After I divorced my first husband I was single for two years. I lived happily with my daughter in the same apartment in Vienna. She was seeing her father or better, her Grandma who took care of her on weekends or whenever she wanted to be with her. I was struggling, because I couldn’t find a legal job – I lost my rights, because I was not married to an Austrian man anymore. And Slovenia was not in EU then…

The situation was exactly the same as then when I was married to him, I just was not married to him officially on paper.

So… I worked wherever they took me. I was a waitress, I worked in shop where I sold clothes. I was washing the dishes (just one night – this was so exhausting…), I was selling sandwiches when I worked in the castle Schoenbruenn, once I translated for slovene policemen who came to see austrian refuges camps. I worked at one telephone agency. I was never working long… the longest was at Schoenbruenn where I worked eight months. But during all this time I was in Celebrity Center where I was on courses.

So… I found him there. He was from Germany, he was different than Austrians. Again… when I look back… this was not this breathtaking love which we have for another. But I was already around forty and I wanted to have more children, children, children.

Since I was in such an abusive relationship before I didn’t expect anything from men. I mean… I felt in love in an American singer who I often saw in these days and I liked another guy, but this was just just infatuation.

When I look it back now, I knew that I was looking for a father of my kids. This guy – Rene looked harmless. He liked me. So… why not marry and have kids before it is too late. 

I met him in autumn of 1999, married him in 2001. I could have married him before, but it was so hard to collect all our papers, since there were three states “in a game” – Austria, where we lived, Slovenia, the country I came from and Germany the country he came from.

I was pregnant three times when I was with him, in the year 2001 I bore a girl, in summer of 2002 a boy and next year I aborted a child when I was three month pregnant.

It was too much for me. In three years I was three times pregnant. Over forty. I became like a machine for birthing. I was fat, I started to be depressed, because it was just too much effort. My husband was away from home and I didn’t have anyone from my family to help me.

At the beginning Rene and I were in love and just going good. But after “his” kids were born, he started to be really horrible with my first daughter who was not his child. He wanted her to take care on two little ones and he beat her once.

Ugly things happened then… My oldest daughter was abused by a pedophile who abused another fifty kids. I blamed myself for this accident, that I attracted this incident with my thoughts – since then I was really scared looking at TV and watching horrible things which happened to kids, specially in Germany.

In the years 2002, when my son was one month old we moved to second “bezirk” – near the river Donau. The flat was big, we had so many possibilities for going out with kids. Life was better for a while.

Till it started again to be very hard. My husband lost a job. I had three kids and was pregnant again. It was hard hard hard. In the year 2004 I got internet and I connected with my country. I started to be on internet whenever it was possible for me – soon I was addicted to it.

My husband started to be cruel to me. Every night my little one was crying. Rene woke up and shouted at me, that I couldn’t raise the kids and that I was worthless.

He hit me once, then he started to strangle me each night when my son was crying. It was big drama – out of nothing – that’s what we humans do often. He actually hit me just once in this period of time, but I was paralyzed with fear that something horrible will happen.

There was no love anymore. There was just my wish – go away from here, till you are still alive.

In summer of 2005 I “met” on internet one nice man from my hometown. We started to text each other. I told him, what my husband was doing, that I was without money and I don’t drive a car.

We chat on internet every day, at the end of October he came and took us to Ljubljana.

So… Rene was left alone. Kids were missing a lot. He was devasteting with pain because he lost his kids.

We divorced him half a year after that. He comes to see his kids three times a year. It is not enough, but he can’t see them often. I hope that this will change soon.

Other things that happened next I have already described in past writings.

So… with my Savior, we were together three years and then he disappeared overnight and marry another woman.

That was it. I was so devastated that I didn’t know what to do. I was on the floor. It could not get any worse.

I literarily couldn’t look in the direction of any man anymore. I couldn’t stand seeing men. It was the first time in my “history”, that I was single and I knew that I will be single for a long time. Before… I was jumping from the relationship to relationship – I never had a break less than one year.