How many characteristics can you give your characters?

I mean, the heroine I'm working with now started early with adulthood. She had kids at 16 in an attempt to keep an older man in her life and have payments for her mother's house after her death in a car wreck. Her son, the second twin, born with heart problems, is doing okay now, but there's always an undercurrent of health problems and extensive, expensive testing to keep his condition monitored. Being self-employed, she relies on her now-husband's insurance to keep her son healthy, and the debt he incurs, and possibly a little bit of not exactly battered woman syndrome but whatever coupled by guilt by snaring him into fatherhood, he needs to pay back through his wife, who now controls the finances, period. There's your family dynamics. Not a good dad, never intended to be a dad, and resentful as hell. She blames herself and she knows she wronged him, and she's more tolerant because of it -- that and they're flat broke.

Husband has a gambling problem after getting booted of a position on a military facility for, on principal, shutting down part of the base to get a point across -- there were big holes in their security system, and the general shouldn't hire based on friendship. Once out, he finds another reliable job, but not at the caliber he once held. In a big baseball and football town with horse racetracks and small-time car/funny car/stuff racing available, his gambling gets him in trouble. To squeeze money out of him, the sharks attack his wife where she now works as a nurse, after getting a GED and going to LPN school. They carve a dollar sign in her chest just to make sure they get their message across.

She recovers, but can't work as a nurse because of injuries also sustained to her legs, so she tries transcription while she recovers, and find it's good. Her boss retires and rather than selling the business, she divvies up the contracts between the transcriptionists who want them. Our heroine's business grows. This is now a span of a realistic 15 years. Kids at 16, GED at 18, nursing school at 19, working for 3 years as a nurse, now 31 and her own business, which keeps growing. She carries a gun, because she's afraid to drive into the city, but she's also afraid of the thugs she's familiar with but are kept in check because she once cared for the organization's matron's husband, and it's possible the perps that carved her up didn't die with dollar signs carved on their chests as mere coincidence.

She's stuck, and it gets worse...I won't give that away, just because it's never been done before in a book. She's got minimal help, but she ends up doing most of the work to get out of it because she's got all the contacts, and they'll only talk to her. Meanwhile, her husband "wins it big," he tells her. She's free, but he won't leave, and begs her for a fresh start.

I guess I could make the "special ops" guy help her develop her skills in the time they're together, but I don't think I should go further. Physical therapy for her legs and arms help rebuild her muscles, so she has to take daily steps to keep her muscles strong so her bones don't carry all the load, so she's going to be in shape. I'm just tempted to throw in a little kickboxing but, trust me, a married mother of twins who are 15, no money, and a full-time business as a transcriptionist just doesn't give you that kind of leeway.

At this point, I'm really not pushing the level of credibility, here. I went to nursing school with someone who did the GED thing and then a year's LPN program. I'm sure she's still working as a nurse, but I didn't; I moved on to transcription. This is something I know, and accidents do happen and people work through them and girls sucker men into marriage and guys retaliate in a variety of ways.

Can I get away with pushing anything further? I don't know. It seems like she has enough survival skills as it is, and a very loving relationship with the other trapped woman she knows, who is even more trapped, the organization's Mama L. That's not a stretch, either. I was a very good friend with a man's wife who, at night, if a car drove into the parking lot, my CNAs dove under the beds. I kid you not! He was very, very feared in the community, and had survived one shooting already.

Okay, no kickboxing. I'm not even how good I should make her with her gun. She and her husband share a car, so it's not like she's got freedom to go to a shooting range often, and if she gets away from her insanely busy schedule as a small business owner, she gets out for groceries and basic shopping at a max.

Anyway, I think I've talked myself into enough points for and against my main chick, and kept it realistic. Trust me. What she gets dumped with is equally as realistic.

I like what I'm doing here. I usually stick with sci-fi/fantasy, so I can stretch things a bit more, but I think this is real life. Please, differences of opinions are welcome.