My husband, endearingly nicknamed Puppy in 06, has been a constant in our lives since we met. We met under strange circumstances as I was currently married to my abusive ex-husband at the time. However, the abusive ex had no problem with Puppy because he comes across as very beta (as opposed to Alpha) and my ex felt that Puppy was no threat to him.

We met through our military technical training, him re-classing to a new job because of his old one not renewing for re-enlistment. I had just come out of basic training. I saw him once or twice in the cafeteria (he was a few classes ahead of me in the training) and felt drawn to him. He knew some of the people I ate lunch with and ended up coming over and having lunch with us and began playing spades together during our free times. We were the best team, beating the heck out of the others who played us. Its funny to think about, but the ability to read each other and know when to play high or play low was good from the beginning.

We weren’t supposed to see each other outside of the school because Prior Service and new Airmen were not supposed to be around each other because it too often meant younger Airmen being taken advantage of by Sergeants who could work the power gradient to get laid more often. So the rules were in place, but I’ve never been one to let rules stop me from getting where I want to be. Given, I tend to be the type that works with loopholes a majority of the time rather than just outright breaking the rules. It started out with loopholes in this case.

There is a religious center on the base that is set up for people to be able to come in and socialize without any concern of Prior Service or non-prior service, Officers or Airmen, and be able to come together to study for the tech school or simply just socialized in a monitored environment that allowed for an exception of the strict training regulations of who you could associate with. We started spending time there a lot. I found out that Puppy volunteered for Airmen Against Drunk Driving as dispatch and he invited me to volunteer with him one Friday night.

AADD was held out of the religious center from about 10 in the evening to about 2 in the morning. It had a somewhat intermittent flow of volunteers, many volunteering their cars to drive people back to base if they were drunk and needed a ride, others sitting by the phone to take the calls and call the drivers to send them out. Puppy and I ended up spending a lot of nights together, just watching movies and talking about life. I shared with him some about my abuse and he wasn’t shocked or horrified, but just accepted it and it never changed how he reacted to me. We ended up getting involved about a month after meeting each other.

We got involved around September time frame, trying to find places where we could be together without being caught. The ex knew we were involved and was surprisingly ok with it, but Puppy and I wanted to be away from him. We found an isolated park that we’d wander to some nights after we finished AADD, have some fun and end up back home as the sun was rising. A month into our involvement, Halloween 2006, I found out I was pregnant. We knew that it was likely to be his, but the ex was possessive about those things and we agreed to make the assumption that it was the ex’s unless it became obvious that it wasn’t.

November, his training ended and he was sent to Maryland and our relationship was put on ice as he was so far away. We kept in touch all the time, talking nearly every night, but with the pregnancy, the distance, and me finishing technical school, the newness of the relationship kind of wore off and I was worried that he would end up as just a friend. Yet he stayed consistent, visiting when he could, setting aside five hundred dollars a month of his paycheck into my bank accounts so I could make ends meet (I was paying a mortgage on a house I no longer even lived in from prior to enlisting).

We kept talking every night. He heard my best days and my worst. He listened for hours as I talked through wanting to leave the ex, getting involved with a new partner who the ex hated, having my first son, finding out the partner I was with had lied to me about his involvement with someone else, everything. He listened to it all, listened to me and talked to me. He was the one consistent thing in the storm that was my life. My PTSD kicked into overdrive after I had my first son and he was still there for me. He visited when he could, seeing the state that my ex was leaving the house in, seeing how he wasn’t doing a damn thing to help me and was neglecting the baby during the day while I was still working full-time as Active Duty.

Puppy saw and heard everything but still wanted to be there for me.

In 2008 I started seeing a Psychologist, something I had feared to do since I was 15 and had an inkling of being a multiple but had shoved it down hard so much I believed it wasn’t real. He was competent, he saw the dissociation, the complex PTSD, and he recognized that I was surviving despite it all. He said to me “You’re far more functional than you have any right to be” when I shared my story. I laughed when I later watched Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood and nearly the same quote is said in that movie.

