Lost Indenity Part 2

“Let no one split apart what God has joined together.” Mark 10:9

At the young age of 19 and the world at my feet I took a vow to love one man for the rest of my life. Through richer and poorer, sickness and health, and all that falls into sharing your life with someone. Coming from a long line of failed marriages I was so hopeful to be the exception. Unfortunately this was not the journey I embarked on in late May of 1999.

My marriage started out as many due. Happy, in love, spending every waking moment with each other. But that quickly turned into not being the case. A short time after getting married my husband turned 21 and that began the long lonely journey of what was suppose to be a marriage but ended up being far from that. While I certainly had many faults in my relationship with my husband I found justification because of his love affair with alcohol and never wanting to be home with me and the kids. We had ups and downs the first 5 years and I stuck through the downs because that was my promise and what I truly believed in.

After years of his alcoholism and abusive nature (emotional and verbal) I finally found the strength to stick up for my 3 beautiful daughters and myself. I set up boundaries and we staredt to fix something that was so broken. At least that was what I thought we were doing. Turns out that while I was working on our marriage he was pretending to do the same but ended up living a completely different life with someone else. I had questions early on in his affair but he was so good at lying and I was so wanting to believe him that I blindly went on ignoring every feeling I had that our vows were no long important to him. I lived in this lie for 2 months of what I thought was a new beginning to our marriage. I was finally seeing the husband I had been waiting out for and things were going great from my view even though I still had that gut feeling that I was being lied to.

One day out of the blue I got the phone call that stopped my world dead in its tracks. Turns out that what I thought to be true but never had the black and white evidence to back it up was true. My husband was having another relationship. There are no words if you have never been in that situation to truly describe what you go through. Its almost like a death. Everything is stripped away! Everything you thought you were is gone in just a few words. For years I had been a wife but at that moment that title was ripped right out of my heart and soul. What kind of wife had I been that my husband turned to someone else?? I must of been far worse of a person then I had ever imagined. How can someone sit there and say you are their life and their love but then go tell someone else the same. At that moment my identity of being a wife died.

Trying so hard to hold some resemblance of my life together was entirely more then I could do. Not only had my “wife” identity been stolen but my “mother” identity had also been stolen away. My world stopped. I couldn’t breath, eat, think. move. It was like I was dead but still trapped inside of someones body. Watching every one pass by and continue with life but I couldn’t join them. My kids lost their mother that day. I again lost a part of me. What kind of mother would let someones stupid choice take her away from her children. It took weeks to start to move and during that time my kids were on their own. I was there physically but not mentally or emotionally. To this day I look back on that time lost and still hold anger against myself for letting someone take me that low. I still don’t think I am the mother I use to be.

Once the darkness started to fade I came to the choice of never letting someone in that close to me again. The helpless romantic I was was gone. Marriage is just a piece of paper. Peoples words mean nothing. When it comes down to it we are all selfish humans and if something better or more exciting comes along then the words we said the day before are null and void. Its taken me 7 years and some ruined relationships to finally see that this isn’t always true. There are people in my life that have always been there. Even if I didn’t see them at the time. I am learning how to trust….I know its still going to be a long process but thanks to God and some amazing friends its getting easier by the day. Why it has taken me so long to start this healing I don’t know. I know over the last few years I started to but then something would happen to remind me of the selfishness in people and why should I let my guard down to just be destroyed again. But I know now that I was in something that I had no right to be in. And God was no where in that relationship and I am realizing how important that is. I know now that someday I will have the identity of a wife again and it will be the way I imagine it to be. And while I will never be the same person I was at 19 I know now more of what I want and I am in no rush so settling is not a option. I believe I have a perfect half out there, whether I have already met him or I still need to, I know its the one God has made for me and in a way it makes me sad that so much time has gone by that we haven’t been together but it just wasn’t time. I’m sure once we find each other we will be able to be so much better for each other because of everything we have endured and survived. Starting to find that hopeless romantic part of me that was lost years ago and just thinking about it has put me on cloud nine. I’m excited to see what God is going to bring my way but I am also patient. Listening to my heart beat with ever person I come across. To know which ones I can trust with my heart and which ones I shouldn’t. So at peace and so happy that I am finding the person I was. I am ready to start living again!

Lost Idenity Part 1

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” 2 Corinthians 5:17

 

     There are times in our lives that our identity is stripped away. How we see ourselves get extremely distorted. Whether this be through our own actions or actions of others it still sends us in a spiral.

