The First Chapter of "Mornings in Lil' Assy"

This is the first chapter of my book, "Mornings in Lil' Assy"

Chapter 1: I’m Leaving You

“I’m leaving you on December 26th,” I said to Krystal, my wife of 22 years, best friend, and mother to our four sons, as we sat in the living room of our southern California home while our kids were at school. It was two weeks before Christmas, 2021 and I was heartbroken. Less than a year earlier on the 22 year anniversary of our first date, we renewed our vows on our “secret” beach in Malibu.

“What? Why?” Krystal said with a confused and terrified look in her eyes that said, “Please don’t leave me. I beg you. I don’t know what’s happening. I’m sorry. I love you.”

The downward spiral of our marriage over the previous months was swift and extremely painful. Krystal was a porn star and had been spending less and less time at home as a mom and wife and more time away from home as a porn star ever since emerging from a 14 hour Brazilian Butt Lift (BBL) and liposuction surgery.

“I’ve been telling you that I was finished with the porn star lifestyle. I hoped we could talk about it, but you’ve done nothing but fight with me and mock me when I try. I’m done,” I said. “I’ve been telling you for weeks that I was serious about all that I was trying to talk to you about. I couldn’t get through to you. You didn’t listen,” I said. “So I’m done.”

“There’s nothing going on with me and any other men!” she said. “I know there’s not,” I said. “I’m leaving you because you aren’t ‘here’ anymore. Living with you is like having a roommate, not a wife. We don’t share intimacy in any areas of our lives anymore. I have been telling you the way that you’ve been treating me hurts and you never changed. I’ve been trying to address my issues with you in therapy and letters. I’ve tried over and over to have conversations, but you never responded or you responded by not caring, and I can’t do it anymore,” I said. “It’s too painful to stay with you, considering all that we’ve been through with each other. I never wanted this. I don’t want this now, but I can’t stay in a relationship with someone that doesn’t want to love me back.”

“But I do love you,” she said with tears in her eyes. “This is for the best,” I said. She searched my eyes for understanding and then got up from the couch we were sitting on and walked up to our bedroom that we hadn’t slept in together for weeks and shut the door behind her.

We had been on one hell of a ride up to this point together, but our marriage had become something out of a bad dream and we were no longer close. I was heartbroken because this was the second time that I was losing her. The first time I lost her was my fault.

The Girl of My Dreams

When I was 14 I had a beautiful dream that I would one day find unconditional love and have a happy life with the woman that I loved. I met Krystal when I was 21, shortly after my Mormon mission. We got married in the Mormon temple. Five years into our marriage, She was my everything. She helped me through addiction. She was behind me as I became a leader in the tech industry. She helped me make brave decisions in my life. She loved me unconditionally. She was my best friend. She was all I ever wanted. She was the girl of my dreams.

We were best friends. We trusted each other and we believed that nothing could damage the beautiful bond that we had. Along with my sons, she was the most precious part of my life. I believed that together we would one day find the unconditional love and happiness that I saw in my dream. My dream of a beautiful relationship and a happy life was coming true, but life had different plans than for the love and happiness of my dream to come to me that easily. Life was about to become much more difficult for us and our love for each other would be tested.

Our lives changed when our fourth son, Tyler, was born with special needs. He was sick most of the time for a couple of years. With the added responsibilities and chaos that Tyler’s birth added to our lives, we soon realized that we didn’t have the capacity to raise him and his three older brothers, ages 6, 4, and 2, the way they deserved. We were often overwhelmed and we were alone in our care of him.

We decided that we no longer believed in Mormonism, but we hid this fact from my family to stay in their good graces. Krystal and I wanted to try everything and do everything that our previous commitment to Mormonism had forbidden us from trying. We tried alcohol and smoked weed for the first time. We opened our marriage to sex with other people. We fantasized about sexual adventures and made them all come true. We started going to raves and doing molly and other party drugs.

I didn’t know how to cope with the chaos at home. Escapism was my outlet. I began escaping my home life to alcohol, massive amounts of Xanax, my career in tech, wild business trips, sex with other women, and spending every last dollar we had. Krystal became a porn star and I got a girlfriend.

