I’m turning 40 tomorrow and I can’t stop thinking about one question: What the fuck has my adult life been?
Did that really happen?
When I was approaching 30, I was terrified. I had spent the entirety of my 20’s married to a man who never showed me love the way that I constantly begged him to, yet I was so committed to the institute of marriage that divorce never even crossed my mind.
I was an avid blogger at the time, writing about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Several months before I hit the big 3-0, I came up with a list of “30 Things To Do Before My 30th Birthday.” It included things like “Memorize Lincoln’s second inaugural address.”
On the outside, I had it all. I was a stay-at-home-mom, thin and relatively pretty, had two gorgeous little girls who went to private Christian school, parents who babysat, a well-earning and respected husband, a side job writing and traveling, and a network of friends that we hung out with regularly.
On the inside I was miserable and I didn’t know why.
When I was 29 and 3/4, I spent more than two months separated by distance from my husband while I was working on the Mitt Romney campaign in Boston. I left my mom to nanny my children while I fled San Diego with only one thought in my brain — I don’t know why but I HAVE to get away and clear my head.
Despite the intensity of that failed campaign, I finally had some space to try and figure out why I was miserable. My husband and I got into one of the biggest fights we’d ever had on October 30th. I can remember the exact date because it was the day before Halloween. He’d always hated Halloween, and had refused not only to celebrate it, but to even allow me or our children to participate for many years. Things had changed once we made friends who enjoyed a good Halloween party and neighborhood trick-or-treating, but for some reason, when I was in Boston, he told me that he had no intention of taking our kids out for Halloween.
I cried and begged him. I said please do not do this to our children (they were 9 and 4 at the time). I called my mom and asked her to use her key the next day to find some dress up clothes in the girls’ room and please take them out trick-or-treating.
The next morning, I called him to let him know that my mom would be taking care of the girls and he didn’t need to worry about Halloween. He asked what I meant. I re-stated that I didn’t want our children to miss out on Halloween just because I was away.
He told me that he had every intention of taking the children to a Halloween party and trick-or-treating, and I was crazy for thinking otherwise.
I didn’t know at the time that this behavior is known as gaslighting.
I came home mid-November in a daze. I was so happy to see my kids. My husband didn’t let them FaceTime me very much when I was in Boston, instead dominating the time claiming that he had met me first, and they needed to wait their turn to talk to me. I just wanted my babies. I wanted to be respectful to my husband, the leader of our little family, but it felt wrong.
In December, I met up with a girlfriend in Las Vegas. We were walking on the Strip, sipping cheap frozen strawberry margaritas, and she made what was obviously a cultural reference, but I didn’t get it. “South Park, Jenny. I’m quoting South Park.”
“Oh I’m not allowed to watch South Park,” I responded, one month away from my 30th birthday.
“Honey, we got to get you some therapy,” was all she said in response.
The next day I emailed some therapists, and started seeing one that I felt fit. Only with my husband’s permission, of course. I had indeed been acting “off” according to him, so I’m sure he was hoping that therapy would fix me.
The first hour I was with my brand new therapist, I unloaded. I brought up every question I wanted to ask my husband, and every question I had about his confusing behavior. At the end of the session he said something that changed my life.
“I think your husband might be narcissistic … and there’s no cure for it.”
I had heard the term before. It wasn’t in vogue in 2012 the way that it is today. I knew the Greek story, about Narcissus who fell in love with his reflection and couldn’t look away. But I didn’t know what it meant.
So I googled narcissism.
Holy. Shit.
It was like getting a stage 5 cancer diagnosis for my marriage. THIS was why nothing was right. THIS was why I hurt so badly, why nothing I did was good enough, and why he treated me the way that he did. It was a relief though — finally having an answer to the question that had plagued me for a decade. Why didn’t my husband love me back?
Because he couldn’t. It was as simple as that. He was incapable of the kind of love that I needed in my life.
It was also a death sentence to my marriage as I knew it, and I had to decide what I wanted to do about it: Stay married even though I knew he’d never care about or for me same way I had for him? Or rip my life apart and venture forth into a great unknown? Would I consign my children to Divorced Kid Life, or Dysfunctional Family Life?
