Like I was saying I no longer wanted the sex life of a 15 year old boy with a dirty magazine, I was tired of being rejected by Susan over and over again.   I had just retuned from Texas after being gone for several weeks and even missing her birthday, Angela’s birthday, my birthday and Sara’s birthday that all occur in February.  I had gotten home late on Friday night and Susan was all ready in bed asleep or pretending to be I will never know for sure.  I do know that when she was asleep was the worse time to start anything with her so I simply went to bed and asleep as well. 

            Saturday morning had come and Susan left early to go to the dance studio again all day with the two girls that left Shawn and I home with me to help me pack up my truck and boat for the move to Idaho.  I was going to have to leave on Sunday morning in order to arrive in Idaho on Friday the day I was supposed to.  It was very cold that day for Maryland the temperature was only in the mid teens and the wind was blowing.  I had to unpack all my clothes that I had brought back from Texas; I had taken several loads there since I had been living there for nearly two months for 6 days a week.  I had to wash what was dirty and pack what I would need for several months to take to Idaho with me.  Shawn and I worked all day packing the back of my truck and the boat and going out to get a boat cover so that the boxes I had packed there would hopefully stay dry during my 3000 mile drive.  

            All day long I was stewing in the fact that the house was a filthy as usual meaning there was barely room for you to walk through all the dirty clothes from the family and every single dish, pot, pan, and glass was dirty and all over the house as well.  Trash had not been taken out in weeks even though it looked normal for the last 3 years we had lived there it still looked like a tornado had struck the place inside and out.  I was pretty upset about that still and the fact that I had not been able to be with Susan alone for weeks and she didn’t even seem to miss that at all anymore.  It took Shawn and I about 8 hours that day to get everything together by the time I went to town and found a boat cover and had everything ready for my early morning departure the next day.  The day I left was March 9^th 1996 my dad’s birthday. 

            At times during the day I was contacting two women I had been chatting with over the internet since December of 1994.  Starting on Christmas day in 1994 I found chat rooms on Prodigy and found out that women there were not afraid of talking about sex or upset if you did.  Actually what I found were hundreds over the next year that were as upset at their husband’s lack of attention sexually and emotionally as I was over Susan’s rejection of me in both sex and emotions over the past several years.  They were going for weeks and months with out intimacy just like I was and nothing they did seemed to make their husbands want to be with them either.  I had pretty much stuck with just two women after the first couple of months one from Seattle and one from middle Illinois.  The last day I was home I was chatting with both of them off and on and even called to talk to them both.  Granted neither knew about the other and I really never dreamed of meeting either one of them at anytime it was simply a way to at least talk about sex since my wife would neither have sex with me or talk about the reason why.  Susan would be quick to tell you it was because she was mad that I had porn magazines in the house but as I use to tell her if we had a normal sex life and I could have sex with her at least a few times a month I would get rid of the porn.  We tried that several times in the past 5 years since I knew that living with her and being sexually aroused by living with the one you love and yet not having sex was causing me to continually get infections in my sperm track I kept porn around to help relief myself and in my own mind at least was not cheating on Susan with a real woman like most men would have done and were doing.  I would agree with Susan several times the last 10 years we were together to get rid of the porn if she would just be a wife to me again and want to be alone with me to make love and have sex. She would do that and sexual relations would be once a week for maybe 3 weeks then she would stop letting me be with her again for months at a time.  After a couple of months and returning to antibiotics again for the infection I would go out and bring home an adult magazine once again to masturbate over.  I realize now of course that I should have simply divorced her years ago but forgive me for being stupid and actually in love with my wife and wanting to try anything to simply stay with her in any way that I could.  I took to heart my oath to stay together till death do us part and I know now how foolish and stupid that was in this time.  I am not sure what others would do or would justify in their minds after months and months of not having sex with the woman you loved all at the same time you were living under the same roof together but I turned to porn to help me both physically and mentally deal with the rejection. Also over the course of the last 14 months I was turning to the internet to converse with woman about sex and yes even having virtual sexual conversations over the internet and the telephone with the two I was talking about.  I have read in the news the past few years that people are actually taking their spouses to court calling it sexual abuse and suing them for being rejected for as little as 5 days in a row, I would have to sometimes go for 5 months before Susan would sleep with me I wonder if anyone would agree that was not normal or just me who thinks that was a problem?  Now a days nearly 10 years later and 5 years since I was last with Susan going with out sex is no real problem a lot has to do with the fact I don’t have to live with someone I love and being turned on by being with her so much that the desire for sex simply is not there and a lot I am sure has to do with the fact that she trained me quite well over 21 years we were married that I could go with out sex as well.  It simply is not a problem physically any longer because I don’t live with a woman I am not sure what the average man can take but it is easier to go with out sex of any kind when you don’t have to live with someone you are deeply in love with.  At least it is different for me in that area. 

