Sam the Sham

Having terminated my first marriage to preserve my sanity after three years of mental and physical abuse, I soon went into the Army. After being sent to a permanent post in Frankfurt, Germany, I met another soldier who was determined to get to know me.

Sam and I both were stationed with the same division so we saw each other virtually every day. After the abuse I had experienced with my first husband, Sam's kind attentiveness caused me to quickly come to like, and later love him. We flew home to Wisconsin to get married a year after we had begun dating.

Our first year of marriage was quite pleasant and we happily shared a tiny apartment off base in Frankfurt. A year later, when we both had roughly a year left in the Army, we were sent stateside, where I spent my final months working at the Military Personnel Center just outside Washington, DC. Without a doubt it was the best year of our marriage as we shared a lovely apartment and truly enjoyed each other's company.

Sam was discharged just weeks before I was and we decided to resettle in Colorado Springs. Trouble began not long after we moved because Sam could not seem to hold a job outside of the military. I was working for an insurance company which was a very stable job, but the following Spring I learned I was expecting a baby.

The baby was due in December so I worked through my entire pregnancy, but it was obvious that Sam was not as interested in the baby as I was. He had grown up in a family with serious mental illness issues and "bonding" with family was something that was quite foreign to him. As he frequently put it, "I grew up on the streets of Philadelphia." I felt sorry for him but I hoped he would love the baby once he saw the new, little creation, after birth.

Jason was born just before Christmas and I returned to work when he was only three weeks old. Sam was now working as a real estate agent and struggling to make even one sale. By the time the baby was three months old, we both decided to move back to Wisconsin where we could live with my parents until we found jobs and an apartment.

While it was very frustrating for me, I never in a million years expected Sam to decide he was in love with my sister, divorced and six years older than me. I figured it was like an infatuation as my sister really is quite attractive, but she had absolutely no interest in him. Actually, she found him to be rather disgusting because of the way he ignored me and the baby and thought only of himself.

Because I knew she disliked him, I didn't worry about his infatuation with her. What did bother me was that after we found our own place, Sam began bargaining with me, saying things like "If you will tell your sister nice things about me, I'll treat you better."

By this time Jason was four months old and even though Sam was still unemployed, he refused to care for the baby while I worked. Instead, I had to take him to a babysitter five days a week. Naturally, my temper was wearing quite thin and my feelings for Sam were now reduced to anger and contempt. What a jerk of a father he was!

Things continued to go from bad to worse. While I did find a better job and we moved into a larger apartment closer to my parents, Sam reached the point of no return one evening. He was so stuck on my sister that when he came home one evening, he degraded me until I finally retreated to the bedroom where I collapsed on the bed sobbing into my pillow. Then he came in and callously said, "You know, if you were your sister, I would be in there comforting you right now."

Enough was enough. At that point our marriage was over! My little son, then age two, and I moved into an apartment of our own where Sam only bothered to visit him three times in an entire year.

When Jason was three, his father remarried, moved away and aside from one visit with him when he was eight-years-old that went very poorly, he never called or had any contact with him again until he was 18 years old. It was certainly no surprise to me that Jason had no feelings for his real dad. Sam had brought it on himself.

I could only be thankful that when Jason was four, I married a former police sergeant who loved and cared for him as much as if he had been his from birth. To this day Jason considers his step-father to be his real father and has taken his last name to be his own. And for the past 25 years, I have been privileged to have a husband who loves me unconditionally and would do anything within his power to make me happy.