Krystal and I became alcoholics and produced dozens of hard core porn videos that we sold on the internet all while playing the part of devoted Mormon parents to my family and in my career in Provo, the headquarters of Mormon propaganda and education. The once unbreakable bond that Krystal and I shared began to crack.

The chaos in our lives didn’t end. Krystal and I got blackout drunk in the Mormon temple parking lot one Saturday morning and attended my cousin’s wedding at the Provo temple shortly before the woman that was my girlfriend when we first opened our marriage began stalking me and threatening me. My mom and siblings began distancing themselves from us around the time that Krystal accidentally sent an email from her porn star email account to my entire family.

Krystal and I stopped attending church. My stalker was ramping up the intensity of her stalking. I learned that she was one interview away from being hired as the office assistant to the CEO at the tech company I worked at. I pulled some strings to get the final interview canceled, but I had to find a way to get me and my family out of Provo. An opportunity to relocate to Boston came at my job, and after a half dozen interviews, I got the promotion. Krystal and I escaped from Provo to a new life in Boston with our four sons.

My relationship with Krystal was on the rocks. We once had been close, but the trauma of all of it all had taken its toll on our once unbreakable bond. Just after we moved to Boston, things got worse before they got better when I went on a business trip back to Utah and invited my stalker to my hotel room. It broke Krystal’s heart and she crashed. It would be weeks before she got out of bed.

One night a few weeks later as Krystal and I drove down a windy road in rural Massachusetts, Krystal screamed, “You weren’t there for me!” Somehow her words snapped me awake and I realized that I had been absent for years. I realized that I had deeply hurt Krystal and that I had some major problems with myself and the way I had escaped from her and my kids for years.

We were broken individually and so was our marriage. It was all a blur. It seemed like before we escaped from Provo, I was trying to manage so many hard things, like Tyler’s sickness and a stalker. I had been numbing myself with alcohol, sex, my career, and drugs. Krystal had taken a back seat to all the chaos. She felt abandoned, and rightly so. I had lost Krystal’s trust and respect.

While living in Boston, I went on a quest to fix all that I had broken and get her back. I wanted to know exactly how I became who I became to lose her and what I needed to do to earn her trust, respect, and love again, if it was still possible.

I wanted to be awake for my life and the people I loved. Krystal and I began making positive changes. Krystal enrolled in college to finish her degree. We both reduced our drinking. I stopped taking xanax. I was recruited by a large tech company that relocated us to Southern California. In California we started couples and individual therapy. We learned in therapy that Krystal had PTSD from all that she had been through. I learned how to listen and validate her so that she could begin to heal from all the shit that I had put her through.

We found effective treatment for Krystal’s PTSD. I began reading books about trauma. I learned how to listen and validate her so that she could heal from all the shit that I had put her through. I learned that I had toxic patterns of people pleasing, addiction, and escapism. I became aware of how these patterns had impacted Krystal. As I educated myself in the process of trying to be accountable for all that I had done to ruin my marriage, I began to see a clearer picture of why I had been so toxic.

I learned how to be a better husband. We got help for Tyler in the home. After 18 months of couples and individual therapy, our therapist told us that we had all the tools that we would need moving forward to handle anything that got in our way. I had come so close to losing Krystal and I was so grateful to have her in my life. We grew closer and love for each other returned. We were finally managing life. We renewed our vows on our secret beach in Malibu. I was back on track to having that happy life and beautiful relationship that I saw in my dream. It was too good to be true.

We had three months of bliss before our lives were turned upside down yet again. Krystal emerged from a BBL and liposuction surgery not only looking different, but she was different. It was like she had not completely awakened from her 14 hour surgery. She was suffering from memory loss. The tragedy was that she could only remember the version of me that abandoned her for years after Tyler’s birth when she needed me the most. She couldn’t remember most of our therapy or the healing that we had experienced together. She couldn’t remember why we renewed our vows. She was closed off to me and not letting me in. It was tragic.

In the months following her surgery, she began spending more and more time in her life as a porn star and less and less time at home as a mom and wife. She was going through the manic episode to end all manic episodes. I was worried about her.

