My Story Part 2....To Be Continued.....

During my high school years is when I really started noticing the kind of mom my mom really was. I’m sure most teenage girls say that because let’s face it, our hormones are on a whole different level at that age, but my mom really had a way of making me feel so unimportant to her. She was still a stay at home mom and supposedly spent her days cleaning and cooking for our family while my brother and I were at school. She would make that known whenever her and my dad would get into a fight about her forgetting to pick me up from school or her going out shopping and spending tons of money on herself. My dad would drop me off at school daily, occasionally he would have to go to work early and mom would do it, but I always hated when she dropped me off because we would fight just about every time. At the end of the day she was supposed to pick me up from school but slowly she started forgetting or she would be “too busy” and tell me to walk home. It was about a 3 mile walk and I absolutely hated it because not only was I carrying my heavy backpack, but it took time away from my homework and downtime at home before it was time for dinner and bed. I never understood why she was “too busy” or how she could even forget to pick me up until now…but I’ll get into that later.

I had a few boyfriends here and there throughout the first couple years of high school. They were all my age so none of them drove yet. One lived across the street from our high school so the days my mom would forget about me I would just go over to his house and hang out until she could find the time to pick me up. In about 11th grade I started dating a senior. Once I started dating him he pretty much drove me home from school every day so I never had to rely on mom again. I didn’t even bother to get my license until after high school because I ended up dating this guy for a long time and once he graduated high school he would pick me up for lunch and from school every day. My mom never really liked my boyfriend. She seemed to have liked everyone except him. I think it was because he was the first boyfriend who didn’t feel the need to make her like him. He was more worried about my dad liking him, which was smart because my dad meant everything to me and none of my prior boyfriends had tried to get to know him. He and my dad got along very well and that pissed my mom off. She would often make smart ass comments about their relationship.

I’m not going to lie, that relationship I was in was not a healthy one. My mom’s instincts were right but I didn’t see it that way at the time. Our fights (mine and my mom’s) got worse the longer I was with him, not because of him, but because she felt she was losing control over the one thing she always had control over, ME. Her and my dad started fighting more too. There was a lot of closed door fighting going on and I never really knew what it was about until later.

The day I graduated high school my mom filed for a divorce from my dad. I’ll never forget that day. They were both at my graduation as two separate people, no longer as a family. My mom seemed to be handling everything well, but my dad was so sick and weak. He had lost so much weight and was emotionally drained. He didn’t want a divorce but had no choice…she made up her mind and that was it. Looking back now, I don’t even know how he stayed as long as he did or why he even wanted to keep her.

To be continued….

My Story --------to be continued....

As I think about everything that has happened so far in 2015 I feel blessed because my husband and I have so much to be thankful for but I also can't help but feel 2015 has been one of the worst years ever. The series of events we have gone through have been one heck of an emotional rollercoaster, especially after losing Josh's little brother. When I look back I realize everything bad that has happened recently with our families somehow has to do with drugs. It seems as though drugs are taking over the world. It makes me so sick to my stomach because the people who do drugs don’t realize how many people they are hurting. We all have a story, we all have some sort of past that has left us with scars, a past that has helped form who we are today……I believe, in order to heal, you should talk about these things. Here is a bit of my story and the hurt I struggle with...

Growing up everyone thought we had the perfect family. We had nice things, lived a better than average life, my mom was a stay at home mom who made sure breakfast, lunch and dinner was always freshly made and that her kids were never in the care of someone else. My dad worked full-time, he owned his own business and made sure we were financially set so that my mom never had to leave us. My mom had me when she was 21 and married my dad when she found out she was pregnant with me. They met at a party and didn’t date very long before she became pregnant. I was an “oops baby” and the reason they got married. My dad wanted a little girl so bad. When he found out I was a girl he was so happy. He spoiled the heck out of me. I don’t remember most of my childhood, but dad reminds me of it often. He would always tell me how jealous my mom was of our father daughter relationship. She would get so mad at him for picking me up from school early the days he left work early.

My brother was born exactly six years after me (we share the same birthday). My mom said she didn’t want another baby but that my dad and I begged her to have a sibling for me. At 18 months old my brother was burned over 50% of his body with a deep fryer full of hot grease. I remember the day like it was yesterday. We were running around the house and jumping on the couches, my mom kept telling me to settle down. She was on the phone with a girlfriend and my dad was cooking French fries in a deep fryer in the kitchen. As my brother and I ran through the kitchen, he stopped, and pulled the cord to the deep fryer. All of the grease in the deep fryer fell on top of him burning over 50% of his body. He was flown from our house to Torrance Memorial Hospital by helicopter. He spent months in the hospital. We are very lucky he made it. My mom spent those months in the hospital with him. She never left his side. Because of his accident, he was babied by all of us for many years, which is totally understandable after all he had went through and all the guilt we all felt for what had happened.

When I was in middle school we moved. I started a new school mid-year and had to make new friends. I remember not really feeling like I fit in because I came from a school that was pretty much every race except white and now was in a school full of white people. Eventually I made friends with some great people. One of those friends is my husband and another is still my best friend to this day.

In middle school my house was the house everyone went to for breakfast before school and the house that everyone hung out at after school because we had a pool. My mom would make us pancakes in the morning and would often host pool parties for us. Everyone though my mom was the best. She got along with everyone’s parents and was good to all of my friends. My dad was a little more reserved. He would work a lot and when he’d come home he would go straight to his room because he would be annoyed that we had so many people over (especially if I had guys over). Not too many people knew my dad, unless they were really close to me, then they knew him.

What everyone didn’t know was how much my mom didn’t care for me and how much I always felt that. How much she resented me for how much my dad “spoiled” me with love. How she was nice to all of my friends but not the nicest to me. It wasn’t until recently that I learned her issues were much further than her being jealous of my relationship with my dad. She had so many hidden secrets, she wasn’t the person everyone thought she was…

To be continued….