The Struggle is Real, but So is Jesus. Tessa

drinking pretty heavy then but didn’t have any trouble yet.

      Where I went, there were bands that also traveled where we were.

      Then the cheating began again. Every time I went out of town, I would sleep with someone in the band.

      I started dancing in town again for a while in between my traveling, and a girl I worked with told my boyfriend I was cheating on him and he started an affair with her. I found out and left him again.

      Then he showed up where I was working out of town and begged me back. I really had no right as I was doing the same thing. But I told him I’d take him back if we got married. He agreed, and it only took me six weeks to pay for the wedding.

      We got into the criminal life again, writing bad checks everywhere. I had a friend who worked at the bank and told us if we started on Friday and stopped on Sunday, we wouldn’t get fraud, just bad credit. We never got caught, but again, he got fake IDs and opened more accounts.

      Almost a year into our marriage, he left me for the manager at Marie Callender’s where he finally got a real job. My intuition kicked in again, and I knew something was going on but ignored it.

      I planned a romantic trip to a B&B for our one-year anniversary. The night before, he went to the store to get toilet paper and never came home until the next morning, two hours after we were supposed to leave. We didn’t even make love. I knew why but found out for sure when his best friend told me not to sleep with him anymore because she had herpes. When I found out, she tried to call him one day, and I answered the phone. I listened to their conversation on the other line, and then when they hung up, I ended up throwing the phone at him, hitting him hard on the head. He called the cops, but I left before they came. So I never went to jail.

      I moved out again for good, and I slept with everyone who was in the wedding, starting with his best man and all the groomsmen. I eventually got a subpoena to go to court for domestic violence. I hired a lawyer and went to court. I went to a fancy store and bought a sophisticated outfit and had my hair styled professionally in a bun. Of course, he showed up with her. I had pleaded not guilty and went to trial. This was the trial day. He had long black hair with tattoos and showed up in a leather jacket. It made him look like the guilty one. When I got on the stand, my lawyer was really good and brought up the fact that he risked giving me a venereal disease knowing his girlfriend had herpes. She was sitting in the back row, but everyone knew who she was as they saw him sitting with her before he got called up. She was mortified, the look on her face was priceless, and the jury found me not guilty.

      Back up two years earlier, I forgot to mention I found my birth parents. That was where I got my alcoholism from, as I did not grow up in an alcoholic family. Shortly after that, my birth mother rejected me again, saying we didn’t share the same morals or values but became really close to my birth father and eventually moved to Nebraska where they both grew up.

      I danced there too, he was cool with it. I ended up hooking up with a couple guys, much younger than me. But it didn’t last long, and I eventually moved back to Arizona. I was upset when the first one broke up with me and I told him I was pregnant. I carried the lie so far that his parents flew him to Phoenix to pay for me to get an abortion. Of course, if I really was, I would never get an abortion as I wanted children all my life. But I went as far as going to the clinic with him and went back in the room where they did an ultrasound and informed me I was not pregnant which I already knew. He didn’t give me the money up front which I intended to keep, so when I came out, I told him I had a tubular pregnancy and would need surgery. He flew home the next day; he never believed me. That wasn’t the first time I pulled the pregnancy threat to keep a guy. I was awful.