2016 was a rough year for my family. A seventeen year relationship, the only thing our children ever knew, was gone, just like that.
It all started December 6, 2014, the night of Lil E's progressive dinner at school. Big E wanted to go hang out with his buddies and have some drinks. After picking up Lil E, the plan was to go pick up Big E. We pull up to Omero's house and I stay in the car because I was in my jammies. Lil E goes in and tells him we were there to pick him up. As Lil E gets in the car he mentions that his dad was eating and had bumped his head. He comes out with his buddies with a rag wrapped around his head, looking like the karate kid.
Me not knowing what happened, Eric gets in the car seemingly fine. As we drive down the road I realize that he is really drunk, his breathing became heavy and I knew he was feeling nauseous. Thankfully he didn't puke in my car. As we got home, he vomited in the sink and was acting strange. At this point I remove the rag from his head to assess the damage. Its pretty bad, I knew something wasn't right at that moment. Because I couldn't determine whether his behavior was related to him being drunk or him hitting his head, I made a decision to call the ambulance. And if I am being 100% honest, I didn't want him vomiting or bleeding in my car.
I follow the ambulance to the hospital in my car. While sitting in the hospital with him I tried to piece together what exactly happened as this drunken fool rambled on making very little sense. I looked at his phone because he hadn't answered my texts to pick him up prior to me getting to Omero's to pick him up. I notice that he had taken a selfie in the ambulance and sent it to "Maria". I asked who she was and he said it was his friend's sister, she was also his co-worker. He passed out from being so drunk. When it came time for his staples in his head, the doctor didn't take her time or try to make the closure neat. Serves him right for being such a drunk fool.
Little did I know that night would be change the course of our future. The next week after the injury he was unusually calm and quiet, it was a nice change from him being grumpy and at times angry. This typically punctual man turned into a man who had to be woken several times and reminded that it was time to get up for work. That quickly turned into him getting angry and annoyed at me "telling him what to do". Who was this man? Where did my husband go? The once caring, doting, loving, affectionate husband I had known for 15 years was gone.
Through the month of December, Eric was often unresponsive to my calls and texts...little did I know at that time that he was texting Maria day and night into the early hours of the morning. Looking back now, I see that there were signs. It wasn't until January that I found this out. January 10th, he took my niece home and then texted me that he was going to go to my aunt's house to talk to her. I found this odd but he said he would be back later. At 1100 pm he said he was on his way home. However, I woke at 0145 to him still not being home. I asked him where he was and he said parked down the street.
I was so confused when he got in the house I asked him what the hell was going on. He said that things were different between us and that he didn't feel the same. My heart was broken. What had I done to deserve this? I reached out to a group of friends online, one of them told me to check our phone bill for his text history. I didn't think for a moment that I would find anything. Low and behold, there were dozens of texts back and forth. When confronted with the evidence he said that she was just someone to talk to. I asked him why he hadn't talked to me. If our relationship was deteriorating in his eyes, why didn't he say anything? Why didn't he TRY? We had invested 15 years into our relationship, building memories, creating a family. I was once his most trusted partner in life, there was nothing that we couldn't tell each other or do with or for each other. He swore it was nothing more than texts.
The next morning he broke down and cried while hugging me telling me how sorry he was. He then told me that the two of them had met up outside of work and kissed a couple times. That stung me to the core. The man who once treated me like I was the only woman in the world, the man who couldn't keep his hands off me had betrayed me. Not only did he not speak to me about any of his concerns or how he was feeling, he told them to someone else, he invited another woman into our marriage.
Things were rocky for awhile. He told me he would stop talking to her, but I didn't trust him still. He worked with her everyday. He was still not attentive to my texts or calls. We used to talk everyday while we were at work. During the time I was home while going to school, not a day went by that we didn't speak 2-3 times during the day. And suddenly everything was different. I had noticed that he was having some issues with memory. It wasn't until we had the exact same conversation 3 times that I addressed my concerns. He agreed to see the neurologist.
When we saw that neurologist, she did a few tests on his cognitive functioning and determined that he was having some trouble but felt that if he could get his depression under control that he would have a 98% chance of getting back to normal. She did not order any additional scans and I wasn't satisfied with her answer. This was a man that I knew inside and out and had lived with for 15 years. Nobody knows him better than I do and nobody ever will. Who he is now is far from the man he was as a husband and a father.
