Thoughts

   I've been thinking a lot lately. Mostly about my past. I have addressed my past, learned from it, and for the most part I've moved on. There are still some things that pop into my head now and then. It's tough to think about them, now that I'm pregnant and not on meds.
   In my marriage to TS, I was very emotionally abused. He would always tell me that things were my fault because I was so "fucked up". I believed him after a while. I mean, this man had been my best friend. He was treating me better than any boyfriend I had before. It was after he enlisted in the Air Force that he started to change. The change was gradual, so I didn't see his remarks as abusive right away.
   When our daughter was born, I was so happy! I thought that her birth would help to bring us together as a family. Instead, it pushed him away. He rarely spent time with her, fed her, or changed her. I would go to the store to go grocery shopping and come home to her upset and in a filthy diaper. He would claim he "didn't know" it was soiled. C'mon... you could smell her a mile away!
   TS never let me have any access to our finances. If I needed to get groceries, he would give me cash. I never knew how much money we had in the bank. One day he left the debit card at home and I went to the commissary to get diapers and formula for T. My card was declined due to "insufficient funds". I was crushed. How could we not have any money to provide for our daughter?!?
   When I got home I searched through his pile of paperwork for bank statements. He came home as I was reading them. He had spent money on internet porn and Classmates.com. I was furious. Our daughter was hungry and out of diapers and he was spending "his" money of filth and getting in touch with God only knows who. He told me it was none of my business where and how he spent his money. I retorted with it was my business when it means our daughter is without the necessities. 
    We ended up borrowing money from a friend of mine. I didn't tell her the truth about why we were broke. I was too angry and ashamed.
   I am a very sexual person. I wanted to be intimate with my husband, but finding out that he was turning to porn nightly, instead of me, turned me off. I knew I had put on weight with the pregnancy, and I was having a hard time losing the weight. It made me feel ugly. Worthless. I didn't look like the plastic Barbie-types he was masturbating to. It crushed what was left of my ego.
   I tried to be everything he wanted me to be. I tried to keep the house clean, have dinner on the table, keep T from "bothering" him. But nothing I did was good enough. He expected me to be his maid. To follow him around, cleaning up after him. Nothing mattered but what he wanted.
   I was crushed when he said he was leaving me. When he called my parents and told them, "I don't want them any more. Come and get them". I felt like I was a failure.
   My parents said I was nothing like the me they had known when I came to live with them. I was so beat down emotionally. On almost a daily basis I had been told how "fucked up" I was and that I would never be anything without him.
   Then to top it all off, he claimed I was an unfit mother and tried to get full custody of T. The child he told me we should have never had. The child he wouldn't help out with.
   It was 6 months of hell. Because of his claims, we both had to undergo a psychological evaluation. Mine proved that I was not only fit, but not as "fucked up" as he was making me out to be. His proved that he had lied throughout his tests and wasn't being honest about a lot of what he was saying. I ended up with physical custody and he got visitation. He still rarely sees T to this day.
    I got therapy and graduated from nursing school. Passing the NCLEX was one of the most amazing things I've accomplished. I proved to myself that I could be successful without TS.
    During my time in nursing school I met M. We were married the day after I graduated. Things started out great. He was wonderful to T and she loved him. He was working a good job and we were both making good money. We were happy.
   Then M lost his job. It was about this time that I really looked at his job history when I was helping him with his resume. He rarely held a job for longer than a year. But his being fired was, of course, never his fault.
   I would go to work at the hospital, 12 hour shifts, come home exhausted, and nothing around the house would be done. Our agreement was that while he looked for a job, I would pick up more shifts, and he would take care of the apartment. He would complain all the time about how he had to take T to school and pick her up. How he was looking for a job and there wasn't anything.
   We sat down and I expressed my frustrations. I even told him that if he could take care of T and the apartment, he didn't have to work. I was making enough with my extra shift or two a week to support us and then some. He agreed.
   Nothing changed. The apartment was filthy. He complained about driving T to school, often calling my dad to do it. He spent all of his time in the computer room playing World of Warcraft. T would be on her own most of the day.
   Then I ended up in the ER with horrible abdominal pain. The doctor diagnosed me with mesenteric adenitis. Basically inflamed lymph nodes in the abdomen. I had to take 2 weeks off of work because of the pain. I was drugged up on percocet most of that time. M still did nothing to help out. I ended up going back to work before I was well because he was spending all the money on booze.
   One weekend when T was at her grandparents, we got into an argument. I was so stressed out and exhausted from working so much. All I wanted was help! I would work 12 hours, come home to a filthy apartment, and start cooking and cleaning. I was resentful.
   The argument escalated and I tried to leave because I had lost my temper. When I get angry, I just need some time to cool off. 5 minutes. That's all I wanted. He kept following me around the apartment trying to talk and I kept telling him I needed to be alone for a bit, I didn't want to lose my temper and say something stupid. I trapped me in our bedroom and kept pushing me away from the door. I threatened to call the cops and he let me out of the room. As I walked down the hall, he grabbed me and shoved me into the wall, saying I couldn't leave. I called the cops.
   There were scratches down my back and red marks all over my arms from where he had grabbed me. The police showed up and he was arrested for domestic violence. I guess he had called my folks during this, telling them I was "out of control" and they needed to come get me.
   They showed up as he was being arrested. My mom looked at me, disgusted, and said, "What have you done now?" I burst into tears and told them that he had put his hands on me. That he had pushed me, grabbed me, scratched me. That he had ABUSED me. They thought I was the one at fault.
   My parents convinced me to drop all charges and to take him back. I was stupid, and I did.
   M's drinking got worse. T and I spent our time together without him. She would beg him to eat dinner with us. He would mumble a response and retreat to his computer room. The sight of him made me sick. I was disgusted by his drinking, his lack of bathing, lack of cleaning, his apathy.
   Then, he died. It hurt. It still does. It was horrible and tragic and I wish he was still alive, even though I know I would have ended up divorcing him. I never wanted anything bad to happen to him. I had a lot of guilt because I had stopped loving him and had started hating him. I loved him as a person. But I no longer loved him as a husband.
   God works in mysterious ways. M dying was horrible... but had things not happened the way they did, I wouldn't be married to E right now.
   It took me years and years of horrible abuse at the hands of my boyfriends and husbands to end up with a man that I just grow to love and respect more and more with each passing day. It took all that to finally make me realize that I deserve to be happy. I had always protected my daughter, but never myself. I neglected myself for years. Now I don't have to. Now T and I are happier than we've ever been before. We're a FAMILY.
   Sometimes it still hurts when I think about how messed up I was in the head. It hurts when I think of the areas I failed as a mother. But then I remind myself that I'm a survivor. I'm a strong woman and I have overcome so much. And I thank God for my life, messed up times and all. Because it's made me who I am today. It makes me appreciate what I have now. It makes me strive to become a better person.