And here we are..

I am going to be 32 on the 10th.  I am more confident in who I am than I was two years ago.  I sometimes wonder how I got here though.

Everything I hated, right down to my name, I love.  With a stupid passion that I guess, is somewhat childish?  The originality, the love and the hopes behind it, became apparent when I named my kids.

Next year, I will be divorced.  I ran off in to the sunset with who I thought was Mr. Right and ended up in the dark for so long, it finally came to my attention that hey, morning isn't going to come with this one.

It's hard to admit out loud that one is in an abusive relationship.  There are cyclic behaviours we fall into never questioning the roots, never wondering why or how...and we wake up one day, and it clicks.

My husband never beat me.  He never raised a hand to me.  But, in his perceived notion that he's only hurting himself, he indulges himself in occasional vacations with his crackpipe.  He has taken my secrets and flung them at me like sand in the wind.  This can happen sober or inebriated.  It doesn't matter.

When I met him, I thought I had found it.  That thing we all search for.  That settling down, that loving feeling, that security, things that make a woman think, hey, I can make this man my baby daddy.  And masks fall away.

It's hard not to wonder if too many stressful things happened too early on, but then, it wasn't early in the relationship, it was just early in the marriage.  To say there were no happy times would be a lie.

There were up times, so quick, so infrequent, so overcome by the down times, they seemed to never have existed.  Family moments, vacations, birthdays, dates, they all happened, they all occurred with laughter, with gaiety.  And then, the disappearances, binges, theft, hurt, arguments, rehab, prison.

Loving him was easy at the start, staying in love was harder.  Of course staying in love is hard, staying in love with a crackhead whose world revolves around him sober, much less toxic, is ridiculously near impossible.  We women have that innate complex that says we can love them better, we can make them change.  We can make it right.  True love conquers all.  One day he'll wake up and see what he has.

Or one day he can wake up and see what he sure as hell lost...