            Well on my last Saturday night I was home and my first time at home in 4 weeks Susan came home around eight o’clock that night and was not interested in spending time with me she was more interested in cleaning the house for the first time in weeks and complaining the whole time because no one was helping her, meaning me since she would never ask the children to help and would get extremely mad if I tried to make them help.  She would start yelling at me that the children were not my slaves I would simply say that since I was not home during the time of the mess being made and it was made by all of them while I was working to support them they should be the ones to clean it up since not one of them was working to help support the family out of the home.  My son had a part time job but that was for his own spending money.  I am not sure if you can relate to how dirty my house would become but it was the worst thing I had ever seen in my life before or since being forced to leave her in 2000.  She would play for weeks at a time with the children never taking even 5 minutes out of a day during those weeks to clean or wash clothes then expect me to come home on a weekend and do it all for her while she spent the weekend off again playing at the dance studio with our daughters.  I remind you that it was not a single class or even two that they would be gone for each day but normally a minimum of 8 hours 6 days a week they spent there.  It was not only a matter of the time gone and the responsibilities of running a home that we had to deal with but the cost of all the classes, the costumes, but all the eating out that they would do during that time since Susan no longer took time to cook or even shop to have food at home.  For years even when I was not traveling I was eating out 3 meals a day 5 – 6 days a week because Susan would not cook except late at night if she did and with my reflux there was no way I could eat at nine o’clock when she would get home and attempt to cook and then go to bed with out choking on it 3 or 4 hours later in my sleep.  I simply no longer felt like I had any responsibility to help her at home since in her mind she had no responsibility to help make money that required me to work the jobs that required me to be gone 12 to 14 hours every day.  Not to mention the fact it was hard to feel sorry for her having to do it when she would simply play with the children for weeks before trying to clean up after them and not allowing them to help her clean up their own messes.  She would get mad at her mother even when they would visit and her own mother would ask the children to at least take their plates out of the living room to the dish washer when they had finished eating telling her mother the same as she told me that the children are not slaves.  Instead she expected us to be slaves to the children even into their late teens.  To me that was counter cultural to the way I was brought up and to the way I wanted my kids to help, it was not like I was asking them to work to support the family I simply expected them all to work together and do something to help each other around the house.  To me I was the only one that continued to live up to my responsibility and by working as required to provide 100% of the income and that was now causing me to work 12 – 14 hour days 6 days a week.   

            By this time maybe you can understand my frame of mind when I left Maryland the morning of 9 March 1996.  My goal for leaving Maryland was to go to a place where we could start over once again as a family unit and try to build on what we once had living in Germany and before.  I had hoped that by moving away from the dance studio and Susan obsession with that we could have time together doing other things.  It had gotten so bad even when we did get a way for a weekend she would take a girlfriend along with us just like the kids would often take their friends along.  Leaving me all alone since Susan would spend her time with her friends and not me, you can think what you want but I know now it was to make sure she didn’t have to have time alone and maybe sex with me.   

            The morning I left I knew I would be driving right through the town in Illinois where the woman I had been chatting with for over a year lived.  I also knew she wanted me even more than I wanted her.  At this time I was afraid that for the first time in my life I would actually cheat on Susan with another man, even though I had suspected Susan of cheating on me for years since her sex drive with me was so low I never wanted to cheat on her just the same.  At the same time I had not been touched by Susan in weeks and I also knew it would be months before we would be together again and then was not sure Susan would change and want to be with me either.  I had just turned 40 years old and was living the life of a 15 year old sexually maybe not the life of today's 15 year old but when I was 15 it was common not to be having sex with girls of our age but masturbating over some dirty magazine instead.  Needless to say I was calling my friend in Illinois and telling her I would be doing my best that night to make it to her town that first night and maybe we could meet each other while I was there.

             I was driving a little 4 cylinder S-10 truck fully loaded and pulling a 2,000 boat also loaded needless to say I soon found out I was not going to make very good time driving 3,000 miles in the coming week.  I left Maryland that Sunday morning about 7 AM barely able to even get Susan out of bed to kiss me goodbye.  I was only able to get a top speed of 40 mph over the mountains in Maryland and I did not get to the town in Illinois until after 10 that night much longer than I had ever dreamed of driving only 500 miles. 

            This woman was all alone that weekend her husband was out of town hunting and her two children were with their own father that weekend.  However since it was late that night when I got there and neither of us really wanting to sleep together the first and maybe only time we could ever actually meet we decided against her coming over that night.  She only was a couple of miles from the hotel I stayed in that night and she would drive over the next morning and see me off before I left. 

