Monday, July 2, 2012

How Did I Get Here?

In the immortal words of the Talking Heads...."You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?"

Good question.

It has been a culmination of many life changing experiences over the last 17 years. 

The first disaster was the unexpected divorce of my parents.  And I mean COMPLETELY unexpected.  We never saw them fight EVER so we were completely caught off guard.

During the midst of this, my great-grandmother died.  Not so unexpected, she was 85 and in poor health, but I adored her completely.  She lived two houses down from us for the first 11 years of my life and I saw her everyday.  When we moved across town we didn't see her quite as much.  Man, I loved her.

After the chaos of the divorce, my dad remarried a year or two later.  It was stressful to say the least.  I was 19.  I wasn't interested in having a second mom.  I didn't want anything to do with having a new family.  So I got engaged to my boyfriend to get out of the house.

At 20 years old I married my 24 year old boyfriend.  It was the biggest mistake of my life.  We didn't talk about what we wanted, or our life plans, or what we wanted in our relationship.  He lied to me about wanting children.  He was extremely selfish and everything was about him.  Four years later in the ultimate act of selfishness he asked for a divorce and started seeing my best friend.  Nice.

On my own at 24 in a tiny one-bedroom apartment, life was bleak.  I began drinking and smoking heavily.  I became promiscuous.  I got involved with married men.  I didn't care about myself or what happened to me.  I was suicidal and hoped that I would die.  I could barely pay the bills.  I had nobody to help me.  Life was miserable.

The time came when I could no longer afford to live on my own.  I had to move home, 500 miles away, to live with my mom.  24 years old, divorced, and living with my mom.  Yeah.  Life was sucking.  It turned out to be the best turning point in my life.  I sobered up.  I got out of the unhealthy relationships.  I got my bills paid off.  And I even saved up a little money.

After a year at my mom's I met a sweet guy who I'll call H.an Solo. :)  Mr. Solo worked at the same place as me and was fun to talk to.  Eventually a friendship developed and after that a relationship developed.  We had our first date on Valentine's Day and married 6 months later.  Nearly 7 years later we have two sweet kids, a boy and a girl, and a pretty normal relationship.  We fight, we make up, we love passionately and we fight passionately.  We agree to disagree on some things, and we make a strong team on others.  We have different opinions at times, but in the end we have the same goals for our life together and for our family.  We came into our marriage with both eyes wide open, and we've had many more good times than bad.  I can't imagine anyone else I'd rather have seen as I walked down the aisle the second (and FINAL) time, or standing at the bedside as I delivered each of our babies.  I can't imagine growing old with anyone else.  I can't imagine taking on the world with anyone else as my partner.  We work hard, and it's hard work, but we're determined to remain a team and to love our kids and each other as best we can.  Divorce is not now, nor will it ever be, a word in our vocabulary.  We are completely committed to our relationship, period.

Life is pretty good now.  There have been some bumps along the way like struggles with family members, loss of grandparents, financial troubles, and health issues.  And of course raising kids is never easy.  But it's for better and worse, richer and poorer, til death do us part!