I was doing all that I could to get us back to where we were only months earlier when we renewed our vows, but nothing worked. The distance between us grew. I moved out of our bedroom and into my office. I moved my clothes out of my closet into the office closet. Krystal was going to sex parties and having sex with every man in the room and booking more and more porn shoots. I wasn’t cool with how things were going, but I kept going along with it, hoping that she would wake up and see me.

I knew that I had a big problem on my hands when Krystal and I attended an orgy together in Los Angeles a few months after her BBL and liposuction surgery. I realized the sad truth about where my marriage was as I sat in the corner of the dark room feeling neglected and unseen as Krystal got pounded by three big black guys: I was a simp. I was humiliated and I wondered how I had ended up so far from what I had hoped for in my life with Krystal.

We left the orgy early. On the way home I told Krystal that I wasn’t comfortable with how much time she was giving to sex outside of our marriage. She wasn’t happy about it. In the following days and weeks we began to argue more and my patterns of escape to addiction returned with a vengeance. I began drinking heavily again. Within a couple of weeks I told her that I was no longer comfortable with her filming porn. She flew off the handle and for weeks she mocked me for the concerns that I was having. We both spiraled.

She was the girl of my dreams and it was torture to see the writing on the wall. After six or seven weeks from hell of me unsuccessfully trying to get Krystal to sit down and talk with me about why I felt the way I did, I decided that for my own happiness and sanity, I would need to tell her goodbye. I came to terms with the reality that the woman that I would share the beautiful relationship and happy life from my dream with wasn't going to be Krystal.

The Turning Point

In the days after I told her that I was leaving her, Krystal didn’t get out of bed. A day or two after I told her that I was leaving her, I walked past our room where she had been sleeping alone. I could see that she wasn’t doing well. “More of her crying about not being able to have sex outside of our marriage,” I thought to myself. I thought about walking past, but at the last moment I decided that I would stop in and check in on her instead.

“Are you ok?” I asked as I stood in the doorway to our room. She sat up in bed. Her face was red and puffy. Her strawberry blond hair was a mess. It looked like she had been crying for days. “You’re being worse than my dad,” she said. I didn’t know how to respond except to say that I was sorry. I walked away and began to think about what she said.

With those words, I believed that she was reaching out to me. I believe that she knew that I would know what she meant, and I did. Her words seemed to snap me awake, just like that night that we were driving in Massachusetts. I was the only person that she ever knew that stood up to her dad. I was the one that was supposed to keep her safe and I had done a terrible job at it.

I became self reflective. The rest of the day and through the night, I couldn’t stop thinking about what she said and what she must be going through. I realized that it was possible to do everything that I could think of to repair our relationship and still miss the mark.

I realized that trying to get back in her good graces by taking over many of the home and family responsibilities wasn’t what she needed when we lost our beautiful connection. I had always put Krystal’s immediate needs at a higher priority than fixing my obvious issues. She didn’t need me to take over more meals for her. What she really needed from me was to change the things about me that had made her feel unsafe for most of our marriage.

I had kept us in a hole financially for years. We had to file bankruptcy twice because of my out of control spending. I had addictions. I was emotionally unstable. I wondered when the last time was that I had actually been the husband and father that she had needed me to be. I couldn’t think of the last time. I had been unsafe for myself or anyone close to me and it had been that way for years, I was realizing.

I couldn’t remember the last time I didn’t have a substance in my body to cover the pain within. I couldn’t even remember what pain I was covering, but I knew that I had been covering it with spending money, sex, alcohol, and drugs.

I imagined what it must have felt like for Krystal to wake up from her surgery and realize that I still had the same problems with addiction, spending, and emotional instability. She had cried for years for me to do something about these issues and I never did. “Maybe Krystal’s view of me after her surgery was spot on,” I thought to myself. “Maybe she has been running from me and her life at home because of how unsafe I am,” I contemplated. I realized in this moment of clarity that it was probably true.

In addition to being real with myself about how unsafe I still probably was to her, I knew that she was also grieving the loss of no longer having Seth, our oldest son, in her day-to-day life anymore. When Seth graduated from high school he moved back to Boston and Krystal missed him a lot. For most of her life up to that point, her purpose in life was to be a mom and one day her son that made her a mom was out of the house. She told me that she felt like she lost her purpose in life when Seth moved away.