His anger continued to increase and he rapidly went down the path of self destruction and the ultimate ruin of our marriage. As I struggled to come to terms with what was happening in our lives, I realized that I needed someone to talk to, someone who could help me understand exactly how to deal with what I was going through. I was a hot mess by the time April of 2015 hit. My anxiety was through the roof, I was having anxiety attacks and there were a few times at work that I had a hard time keeping it together. He continued to remain distant most of the time. He did agree to marriage counseling which was a bust. He didn't even try, all he did was blow up in our sessions, to me and to our LCSW. It was embarrassing and I couldn't believe that this was the man my once respected husband turned into.
I continued my solo sessions with Holly and I learned a lot about myself. I learned so much that I could apply to not only my personal life but to my profession as well. There were a couple weeks in June of 2015 where Eric was out of the house at the request of our son, Little Eric. He was sick and tired of him blowing up and going off on them for little things. At the end of July Eric became suicidal and was admitted to Aurora for six days. The first night we spent at Zion, I stayed by him the whole night, the two of us were snuggled into his hospital bed. I held him and told him that everything would be alright. I held it together most of the night. When the doctor came in around 0600, she spoke to him and gave him some statistics. She told him that children of parents who commit suicide are more likely to commit suicide themselves. She looked at him and asked, "Which one of your kids would it be?" We both cried.
Throughout the year I tried everything that I could think of to fix what he had broken, however he was still struggling. He continued to say things to me like "You are too good for me" "I don't deserve you" "You deserve somebody better". He often referenced my education and for some reason felt inferior to me because I earned my BA and he didn't have a HS diploma. I tried to tell him that it didn't matter to me, I knew that when I married him. I tried to encourage him and reminded him of the great things about him such as his ability to fix vehicles and heavy machinery.
But the truth was, he had made up his mind that I was better than him and he did everything that he could to push me away. He reminded me of what he did and how he could never fix it, how things would never be the same. Never would I have thought that this would be the outcome of our marriage.
The day before Easter of 2016 is when things took a turn for the worse. We were on our way to meet my family from Northern Cali at a pizza place in Vista and we were using his phone as GPS. As I am holding the phone in my hand, a text came over the phone from Maria. She called MY husband "Mi Amor". I was seeing red. I asked him what the hell was she doing texting him calling him her love. He claimed that he didn't know. When we got into the pizza place he made a scene in front of my family and the other patrons of the restaurant. I was so embarrassed.
No one in my family had ever seen him behave that way. He ended up leaving the restaurant. My niece and I looked around for him but couldn't find him. I had his phone so I couldn't call him. All the while, in my head, I was questioning why he was angry with me when this was his own fault by maintaining contact with her. Earlier in the month I had caught him with a second phone that he would use to talk to her and another girl. He broke it because he didn't want me to see what was on it. During the time all of this happened, he damaged a lot in our home. There were a lot of holes in the walls, broken items and he even managed to punch a hole in one of our dining room chairs which was a synthetic leather.
Back to the night before Easter...my niece and her kids came back home with me and the boys. We all went to bed not knowing where Eric had gone. I figured he probably went to her. At 0145 on Easter morning there was a loud knock at the door. I open it and there he was. He acted like he was drunk, looking back on it, he was somewhat manic in his behavior. He came up to our room and he started yelling, I can't even remember what about then he began to grab things off of his night stand and threw the items across the room, nearly hitting me. It was at that time that I made the decision to call the police. I told him I was calling and he took off. After he left I went downstairs to lock the door and my niece was also on the phone with a 911 operator.
The police responded shortly after our phone calls. I went over the events of the evening with the officers and explained how earlier in the evening when we were at the pizza place, Eric had threatened to throw himself in front of the Sprinter, he also tried to start a fight with a random very scary looking guy. The officer told me that I should file a restraining order because typically these things become worse. At the time I decided against it but had I known what future things were to come, I would have filed the next day. After the officers left they were able to make contact with him. After they made contact with him, I began to receive goodbye texts from Eric, indicating that he would end his life. I placed another call to the police department to let them know about his texts. Once again they made contact with him. The officers took him to a local motel so he could "sleep it off".
It was then that I made the decision that he could no longer be in our home. He had a lot of work to do on himself and had caused far too much physical damage to our home and emotional damage to our family. He couch hopped for the first couple days and then after talking to my aunt and uncle we decided that he would stay with them as we try to work on our marriage, hopefully repairing some of the damage that he had done. Now I won't pretend that I was sweet and kind the entire time, because that would not be the truth. There were times when I was angry, hurt, and felt downright betrayed. And I let him know.
