For a while, I really believed we were building a family.
Not a perfect family.
Just ours.
Jon had five children from before our marriage, and eventually we had two daughters together. That meant our family was bigger than the traditional picture I had grown up with, but I embraced it.
I wanted my children to have a relationship with their father.
I wanted Jon to have a relationship with his children.
I wanted everyone to feel like they belonged.
The irony is that I spent so much time trying to hold everyone together that I didn't realize how much of myself I was losing in the process.
When Jon and I first met, his relationship with his children was limited. His two youngest were in Le Mars, Iowa, and the visits were supervised.
I remember the long drives.
Kansas City to Iowa.
Two hours of visiting.
Then back home again.
It was exhausting, but I kept going because I believed it mattered.
I believed that if I supported Jon, he could become the father he wanted to be.
After we married, Jon worked for my parents in outside sales. He became part of my family's business and part of my family's life.
That created another layer to everything.
My parents weren't just my parents anymore. They were his employers.
Our home life and work life began overlapping.
And when problems happened in our marriage, they didn't simply stay between Jon and me.
There were other people affected.
There were children affected.
There were jobs and finances and family relationships affected.
I had entered the marriage believing that love could overcome the past.
But the past doesn't always stay where you leave it.
Eventually, I learned more about Jon's previous relationships.
I learned about the relationship with the woman who was related to him through marriage.
I learned about the communications with other women.
I found the escort-related communications.
I found things that made me question whether the relationship I thought I was in was actually the relationship I was living.
Still, I stayed.
I told myself that people make mistakes.
I told myself that everyone has a past.
I told myself that our children deserved a family.
And, most of all, I told myself that Jon loved me.
Those explanations can carry you a surprisingly long way.
Until they can't.
Our relationship became increasingly complicated.
There were fights.
There were accusations.
There were moments of physical violence.
There were periods when things seemed better, followed by periods when they weren't.
I became angry.
Jon became angry.
We both said things we shouldn't have said.
There were things I did that I am not proud of.
There were things he did that hurt me deeply.
And over time, I began to understand that trying to explain who was right and who was wrong did not explain what was happening to our family.
By 2017, things were changing.
That year became important for reasons I couldn't fully understand at the time.
There were police reports.
There were allegations.
There were questions about our children.
There were documents that would eventually become part of a much larger paper trail.
One of those documents was a Missouri Children's Division letter dated September 20, 2017.
The letter was addressed to me at our Bates City, Missouri home.
It referenced an incident number and said that a report of concern regarding a child or children had been received on July 23, 2017.
The family assessment was completed.
And then came a sentence that I would later realize was important:
“A Family-Centered Services case will not be opened.”
The assessment was retained.
The letter explained that family assessments could involve both parents when appropriate.
But it did not tell me everything that had been alleged.
It did not identify the reporter.
It did not establish that an allegation was true.
And it did not say that Jon had been found responsible for anything.
That distinction matters to me now.
Because when you start looking backward through your own life, it is tempting to take every report, every police narrative, every accusation, and every court filing and turn it into one clean story.
Real life doesn't work that way.
Some things happened.
Some things were alleged.
Some things were investigated.
Some things were dismissed.
Some things eventually resulted in convictions.
And some things remain questions.
At the time, I wasn't thinking about evidence.
I was trying to survive my own life.
I was raising children.
I was trying to keep a marriage together.
I was working.
I was dealing with the emotional fallout of a relationship that had become increasingly difficult.
And I was trying to understand how the man I had met on Cinco de Mayo had become someone I barely recognized.
Then came Iowa.
And with Iowa came paperwork.
Police reports.
Court cases.
Protection orders.
Search warrants.
Dismissals.
New charges.
Old charges.
Names that appeared over and over again.
The paper trail was beginning to tell a story of its own.
I just didn't know yet how to read it.