the Church was through the improper treatment of women.
Blaming the Church for my situation would be super easy. It would be easy to put all the blame on my husband or his father, who has had a huge influence on my husband and seems to think this is his fight, too.
The truth is that I'm partially to blame, and the Church did nothing wrong. I made the decision to get married when I knew that my husband and I would have to work really hard to be happy, and that my husband didn't plan on doing much work at all. The Church was never the problem, but it was my safety net when I had nowhere to go. I've had immense help from bishops and the few people that I actually talk to at church. I've started feeling the Spirit again since I left the toxic situation I was in, and I can feel the love and hope that Heavenly Father has for me.
I play a lot of roles; daughter, sister, student, Primary teacher, friend, and, legally, wife. Sometimes I need to forget all the titles and responsibility and focus on my Heavenly Father. He will guide me through this storm and the storms to come. I belong to His church, and I will not leave it because I chose to marry someone who did not follow its teachings.
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