I also began to realize how scary it must be for her to be missing memories from her life. In addition to these difficult things that she was dealing with, it had been only six months since she ended her relationship with her parents, which she did when she wasn’t able to work through many of her painful traumatic memories from her childhood with them still involved in her life. She said it felt like they died on the day she told them goodbye so that she could begin healing. “What if she doesn’t know where or how to find herself again?” I asked myself.

I asked these questions and many others as I laid awake the entire night after she told me that I was being worse than her dad. Whatever the reasons were that she was running from her home life, I felt a deep love for her and compassion for what she must be going through.

Hyperbaric healing

I hadn’t slept a wink the entire night. Krystal needed me, I realized in the darkness of the night. After a long night of deep contemplation, I no longer viewed myself as a victim of her surgery, her memory loss, and her manic sex adventures. I wanted nothing more than to be by her side from that point on. I decided to drop my justifications and reasons for getting and staying hurt. At 3:00 or 4:00 am I knew what my path was. “I need to help her. I need to be there for her. I need to be safe for her.” I thought to myself.

I walked into our room when the sun came up the next morning. Krystal was lying in bed crying when I walked in. She looked up at me, wiping away tears. I sat down on the bed and took her hand in mine. “I’m going to be there for you from now on. I realized that I was approaching everything the wrong way. I wasn’t compassionately or empathetically thinking about what you might be going through or what you needed. I have only been selfishly focused on myself and how much I was hurting. I wasn’t considering that you might be going through some hard things. I’m sorry, honey. What do you need?” I asked her.

When I said those words, Krystal seemed to collapse. She laid her head on my shoulder and cried for a couple of minutes. When she was ready to talk, she told me exactly what she needed. “I need a hyperbaric chamber treatment.” In the months after her surgery, she found hyperbaric chamber treatments to be effective at helping her feel better and think clearer, but she hadn’t had a treatment in a few months. I called and made an appointment for her to have a hyperbaric chamber treatment later that day.

We drove to the valley where her hyperbaric treatment would be. The drive was peaceful but quiet. There was no anger or hurt between us for the first time in months. We were emotionally raw from what we had experienced over the previous months. I hoped that the treatment would help Krystal.

Krystal emerged from the hour-long hyperbaric chamber treatment as a new person, or should I say, herself. She immediately began to remember much of what had been lost from her memories after her surgery. On the hour-long drive home from her hyperbaric chamber treatment, we laughed, we played our favorite music, and we held hands. We cried, a lot, about what we had gone through over the previous months. “I’m sorry that I got lost and that I have forgotten so many important things. I’m afraid of getting lost again,” Krystal said. “If you do I’ll come find you,” I said.

To celebrate Krystal’s “waking up,” we stopped at the weed dispensary on our way home from the hyperbaric chamber treatment and bought some THC drinks and edibles. It felt like old times. We got home and went up to our bathroom that we had turned into a dance club, complete with a daybed, a big screen TV, a nice sound system, LED lights, and huge mirrors on the walls. We turned on some EDM music and danced for hours like best friends for the first time since Krystal’s surgery. We heard the song “Always” by Rufus du Sol for the first time that day in our party bathroom. It’s like the words were written for us.

Faith, trust that I will stay

I'll always be there

Faith, know that I have changed

I'm never leaving

Look into my eyes

Deep into my soul

I know I let you down

But I never let you go

We decided that it would be “our song.”

We listened to the song over and over and cried like babies in each other’s arms as the bass from the speakers in our party bathroom reverberated through our bodies. I knew that Krystal was still “in there.”

I believed from the 180 degree positive change that Krystal experienced from the hyperbaric chamber treatment that she was indeed not physically or emotionally well. I realized the truth was that she was an amnesic sex addict who was going through a manic episode due to the physical and emotional trauma of many things, and she needed me. I changed my mind. I wasn’t leaving her. I wasn’t going to abandon her. I was going to man up. I wasn’t going to be a victim anymore, no matter how much of a pain in the ass Krystal might be as I stood with her through the sure-to-come withdrawals of her now-cut-off sex addiction and any other issues that we would need to work through again. I was going to be by her side and help her heal from that day on, I vowed to myself.