            I got up that next day and showered and packed up my truck and stood outside all ready to go when she came by around 8 that morning on her way to a course she was taking at college.  Don’t get this wrong she was 34 years old and I was 40 not a big deal in age difference.  When we met it was like dynamite instantly, we had talked so much about what we would do when we met that nature just took over for both of us.  It was not even 5 minutes before we had gone to my room to be alone to kiss.  It was not even 5 minutes later that I was naked with a woman other than Susan for the first time since I had met Susan in 1978.  I was 40 years old and had never once had oral sex in my life and one of the things this woman wanted with her husband was to give him oral sex and he didn’t like it so never allowed her to do that.  So she had always said that if we were to ever meet she would love to treat me to my first time.  I had no resistance left I had not masturbated in a couple of weeks hoping that the weekend I was home with Susan would allow me to have sex with her however Susan was Susan and simply had no desire for sex at least with me.  So once again nature took over and we spent about an hour alone together simply holding each other and her giving me what she had promised to me.  I had not held Susan in weeks it was quite comforting to actually be with someone that wanted to be touched by me and held by me and also loved touching me after so many years being rejected.   

            We only had the hour and for that whole day and the rest of the trip I regretted letting my desires get the better of me for the first time in my life. I had just done something I swore I would never do as long as I lived.  I had just let it get to me and was too lonely to go for several months with out Susan and having gone with out a normal relationship with Susan in the past several years either.

            The drive was pretty normal other than the speed and some minor problems with a flat tire on the boat and the cover blowing to pieces every day.  I would spend an hour each day re taping the cover tears and trying to keep the wind from destroying it completely before getting to Idaho. The day I left Illinois I stayed with my sister in Des Moines, Iowa and ate dinner with her and my mother.  I was planning on spending two days there but the speed I was making even in the flat lands was going to prevent that and I only got to spend the one night there.  I spend the rest of the week driving the best I could and got to Sandpoint, Idaho that Friday around noon. 

            Before leaving Maryland I had made arrangements to live Susan’s parents motor home even pre renting a space in a local trailer / camping park near Sandpoint.  So when I first got there I went to look at the space I was going to be renting gave them the deposit and first months rent and quickly dropped off my boat in my space.  I went to lunch at a local Chinese place and for the next 4 years I lived there never went back the service was very bad and the food the worst I had ever had.   

            After lunch I went to my new job to let them know I had arrived and to collect a check for expenses so I could live the next few weeks.  I had not been there talking to my new boss for even 5 minutes before I knew I had made a terrible mistake in taking this position and working for him.  I knew then I should have quit right then and walked out and drove back to Maryland.  I had made it very clear during the interviews I had a month prior that I was not a technician and had very little to any hands on equipment experience in 20 years. I had been a project and program manager for nearly 20 years managing processes and people. I was told that they had two technicians working there for the phone system but when I arrived they had fired them both and told me now it was my job to program the telephone switch and install the telephones as well as the job I had been hired to do.  I had been hired to find a new phone system that would keep up with the companies planned growth over the next several years and build up the current call center from a 60 seat call center to a 120 seat call center and to also build a new call center 60 miles a way from scratch, network the two call centers together and at the same time help choose a new long distance provider. 

            I had gone to work for a catalog company that made 100% of their income over the telephone and toll free numbers for the US and for Japan.  They found my resume through a head hunter in Spokane when their current system failed them during November and December of 1995 the only two months of the year they not only made a profit but made the money they used to survive the rest of the year.  The switch failed because no one there understood that no telephone system can take an infinite number of calls at the same time, at least not with out upgrades to handle additional loads and peaks.  Because the switch was provided by their current long distance provider and it failed they were bound and determined to switch providers and switches all at the same time.  The fact is that my boss pretty much had all ready made up his mind and my sole job was to go in approve his choices and make it work.  Needless to say since both of these contractors knew that as well there was little I could do to obtain competitive prices for either the carrier or the hardware for two new systems.  The cost of the two new phone systems one for the current call center and one for the new one 60 miles a way was going to be just over a million dollars.  There really was not a lot of choice either for the hardware portion simply because there was only one vendor that was local and able to respond to any emergency in less than a couple of hours.    

            At least once I gave my “approval” to the owner of the company that we could make this work out my boss left me alone except for the normal day to day things going on with moves around the company and phone problems with the current system.  Now since I did not have hands on experience nearly every time I had to do something I would call some men that use to work for me when I was at the White House and they would walk me through the programming of the telephone system computer so that the phones would do what I needed them to do.   It would take me 3-4 times longer to do the technical work than it would have taken a technician with years of hands on experience and it also would take me away from the project management of putting in the two new systems and building the new call center as well.  I soon found out that I had made another tragic mistake when I believed my boss during the interview that I would be only working a 40-50 hour work week.  Between the project and all the problems that were occurring I was working once again 12-14 hour days 6 if not 7 days a week.  I had actually hoped for the best but all I had done was trade a 5 hour a day commute time in Washington, DC for 6 more hours of work every day in Idaho. 

