Never Too Late (11 page)

Just looking cute . . .

Bubby on the bull

So proud of my brother and all the troops fighting for us.

Sad day watching my brother leave for Iraq. So thankful he’s back here with me now.

This girl is so damn loved

Mom and dad actually standing
actually
standing together . . . WHAT?

Looking innocent with Krystal

Just sitting there looking super happy . . .

Seeing myself on the cover of In Touch

Y
eah, I know most of you see where this is headed. If you’re reading this book, chances are you know enough about
Teen Mom
to know how one of the lowest points of my life turned into one of the show’s most shocking clips. You know, the one of me losing my temper and physically attacking the father of my child.

I didn’t write this book to make excuses for my behavior. And I’m not denying anything we all know is true. I’m just telling a part of the story that people don’t know. So when I talk about what happened, I don’t want anybody doubting how much I regret the things I did to hurt people, or how sorry I am about it. I know I was messed up, my behavior was wrong, and there’s no excuse for abusing people in your life. And me, of all people, I should have known better. I
did
know better. I just messed up anyway. I’m not trying to justify it. It’s a horrible way to act and that person I was at the time is a person I’ve worked really hard not to be.

But you can’t change the past, as much as you might like to. All you can do is try to look back with a clear mind, see where you went wrong, make amends where you can, and move forward. It’s never too late to do that, and I’ve tried hard to make it happen for myself and for the people around me. Even when it means facing how horrible the reality was when things were going wrong.

Even before he cheated, we were in trouble as a couple. And I mean
trouble
. The fighting was bad. But still, the cheating was just the worst fucking thing. I was so hurt it just crushed me. I never in my life, ever, dreamed that he would
ever
cheat on me. Never in my life did I dream he would do that.

The whole thing was kept under wraps. He actually filmed with this girl one time, and people who were watching didn’t realize he’d cheated on me with her. It was kept covered up for a long time. And the twisted thing was that I was part of that cover-up. He was the love of my life and the father of my daughter, and even with all the bullshit blowing up between us, I was still trying to fix our relationship. There was nothing simple or easy about the idea of breaking up with him for good, especially since we’d split up and reunited so many times already in our history. It wasn’t just the fact that we’d been together so long and had so much love and so many memories between us. The fact was that we shared a child. We were family. So even as things between us got worse and worse, we did still try to force the pieces back together. At least, I did. I can only speak for myself.

So all through this time, there were things happening behind the scenes that I didn’t talk about, because I didn’t really want our business out there when I was trying as hard as I could not to give up on my family. Off camera we kept on talking and fighting it out, just looking for any possible way we could hold things together. We tried to work it out about a month after he told me he cheated. He came over to my place one night to see me, and we just had a wonderful time with each other. I made dinner, and we talked and hung out for awhile, and then we put on a movie and fell asleep in each other’s arms. It was really nice. It was the kind of night that made me remember what we had in the beginning. It made me remember the love I thought we were still capable of sharing. As I fell asleep with him like that, I was feeling good about us and our chances of fixing what we had.

I woke up around five in the morning and he was gone. The movie was turned off. I was in the dark, alone. And I heard these faint sounds like voices out in my living room. This was my house, let me mention. I paid for it. He wasn’t living there anymore.

When I heard someone talking out there, I got up and sort of quietly went down the hallway to listen. And there he was, on the phone, talking to this girl.

In my freaking house, he was sitting there talking to the girl he cheated on me with.

I flipped on the light and I was like, “What the fuck are you doing?” And what he said to me was something like, “Quit it, Amber.” Like I was the one acting insane, and like he had no intention of hanging up that phone.

I could not believe my ears. I asked him, “Are you fucking serious right now?”

He held his hand up and said, “Stop it. You’re makin’ her feel bad.” He wouldn’t hang up. He was sitting there bitching at me for making this girl feel . . . what? I don’t know. I couldn’t believe it. And I was so shocked, I didn’t even get mad. I walked out into the living room and sat on the couch bawling my eyes out, begging him to hang up the phone. And he wouldn’t.

What the hell kind of way to act is that? This is the same man who used to care so much about others it would kill him to hurt somebody like that, and who I still have so much love for in my heart, and is such a big piece of my life. And here he was cheating on me and coming over to my freaking house to act all sweet with me and make me feel good about us, and then he’s calling this girl up and telling me to leave him alone. It’s crazy how somebody can show such different sides.

I don’t know how to explain what happened to him. But I do think, hypothetically speaking, of course, that an experience like a reality show can turn a regular person into a piece of shit. That man was less than a boy at the time. To me, behind closed doors with the cameras off, as far as I could tell, he was nothing but a cheater and a liar. And nobody knew because by that time I was already so used to trying to hold up the routine. And I know people might think they know how bad it was from what they saw, but what was inside our world, what we did keep from showing other people, was even worse.

There were times we’d physically fight, both of us. He’d spit in my face and I’d spit back in his face. He’d hold me down and lay on me, all three-hundred seventy-five pounds, and I’d be fighting and telling him he better knock me out because if I got up I’d beat the hell out of him. That was our lowest point. We hated each other for what we thought we’d done to each other, and we got to just about the worst place in our relationship that you can imagine.