I met Jon on Cinco de Mayo in 2010.
I had been out with friends, drinking and having a good time, when I needed a designated driver. Jon was a friend of a friend, and somehow he ended up being the person who came to get me.
Before I ever really knew him, I had already heard a few things.
I heard that he had been kicked out of a downtown Kansas City bar or that general area because of the way he was dressed upon arrival. Apparently, he had been wearing a wife-beater undershirt, he was tan, and he carried himself like someone who knew exactly who he was. For some reason, I remember thinking that if a man looked like that, he probably had a job and had his life together.
I was wrong about a lot of things in those early days.
But that night, none of that mattered.
We hit it off.
There was an immediate connection between us. I liked him. He made me laugh. There was something about him that pulled me in, and before long, Jon was spending more and more time at my house.
Eventually, sooner than later, he moved in.
At that point in my life, I had what I thought was a pretty normal, stable life. I had a home. I had a car. I had a job. My bills were paid. There was food in the refrigerator. I had a dog. I had responsibilities, but I knew how to handle them.
Jon's life had been very different.
He had recently been released from an Iowa prison, roughly a year before I met him, and had moved to his father's house in Kansas City, Kansas in hopes of reestablishing himself and his name for that matter after his last stint for domestic violence crimes against his children Emma & Sophie's mother, Jessica. According to a disposition I uncovered years later in my basement unbeknownst to me, it was actually RAPE that he was originally charged with as he held her hostage in her own home and proceeded to have his way with her from what I read in those papers. But like I said, I had no idea of the actual original charges until many years later. He claims he only broke a lamp and that's why he ultimately was sent away for a few years on the domestic charge. Make since of that. Oink Oink little piggy, is my only theory and is still to this day.
I knew pieces of his past, but I didn't understand the whole picture.
I grew up in what I considered a stable and conventional family. Both of my parents were there. We lived in a great neighborhood. I played sports year round, my parents were always supportive and proud of my achievements. I traveled in the summers with my equally supportive grandparents all over the United States, started a charity called Common Cents that is still alive today that helped local children with medical needs where we traveled to. And then I graduated high school in 2003 and went on to college. Eventually, I worked for my parents company from 2008 through 2016 and I've missed those times dearly ever since. Truly, the only job I didn't want to leave at the end of the day. It was my big girl job career ultimately. Just another thing I ended up ultimately sacrificing on Jon's account.
My life had not been perfect, but it had structure. It was full of love and warmth.
Jon came from a completely different world.
He had already been married young. His first wife had been only fifteen when she found out she was pregnant and she was his best friend's little sister. By the time I met him, he had five children with three different women that all lived within a few blocks of each other and were at one point, friends of one another.
He had also spent time in prison.
I knew enough to know that his past was complicated, but I didn't understand how much that past would eventually become part of my own life.
I also didn't know everything about the circumstances surrounding his previous relationships, his children, or his time in prison.
What I knew was that I thought I loved him.
And because I loved him, I wanted to believe that the past was the past.
Jon had very little relationship with any of his children when I first entered his life. His two youngest children lived in Le Mars, Iowa, and we would make the trip from Gladstone, Missouri, on weekends so he could have supervised, paid by us, visits with them.
The visits were usually only about two hours.
We would drive all the way there, have the visit, and then drive all the way back.
I remember thinking about how strange it was that someone could have five children and yet have so little of a relationship with them.
But I also remember wanting to help.
I thought maybe I could be the person who helped him build a different life.
That became a pattern in our relationship.
I kept seeing the person I believed Jon could become rather than fully accepting the person he was.
Eventually, Jon started working for my parents.
He worked in outside sales in Missouri. Before that, most of his work had been construction-type jobs.
My family became his family.
And I became increasingly invested in the idea that we were building something together.
There were warning signs.
There were arguments.
There were things that happened between us that I should have taken more seriously.
Physical violence began before we were married.
Even then, I convinced myself that we loved each other enough to get past it.
I was twenty-six, and I remember feeling pressure about getting older. I didn't have children of my own, and I thought maybe it was time to settle down and build the family I had always imagined.
So I married him.
I didn't tell my parents everything about Jon before the marriage. I didn't tell them about all five of his previous children. I didn't tell them everything about his prison history.
I think part of me was afraid that if I told them everything, they would see what I was trying not to see.
The wedding was beautiful.
It was a big wedding, a catholic wedding, and for that moment, I believed I was beginning the life I had always wanted.
We went to Puerto Rico for our honeymoon.
Seven nights, eight days.
And by the time we were getting ready to board the plane home, we were flat broke.
Looking back, that should have meant something to me.
At the time, I just thought we were young and starting out.
I didn't know how many times over the next several years I would find myself explaining away things that should have stopped me in my tracks.
I also didn't know that I was going to discover things about Jon's past that would completely change the way I looked at the man I had married.
One of those discoveries involved a woman who was related to him by marriage.
I learned that Jon had previously had a sexual relationship with her.
What made it even harder was learning that they had continued communicating for years after we were married.
Then there were the women I found through his phone and computer.
At one point, Jon was working out of town once a week for my parents company.
I began noticing things that didn't make sense.
I started checking.
I found communications with escorts through Backpage (a website that was ultimately shut down because prostitution in not a legal thing in most places). I found references to women and a questionable massage or back-rub establishment in Edmond, Oklahoma.
I didn't simply accept what I saw. I researched it.
The more I looked, the more questions I had.
Jon had his own insecurities. He was self-conscious about balding. There were sexual issues between us, and there were things about sex, power, attention, and ego that I didn't understand at the time.
But I kept trying to make the relationship work.
Eventually, we had two daughters together.
Suddenly, our family wasn't just about Jon and me anymore.
There were children who depended on us.
There were bills, jobs, houses, school, family, and all the ordinary pieces of life that make leaving something complicated even when you know something isn't right.
For years, I kept believing that things would eventually settle down.
I thought if we worked harder, loved harder, forgave more, or started over one more time, maybe we could get back to the people we had been when we first met.
I didn't realize that the story I thought I was living was slowly becoming something else.
The story wasn't even close to its worst chapter yet.