            I also had to learn a whole new political system when it comes to small private business politics.  One I never really learned or would accept that in time would be my down fall.  The first encounter I had was with a young teenager that was working part time for the IT department at this company.  My boss had given him to me to use so I could count current telephone systems through out the complex of buildings so I would know exactly how many I needed to replace in addition to the ones we were going to be adding to the call center.  Well it didn’t take long to find out this kid was useless not only to me but to the company.  He would come to work when he felt like it and then would not do what he was told to count the phones and types of phones.  What he would do would be come in late at night after everyone would go home even me like after 8 or 9 at night and then play on the computers normally looking at porn sites on the internet.  When I would talk to him he would pretty much blow me off and when I talked to my boss about this kid needed to go my boss told me he was the best friend of his boss’s teenage son and there was no way we were going to fire him as long as his boss liked the kid. I was told to forget it and not say a word about it.  So not only did I have to come in my self at night and count phones in addition to my other two jobs this kid was getting away with getting paid to look at porn on the computers throughout the company at night when no one else was around to catch him. 

            I was also told when I was hired that they would pay all my expenses to travel back to Maryland once a month for as long as it took to sell our home there so Susan and the kids could join me in Idaho.  Well with working 6 – 7 days a week that was never going to happen. So during the Spring break I had them fly Shawn out to me for a week so we could spend some time together and he could see the area, Shawn loved to fish and camp and so did I and I was hoping that once the project was over and they moved out that way we could get back to the life we had in Sacramento where Shawn and I would go fishing several times a month and camping 2 to 3 times a month. I wanted him to get excited about living in the mountains full time and not just visiting like we had always done before.  He was very happy that week at what I could show him I did not get to spend a lot of time with him but we did drive around quite a bit and did a lot of site seeing of the area.  At the time he was very excited about the move.  This was in April of 1996. 

            Over the course of the next few weeks and months I had the two call centers built and the contractor had done everything I asked them to do. We had the smoothest transition from long distance carriers that anyone in that company had ever seen and the same when we switched over hardware systems everything worked exactly as I had told them it would work.  They were all quite happy and the owner of the company was very impressed.  To me it was no big deal after all you don’t do the same thing in the Army for 20 years or 4 years at the White House and fail even once so this was not a big deal to me but normal.  However as it turned out the owner started getting closer to me than to my boss or his boss and this caused a lot of the political problems I was telling you about earlier.  My boss said the owner thought I was the messiah of IT systems and he personally hated messiahs and would do his best to destroy that image anyway he could.   

            My boss started to destroy me almost immediately after the successful switch over of the hardware systems.  He gave me the whole PC department, the computer network and the servers as well.   The more I told him what needed to be done the more he would cut back and tell me no I had to make it work with what we had.  What we had was untrained staff and a desktop 386 computer that acted as the server for the company.   By the end of the summer I finally convinced him that we needed to hire someone that understood networking if we were going to move forward with the company growth plans and also someone to work full time on the telephone switches for both locations if we were going to keep up with the daily changes being made to company and telephone needs.   

            We had interviewed a few people and made our choices the network guy was not perfect but he made up for it in determination to work as long as it would take to make sure what he did would work the first time and on time.  The telephone guy we hired was a disaster from the first day he walked in to the office.  He wanted to be hired for the network job and would spend half of his time telling me and everyone else in the company what was wrong with the network, phone system and the rest of the company.  When ever he would do anything with the telephone switch it was a disaster he would bring the whole system down. Even when I ordered him to have the technician from GTE with him while he was learning he would refuse and instead tell us that it was better for him to learn the hard way.  He had no appreciation for the fact that we could not afford for the whole system to keep going down while he was learning the hard way when 100% of the company’s income was based on the telephone systems he was bringing down so often.   Anyone with any experience with different types of companies and telephone systems understands that an inbound call center’s telephone system is programmed to work differently than say a lawyer’s office would use their phone system. However most technicians all though they have a lot of experience with the hardware it was experienced gained in only one type of environment and it takes a little time for them to understand the differences in programming and even what the telephone system can do. Most spend their time using only 10 -15% of the systems capabilities in the environment they have their years of experience in, some even refuse to believe that a system can do anything else and have to be let go. The guy we hired was one of these guys. 

