Turn the page

This isn’t embarrassing so much as it is a No Regrets. The last 20 yrs have been a nightmare. I was married and started having children young. Choices I made as a rebellious teen forced me into a position of “Following through.” I’d made my bed and so I’d have to lay in it. In 9 years I’d married and had 4 children. The last a traumatic delivery that turned my world upside down. My marriage already a difficult one, filled with alcoholism, verbal and emotional abuse and trying to cope with raising children, constant financial stress and life’s regular hardships, was thrown into a tailspin that spiraled downhill for the next 15 yrs of my life. My 4th child suffered massive brain damage at birth and required 24/7 medical care his entire life until his death a month shy of his 15th birthday. My marriage slowly fell apart as we each dealt with those 15yrs in a different manner. While I remained eternally optimistic, making lemonade out of lemons. My husband took the lemons and added vodka. His drinking became unbearable as did the fighting and emotional abuse I suffered. But I stuck it out fir the sake of my children. They were going through the emotional roller coaster of their brothers disabilities and traumatic life and the changes and affect it had on our family right along with me. The last thing I wanted was to remove their father from their everyday life in top of it. Because despite how our marriage was, he was a good father. But after my son died, after my two oldest had moved out and were following their dreams, things really went down hill. The fighting had stopped but so had our words. My husband and I would go days without acknowledging each other’s existence. We slept apart and hardly spoke. I’d been dealing with PTSD and depression and anxiety since my sons birth but for a short time after his death it became very dark. Then my daughter who was entering her senior year of high school became unhinged herself. She was diagnosed Bipolar with manic episodes of depression, anxiety and anger. And working through it with her, helping her cope and get through her own mental issues, woke me up to my own. I was miserable. Unhappy and tired of being that way. There was no marriage to fight for. It had died out years before. When we did speak it turned into vicious arguments. And when my son died, with him my excuse for not moving on died too. So I started to make plans. I got a job, my own car and my own banking accounts. I got my shit together. My daughter was begging me to leave and take her with me. She’d endured her own mental hell and the tension between her father and I had reached epic proportions. If my life was going to change, if I was going to find the happy woman I once was, it was going to be now or never.

So I informed my husband of my plans to move out as soon as I could find an apartment. He laughed. Didn’t think I could or would ever do it. Which pushed me on to making it happen. And on a cold November day, 2 yrs after my sons death, I packed what I could into my car, packed my daughters things into hers and with a few pieces of furniture that were not being used packed into my sister truck, I moved out and on my own for the first time in my adult life.

I was terrified. I was sad for all that I’d lost yet happy that I was finally free. It wasn’t easy. My daughter lived with me for the first 6 months before moving out on her own with her boyfriend. I was alone at 45 yrs old, for the first time in my life. For the next three years I worked mad hours, paid my own way and healed myself from the previous 28 yrs of struggle, pain and unhappiness. It wasn’t easy. But over the last 6 years I’ve become stronger. I’ve found that woman who had been lost so long ago. Nobody in my inner circle ever thought I’d leave my husband. Nobody ever thought I’d escape the world I’d been shackled to. But I did. I’ve stood on my own two feet and have followed my heart and made my own dreams. I’m still healing, I’ll always be a work in progress but so are we all. Life will continue to throw us curveballs and hand us opportunities that we can either seize or let pass us by. And I’ve chosen to seize them. I’ve chosen to be happy. Our stories are never going to change If we never turn the page. I turn a new page every day now. We are the authors of our own stories, so make them the best stories they can be. Turn the page...