A little history

I thought I'd write down the things that led up to my separation from K. This journal is also some form of therapy for me - I've always been one of those people who learned more from writing information out as opposed to just hearing it, so I'm hoping that writing all this out will help me make sense of things.

Brief timeline (some of these things may be covered in more detail later, just depends on how I feel): Got married in 1994 at the age of 26 (on New Year's Eve, no less). Through the next eight years, we dealt with loss of a parent (my mother passed away 10 days after my wedding), loss of jobs, moving, one of us going back to school, financial stresses, and infertility (this in 2000-2001, when it finally seemed like the right time to have a child). My son was born in July 2002 after some help from fertility meds and insemination, and that's when my life really began to change. Up until that point, I was still pretty much the painfully shy, totally unable to speak her mind, seriously repressed little being I'd been since about junior high (I was much more outgoing as a young child, but something about junior high and beyond just sucked that out of me, except with my close friends). Even with K, I had a very difficult time telling him what I really thought. I reckon that came from growing up with a father who had a pretty good temper, and from seeing a lot more of my father in K than either of them would care to admit (not as far as the temper, K thankfully doesn't blow up like my father was prone to do - but they're both not real good at handling things that could be construed as criticism). But after July 2002, things were gradually going to start to change.

Wait, another brief digression. Before my son was born (maybe this was in 2000?), K got in touch with an old high school friend. She lived out of state, and they talked by phone and e-mail and instant messenger. I'd get perturbed because he'd spend a lot of time on IM with her, but I didn't get real uptight over it until I came across an e-mail where he'd told a friend of his that he thought he was developing feelings of more than friendship for her. I got pretty upset over that, and K told me later that when I confronted him with it, he saw our marriage flash before his eyes and he figured that was it. Whether foolishly or not, I gave him the benefit of the doubt - after all, she was over 1000 miles away, it wasn't like anything could actually *happen*. And life went on.

Then J was born.