Once Upon A Time...

When I was thirteen years old my parents split up. The strangest thing about it was that I was actually happy. They had been fighting for as long as I could remember. They had some good times too. But good times are so easily erased by alcohol abuse, verbal abuse and just plain absence. I was thrilled to move away from the town where I had been bullied and belittled by my classmates more days than I cared to think about. It was a fresh start for my mom and I. In time she healed and became the mother I always knew she could be if not preoccupied by a failing marriage that was an unbelievable heaviness on her shoulders. We could now move forward and make a life for ourselves.

What did I learn from that experience? I learned that I never wanted to go through what my mother went through. I never wanted to spend my life with a person, have children with a person, and have that person trample on those years and those memories and tarnish them forever. I was convinced that I would never find someone that I trusted so implicitly to never do that to me. Someone who would truly commit to me for life, in good times and bad. I thought I'd found that person in high school. We were each other's first 'real' loves. We dated for 2 ½ years. The last 1 ½ were not great. They were filled with jealousy and trust issues until the relationship finally dissolved. My world crashed in on me. My suspicions had been correct, I couldn't trust anyone. I was only happy to have found it out before I married him and had his children. I then attempted to have a 'casual' relationship, one that would never lead to marriage. This relationship which last for about 3 years was also emotionally draining and seriously damaging to my self esteem.

It was at this point that my life took a turn. I went to visit a friend out of town for the weekend. When I arrived her husband's brother was already there. I had met him several years earlier when I was 19 and still dating my 'high school sweetheart'. I had always thought him to be 1. gorgeous 2. Intelligent 3. Interesting. He was also painfully shy and over the years when I was around him I enjoyed forcing him to talk to me by asking him questions about the book he was reading or whatever. From pretty much the first time I met him I would often think about him and consider what it would be like to date him. I didn't even think of this as being a real possibility since I was always dating someone else and he lived two hours away. Yet on that weekend while visiting his sister in law the possibility presented itself. I had recently given up on the 'casual' relationship that was going no where and found myself to be unattached for the first time since I was 16. I hadn't expected to be spending so much time with my friends brother in law during my visit but each night, after everyone had gone to bed we stayed up talking. I wanted to hug him many times but he made me nervous. I was never too nervous to be affectionate. Except with him. I left that weekend with his address in my pocket. Little did I know that he would be the person who I would trust enough that I'd agree to spend my life with him.

And now we have had his baby. I don't regret it. Not one bit. Even though our relationship has gone through more ups and downs in the past months since her birth than it has in the nearly ten years we've been together. I look at him and I believe that it is all going to be okay.

Yet things, bad things have been happening to women I care about lately. The men in their lives have disappointed them in the worst ways. It shakes my confidence in my own relationship. We all want to believe that we are going to live happily ever after. When the happily ever after falls apart for people we know how do we pick up the pieces? And how do we not lose faith in our own happiness?