The 2 and a half months that he was out of the house we were supposed to have weekly dates. That didn't happen as planned. Much of the time his anger and outbursts would prevent that from happening. We did go on several dates, some of them went really well and instilled hope, hope that perhaps some of the damage could be repaired. Unfortunately, Eric was not active in his kids lives like he should have been. There were times when I asked him to come watch the kids because I had to work or that I wanted to go see a movie by myself. He never initiated visits with them.
It wasn't until he was laid off of his job due to his leg injury that he began to come to the house during the day. At this point the boys were on summer break and home all day. Unfortunately, his time with the boys had to be limited and I had to ask him to leave the house immediately because he began throwing stuff around the garage when it was just him and the kids at the house.
I wanted complete accuracy when I wrote this out so I just got done reviewing his texts which I have saved for court. He is not only angry but raging in some of his texts and voice recordings. After a few of his outbursts I told him that I would begin recording our conversations and he allowed it. There was a point in time that I had him listen to one of our conversations and I asked him what he thought and he said, "I am an asshole". Although I didn't tell him so, he was right.
On August 3, 2016 is when things peaked. He harassed me all day long via text message even after I had asked him to stop. That night little Eric decided to push me and was out of control. My sister and brother in law came over and the police were called. I found out Eric was out front and I told him to leave and that I didn't want him here. At this time the police came and shortly after made him leave. One of the officers that responded that night, also responded the day Breanna and I called the police. The next day I went to the courthouse and filed my divorce paperwork and a restraining order. Little Eric had spent the night at my sisters so he could cool down and my sister told me that Eric called to ask to speak to our son. He was at that time informed that there was a restraining order filed. It didn't matter to him. He continued to harass me via my work phone and after I blocked him from that he began to harass me via email. He was saying things like, I wish I never married you, I'm glad we didn't buy a house together, all kinds of things to try to hurt me. Little did he know that I had already moved on and decided to be happy.
He ended up going to jail for breaking the restraining order. His rotten brother and his girlfriend were working with little Eric in a plan to try to get the kids taken away so he could be their guardian. After I did some digging, I found that not only were they part of it, but so was Eric. I have zero respect for any of them after I found that out. Needless to say there are no grounds for my children to be taken from me. I have busted my ass to ensure that they are safe and that emotionally they are doing okay. The three of us attend weekly counseling and I believe that it has been helpful for the boys when dealing with their feelings of abandonment and just making us a stronger family unit. We still have some tough days, but we are managing much better than we did before.
It all started December 6, 2014, the night of Lil E's progressive dinner at school. Big E wanted to go hang out with his buddies and have some drinks. After picking up Lil E, the plan was to go pick up Big E. We pull up to Omero's house and I stay in the car because I was in my jammies. Lil E goes in and tells him we were there to pick him up. As Lil E gets in the car he mentions that his dad was eating and had bumped his head. He comes out with his buddies with a rag wrapped around his head, looking like the karate kid.
Me not knowing what happened, Eric gets in the car seemingly fine. As we drive down the road I realize that he is really drunk, his breathing became heavy and I knew he was feeling nauseous. Thankfully he didn't puke in my car. As we got home, he vomited in the sink and was acting strange. At this point I remove the rag from his head to assess the damage. Its pretty bad, I knew something wasn't right at that moment. Because I couldn't determine whether his behavior was related to him being drunk or him hitting his head, I made a decision to call the ambulance. And if I am being 100% honest, I didn't want him vomiting or bleeding in my car.
I follow the ambulance to the hospital in my car. While sitting in the hospital with him I tried to piece together what exactly happened as this drunken fool rambled on making very little sense. I looked at his phone because he hadn't answered my texts to pick him up prior to me getting to Omero's to pick him up. I notice that he had taken a selfie in the ambulance and sent it to "Maria". I asked who she was and he said it was his friend's sister, she was also his co-worker. He passed out from being so drunk. When it came time for his staples in his head, the doctor didn't take her time or try to make the closure neat. Serves him right for being such a drunk fool.
Little did I know that night would be change the course of our future. The next week after the injury he was unusually calm and quiet, it was a nice change from him being grumpy and at times angry. This typically punctual man turned into a man who had to be woken several times and reminded that it was time to get up for work. That quickly turned into him getting angry and annoyed at me "telling him what to do". Who was this man? Where did my husband go? The once caring, doting, loving, affectionate husband I had known for 15 years was gone.
Through the month of December, Eric was often unresponsive to my calls and texts...little did I know at that time that he was texting Maria day and night into the early hours of the morning. Looking back now, I see that there were signs. It wasn't until January that I found this out. January 10th, he took my niece home and then texted me that he was going to go to my aunt's house to talk to her. I found this odd but he said he would be back later. At 1100 pm he said he was on his way home. However, I woke at 0145 to him still not being home. I asked him where he was and he said parked down the street.
