Part III: Four Thousand Miles, Same Marriage

The fresh start I was chasing never had a chance.

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This story is part of a series on the collapse of my marriage in the wake of infidelities and years of emotional abuse. You can find the first installment about the night I discovered my husband’s affair here.

Jake left FEMA still angry about the promotion he didn’t get and the move to Colorado that never happened, and that anger turned into a pattern. He changed jobs every six to eight months; one lasted three. He was never without work, but he was never satisfied, either, always quietly applying somewhere else. Eventually he started removing jobs from his resume just to hide just how quickly he came and went.

So when someone from SAMs called in early 2021 about a DoD position in Germany, two to three years then back to DC, I understood why he wanted it so badly. I could see it on him. I agreed, on one condition: Aaron had to let the kids come with us. I gave up a promotion to Deputy Division Head to make it happen. I told myself it was the least I could do. I felt like I owed him.

Jackson was twelve, Olivia was ten, and they were old enough that the move felt like an adventure instead of me trying to take them away. Aaron had remarried by then and mellowed some, though he was still inconsiderate. He agreed to let them go, on the condition that they’d spend Christmas or spring break, plus summers, with him in Virginia.

We had a month to pack an entire life. The kids stayed with Aaron to finish virtual school; I’d fly back to pick them up in July to give us time for a fun vacation and to enroll them in the base school. Jake handled the military side of the move. He’d done it before, growing up with a career-military father, and the one mercy of a government move is that the packers come to you. I sold the house without ever listing it to a construction company flipping homes nearby. I filled three dumpsters with everything we weren’t taking or storing. I did the paperwork to get our cat overseas. It was chaos, but we made it happen.

I let myself believe Germany could be a reset. Four months alone with Jake before the kids arrived, time to reconnect, to travel, to be a couple again for the first time without Aaron one town over. I wanted my Jake back. The one I thought I’d married.

That isn’t what happened. If anything, he got worse, more critical, more defensive, angrier at things that weren’t there.

We landed and went straight into survival mode: a month in a hotel, then a flat, an avalanche of paperwork. I speak German, so I became the one who got the furniture delivered, the utilities turned on, anything that needed a German speaker. It took me a month to find work, and in that month I also unpacked our entire household and built every piece of Ikea furniture we owned, alone.

Jake hated his job almost immediately; the same story I’d heard since he left the Marine Corps. Lazy coworkers. A boss who dumped everything on him. Nobody understood the work the way he did, so he had to fix it all himself. He’d come home already furious, and nothing I did could change his mood once he was in it. Within a month he was hunting for a new position in Stuttgart. He criticized how I was job hunting. He criticized the plans I made to bring the kids over. He picked fights over input he’d asked for and didn’t like once he got it.

We traveled constantly that first year, every long weekend, somewhere new, but the trips themselves became a source of stress. Jake built detailed itineraries, asked me and the kids what we wanted, and then bristled the moment our answers didn’t match the plan already in his head. By February of 2022, my own job had gotten demanding enough that I asked him to do more at home, and that became our standing argument. The kids started disappearing into their rooms whenever he was around. I didn’t notice until later that Jackson and Olivia had quietly started doing more around the house themselves, trying, in their own way, to keep the peace.

That summer, when the kids went back to Virginia, Olivia told Aaron she didn’t want to come back to Germany. Jackson did, he loved it there. Aaron gave us almost no warning, so there was no time to do anything but accept it. Jackson flew back alone and returned to his DoD school. The three of us took trips to Spain, Scotland, and London. Jake went sullen every time Olivia’s name came up.

He got harder to be around after that. He made a show of job-hunting back in Virginia, but he’d gone distant in a different way, meaner now, more direct about it, instead of the passive-aggressive routine he used to fall back on. In October I had a work trip to Virginia and spent every spare hour with Olivia. She told me, plainly, that she wanted me to come home. I came back from that trip distraught, and asked my boss if there was any way to transfer back early. There was, and it came with a promotion.

I flew back to Germany braced for a fight. Instead, Jake had already saved a few listings for houses back in Virginia. He said he’d known all along I’d never be able to stay away from Olivia that long. Jackson, who loved Germany, said he understood anyway. He and Jake both wanted the same Virginia neighborhood for the school and the commute, so we picked two houses there and scheduled virtual tours.

We closed on one in late December. The plan: the kids and I would fly back the week after Christmas, and Jake would close out the flat in Germany and follow later. He’d handle Germany; I’d handle Virginia. I packed and sold everything he wouldn’t need before we left, and we bickered our way through most of it, though I didn’t know yet just how much resentment he was burying under his agreeable front about the year apart from Olivia.

Olivia stayed enrolled in Aaron’s district for the rest of the school year. I got Jackson back into his old school, and he slid right back into his friend group, sports, and the run-up to high school. For those few months, Christmas to March, it was mostly the two of us, since Olivia was mainly at Aaron’s. Jackson still calls it one of his core memories: camping out in a half-furnished house, mattresses on the floor, the cat racing around empty rooms, dinner in camp chairs in front of a TV balanced on a shipping box. Anyone who’s lived through a military move knows that limbo. We had a strange amount of fun in it.

The one thing that didn’t let up was Jake’s calls. Every day, he’d phone to recount everything he was suffering through alone in Germany, how stressed he was, how much he had to handle by himself. I never once mentioned that I was doing the other half of the move with a fourteen-year-old and no car for the first 8 weeks. When he finally landed a new job with a March start date, he booked his flight home. I told myself that once he was back, the stress would finally ease. The house was set up. All we would have to wait for was the second car to transit from Germany.

I was wrong.