I was going to stay because she needed me. I was going to stay because I loved her. I was going to stay because I was realizing that the chaos in our lives was my fault.

“I’m not going anywhere on December 26th,” I told Krystal when we took a break from dancing. She smiled briefly and then walked away for a moment and came back to me with her grandfather’s class ring and slid it onto my right ring finger. “Look. I have my grandma’s class ring and now you have my grandpa’s,” she said as she held her hand up, showing me her grandma’s matching class ring. We didn’t waste any of the time that we had together. We stayed up all night to be with each other and drove to the park near our house to watch the sunrise together.

The version of Krystal that disappeared the day that she went into her surgery was right in front of me and connected to me during those three days, and we made the most of it. We looked through old family pictures and family videos. We talked about the old times. Each night for three nights we stayed up late listening to music and dancing in our party bathroom. We knew that the effects of the hyperbaric chamber treatment were wearing off, so we wanted to be awake for as much of it as we could.

In the movie, Inception, the characters use a “kicker” to wake up from their dream state and back into a more conscious state. I think that telling Krystal that I was leaving her, combined with her hyperbaric chamber treatment were the “kickers” that woke her up from her dream state to the reality of what was happening in her life.

We shared three days of bliss after Krystal’s hyperbaric chamber treatment. In the days after I told Krystal I was leaving her, the angry, fighting, furious, sex addicted, manic woman that had replaced Krystal after her surgery seemed to have left for good, and in the ashes, my loving, caring wife and friend that I loved with all my heart remained. She was exhausted from the previous seven months of her life. She would need a lot of love moving forward, but I was in.

A couple of days after her treatment, Krystal told me that she felt herself losing consciousness again. Her energy levels began to revert back to her pre-hyperbaric chamber treatment levels and her memories began to fade again, just as she worried they would. She told me that she was worried about becoming who she had been in the months after her surgery. She wouldn’t be alone this time, I assured her.

She didn’t know that I was going to make the changes that I needed to make in my life so that she could feel safe with me and her life again. I didn’t know how much longer she would be awake with me or how long it would take for her to wake up after she fell asleep again, but I was going to be there for her.

Balance

When Krystal crashed in Massachusetts, it took weeks for Krystal to begin to get out of bed and come back to her life again. I guessed that this crash would take much longer to recover from. She was not well, I realized as she fell asleep on my chest in the bed that we would sleep in together from that point to forever in our life together. I wasn’t losing her again, but I knew that I had a lot on my plate.

As we fell asleep in the early morning hours a couple of nights after Krystal’s hyperbaric treatment, I began to try to figure out my plan for getting my life back in balance so that Krystal would feel safe to come back to me and her life. I knew that I had been avoiding my problems because they were hard to think about. I had been blind for years about how impactful my addictions and patterns of escapism had been on my life and the people I loved.

I was spinning. I went from telling Krystal that I was leaving her to having a beautiful three days with her. I had lost her twice and I would need to do it right this time to ensure that I didn’t lose her again. My life was out of balance in so many areas and it was causing chaos in my life. The chaos and imbalance resulted in Krystal feeling unsafe with me and in her life with me. It was critical for me to learn how to always be safe for her.

For the first time in years, I had true clarity about why my life had been so chaotic. It was me. I was the reason that my life had become a dumpster fire, not Krystal. I would need to be Krystal’s caretaker until she was feeling better. Tyler needed me full time, too. His behavior at school and at home had been worse in the previous months. All my sons needed me. I had been neglecting my career to manage the chaos at home. I didn’t know how I would be able to show up for my career and give my family what they needed. I knew that I would need to make some big decisions, take risks, and have courage to find the balance that I was seeking.

Just like in the movie, Flowers for Algernon, when the effects of the hyperbaric chamber treatment began to wear off, Krystal began to slowly fall “asleep” again. “I’m falling asleep again,” Krystal said on the third night after her hyperbaric treatment. I looked into her eyes. “Don’t be afraid. I’ll be here when you wake up.”