I was so confused when he got in the house I asked him what the hell was going on. He said that things were different between us and that he didn't feel the same. My heart was broken. What had I done to deserve this? I reached out to a group of friends online, one of them told me to check our phone bill for his text history. I didn't think for a moment that I would find anything. Low and behold, there were dozens of texts back and forth. When confronted with the evidence he said that she was just someone to talk to. I asked him why he hadn't talked to me. If our relationship was deteriorating in his eyes, why didn't he say anything? Why didn't he TRY? We had invested 15 years into our relationship, building memories, creating a family. I was once his most trusted partner in life, there was nothing that we couldn't tell each other or do with or for each other. He swore it was nothing more than texts.
The next morning he broke down and cried while hugging me telling me how sorry he was. He then told me that the two of them had met up outside of work and kissed a couple times. That stung me to the core. The man who once treated me like I was the only woman in the world, the man who couldn't keep his hands off me had betrayed me. Not only did he not speak to me about any of his concerns or how he was feeling, he told them to someone else, he invited another woman into our marriage.
Things were rocky for awhile. He told me he would stop talking to her, but I didn't trust him still. He worked with her everyday. He was still not attentive to my texts or calls. We used to talk everyday while we were at work. During the time I was home while going to school, not a day went by that we didn't speak 2-3 times during the day. And suddenly everything was different. I had noticed that he was having some issues with memory. It wasn't until we had the exact same conversation 3 times that I addressed my concerns. He agreed to see the neurologist.
When we saw that neurologist, she did a few tests on his cognitive functioning and determined that he was having some trouble but felt that if he could get his depression under control that he would have a 98% chance of getting back to normal. She did not order any additional scans and I wasn't satisfied with her answer. This was a man that I knew inside and out and had lived with for 15 years. Nobody knows him better than I do and nobody ever will. Who he is now is far from the man he was as a husband and a father.
His anger continued to increase and he rapidly went down the path of self destruction and the ultimate ruin of our marriage. As I struggled to come to terms with what was happening in our lives, I realized that I needed someone to talk to, someone who could help me understand exactly how to deal with what I was going through. I was a hot mess by the time April of 2015 hit. My anxiety was through the roof, I was having anxiety attacks and there were a few times at work that I had a hard time keeping it together. He continued to remain distant most of the time. He did agree to marriage counseling which was a bust. He didn't even try, all he did was blow up in our sessions, to me and to our LCSW. It was embarrassing and I couldn't believe that this was the man my once respected husband turned into.
I continued my solo sessions with Holly and I learned a lot about myself. I learned so much that I could apply to not only my personal life but to my profession as well. There were a couple weeks in June of 2015 where Eric was out of the house at the request of our son, Little Eric. He was sick and tired of him blowing up and going off on them for little things. At the end of July Eric became suicidal and was admitted to Aurora for six days. The first night we spent at Zion, I stayed by him the whole night, the two of us were snuggled into his hospital bed. I held him and told him that everything would be alright. I held it together most of the night. When the doctor came in around 0600, she spoke to him and gave him some statistics. She told him that children of parents who commit suicide are more likely to commit suicide themselves. She looked at him and asked, "Which one of your kids would it be?" We both cried.
Throughout the year I tried everything that I could think of to fix what he had broken, however he was still struggling. He continued to say things to me like "You are too good for me" "I don't deserve you" "You deserve somebody better". He often referenced my education and for some reason felt inferior to me because I earned my BA and he didn't have a HS diploma. I tried to tell him that it didn't matter to me, I knew that when I married him. I tried to encourage him and reminded him of the great things about him such as his ability to fix vehicles and heavy machinery.
But the truth was, he had made up his mind that I was better than him and he did everything that he could to push me away. He reminded me of what he did and how he could never fix it, how things would never be the same. Never would I have thought that this would be the outcome of our marriage.
The day before Easter of 2016 is when things took a turn for the worse. We were on our way to meet my family from Northern Cali at a pizza place in Vista and we were using his phone as GPS. As I am holding the phone in my hand, a text came over the phone from Maria. She called MY husband "Mi Amor". I was seeing red. I asked him what the hell was she doing texting him calling him her love. He claimed that he didn't know. When we got into the pizza place he made a scene in front of my family and the other patrons of the restaurant. I was so embarrassed.
