Embracing Your Mess Part 1

This year I am embracing who I am and not who everyone thinks I need to be. My life is a mess and, it is mine. In all, it’s uncertainty, confusion, beauty, and struggle. Life is hard in the best of times. Add in years of being who others expect you to be and, you have a hot mess.

Related: Embracing Your Mess | Part 1

An Honest Look

My life in the last ten or fifteen years has been all over the map. Scratch that, say the last twenty. I think things fell apart after my father passed away. At least, it seems like it did. It may have started before then but, I didn’t notice anything before that. I’ve been looking back so that I can face the future with a clearer picture.

After my father passed away, we floundered as a family. That first Thanksgiving was little more than one argument after another. So much so that we didn’t even bother with Christmas when it came. It came and went that year without us celebrating it all. My father would have been so disappointed in us. We all just seemed to stop making any effort. It would be years before we would all be together again and attempt a holiday meal.

A DisasterOus Relationship

I can say with all honesty my ex and I should have never been together. Looking back at it I can see the desperation and need that I had to be loved. Not that I wasn’t by my parents. My childhood was a good one but when it came to romance I was more of a book smart gal. I had the knowledge in theory yet lacked the practice. I was t the girl that guys in high school wanted to date and by college it was so ingrained in me that I couldn’t tell when someone was flirting. I still can’t as a matter of fact.

When my ex came along, I was ripe for the picking and, he knew that. I was the caregiver for several years while my father had been sick. Even before that, I was a caregiver. When I was in my teens, my older brother began working and, I took over as the one who got everyone up for work and school, made the lunches, etc. I just naturally took over the caregiver role. So when my father got sick, I added more onto that role. By the time I met my ex, I was ready for someone to take care of me. Someone who would put my needs first for a change.

That is how it was at first or, so it seemed. He was good, early on, at presenting himself in a different light. I didn’t know he had two children until it came time for them to stay with us. Their mother called and told him she put them on a plane from Mexico and, he told me I needed to pick his kids up from the airport. I know that should have been a huge red flag but my desperate, needy self didn’t notice it. So, I went from wife to stepmother easily. They spent half the year with us and half the year with their real mother. Then one year she said they could stay with us. I don’t know why to this day but from that moment on they were with us.

Unlikely Motherhood

By this time he had began to show his true self. The abuse had started and it wasn’t as much physical abuse as it was mental. I suffered my first miscarriage alone on the bathroom floor. The next three were enough to make me want to end it all. After the final one my ex introduced to me to his latest girlfriend who was married herself and pregnant. She didn’t want her husband to know she was having an affair and offer us the children. She told her husband she was our surrogate. I don’t know if he believed all of that or what but in the end I got the twins.

Now, y’all are reading this and thinking what kind of crazy woman just takes on her husband’s children of an affair. My best answer if that I was simply desperate for love and who knows what. We did separate again at that time. We had separated several times over the course of our marriage. He always knew what to do and say to get back in the door. The twins were not even a year old when he left for the final time. He was suppose to be out of town working which was normal. He texted me one night and told me to find someone new. He was done with my, and I quote, worthless a**.

I was heartbroken and it took me a few years to be able to say that was the best thing he could have ever done for me. I will say that no matter how he has treated me he was and is a good father. I just wasn’t what he wanted or needed. I am more than okay with that now. In the midst of all of this my mother came to live with us and then later my uncle. They had health problems and needed a caregiver. So, I ended right back into that role.

My youngest is special needs and had cancer which meant taking care of him beyond the normal everyday stuff that parents do. I don’t resent being the caregiver to so many. It just would be nice to be the one taking care of sometimes. A good example is I hurt my foot the day my mom came home from eye surgery. I was in one of those walking cast shoes and not suppose to be on my foot. However, someone has to cook dinner, make sure everyone takes their medications, put the eye drops and cream on my mother’s eye, take the trash to the street, etc.

New Fears

I got congestive heart failure last year and things looked bad. However, I have been fighting tooth an nail every day to make sure that I don’t move beyond the early stage that I am in. I have had ups and downs but such the progression of this illness. It is the same illness that illness my father and I am determined to see my children to adulthood. That was until my ex decided him and his new wife needed to take a more proactive role in our children’s lives. Just before Christmas I was informed they were filing for sole custody. I received all of the paperwork and began to figure out how to fight this.

He planned to share all of my faults. All of my shames, like how after my first miscarriage I attempted suicide. That I had attempted it twice and failed both times. How I have a mental illness on top of a chronic illness that can and most likely will kill me. Of course he made himself look like the perfect parent. No mention of the fact that two of his children are products of an affair. That he left us without any sort of warning. That he was abusive towards me. All they planned to share was my faults and trust me I have many. I don’t claim to be perfect but I do the best I can each and every day.

Part 2

Part 2 will be coming tomorrow. There is just so much to get out and say in this particular post that doing it in two parts seemed like the way to go. So be sure you stay tuned.