In the murky, foggy brain space I was in in the last month before I turned 30, I prayed to God to save my marriage. I prayed to God to be able to handle the burden of having a husband on such a different wavelength as me.
I felt like a total failure not getting my “30 by 30” list accomplished.
Then all of a sudden I was 30. My birthday was on a Monday, because of course. We went out for dinner and I actually got to pick the restaurant — a rarity. On the way there, my husband granted me an extra treat. He said, “Because it’s your birthday, you can pick the radio station.”
I can’t remember if I laughed at the time, but I laugh now remembering it. How magnanimous of him, my dear husband.
It took me an entire MONTH after that to realize that my marriage was unsalvageable. It took many additional months to make a plan and GTFO. All the while still trying desperately to save my marriage, just in case I was mistaken and was actually in a nightmare that I might be woken from at any second.
It didn’t happen.
I went through with the divorce.
It was horrible and tragic and liberating. All at once. What’s that line from 13 Going on 30? Thirty, flirty, and thriving.
I got my first real job — as a full time writer. With benefits like a dental plan and everything! I stood firm against the barrage of “helpful Christians” who told me I “wasn’t allowed” to divorce my ex. Without blinking an eye, I told them, “When you are married to him for 11 years, and have two children with him, let me know how you did it. Because I couldn’t.”
I bought my own furniture and I didn’t even have to ask for permission!!!
I also fell deeply in love with my best friend, who was also in the beginning stages of a messy divorce. He had gotten a dream job in Los Angeles, and his already very shaky marriage completely fell apart. Instead of moving with him, she decided to move into an apartment after they sold their house.
Justin drove down to San Diego often to visit me, and we held each other's hands while we had very difficult conversations with our exes about splitting assets and visitation schedules. We cried and mourned together, and found solace in each other. Looking back, it’s inevitable that we fell in love. How could we not?
But nothing is easy. While I had gained an incredible best friend and new love, a sense of freedom I’d never known before, and fledgling confidence in myself, I lost almost my entire social network and my church family. My lawyer actually had to draw up a cease and desist letter to the church when the pastor declared over the pulpit that I was “caught in the snare of the devil.” My ex fought for custody even when he’d barely had anything to do with our kids when we were married, and because California is big on equal parental rights, he won.
Right around the time that my ex won 50% custody of our children, Justin’s ex-wife decided that she wanted to move to California to give their marriage one more chance. It was mid 2014, I was 31.5, and I was devastated that he decided that he needed to give her another chance for his children.
But what could I say? I’d just been through a battle for my own children. I let him go.
He didn’t understand why I couldn’t revert to being “just friends.” Because I love you, you idiot, I yelled at him. Drunkenly. More than once.
They lived together for a year with two of their teenage children (the eldest had already moved out) before they decided that it wasn’t working and they separated again.
I call that year my Tinder Year. Do you know how many men wear gold chains on first dates? So, so many. I tried to move on from Justin. I even had an almost boyfriend at one point, until he literally told me on the phone, “I’m not the kind of guy who is going to call you and ask you about your day every day.”
I can’t remember if I laughed at the time, but I laugh now remembering it.
WTF is the point of a significant other if they aren’t going to care about you?
Eventually things between Justin and his ex didn’t work. She moved in with family out of state. He begged me to date him again. I said no. He kept showing up. He kept being there. I blocked him. He showed up at my door. With flowers and wine. I slammed it in his face. And opened it again.
I loved him. I knew his pain. I recognized it. I told myself that I could not fix him. He had to fix himself. Before that happened, I got pregnant. I was 33.
He told his estranged wife that they needed to finally make the divorce official — his girlfriend was pregnant. She said no, and I spent the pregnancy alone. I was 34 when Arya was born.
Arya was 17 days old when his ex-wife said Justin needed to choose between her and our baby. He chose our baby.
It took a long fucking time to heal from that. I was hurt, and it connected to all my pain points from my first husband completely emotionally abandoning me. But Justin was there. Every. Single. Day. He swiftly stepped into a step-father role with my older girls, who already knew him as “mom’s friend” because we had never been physically affectionate towards each other around them.