            It was only about 3 weeks after he was hired that the VP of Operations came to me and asked me what this guy’s problem was and was it a good decision to hire him and should we let him go.  I had been talking with my boss all ready about letting this guy go because he would not listen to anything he was told.  My boss told me however it was my fault and maybe for the first time I was working with someone that actually knew more than I did and I couldn’t handle it.  I told him my whole life I had worked with technicians that all knew more about their hardware than I could ever hope to know other wise I would have never hired them or needed them if I knew more than they did I could do it myself. I hired everyone based on the fact that they were smarter in their areas than I was that was my job as a manger and a director.  I told my boss in this case the problem is I know more and that is causing the problem he was costing the company money everyday he was their because he refused to listen to anyone.  It was only in the next week that the owner of the company called me to his office and told me maybe I made a mistake in hiring this guy and we needed to let him go he would take care of him and ensure he was given the expenses to move back where he came from and a severance pay as well.  I went to my boss and told him that I was being directed by the owner now to fire this guy but my boss told me that the owner was an idiot and if I fired this guy or let him quit I would be fired my self.   So I was stuck between a rock and a hard place now. For the first time in my life as a manager I was not being listened to and unable to follow the orders even of the owner of the place with out going to him and being a tattletale on my boss and his boss.  Well I had learned in the Army that there is more than one way to succeed in a mission given by higher commanders when my immediate commander doesn’t want to do it.  I made life so hard for this guy that he quit with in the week. Much to my boss’ disappointment the owner was so happy that the guy quit on his own and didn’t have to pay expenses or a severance pay there was nothing my boss could do to me.  However it only made my boss more determined than ever to make me look bad. 

            I am going to go back a month or so now and talk about my family and Susan and our move to Idaho.  Susan was not happy at all about leaving Maryland even though she had always dreamed of living in that part of Idaho her whole life it was near where she grew up and her parents and where she also went to college. The problem is she had lived in Maryland now longer than ever before and she had her own life there and didn’t have much to worry about being a wife or homemaker since I had been gone so much. She was not looking forward to having to live with me full time again since it had been since 1990 and when we lived in Sacramento that I was home every night she had not only grown accustomed to me being gone most of the time but actually preferred it since she didn’t have to worry about the kids thinking there was anything wrong with living in a pig sty or no groceries in the house most of the time they grew up the last 6 years that way and simply thought that was normal.  After all they were teens themselves and you know they love to live in a place with no rules and don’t have to worry about cleaning after themselves.  Susan pretty much drug her feet from day one about putting the house in Maryland up for sale even refusing to go to a professional real estate agent to get the place sold.  She finally found a local agent broker that reminded her of her own mother to sell the place and by August my company was ready for me to have my family there with me so they agreed to pay my house payments in Maryland in addition to my normal pay until the house sold.  However with Susan’s choice of agents what happened was a big disaster and with her own devious mind she pretty much set the place up not to sell in order to get back at me for making her move.  Also by this time my son had his first love and he was in no way ready to move away from her by August and that was pissing Susan off as well that I would make him move when he did not want to.  She wanted me to quit and come back to Maryland and do the 5 hour commute again and be gone 50% of the time.   She did not do much to get the place ready to be sold the pool she insisted that we had to have for her to move from Sacramento had pretty much not been used in nearly 2 years since she found out it required daily maintenance to be able to be clean enough to use.  It was filled with garbage including bikes and bricks that I would find out about over a year later in 1997 when the place finally sold.   

            When I flew back to Maryland on a Friday night all was suppose to be ready for us to leave that night and get out of the state that night.  However a series of things were going wrong.  I had flown with a hand gun since I don’t like to drive across the country with out one and after all I was still somewhat of a target for foreign agents if they ever learned what I use to be responsible for at the White House and for the JCS.  I know few people understand that but just because I wasn’t working there or on the programs any longer didn’t make multi billion dollar projects go a way or unimportant to national security or the Presidents security because I was gone.  Some will never be declassified and others will fade in the coming years but still likely to never be known by the general public.  Well the suitcase I had put my gun in was missing it was legally declared so that was not the issue it simply missed the connecting flight somehow.  To make matters worse Susan had delayed getting our motor home ready for the trip and had to pick it up at the garage that day and she lost a cat.  She was not going to move to Idaho with out her cat.  She was not at the airport in DC when I got there I waited around 5 hours for both her and my suit case to arrive then finally took a cab down to a small town hotel near where we lived.  She came about hour later after she found the cat.  She cared a lot more for her cats than she did me that was for sure but at the same time she cared for them and paid so much attention to them she failed to also take them or the dogs in for their shots either.  So to make matters even worse when we were suppose to be out of Maryland on Friday night on Saturday morning I had to find a vet open that would give them the shots required to move across country.  We soon found out after moving to Idaho that the cat she lost was terminally ill anyway with leukemia because she had never taken the time from dance to take it to the vet years before for any vaccinations at all. 

