At 18 I was a military wife. By 22 I was a single mom of two toddlers in the Great Recession of 2007.
I was a military wife at age 18. I graduated in 2003 in the top 10% of my class with a 3.8 GPA and a state scholarship. Before a year had passed, I was married and had moved across the country from Goose Creek, SC to Colorado Springs, Colorado.
We only had one car and didn't want to work opposite schedules as newlyweds, so we planned to buy a second car ASAP and find work for me then. We’d originally planned to wait on kids, but after a pregnancy scare, we realized we felt ready after all. Less than six months into our marriage, I was 19 and pregnant.
It already sounds like a trainwreck unfolding, doesn't it?
We bought two cars and a two-bedroom townhome in an up-and-coming neighborhood. My ex drove a red Pontiac Sunfire, while I had a dark green soccer mom minivan. I found a part-time job at a local marketing agency and greeting service that let me bring Corbin along (until he got too mobile).
I started writing. That made me really happy because it was what I always wanted to do. I mastered SEO, rose to the highest pay grade at the primary site I wrote for, and was featured on the front page more than once. I even taught new writers and caught the attention of a few respected voices in niche fields.
I believed in attachment parenting. We coslept from day one. I breastfed Corbin until he was two but stopped short of tandem nursing. Orin was born a few months after Corbin weaned. By then I'd switched to cloth diapers (and cloth TP for myself), couldn't wait to homeschool, and was caught up in the natural living craze. I made very different health decisions, like that Orin was born at home.
I also ran a home daycare, serving military families and low-income single moms. Between parenthood, babysitting, and writing, motherhood became my whole life and identity. Sometimes I'd have up to six kids in the house and work as many as sixty hours in a week. I never came close to earning what my husband did, but I felt like I worked constantly.
Friends and family back home had little idea what went on behind the scenes, but my ex's alcoholism wasn't some well-kept secret through all of this. It wasn't plastered all over social media, but it was very public locally. There were other issues, too--personality clashes, communication breakdowns, lifestyle incompatabilities.
I've been asked, "Was it really that bad?" I don't know. Whatever it was, I left before Orin's first birthday. I was 22 when I packed my kids, my dog, and whatever would fit into a Dodge Caravan and drove from Colorado back home to South Carolina.
My birthday was a few months later. At 23, I was a low-income single mother of two toddlers with only a high school diploma and limited work experience. That was in 2008--during the "Great Recession." The bank took the townhouse. I guess it wasn't much of a home anymore by then anyway.