I went through their CB Therapy and started to find a grip onto dry land again. I was still involved with my other partner (Ryan) though and while things were falling apart with the ex was intermittently with him through his guilting me or through him triggering me to a sexual state intentionally. My other partner ended up getting me pregnant as birth control (a different type this time) decided to fail me again. I was med-boarded out of the military by October of that year for PTSD-related issues, was doing school full-time from June onwards while doing the med-board stuff for Active Duty and still working full time and being pregnant.

Ex and I returned to NC where the house was. The other partner got orders to Korea and then Japan where he married the girl he had lied to me about initially. She wanted full monogamy and didn’t know about my younger son until later. Through all this Puppy was there, talking me through things, giving me advice on how to deal with Ryan and his drama, how to handle the ex and his BS, and generally keeping me as stable as possible from a distance.

He visited in November of 08 before a deployment, not to anywhere too dangerous, but it stopped our communications. I went from talking to him every night to only getting to talk to him once a week. Things were rough. I dove into my online school work and was taking twice the amount that was considered full-time while hitting immense depression related to my environment and abusive husband, and had no job. I was soon was on bed-rest and was doing everything from my own separate room away from the ex. I had been bringing in all the money with my Active Duty pay…his shitty retail job (he was a level 1 sales clerk for eight years at the time) paid barely enough to cover the mortgage and utilities (which we weren’t using except for the internet and electricity that was mandatory for my laptop to function and let me do schooling).

I had an 20 month old  to care for and had my second son in Feb of 09. Things kept getting worse with the ex: He became more and more agitated, more angry, more threatening. When he was home my older son would lock himself in his room, preferring to be alone and look out the window rather than deal with the chaos that he saw/felt from my ex (and from myself because of my reactions to the ex). When my younger son was only four weeks old, things broke beyond repair.

After my younger son was born, the ex freaked out about the children not being his, wouldn’t hold the baby, wouldn’t interact with my older son, and just became more and more dangerous. I sent an email to Puppy letting him know what was going on. I got a phone call from his deployed location, worried and stressed. He didn’t have an extra key to his apartment that anyone could give me but if I could wait two weeks he would be home and could come and get me himself.

True to his word, as soon as he checked into base in MD, Puppy drove the ten hours to where I was in NC, picked up my 20 month old and my 6 wk old baby, loaded his car and mine and we drove back to MD. We spent a month in that one bedroom apartment, the baby sleeping in a pack-n-play in the living room, the toddler in the walk-in closet in the bedroom to sleep. He put up with all that, with the sudden drastic change of having children, with the change in residence so we could have more space. He dealt with all of it, despite his initial inclination to be happier as a single guy on his own.

He dealt with me coming to too many realizations, with the physical health struggles I’ve had, with the mental and emotional flux that I’ve had, with my insane ex withholding the divorce just to screw us out of more money. He dealt with the 10K in debt that came from that divorce. He dealt with my shattered self and all the crazy ideas and thoughts I’ve had over the years. Yet he is still with me.

He understands in many ways though: He dissociates too. He doesn’t have other people like I do, doesn’t create new ways of dealing with the world when it is too much, he just goes away, disappears and becomes nothing. We talked about this last night and how hard it is at times because he does disappear, but we understand it. He has been under so much stress since we got up here, as have I. He is working in my old shop from when I was Active Duty and the ghosts of things that happened here, in this city, in the surrounding areas still come out and grab me by the throat intermittently and make me shift all the more.

Yet even through it all Puppy is consistent, understanding, and willing to listen. We have both been through a lot, and a lot of it has been because of me. Yet, he takes it all in stride. He understands that parts of me still want to seek out other partners, but understands why I’m hesitant to. He supports me in making that decision for myself; he supports me in figuring out what is right for me, not what he thinks is right for me. He knows the control that has been exerted over me in the past and while he has never gone through such things, he has gone through enough to understand why it makes me who I am.

He doesn’t see the alters, he is blind to them. To him, they are all just “me” and I’m ok with that. He doesn’t judge, doesn’t snipe, and doesn’t really complain. They are all just me, and in being such he wants them to be happy or at least ok with who/what they are. I have a lot of work to still do on me, but I can count on at least one person to be there beside me through all this, and that is Puppy.