            That first night we were together was much like a honeymoon should have been for us intimacy was great we had two rooms one for us and one for the kids since the company was paying expenses and not the Army we could afford privacy.  In fact every night on the move was like a honeymoon for us for the first time in years we were being intimate every night I was surprised but didn’t say anything I had learned long ago that to complement her or to thank her would ensure being cut off for weeks or months if one particular night was better than most.  I simply had thought I had done the right thing in moving from Maryland and I was regaining my family and my wife once again and nothing else mattered to me as long as we were together and being a normal husband and wife and family again.   

            However that the honeymoon ended the day we arrived in Idaho when the first stop Susan had to make was the local dance studio again, her fist step was to sign the girls up for as many classes as she could.  That took her away immediately once again for 8 or more hours a day.  Since I was working full time and she was at the dance studio full time it left us little time to find a house together.  After all the months I had looked alone I did not want to pick a place out by myself since the house in Maryland had not sold and Susan always complained about my choice.  We looked at several places we could rent with an option to buy some were very nice but too far and too remote to even contemplate the drive during the winter.  The last thing I wanted was to be stranded for weeks in the mountains in a snow storm.  We finally found a very nice place on 4 acres of land with 3 bedrooms and 2 and 1/baths that we could rent and buy later once that house in Maryland sold. The idea was to finish the basement for Shawn so he could have his own room and we did turn it into a full master bedroom for him soon after the house in Maryland sold finally in late 1997. 

            A month after we all got to Idaho I was living in my dream home with a porch that I could sit on and view the mountains and a lake below.  The cat that got lost when we were leaving Maryland soon died after we got there. For weeks it did nothing but sit in the same spot I finally convinced Susan that it was not getting any better and she had to take it to the vet it was her cat and I simply could not take the time off work to do it for her. Remember she was not working except taking the girls to dance class.    She was taking care of the house a little better there than the one in Maryland but not by much she was only cleaning about every 2 – 3  weeks or when ever her parents would come to visit since they only lived about 4 hours away. Susan hated to listen to her mother tell her how dirty the place was so she would clean it before her mother came then leave the daily cleaning to her mother once she was there.  Sex with us was less than weekly but normally a couple times a month at least the six months we were there.  I was still in communications with the woman from the internet I had met in December of 1994 that lived in Seattle but we agreed we could never meet and I had stopped communicating with the one I met in Illinois soon after I got to Idaho I felt so guilty about actually having sex with her I couldn’t take the chance of letting that happen ever again.   

            Soon after the telephone technician had quit I had found a man that actually was in my command at the White House living in the local area that was telephone technician and we hired him with in a couple of weeks of the other guy quitting. The idea was for him to move a little closer to us so he could work out of Sandpoint and then later hire another guy so he could go back to Coeur d’Alene where he preferred to live. Things didn’t work out quite like that the first year and he had to commute the 50 miles every day but to his credit and military background he was never late not even once and worked like I was working 12 hour days trying to keep up with both call centers 60 miles apart. 

My boss had become impossible to work with by the end of 1996 no matter what I said we needed to do he would cut it by half and his boss by another half and the owner by another half.  We were soon failing at everything we tried because we didn’t have the equipment or training required to do the job.  I learned after a while that they were all such liars that they only assumed I was padding the budgets that I would request and they had all gone to the same management training that if you as the senior boss don’t cut the budgets by half at every level you would be wasting you money and your boss may not think you were needed any longer. Not an effective way to manage but I did learn it is common in private industry for managers to work that way especially if they have no clue what so ever what you do for a living.  What we learned to do the hard way was to pad the budget and put all we needed plus several items we knew should and would be cut in order to give the higher ups something to do and joke about how we were trying to pull a fast one on them. They would cut the obvious and leave us alone with the things that were required it was a big joke the first time we did it because I told the guys that worked for me what we needed to do and when it worked perfectly at all levels we all laughed our heads off for days.   

            By the spring of 1997 the house in Maryland had still not sold, Susan was back to living the way she had become accustomed to in Maryland sex less than once a month and everything in the house being dirty all the time maybe cleaning every 4 – 6 weeks even the laundry was packed so high in the laundry room between the house and the garage it was impossible to use the room to go through the laundry would be piled on both the washer and dryer and on the floor higher than the machines as well.   

            In June of 1997 and since my son’s birthday and my father in-law’s birthday were on the same day they came up to celebrate together for the first time since Shawn was born it was hi 18^th birthday as well.  Things at work couldn’t be worse actually I had been relieved of all but the telephone duties and they had hired another man to manage the PCs and networks since I had been set up to fail too many times by doing only exactly what my boss told me to do.  We were going to need to expand the computer room the same as I had told him from day one when I got there and he was refusing to do it even at first when the new guy was telling him as well that it would be required once we finally got the real servers we finally had gotten approved before the new man was hired. We were fighting all the time over the lack of space but the boss was holding fast to the fact that he could make it work. 

