Sunday, April 14, 2013

When my life changed

I finally figured it out. The moment my life changed. I was standing in a hotel room in San Francisco. A dive next to David's cafe that the hostel had put my mother and I up in. She was yelling at me. Calling my six year old with ASD a pervert. I had come down for clarity an I was stuck in the same cycle I had been in for as much of my life as I could remember. She was screaming. I was having a panic attack. My life felt like it was crumbling for the millionth time. I was sick of it. I got up, went in the bathroom, fixed my make up and went on with the day.

You see, my son had taken a picture down his pants with his 12 year old aunts camera. Nothing was visible. He had taken the picture for whatever reason made sense to him at the time. He has no reasoning of personal property and his boundaries are so hazy that it is hard to even see right and wrong let alone the line that is drawn between them.

That night I prayed. I prayed long, hard and incoherently. By the time morning came and we went on with our vacation I had a self realization that I didn't realize I had until now. Almost a year later. The moment that hanged my life. I was sick of depending on other people. Sick of playing good wife to my mentally ill alcoholic husband. Sick of being the only mother my sisters ever had. Sick of waking up every morning already exhausted with the day.

But I chose to go on. I chose to be every bodies everything and it drug me down to a point that I would have never chosen to go. I screamed and I kicked and I yelled. I kicked my husband out. I moved to another town, got a job and started raising the kids myself. In the six months that we separated, we found each other again. He found sobriety and I pushed my mother away. Most importantly, I found strength in myself. Buried under my insecurities and scars from my life, I found strength to be a mother and to be a wife. I found out that I can do it on my own. I learned how to be selfish because if I don't get to be once in a while, I will fall again. 

If we surround ourselves with people who need to be taken care of, we won't wt taken care of. Relationships, no matter how big or small, have to be a balance of give and take. 

Some days I feel like I have scarred my children by turning there little lives upside down, but I look at them and I see a reflection of my own strength.