      In my early 20’s I decided that I was prepared to find my father who I had not heard from since I was 14. Seeing that the internet at this point was in full force I figured I would take the little bit of info I had about him and just search around, not thinking that I would actually come across anything. Knowing his last place of residence was in Montana I thought I would look into the prisons there, seeing as my father was not one to stay out in a functioning world for long. Well my search ended up much easier then I thought and what I found sent me into a emotional tail spin that I would have never seen coming……

    When I was 14, not long before Christmas. my father contacted us out of the blue. There was a few phone conversations about him living in Montana, working on a ranch, and doing his best to stay in the straight and narrow. During one of these conversations he had made a statement about his boss being crazy and threatening him. Why I choose to remember that out of everything else is a mystery to me. Well the phone calls stopped. Use to this disappearing act my father pulled so well I went on with my teen years. So after becoming a mom and finding out information about his side of the family that I had never known I felt a need to maybe get to know this person who created me and to even get to know family that I had that I never known about. Plus the thought of possibly having a sibling was always on my mind as well.

     Montana State Prison, 99 plus years for MURDER!……I don’t think I can ever explain what it felt like to read those words. With the click of one web page I ended up finding the person who created me serving life for taking someones life. My brain went crazy….Who was this person?? Did they have children?? What could of happened to drive my father to take this persons life?? So many questions and no answers. I went from being the daughter of a guy who just loved his drugs and alcohol more then me, to being the daughter of a convicted murderer. For some reason I was ok with the drugs and alcohol and stealing and bar fights. but to know that the blood running through my veins was given to me by someone that had it in them to take a life knocked the air out of me. That was the first time I started to question my identity and who I really was. Upon finding out this information I was learning that my father was adopted and the woman I loved with every part of me wasn’t my biological Grandmother. And while that doesn’t matter in the big scheme of things, at the time I was wondering who my “real” grandma was. Did I have cousins?? A Grandpa, Aunts, Uncles. All information that I slowly started to learn through the years. Adoption doesn’t only effect the child but it can effect generations. I am so grateful of the Grandma I got to grow up with but there is still a void you feel when finding these things out. At some point my Father actually reached out to me and we started communications. Turns out the man he killed was the very boss he had talked about. As far as other details I will not go into because I am very unsure of what is true or not. But I have gotten to be in contact with some of biological family and while to this day I haven’t met them I feel a piece of me is filled in just knowing they are out there.

     I have had one other time in my life that I felt I had my identity ripped away from me but I am going to save that chapter for tomorrow……

I will end this saying how grateful I am that I was given the wisdom that my true identity lies in Christ. And I am so grateful God sent my daddy (Myke, my step-dad) into my life so that I had a idea of what it is like to be loved by my Father God. While growing up I always felt a void from my Father not being a part of my life, but I can look back now and see clearly that God sent Myke into our lives so that he could save us and we could save him…..Miss you daddy!!

 

Complete love……complete darkeness

We come into this world a little bundle of perfection most of the time made up from complete imperfection. If I was to ever imagine what it would be like to have a glimpse of what it would be like to be standing in front of God I would think it would be those first few moments holding your new creation. Your heart filled with so much love that the world just stops…..you feel as if your heart could explode from the joy and love. All the pain you were in just seconds ago just melts away and nothing matters except to count the fingers and toes and memorize the breaths, sounds, and movements of something you waited so long to see face to face. How can you go from that feeling of complete awe and overwhelming love to something so much darker and selfish. Not speaking to parents as a whole. This is my story of my life. I am speaking to what I have witnessed and at times experienced myself.

      You start out so in love and then over time life takes over and the one thing you promise to protect and make you world becomes a forgotten tea kettle on a back burner. Abandoned and alone a child who only knows what is shown to them, starts to feel empty. And when a parent does come around there are more times of yelling. name calling, and even abuse that this begins to darken a soul that was just cradled in the hands of God. What happens to us that we forget that moment when we first hold our babies? And when is the moment that our children feel like more of a burden on us then the amazing beauty that we first saw when we held them?

     Growing up in a house where you are neglected and the attention you get is more negative then positive you start to learn how to protect your self and how to fight for whatever attention you can get. You start to doubt your worth and why you are even on this earth. If your own mommy and/or daddy cant love you then why would anyone else ever truly love you?? So we grow up looking to fill voids that were given to us without our permission and we learn to love those we know we can keep at arms length. To love someone who is as broken as you are makes it easy to feel like your in control of your heart and you know that one day it’ll be shattered so that becomes your way of protecting yourself. There is that saying that you cant love someone else if you cant love yourself and I find that to be untrue in my life. I love people more because I cant always love myself. But yet a lot of the people I choose to love I know will leave one day and so I poor myself into them right away and once they start to look towards the door I start to let go. Never really ever giving relationships a chance because when it comes to the fighting for the relationship part I just don’t completely have my heart in it.