            The day of the birthday party my mother also had a heart attack.  Susan true to her form was mad at me and my mother because she had to have a heart attack on Shawn’s birthday and ruin the day for the family and cause me to think more about her health than Shawn and her dad’s birthday.  It wasn’t all that bad really my mother was doing okay all things considered but I was concerned for her none the less. I think it is normal for even an older son to worry about his mother when she has a heart attack much less when he is 2000 miles away and really can’t see her for himself.  Susan was pissed all day long over it and told me so in no uncertain terms that night in bed. 

            The day after my mother’s heart attack things took a turn for the worse for her and I really started getting worried about how things were going they were no worried if she would survive the way her body functions were starting to fail.  Susan was pissed again that I was worried about my mother telling me how her father had had heart attacks and how he survived and was okay and I should not worry so much or bother her or the kids with her pain.  By the second day her kidneys and other organs had shut down and they were not expecting her to live much longer. I started to make plans to make the drive to Iowa to see her before she would die and to be there to help my sister with the arrangements. I did not want to drive alone and I did not want to drive my little pick up the 2000 miles either. I wanted the family to go so they could see their grandmother one more time and be there for me when this was all happening. However no one could take the time to go with me not even Susan they were all so busy with their games and dance that no one had time for me or my mother.  I wanted to take Susan’s car since it was much more comfortable and would drive much faster than my truck as well. Nearly 1/3 of the trip was through Montana and they didn’t have a speed limit in those days.  Susan car needed brakes and tries to make that trip.  She got mad at me because I spent $150.00 on a brake job and she said she new a friend of hers that could do the brakes for $25.00 now any man who has ever replace brakes himself knows that that you can’t even buy the brake shoes or pads for all four wheels for only $25.00 much less turn the rims and the rest of it.  I really suspected from that point on that the only way she could get a $25.00 brake job was by providing some sort of personal favors for the man doing it.  Not to mention how did she have the time to know a man in the first place that was single and could do that? Also not to mention the fact that she had no interest in going with me while my mother was dying.    

            I have to tell you the day I left to go to my mother’s side I was sure it would be the last time I would ever see her and I was really pissed off that not one of my children or my wife cared enough about me or my mother to go with me. I fumed the whole trip and tried my best to find a female hitch hiker to go with me.  I was talking with my friend in Seattle that I had now known for a couple of years and trying to get her to meet with me but she worked and the mad she was with was not doing so well either and she just couldn’t get a way at all.   

            By my second day on the road to Iowa my mother had started to make a turn around I am not sure if it was because I was coming or what but I was more than half way there by the time I found out so I went and spent a week with her anyway. It was good for her and my sister to have me there during that time. She spent another couple of weeks in the hospital after I left before she could go home.   

            The damage at home had all ready been done by this time I was very mad that my wife of 18 years would let me go to my dying mother’s side all alone and didn’t even  care enough about me to be there for me at all.  I suspected because of the lack of intimacy between us and that she was having an affair since she was gone so much of the time anyway.   

            I had been looking for another job for several months by the summer of 1997 I just could not stand working for the boss I had.  Since I started working when I was 15 I had never ran across a man like that before as my boss if I did he normally worked for me and I could either get him to change or fire him in the positions I held.  This guy was impossible to work for.  I had lined up a very good interview that summer that somehow they found out about.  Two days before I was going to go to the interview my boss’s boss took me out for a boat ride on his boat all alone and to dinner to find out why I was looking for a different job and that they needed me to stay.  The next morning the owner of the company had me meet him for breakfast to do the same.  Needless to say like an idiot I let them talk me into staying since the owner told me how much he and his wife liked me and no matter what they would take care of me and always have a place for me in their company regardless of who I had to work for. He explained to me he knew how hard it was to work for my boss and he was in the process of taking care of that problem for me if I would only trust him and stay around. 

            Later that summer I had to have knee surgery for an injury I had gotten in 1975 during basic training I had been suffering with knee problems every day of my life since that day for 22+ years and they finally the VA hospital in Spokane did an MRI and knew exactly what they needed to do to repair the problem. Prior to that the x-rays never showed anything wrong and they wanted to do exploratory surgery which I was not interested in since I heard nothing but horror stories about those from too many people.  When they did the MRI the clearly saw the damage and knew exactly what needed to be done.  The day the surgery was scheduled Susan was too busy to take me to the hospital however her parents were staying for the night and offered to take me to the hospital and Susan could come later and pick me up.  One has to wonder what his wife of 18 + years is too busy at 6 AM to take her husband to the hospital for surgery but I was accustomed to that kind of treatment when ever I had to go to the hospital for any thing including emergencies.  I am pretty sure now that she had made a prior date with her boy friend and that is why she could not take me.  At that time I think her boy friend lived in Canada or pretty far from where we lived since her gasoline bill was over $400.00 a month when gas was less than a dollar a gallon and we lived in a very small town. Even when I had to drive weekly to Spokane and my normal drives around town for work and pleasure I only used half that much in two months as she was going through in one month.   