No one in my family had ever seen him behave that way. He ended up leaving the restaurant. My niece and I looked around for him but couldn't find him. I had his phone so I couldn't call him. All the while, in my head, I was questioning why he was angry with me when this was his own fault by maintaining contact with her. Earlier in the month I had caught him with a second phone that he would use to talk to her and another girl. He broke it because he didn't want me to see what was on it. During the time all of this happened, he damaged a lot in our home. There were a lot of holes in the walls, broken items and he even managed to punch a hole in one of our dining room chairs which was a synthetic leather.
Back to the night before Easter...my niece and her kids came back home with me and the boys. We all went to bed not knowing where Eric had gone. I figured he probably went to her. At 0145 on Easter morning there was a loud knock at the door. I open it and there he was. He acted like he was drunk, looking back on it, he was somewhat manic in his behavior. He came up to our room and he started yelling, I can't even remember what about then he began to grab things off of his night stand and threw the items across the room, nearly hitting me. It was at that time that I made the decision to call the police. I told him I was calling and he took off. After he left I went downstairs to lock the door and my niece was also on the phone with a 911 operator.
The police responded shortly after our phone calls. I went over the events of the evening with the officers and explained how earlier in the evening when we were at the pizza place, Eric had threatened to throw himself in front of the Sprinter, he also tried to start a fight with a random very scary looking guy. The officer told me that I should file a restraining order because typically these things become worse. At the time I decided against it but had I known what future things were to come, I would have filed the next day. After the officers left they were able to make contact with him. After they made contact with him, I began to receive goodbye texts from Eric, indicating that he would end his life. I placed another call to the police department to let them know about his texts. Once again they made contact with him. The officers took him to a local motel so he could "sleep it off".
It was then that I made the decision that he could no longer be in our home. He had a lot of work to do on himself and had caused far too much physical damage to our home and emotional damage to our family. He couch hopped for the first couple days and then after talking to my aunt and uncle we decided that he would stay with them as we try to work on our marriage, hopefully repairing some of the damage that he had done. Now I won't pretend that I was sweet and kind the entire time, because that would not be the truth. There were times when I was angry, hurt, and felt downright betrayed. And I let him know.
The 2 and a half months that he was out of the house we were supposed to have weekly dates. That didn't happen as planned. Much of the time his anger and outbursts would prevent that from happening. We did go on several dates, some of them went really well and instilled hope, hope that perhaps some of the damage could be repaired. Unfortunately, Eric was not active in his kids lives like he should have been. There were times when I asked him to come watch the kids because I had to work or that I wanted to go see a movie by myself. He never initiated visits with them.
It wasn't until he was laid off of his job due to his leg injury that he began to come to the house during the day. At this point the boys were on summer break and home all day. Unfortunately, his time with the boys had to be limited and I had to ask him to leave the house immediately because he began throwing stuff around the garage when it was just him and the kids at the house.
I wanted complete accuracy when I wrote this out so I just got done reviewing his texts which I have saved for court. He is not only angry but raging in some of his texts and voice recordings. After a few of his outbursts I told him that I would begin recording our conversations and he allowed it. There was a point in time that I had him listen to one of our conversations and I asked him what he thought and he said, "I am an asshole". Although I didn't tell him so, he was right.
On August 3, 2016 is when things peaked. He harassed me all day long via text message even after I had asked him to stop. That night little Eric decided to push me and was out of control. My sister and brother in law came over and the police were called. I found out Eric was out front and I told him to leave and that I didn't want him here. At this time the police came and shortly after made him leave. One of the officers that responded that night, also responded the day Breanna and I called the police. The next day I went to the courthouse and filed my divorce paperwork and a restraining order. Little Eric had spent the night at my sisters so he could cool down and my sister told me that Eric called to ask to speak to our son. He was at that time informed that there was a restraining order filed. It didn't matter to him. He continued to harass me via my work phone and after I blocked him from that he began to harass me via email. He was saying things like, I wish I never married you, I'm glad we didn't buy a house together, all kinds of things to try to hurt me. Little did he know that I had already moved on and decided to be happy.
He ended up going to jail for breaking the restraining order. His rotten brother and his girlfriend were working with little Eric in a plan to try to get the kids taken away so he could be their guardian. After I did some digging, I found that not only were they part of it, but so was Eric. I have zero respect for any of them after I found that out. Needless to say there are no grounds for my children to be taken from me. I have busted my ass to ensure that they are safe and that emotionally they are doing okay. The three of us attend weekly counseling and I believe that it has been helpful for the boys when dealing with their feelings of abandonment and just making us a stronger family unit. We still have some tough days, but we are managing much better than we did before.
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