We were beginning to make a life together, even with all of the fallout from not being together during my pregnancy with Arya. I loved him. He loved me. We decided to have another baby. And go on an epic trip to London and Paris with our baby and my two girls.
The first day we were in London, he got a phone call from his boss, letting him go. Justin has a bad habit of sharing his politics with everyone who will listen, and that doesn’t always bode well as a conservative in California. Thank God we hadn’t really started trying yet for another baby.
10 days later I got a positive pregnancy test.
Thankfully he got another job almost immediately. The job made him miserable. He was a shell of himself, but he dutifully went to work and provided for two families, while I still worked full time too, even pregnant with a baby at home.
When I was six months pregnant with Trinity, Justin got sick. Really, really sick. Convinced he had the man flu, I drove him to the doctor so they could tell him to get over it. They sent us to the ER, and he was ultimately admitted for nearly two weeks, and almost died. He had been going into septic shock. He still holds this over my head, by the way.
Did I mention that he was let go again from the new job that made him miserable?
I was exactly one month from turning 36 when Trinity was born.
I had a toddler, a newborn, two older girls who were desperately unhappy with their custody situation, a full time job, and an unemployed, sick partner who was doing his best but he was sick. We had a nurse come daily for over a month after he was released from the hospital to administer antibiotics through a midline IV.
He freelanced, but there were a good six months that he wasn’t pulling in real income. I was tired and I was stressed to the max. My own job had gone through multiple corporate takeovers, and I was told that I was lucky to even still have a job having taken two maternity leaves in two years (they were 8 weeks and 12 weeks, in case that matters).
Things finally started to look up. Justin got some solid clients, and was making decent money again. Everything came to a head in my custody situation, and after going back to court, I won majority custody of my daughters. I got a new job, and left a very toxic environment behind.
Finally. FINALLY. Everything was going our way. The whole last 7ish years were worth it for us to get to that point. We were doing it. We were making it. The dust had settled, and we were putting all the crap we had gone through in the rearview mirror.
I was 37, and it was February 2020.
We all know what happened then.
Justin lost his new clients. I was dealing with a new job while all of a sudden having four children at home all the time. We didn’t know how we would pay rent. I said we should move into my mom’s basement. She has a nice basement to be fair, less than 30 minutes away from us.
Instead, he looked at the data. It was clear from March of 2020 that children would be extremely more harmed by school closures than by contracting covid-19. That society would be more harmed by shut-downs than by the virus. Justin said so. He had nothing to lose. We’d already lost so freaking much, but we had each other. He said he was going to publish something. I said, “Do it.”
It’s been three years of a wild roller coaster ride. I can’t believe sometimes that it’s been three fucking years of covid fights. Always trying to be sensitive yet still losing friends. Feeling alone. Crying in the car after wearing a mask to grocery shop because I have sexual abuse trauma. My children being discriminated against because we chose not to medically experiment on them.
But the friends we have made. I never in my wildest dreams could have imagined this. I’m turning 40 tomorrow, and I’m putting the final edits on this in the airport where we just landed to spend a weekend retreat with some of our nearest and dearest. Justin wrote a book that is one of the greatest collections of covid hypocrisies that exists in 2023. We started a Super PAC to guarantee that our children and grandchildren will not fall victim to unelected officials deciding that they don’t deserve to be in school. We are making a difference, right here, and right now.
So here's to the next decade. May it be infinitely better than the last two.
And to Justin — I wouldn’t change a thing if I meant I didn’t have you. Thanks for getting me through the last three years. I couldn’t have done it without you.
Jenny, I’m so glad you started this Substack. And thank you for sharing this.
What an interesting story. I briefly met you two at a very early 2020 rally to reopen schools at the Carlsbad Mall. I’ve followed Justin ever since and have seen a little about you through things he shares. I would’ve never guessed this was your story. It made me think of the song, Different by Joshua Bassett on YouTube. So glad you two grew strong together. You’ve been a blessing to many during these insane years.