After she first left, I had filed for divorce.
At the time it felt logical. Necessary even. The paperwork had already started moving through the courts while I tried to survive raising Christian and holding my own life together.
But when she came back, I cancelled it.
Looking back now, I can finally admit how desperate I was to save the idea of us.
I still believed in the fantasy of the family more than the reality of the marriage itself.
I thought love meant endurance.
Forgiveness.
Sacrifice.
I thought if I simply loved hard enough, eventually everything would stabilize and become the life I imagined we were supposed to have.
Instead, I prolonged the collapse.
The financial damage came slowly at first, then all at once.
I fell behind on bills.
The apartment in St. Joseph became impossible to afford.
Eventually we were evicted.
My wages started getting garnished, and suddenly every paycheck already belonged to somebody else before I even brought it home.
I barely had enough money left to survive.
For a while, I stayed with my parents again.
She stayed with hers.
Christian spent most of his time with her and his grandmother in Stevensville.
And honestly, part of me believed he was better off there.
Her mother was good to him. Truly good to him.
Looking back now, I’m grateful for that.
At the time, though, gratitude and heartbreak somehow existed together inside me.
With help from my family, we eventually found a tiny rental house in a rough part of town.
It wasn’t really a home.
Just a temporary place where people survived while hoping life eventually became something else.
The neighborhood felt worn down and tired. Broken fences. Cracked driveways. Stray dogs wandering through yards while televisions flickered blue light through thin curtains at night.
But it was cheap.
Cheap was all we could manage anymore.
I kept working at the print shop.
Factory life suited me in strange ways. Machines made sense to me. Systems made sense to me. You learned procedures, solved problems, fixed jams, kept production moving, and at the end of the day there was at least proof you had accomplished something tangible.
Human relationships felt far more complicated.
During that time I started rebuilding a Pontiac Fiero.
Looking back now, I realize it probably represented more than just a car to me.
It was something broken I could actually repair.
Something I could control.
Eventually I got it running well enough to become my main vehicle.
It only had two seats, which honestly made it a terrible family car, but by then the idea of us being a family already felt mostly fictional anyway.
Christian loved the Fiero.
But even more than that, he loved the little Suzuki 75 dirt bike I fixed up for us.
We would ride slowly around a tiny dirt track I made near the rental house while he sat in front of me pretending he was the one driving. We never went fast. Probably less than ten miles an hour most of the time.
To him it was an adventure.
To me it became one of the few moments during that period when life still felt real.
I brought home giant stacks of scrap paper from the print shop for him to draw on.
We spent as much time together as we could.
Looking back now, decades later, I can still feel how deeply I loved him.
Maybe even more clearly now than I understood it then.
The strange thing about memory is that some of the poorest years of your life later become the moments that glow the brightest.
Meanwhile my marriage continued drifting in circles.
Leaving.
Returning.
Distance.
Silence.
At one point we even adopted a dog from the pound.
Looking back now, it was a ridiculous decision made by two emotionally exhausted young adults trying to fill emptiness with responsibility we were not prepared to handle.
Later in life I would eventually own dogs and understand what proper care and commitment actually meant.
Back then we barely understood how to care for ourselves.
For years I begged her to stay.
I begged for the marriage.
I begged for the family I thought we were supposed to become.
I kept believing if I just loved harder, sacrificed harder, forgave harder, eventually things would somehow become normal again.
But one day something inside me finally broke.
Or maybe it finally woke up.
I remember realizing with terrifying clarity:
This isn’t right.
Not the marriage.
Not the constant leaving and returning.
Not the emptiness.
Not the feeling of spending years begging another person to simply want to be beside me.
Somewhere along the way I had stopped living and started emotionally surviving instead.
My heart no longer felt broken.
It felt dead.
And for the first time, I was the one who chose to leave.
She moved back in with her mother in Stevensville.
Christian went with her.
And I let him go because at the time I still believed a son needed his mother more than he needed his father.
Looking back now, I’m not entirely sure whether that belief came from love, guilt, exhaustion, religion, or simply feeling like I had already failed him somehow.
Maybe all of it.
But I truly believed he would have a more stable life there than I could give him at the time.
And for the first time in my life...
I was living alone.