I graduated in June of 1953 and Grandma Minnie was there to celebrate with me. She died shortly thereafter and I missed her greatly. It marked the end of my family. By then even Aunt Eleanora had been killed in an auto accident. It seemed my hopes and dreams for a real family of my own were never to be realized.

I began my first job at Ohio Bell Telephone Company as a Billing Clerk, and Jack asked me to marry him to my great surprise. We were really just good friends and he often said I was just like a sister to him. But I said, "Yes!" and we married on Feb. 27, 1954. God answered my prayers on July 26, 1955 with the birth of our first son, Timothy. Beginning my life with my new family seemed a dream to me. I told Jack I wanted twelve children and that was fine with him.

Despite all the celebration and the genuine joy that came with our little family, I always felt I had been unfair to Jack because I didn't love him. I married my dream of having a family. I did like him a great deal, yet I was not in love with him. I thought it work but it just didn't.

Our relationship was unhealthy from the beginning. He always tried to "fix" me. He put it like this, "You were always like a little bird with a broken wing, and I wanted to take care of you". In essence, he became a caregiver to me. Our relationship was like parent and child. I was the child and I never could have grown up as long as he related to me in the way that he did, and now he agrees with that assessment.

Life was joyful for me. One baby after another came along. Next, a daughter Darcy, followed by four more, Julie, Jennifer, Kristin and Molli Jo. I kept telling Tim he would get a brother next, but after the five girls I just told him, "Tim, go find a friend, I think this is going to be all the babies Mom is going to have." I was thirty years old then and had six children, and I was tired! Tim was accepting and learned to live with five sisters, never easy for him.

The children were really the only factor keeping our marriage together. We started to grow apart emotionally, physical, and spiritually. Jack seemed to go his own way and I did also. We tried marriage counseling and even Marriage Encounter, yet we were left with the truth, and the truth hurts. The marriage was dead and neither of us tried hard enough to put it back together.

I began to seek comfort in my faith, yet there was this sadness I dealt with every day. Like a melancholy, never quite going away. I remember the hymn "This is my Father's World, why should my heart be sad?" I cried uncontrollably, and had to find out what was troubling me.

After the birth of Molli Jo, I had a complete mental breakdown. I went through post-partum depression and ended up in the hospital for two weeks. All the sorrow, pain, and trauma of my early childhood that I had denied and repressed came to the surface. I was overcome with grief, fear, anger, hatred, and denial. All these emotions became an obstacle to God's grace, and I immersed myself in darkness. I pushed God from my life by deliberate choice. I underwent a series of shock treatments to break up the thought patterns that had surfaced.

I had to face the long-denied truth that my father in his alcoholic stupors had molested me the year after my Mom died. Today, I know this was the reason my Mom did not want me to stay with my dad. It took me many years to get through this darkness. Therapy helped, but was not the answer for me. I knew I needed to turn toward God. At one time my aunt thought I should be a nun, now God had called me to be a church secretary at a Lutheran Church.

I went back to work with six small children working part-time as a church secretary. Just doing God's will and reaching out to others, focusing on God's will and not mine, drew me into the light of Christ once again. I did face the truth and the truth did set me free. Free from all the guilt, shame, anger and fear of the past.

You see, I had to go back and relive the past in order to find the healing and wholeness that I prayed for so much and the JOY I so desperately needed in my life. Joy is a gift from God!

Always seeking the truth I had to admit I was so unhappy in my marriage. Jack was successful in his work and he climbed the ladder of success to become the Vice-president of his company. Both us by this time had been unfaithful to our marriage vows, so we knew that it was time to bury the marriage, ask for forgiveness from God and each other and move on. Another chapter in my life to close.

Little did I know the pain I would bring on the my children. I was such a great actress, I could have won an Oscar for pretending. I was never honest with the children and when it came time to announce our divorce, the children were devastated. To this day two of my daughters have deep issues with me. I can only pray that those issues will heal in time. What God planned for my later life only added to their angry feelings toward Jack and me.

A prayer meeting and a prayer I prayed changed my whole life.