Thirteen Years Ago

today a lot happened in my life. I was stationed in Naples, Italy in the Navy there. I was married and pregnant.

At 6:00 AM, or thereabouts, my husband walked out of the door of the barracks where I was living and boarded a bus that would take him to the airport in Rome. I never saw him again.

I thought he had come over to be with me for the birth of our son, but in reality he had come to tell me he'd decided he didn't like married life and wanted a divorce. I asked him how did he know. You see, we had never lived together as man and wife.

Six weeks before we were to be married, he was transferred back Stateside. I wanted to postpone the wedding until we could be stationed together, but he told me that this was only TAD (Temporary Added Duty). He would be back in 8 to 12 weeks, then we would be together forever. I decided that if that was all he was going to be gone, there was no need to postpone our wedding. So we proceeded with our plans.

We were married on March 6, 1993 in my hometown. Two weeks later, I returned to Italy with the expectation that he would follow in about a month. I kept asking him when he was going to return to Naples, and he kept putting me off.

"It'll be a few more weeks." This came up, or that came up, and there were delays in getting his orders, etc, etc. Sometime in July, his tune changed. He became abrupt with me. Even angry sounding.

"That was a permanent transfer. You knew that. I told you that when I first got the orders!" Then he began urging me to get a hardship transfer, so that I could return to the States. I guess he thought I could get one simply because I was pregnant.

About two weeks after he had transferred that January, I started suspecting that I was pregnant. A home test, followed by a doctor visit, confirmed it. But no, the Navy doesn't give hardship transfers simply because you are expecting a baby. Or they didn't back then. Things may have changed since I was in.

Ironically enough, he was the one who wanted to hurry up and get me pregnant. It was all he talked about for the longest time. He even went and bought a home pregnancy test and wanted me to take it. When I finally did end up pregnant, the first words out of his mouth were,

"Oh no"

He said that we didn't really need a baby in our lives right then. Things were too complicated and a baby...well, we just didn't really need a baby right then. I said, "There's nothing we can do about it now" to which he replied, "yes there is." Though he didn't use the word, I knew what he wanted me to do. I refused.

"I'm having this baby, and if you don't want any part of it, I'll have it without you."

For a while, he seemed to accept that, and even appeared to be excited about the baby. He was still in the States, and we were making plans for him to come to Italy when the baby was born. I told him to fly over on October 13. My due date was actually the 23rd, but I had a feeling the baby would come early. By this time, we knew it was a boy. When I told him that I was having a boy, he stated that he'd "really, really wanted a girl." I answered that there was nothing we could do to change that now. He said, "well, yes there is..." And I refused yet again.

We knew the baby was a boy, but we hadn't decided on a name. I wanted to name him Luke, and he wanted to name the baby Dalton. We finally ditched both of those names and agreed on Cody Matthew.

I had told him to fly over on the 13th, but he insisted on coming on the 6th. I knew right away something was wrong. Now, we all know what men are like, and when my husband, whom I hadn't seen in 7 months, didn't want to sleep in the same bed--even the same room--with me, I knew something was wrong. The next morning, I went down to his room, and he asked me--his wife--to leave the room so he could get dressed.

He hemmed and hawed around for a couple of days, acting like he just didn't even want to be around me. Indeed, I hardly saw him while he was there. Finally, I confronted him, and that's when he admitted he just didn't' like married life. He didn't know it would be like that. He wasn't ready. He was too young. He was never going to get married. It just wasn't for him.

What I strongly suspected, though he would never admit to it, was that he had met another woman. He had met Angie just a month before. Only a month. That's all it took for him to decide to divorce me and marry her. Oh, yes, he asked her to marry him the day he got back to the States. He even tried to give her my engagement ring. He didn't buy it. It had been his mother's, and that's the only reason I gave it back to him. I felt it should stay in his family. I don't know what happened to it, because Angie refused to take it.

October 12, 1992. At about 7:00 PM, I went into labor, though I didn't realize it at the time. I asked him, "If I went into labor tonight, would you stay just one more day?" He refused. The next morning, he walked out of the barracks to board the bus that would take him to the airport in Rome. He didn't wave goodbye. He didn't even look back.

I spent that day getting my family housing set up. At that time, because I was living in the barracks, I couldn't move into family housing until the day I got out of the hospital. But I had to get my apartment before I went into the hospital, because once I had the baby, I couldn't go back to the barracks. Now, anyone who has moved, and anyone who has had a baby, knows you don't want to both at once. But that's how it was.

I still didn't realize I was in labor. I'd had the Braxton-Hicks contractions all throughout my pregnancy, so I thought the cramps I was feeling was just more of those. I wasn't. When I finally went to the hospital, I still didn't know I was in labor. I went to get checked out because I couldn't remember when I'd last felt the baby move. They hooked me up to the monitor and said, "Are you having contractions?" When I responded negatively, the nurse said, "According to my paper, you're in labor." She called the doctor, who told me to go home and come back in two hours. That's what I did, and when he checked me again, he said, "You're going to deliver tonight."

It is a very difficult thing to go through labor and delivery alone. There was one point at which I opened my eyes and there was no one in the room with me. No one. I was completely and utterly alone. The nurses were great, and stayed with me most of the time, even coaching me through the contractions, but it's not like having someone there who loves you and supports you. To make matters worse, I had begun running a high fever, with a temp of 102+. Though they never told me so, I believe that's the reason they wouldn't give me any pain medication. Not even so much as a Tylenol to take the edge off. Yep, I delivered my 8 1/2 pound son completely natural.

Around 9:00 PM, I went into hard labor, which lasted for about 3 hours, and...