            I got to the hospital that morning only to find out my surgery had been cancelled at the last minute due to an emergency surgery my surgeon had to do.  We ended up rescheduling it for a month later and my in laws stayed with me for the next six hours until Susan could come and pick me up. 

            When I finally had the surgery Susan was free to take me and we actually spent the night before in a hotel in Spokane so we would not have to get up so early and make the drive in the morning. I had to be there at 6 AM.  By noon that day it was over and we were on our way out.  My knee did not hurt for the first time in over 22 years and I was feeling real good about that I could walk or set and have no pain for the first time in all those years. I did not listen to the doctor I was over come by the fact that I could walk and not feel pain not fully understanding it was the medicine he used to numb the area was why I felt no pain. I insisted in walking with Susan since it felt so good to be alone with her and my knee did not hurt either.  However by that night that all changed my knee had swollen to the size of a grapefruit and it hurt worse than any pain I had ever had.  I was going to have to stay in bed for a few days and no walking around exactly like the doctor told me in the first place. That night I finally got out of our bed and slept on floor on an air mattress because both Susan and Sara were in our bed and I didn’t want to disturb them any more with my moving around trying to get comfortable.  That is another thing since Shawn was born in 1978 Susan and may have slept alone maybe only 10 nights a year so for nearly 20 years it had been pretty hard to get to amorous in the middle of the night even if she would.  

            The first day at home I was sleeping when Susan left and took the kids off for the day with her.  The second day I was in our bed and awake when I heard her get up and tell the kids that they better go with her or other wise they would be forced  to wait on my all day long since I could not leave our bedroom. I don’t know how that would make you feel knowing you were bed ridden for a two or three days and hearing your own wife telling your children even they needed to get out of the house or be forced to wait on me. They all left that day and left me with nothing on the second floor to eat or drink either one. Our kitchen was on the first floor and the bedrooms on the first floor.  Angela was in school but not the other two and in fact Angela had one of her friends from Maryland visiting us at the time so it was just me and her teenage friend alone all day long.  I never asked her friend for a thing and I don’t even remember seeing her. I drank water I could get from the bathroom faucet and didn’t eat all day long.  What I did do was the beginning of the end for me when it came to the internet.   

            I was so pissed off about what Susan had said that day then leaving me all alone with nothing to drink or eat I got on my company lap top and loaded a disk I had from AOL.  I had never used AOL before I had only been chatting now with the woman from Seattle for over a year but she was at work and I was lonely since no one was at home.  I loaded AOL and found there hundreds of chat rooms there of all kinds. It did not take long to find dozens of women to listen to my sad story and to hear theirs as well.  I was lonely and since Susan was not only not there and paid so little attention to me anytime she was there sick or well I grew addicted to AOL chat rooms and all the lonely women there.    Mind you I only chatted with adults it was pretty easy to tell if you were chatting with a minor pretending to be an adult since they neither typed well or used the same words as adults did.  But the adults I talked with would talk about anything and for me the first time in my life I found some one I could have a conversation with any time day or night.  Since Susan by this time was spending hours and hours away from home with the dance studio and her friends staying out late at night drinking and parties AOL was the answer I thought to my problem of having no one around.

             I know a lot of what Susan did to me all those years was a direct result of the hours I had to work both in the Army and in civilian life so far. But, since I was the only one working in the household I had to work the tough higher paying jobs in order to support and be the sole provider for my family. She would leave me alone to show me what it was like when she was alone all those years never appreciating the fact that I was at work providing for them all but simply focused on the fact that I was gone and it was pay back time. She never remember the time when she was pregnant with Sara and while in the hospital how I had to be everything all by myself for everyone for six months.  Even when she was home for 3 months I had to wash all the clothes, cook all the meals, work full time and take the kids to school and take care of her because she had to stay in bed 24 hours a day only supposed to get up to go to the bathroom and shower once a day.  Needless to say that sex was completely out of the question during that time because it clearly could have killed her or Sara to do that.  Susan was paying me back in Idaho for making her move and leaving her alone.  She always would argue with me for years in front of the children about say I only worked and traveled so I could get out of the house. 

            From the summer of 1997 on things only went down hill faster than ever before for the first time things were not only bad at home but they were just as bad at work I had no place to go where I felt I was wanted by anyone.