An Honest Hot Mess

This isn’t the part I wanted to write. Honestly, I considered skipping it entirely and blaming “technical difficulties.” But I can’t tell you the whole story without telling you how we got here.

Because up to this point, what you’ve read could be illustrated as dozens of fingers pointing at Eric. But that’s unfair. It takes two to tango—and we were square dancing, to techno.

On our honeymoon I was an anxious wreck.

I wanted to blame it on Eric—his drinking, his weed smoking, cigarettes. 🤮 This wasn’t the man I fell in love with. In fact, I fell for him partly because he didn’t do any of those things.

Yet …here I was. Once again in a relationship with an addict. We can unpack that whole mess another time.

The anxiety I felt on my honeymoon was not all Eric’s fault. I was anxious because I was hiding something.

So while a finger may have been pointing at Eric… the rest on both hands could point back at me while asking “who did he fall in love with?”

When he met me, I looked pretty darn good on paper. Living in my own place. Holding a good job at a web development firm.

But what he didn’t know was that I had a heaping mound of debt that was causing me enormous stress. I was robbing from Peter to pay Paul and he didn’t have a clue. He assumed my stress was from starting a new business.

Which was in fact true.

But how would he feel knowing that when I quit my job to start a web design business (with no real plan) I was dragging a mountain of debt behind me?

I was terrified to tell him and of how he would look at me and what it would do to him. What it would do to us.

But it was gnawing at me.

Big time.

And how would he feel that I had waited to tell him, after the wedding, instead of after our pastor opened the floor to both of us to divulge anything heavy during our pre-marital counseling session.

When I said nothing. My lips were sealed tighter than Tupperware in a microwave.

Here’s where I could absolutely berate myself for being a total moron.

How much I wish I could go back and teach myself how not to make all the mistakes I had made.

But instead of beating myself up, I have learned to forgive myself. Partly because I now know why my brain is the way it is and that a lifetime of struggling with ADHD is the reason for hundreds of regrets due to rash decision making.

And money management with ADHD?

Picture a squirrel frantically gathering nuts for winter—then forgetting which tree he hid them in and giving away the rest at whim.

Yeah. That’s about right. 🐿️

One other fun fact: Shame Avoidance and ADHD is also a thing. And don’t even get me started on Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD).

But I didn’t know any of that back then.

I only knew that Eric deserved the truth and I hated what I knew I had to do.

So, holding onto the belief that God had brought him into my life, gave me the courage to tell him.

And so I did.

I don’t recall how I told him or exactly what I said, or where I said it, and I don’t recall his reaction. It’s been conveniently plucked from my memory.

Side note: If this didn’t give him fuel later on to keep things from me that he didn’t want me to know… just sayin’.

And then I told my parents.

Their only words: “We wish we could help you, but we can’t.”
I wasn’t asking for help. I just thought they deserved to know.

The mess only got messier from there.

There was the condo I co-owned with my sister—the one tied up in the HELOC loan I had taken out to qualify for my mortgage to consolidate my debt. This was the bank’s idea, not mine.

The only thing I knew for sure:
My sister wasn’t going to pay for my mistakes. No one but me should pay for my mistakes.

So, with the help of a bankruptcy lawyer (same one Eric’s uncle had used years earlier), I filed for Chapter 13 instead of Chapter 7.

It was grueling, but it protected her.

And Eric—shocked, hurt, upset—still supported me.

Even when he said, at one point, “If I’d known, I probably wouldn’t have married you.”
(Which—ouch—but also… fair.)

He didn’t say it to hurt me.
He said it because he knew it would’ve been easier for me, and for us to get through it all without his income being a factor.

Totally true. But still not words any newlywed wants to hear from their spouse.

But he stayed.
And we pushed on.

And then… amidst the chaos came Ethan.

We got pregnant on our one-year anniversary trip to Costa Rica.

Eric had heard about a couple who was selling their surf charter business and it had always been his dream to own one. He had been terminated from the job he had when I met him so we took it as a sign to finally pursue a dream.

It felt reckless. It was reckless.

Go to Costa Rica penniless and get pregnant.

Sounds like the title to a Jimmy Buffet song, doesn’t it? 🌺

(Also, let me just say:
Drugs and alcohol = terrible life decisions.
There. I said it.)

We had a large time in Costa Rica despite the fact that most evenings I would go to bed irritated with him while he hung out at the local watering hole. Drinking and smoking mota, speaking his obnoxious Spanglish with the locals. And yet still somehow I got pregnant.

Even though Eric had basically promised half the village a job once we bought the surf charter business, we left Costa Rica with no real intention—or plan—to ever go back. Not only was the charter boat a hot mess, so were we. And, by the grace of God, we had just enough sense left to recognize it wasn’t something we could—or should—pursue.

So we came home and did what we’d always done when life got messy: we hustled. We leaned on our networks, took whatever jobs we could, and tried to make it work. The connections we’d built over the years—through former jobs, side gigs, and a few gracious friends—helped us get back on our feet faster than we probably deserved. It was a patchwork of opportunities, but it paid the bills.

And just when I thought I might have to start designing websites for dog groomers and real estate agents again—using their homemade logos in Comic Sans, mind you—the company I’d left a year earlier called me out of the blue. They offered me my old job back as an account manager. Not my dream job, but with a baby on the way, and the memory of pastel paw prints and flaming WordArt still fresh in my mind, I wasn’t about to be picky—especially when it came with health insurance.

Eric, meanwhile, got a job offer in Mississippi and left just a few weeks later. We told ourselves it was temporary, just long enough to get back on our feet. But while I was growing a baby, juggling a full-time job, and trying not to vomit every time I passed a microwave burrito, he was sliding deeper into the very habits I had hoped would fade. Especially with a baby on the way. I kept thinking: surely this will snap us out of it. Surely this will be the turning point. But addiction doesn’t care if you’re expecting.

Long-distance marriage? Not for the faint of heart. Long-distance marriage while one person is nesting and the other is numbing? That’s a recipe for some future posts.

Before we fill in those giant gaps, I feel compelled to jump back into what led me to writing this blog in the first place.

Where did I leave us? Let’s see: Eric was out of the hospital, and we were home. Ethan started the 5th grade. And we started the process of getting our 💩 together.