Ohio or Bust

Ohio Welcom Sign 90's Style.  Photo from Wikipedia

From the time I was a young kid, I always wanted to be a police officer.  My dad was, and my brother and I always dramatized ourselves working the beat together when we were old enough after both of our missions.  In fact, this was how things were going.  My brother had become a police officer while I was on my mission, and that’s what I was going to work towards when I got back.  Unfortunately for me, the police department my brother worked for was not hiring any new officers when I was ready.  They were in the talks of merging with the county sheriffs department, so until that was resolved, there would be no new hires.  

Since my wife at the time gave me the ultimatum to move out of state or country, I couldn’t wait for the local police department to hire again.  This is why I applied for a police department out of state, and was subsequently offered a position to a department in Ohio.  On one hand I was fulfilling my lifelong dream of becoming a police officer, but on the other I was far from home now, and not doing this with my brother as intended.  

There in Ohio we did everything Mormons are supposed to do.  We went to church on Sundays and paid our tithing and fulfilled our callings in the ward we belonged to.  Things got a little more difficult when I graduated the police academy though.  As a brand new police officer I was stuck working either 2nd or 3rd shift.  I chose 3rd shift so I could be home in the evening time with the family.  I didn’t have weekends off, and so dragging my ass to church on Sundays became a challenge.  We still did though, but I wasn’t in it 100% due to being very tired.  We still paid our tithing, but I had to give up any church callings as I couldn’t be depended on due to my schedule.

My relationship with Swede became strenuous the longer I worked nights.  I never slept well and Swede didn’t seem to care.  She expected me up by a certain time, and didn’t cut me any slack.  She didn’t work.  Instead, I provided and she was a stay at home mom.  Which is fine, but I certainly didn’t feel appreciated at home.  Swede was a very conservative person, and our sex life wasn’t much to brag about.  She was very self conscious about her body and wouldn’t let me see her naked.  Even when we had sex, she would keep her top on.  Sex didn’t happen often either, and I needed it.  She really only wanted to have sex in order to make a baby, so when we weren’t trying for a baby, we weren’t having sex.  

This led me to self gratification.  And if you’ve followed my other post about “little factories”, then you’ll understand how the Mormon church feels about masturbation.  None the less, I turned to it because I wasn’t getting fulfilled by her.  This soon turned into my viewing pornography on the computer.  One day, Swede saw my Internet history and called me out on it.  This made matters even worse.  Instead of talking about why I was watching porn, she just shut me out all together.  The Mormon mentality we had caused a great rift between us.  I was a terrible terrible sinner and she made certain I felt it, and I did.  Being a Mormon, I knew these things weren’t condoned by the church, yet I did it anyways.  I felt a lot of shame due to my actions and with my wife not allowing a discussion to occur between us, we became strangers to one another.  

This didn’t stop her from wanting another baby though.  After all, Mormons believe there are spirits waiting to come to earth and it's our job to create the body for them.  Naturally, doing God's will, she felt it would make everything better, and I wanted to have the sex and try to repair things between us.  I wasn’t able to ever see her breasts again though.  I couldn’t even touch them because I had chosen to look at boobs on the Internet.  After a few attempts, we were successful and she was pregnant with our second child.  We continued to go to church and I tried hard not to look at porn or masturbate.  It’s not very easy, and when I wasn’t being gratified by methods approved by the church, It became increasingly difficult to restrain myself.  She wouldn’t touch me or allow me the pleasure of touching a woman’s body.  She blamed me for taking her away from her home, and told me numerous times she should have married a different missionary.  She always pointed out my follies, and never blamed herself.  On top of all this, I had to deal with the stresses of being a cop.  I had to see terrible things.  Children killed, people blowing their brains out, decapitated drivers, parent’s overdosing, abused spouses and just the utter suffering of the innocent.  The last thing I needed, was a wife that shut me out and blamed me for all her woes.  I was slowly losing self control.  

But, the church was always first, and everything we did was in attempts to be good Mormons.  So we still went to church and paid our tithing, and put on a happy face.  I remember this time very vividly.  Like I said, the Church is a round hole, and it expects it's members to become round pegs.  I couldn't.  I was a square peg, and couldn't change that fact.  I was so focused on trying to be a round peg to fit the Church, that I didn't focus on just being me, and working on what I could control.

My second daughter was born in 2008, and her arrival brought both excitement and terror.  What happened next would utterly change the course of my relationship and life forever.