Love in My Life.. This Time Forever
There is something about letting go of preconceived ideas. Although you may have traveled a similar path you really can't know what lies ahead.
I've seen the signs many times. I've even had similar outcomes. Then one day it's a completely undeniably different ending.
I'm talking about love this story. My first love occurred in high school with a man ten years my senior. Sure I had previous boyfriends but this to me was love. I was convinced to give up everything. I left home, my sister, my job and car. I left before Christmas and before I received my diploma which I had enough credits to graduate that January. I left before my 18th birthday in February.
This love sold his Thunderbird for enough cash to feed us and get us to Oregon where he had a friend that would give him a job. He was a good construction worker but there was still no work available in the middle of winter. We hitchhiked through Salt Lake City before hearing about a job in Evanston, Wyoming helping build onto a Ramada Inn there which was providing rooms for the construction crew. In a few months I was abandoned there. Barely 18 and with no home or family, I worked at the Ramada Inn as a maid for my room at half price and worked across the street at the Cafe for food to eat.
Here in Evanston I met a new love at the local tavern. Before long we were leaving to go to Coram, Montana to be with his grandparents. I was going to get married there and we would raise a family. This love was doomed from the beginning. I did get married and I got pregnant but he had been cheating on me and gave me a terrible venereal disease called gonorrhea. The entire pregnancy I worried my baby could be born blind, deformed or have problems his whole life.
I was raised that if you made your bed you lie in it. Divorce was not viewed well in the eyes of God or Christianity and I needed to keep Daddy for my son who by the grace of God was born perfectly healthy.
My sister had somehow found me in Montana and came to live with us. We eventually moved to Utah and then to California. She found a husband of her own and my daughter was born in Riverside, California. My husband and I then moved back to Montana near his Aunt in Cut Bank. My husband continued to drink and cheat and I hated him. I knew if there was a God, it was not intended for me to live with this man. I ran to California with both babies.
I met other men I cared a lot about and even had another daughter with one of those men. We only stayed together a year and a half. Mutually agreed we should separate, I no longer knew love.
I never really did know love. A couple years later I thought I found a good man from an upstanding family. We stayed together 8 years on and off between fights and had a son together two years after my second daughter was born.
I was an alcoholic and had lost custody of my two oldest children. My second daughter was living with her Grandma on her Dad's side and my youngest boy was staying with his Grandpa and Grandma and Dad. I was in jail for a third time and decided I didn't want to live like this anymore. I was in a drug program for 6 months in jail then released on parole to continue to live in drug rehab for 6 more months. The end of that time I was to be working and back into society.
This is when I met love. The path was a little different but I was still leery of where it might end. This love is now my husband of over 30 years. I met him at that job in Palm Springs, California. He had custody of his two little girls then teens and I got my two youngest, then young teens back home with me, so we shared our home with four wonderful children. It was to be another 24 years before I saw my two oldest children again.
I can honestly say this was true love and I was so lucky to have found him. I was trusting my gut instinct pulling a complete 180 in my life a year sober and married him right out of sober living home. He took me to my meetings, he helped get me to the driver's license class for 18 months every Wednesday so I could get my license back. He loved me enough so I could love myself and I really did love being a part of another world. He didn't drink and he was meant to be mine!
Thank you for reading another story in my life. I appreciate you! I would wish everyone would find their true soul mate before finding poor choices. Alcohol didn't help me ever. I thank God I learned to live without it.
