by Tina Shelnutt

Created on: February 02, 2009   Last Updated: February 04, 2009

Our marriage has been one surprise after another. We married and had our first child at age fifteen. My first surprise was the day I realized that my husband was controlling and demanding. Life was not what I had expected with his hobby of drinking and hanging out with his friends. I found myself spending most of my time alone with our daughter. When things were good, they were very good and when things were bad, they were very bad. I had to except the fact that the man I love was not acting like the man I loved.

He was a good provider for a teenage husband and parent. He worked faithfully no matter how hard he partied. He was dedicated to taking care of us and providing our needs. When our daughter was ten months old, I learned that I was pregnant again. The news put another weight of burden on our relationship. This would prove to be only the beginning of our marital surprises.

When our daughter turned one, she became ill and almost died from Meningitis. This brought even more struggles to our already stressed marriage. By the time she was well enough to come home, she was a total vegetable and had 80% brain damage. Blind, deaf and paralyzed! The doctors gave us no hope. Due to our age, the doctors were prepared to take us to court to place her in an institution. Stating that we were too young to meet her needs and we had another child on the way.

We worked things out with the doctors to allow us to keep her home with family support and help. For the next seven months I spent most of my time visiting my daughter at my aunt's house. My marriage was pressed to limits of ending. We truly loved each other very much and wanted to somehow make things work out. By the time we had our son, we were ready to bring our daughter home.

Things got better for a while and then another surprise would take us to another level of marital stress. I learned that my husband had been seeing a friend of mine, which at the time I was the one who took her to see if she was pregnant. Not realizing that it may be my husband's child. Fortunately, she wasn't pregnant and we were faced with some serious decisions.

We decided to give our marriage another try with the condition that we would move away and start new. After the struggle of trying to forgive and move on, we finally seemed to be over the hardest time in our marriage. Of course we still had our handicapped daughter to care for and our son. We had little money and somehow managed to keep a roof over our head. I stayed home with the

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