     Most of my life I have known that people who say they love you leave. Sometimes they come back sometimes they don’t. I am one of the lucky few that have been through abuse and being abandoned that did have amazing people in my life that tried their hardest to save me and show me unconditional love. And because of them that’s what I long to be for people in my life. I fall short as we all do but I take pride that my children, family, and friends are always first on my heart. But now I sit at a cross road. I spend so much time pouring myself into others that I have fallen back into the shoes of that 3 year old little girl who is watching her daddy leave her yet again but this time to never return. I am starting to let go of people that are getting to close because of fear of them leaving. I feel as if I give so much of myself that I never stop and ask myself what it is that I need……or even ask for people to be there for me. I know that I have some amazing people in my life that have my back and if I ask for help they will be there but Ive been doing this life thing on my own for so long I don’t know how to ask for help or even except it. Somewhere along the line people started to call me strong. Well truth is I’m not. I am extremely weak. I just learned how to put on the mask of strength from the women in my life. Life knocks you down then you get right back up brush off the dirt and live another day. And I hate that people see me as strong most days. They figure they can go about their lives continuing to break my heart because they see me as strong. There are days that I just want to scream that I am weak and broken. But I cant……its not about me and the I have always felt that the second that I make it about me I will start to loose people that I try so hard to hold on to. So for now I am saying “ITS ABOUT ME!” and I’m ok with whatever that is going to mean. I want to be selfish. I want to tell everybody to just go away and leave me alone. I don’t want to smile. And it feels amazing to say that. I know this journey will be a short one and that I will soon be back to who my loves need me to be if fact just the last two days of complete break downs already has me feeling more at peace about certain things that I have been fighting. This time for myself is going to make me a better mother and friend. Its time to repair a broken heart and soul that has been that way since before I could even walk. I am going to need to step out of my comfort zone and confront certain things that I have buried along the way but I know who is ready to carry me through when I can no longer walk. I am so thankful to Him…..

Running, running, running….brick wall….flat on the floor

Life keeps going even if we stop. There is always a new hurdle to jump and some days it feels as if each one of them gets higher and higher. Taught at a young age to smile through pain and forgive the unforgivable has lead to a life of hiding behind a mask and masking my own pain by focusing on others pain and trying to make their life more manageable as mine is completely unraveling. I live this life the best I can trying to not regret anything I have done or even things that have been done to me. I refuse to be a victim and yet sometimes I hear myself complaining like one. I find that I surround myself many times with people and things that keep my mind busy so that I don’t face my demons that are trying hard to out run me, so the second I slow down to take a breath tired from all the running there stand them suckers formed into a 10 ft tall brick wall that I slam into. Flat on the floor drowning in my tears and unable to breath. Then instead of searching through the tears to heal my shattered heart and tangled soul, I wait for the first distraction to reach a hand out to me and then off I go again. Recognizing this cycle is the easiest part. Doing something to change a life time of running and hiding is not easy by any means. I love the fact that I can let go of pain people cause me. And that I can drop everything to be there if someone needs me. But I think it is time that I say stop! This needs to be about me and no one else. This is my journey through life and if I am stuck feeling lonely while I am constantly surrounded by people then I am cheating myself out of so much. I hope to one day have someone completely by my side and to love me unconditionally but I can never expect anyone to ever be that person as long as I live this life of running and hiding. If I loose “friends” during this journey because they feel like I’m not being what they “need” me to be then I guess they were only friends with me because of I could do for them and not what I add to their life’s. This coming month the brick wall before me is much taller then ones in the past. I know that the journey of life is not meant to walk alone, but at this time I need to start sorting through the tears by myself with only help from the one that can help me truly start to heal all of the pain that I have been running from. I want to use blogging as a way to record this journey and this way if anyone cares enough to know and maybe learn to understand who I really am then they can share in this journey with out being a distraction to me. Facebook posts have just become a way of me talking when I have no one here to talk to. So for now if I have no one to talk to then that means that its time to hit my knees or open the Bible. If you are someone who wants to follow this journey please know that anything I may post is not to get pity or for me to “cry for help”, its just my life, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Here is to ending 2012 by becoming a stronger version of who I truly am without felling like I’m leaving myself behind.