The Ex Factor

I woke up one morning in Mississippi and realized I was tired of being alone, bored and horny. I had my daily dose of scanning over the personals. I came across a picture of a dude that totally got my eye. 6'3, tall, dark, handsome, successful, car, house, 2 cats? Wow, jackpot. For the first time, I swallowed my pride and made a profile and contacted him. I had nothing to lose.I was stuck back in my home town and was looking for a way out, a reason to go back to the one city I loved..Baton Rouge, La. I remember my first message to him. "Hi, my name is Bertha..I am a 600 lb black woman that loves ribs, ding dongs, and a good time". Nothing against my black friends but he thought it was funny. We hit it off. We would talk on the phone for hours and IM back and forth through out the day. He kept asking me to come visit him but my own ailments kept me from leaving the house. I was burdened with bad anxiety, panic attacks, fibromyalgia, depression,etc. I was a complete mess but I did a good job of hiding it. Somehow I made it out of the house for a night to meet him, I wasn't impressed. He was too cocky, too conceited and just too much. I decided that he would just make a good friend. We stayed in contact and shared dating stories and gave one another advice on who the other was dating. Almost a year later, I wanted to bring a friend down to visit him to hook them up. We went out that night, the two of them did not hit it off but we did. Weird. I always thought that it was best to date a friend, right? We started dating and it was a complete whirlwind. Out of nowhere, butterflies and infatuation took over. I was driving to Baton Rouge quite frequently, stuffing my anxiety. We didn't have sex for the longest time. He thought I was playing hard to get but he had no idea I wasn't attracted to him. I can remember the first thing he said to me after we did the nasty, "You were a long road". Pfft, I was kind of offended. Why was I with this dude? I wasn't even attracted to him. I think I had created my own butterflies because I wanted something so badly. I was in love with his yahoo personal profile. I was in love with the person I talked to on IM. I imagined him to be someone he was not. Having talked to him for so many months on yahoo chat,it's like I dreamed up an entire different person than what he really was. Not being there to see facial expressions, tone of voice, responses..I had to make them up on my own..so naturally, when I finally started to hang out with him more, I was somewhat dissappointed but I continued to hang onto that love for his profile. We dated for two months and then I got pregnant. It was the hardest thing I had to deal with ever. On top of my own personal anxiety and depression, I had to deal with the anxiety of being with some dude I didn't really know or love and I also had to battle the anxiety of explaining the pregnancy to my Southern Baptist father. It was hard as hell. I moved in with him immediately and started playing family. Being away from my own family, I was alone and kind of attached myself to his family. I became extremely close with his mother and siblings. Sometimes, when I would feel lonely and depressed..I would sign onto yahoo while he was at work, just to talk to him online..so I could get that old feeling..the feeling of who I thought he was and who I wanted him to be. You know, the 6'3, tall, dark,handsome, successful, car, home...so vague but I fixed that up with filling in the blanks with my own desires. Throughout the pregnancy, there was a lot of fighting. He was very condescending and had a great way of making me feel stupid. He would come at me yelling, throwing up his hands... and I would scatter to the bathroom and lock the door. I lived in fear almost the entire pregnancy. Who was this dude? What have I done? I continued to battle anxiety and depression and was SOL because medications were not an option. He basically told me I was going to therapy for anxiety and there I went, battling a pregnancy, a miserable relationship, and cognitive therapy at 4 months pregnant. It was all too much. My son was finally born and my soul dropped into postpartum. I was so in love with my son, I totally bonded with him. What triggered the postpartum was his mother. She had told me SHE wanted to be the one to help when my son was born. I told everyone else "thanks but no thanks, his mother is helping." The third day, when I needed her the most, she said she was leaving to go visit her fiance...so she was basically done with helping. Say what? I lost it. It was all too much. I had had a c-section, I was still battling anxiety, I needed help. Not only did she sell me out but she went over to her other son's house, where she knew they were sick and brought the sickness straight to me. I got sick. She said she wasn't staying and my only option was for her to take my son with her. I had no choice. After that, I had serious bonding issues because of the dormant postpartum, it went full blown. Suicide came into the picture and I kept crying to him that I wanted to kill myself and he kept telling me, "you'll be okay." Eventually, my family had to step in and have an intervention because of my health. They saved my life. For the first time in my life, I got placed on the right meds and after battling full blown postpartum for a month, my head started to clear. The relationship continued but things were still going to shit. He had asked me to marry him while I was in the bathtub one night, ring and everything. I didn't have the balls to say no. Tension kept rising and the breaking point in our relationship was when he threw me up against a bed and slammed me against the wall (in front of our son). I layed on the floor feeling like I was in a Lifetime movie. I know I layed there for at least an hour, crying. I can't believe I had got myself into this. I now understood why women stayed in abusive relationships, and that's just what I did... I stayed, for our son and our family. Things finally came to a head when he got rushed to the hospital with a blockage. To make the long story short, I finally got to see him and his family for who they really were. I had no idea he was still sucking on his mother's teet, nor did I realize their level of insanity. He was in the hospital for about a month. During that time, his mother decided that she didn't want us together. She said that I wasn't 'there' for him but I was there every single day from 8-5 or until I had to go get our son. Remember I was still battling postpardom, raising a son, and trying to be with him. It all ended when she twisted a story about me leaving him at the hospital. She told the entire family I left him to die and that he quit breathing. I got the news that he quit breathing and called my parents in Mississippi, bawling. I thought I was the cause of his death and literally lost it. My parents sped an hour or so to Baton Rouge to be there for me and when we walked into the hospital room, he was sitting up, talking...like nothing happened. Nothing did happen. He never did stop breathing. I sat with him at the hospital for a month. I still battled fibromyalgia and was running out of energy. They had no idea what I was dealing with. I was by myself. It was just me and my son. They had a huge family that took turns sitting with him, but I was there every day regardless. I actually fainted one night when I got home because I was so exhausted. I wanted to leave. I wanted to leave him but I could never just leave him in the hospital. He treated me like shit, even though I was trying to be there for him. He would talk down to me like I was stupid, never could understand why he was treating me this way. I literally cleaned up this dudes shit off of the floor over and again. I bathed him. I cleaned up his throw up. I sponged his body with ice water when he didn't feel good. Every thing I did was gone unnoticed and the day he got out of the hospital, he dumped me. As much as I didn't like him, I was torn completely. I had just gone through the most traumatic dramafied chaos in my life and now this. He told me he wasn't choosing me over his family. I never understood what I did wrong. That day I realized how sick he was, how sick they all were. I packed my shit, got my son and left. I became a single mother and walked into the world alone, a different person. After getting over the initial shock, my life started to come together. The medication they had put me on for postpartum gave me my life back, the son that he gave me gave me purpose... it was the worst ride I had ever taken in my life but every single bump in the road was worth it. To be where I am today, with a beautiful son, with purpose, with a better understanding for life, not to mention my freedom...freedom from him, freedom from anxiety, depression... sometimes I still think about that yahoo personal profile. I still think there is still a little bit of love left for it... only the profile, not him.

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