A little note to my family...

I know some of the things I have said and done are not easy for you to understand. My whole life you have stuck by me and guided me through difficult situations and never once did you give up on me. I thank you for always telling me how beautiful I am even if I never see it and who knows maybe one day I will. You have cried with me and you have been angry with me when someone I thought I loved broke my heart. You are all my reason for living. I have made many mistakes and one day I plan on making it all right. I have let myself fall right to the bottom of that so called bottomless pit and now only I can find the strength to crawl out one inch at a time. I have put myself into financial debt. I have betrayed my body and mind. I have given in to sins of the flesh and of the mind. I let my morals wash away with every sip of beer and wine. I have lied to my family and myself. I am a daughter, a mother, and a sister. I have to make my life better not only for me but for the life of my son. I wish to be that happy person you all remember. It will take time for me to heal. Time for me to find the person I used to be so long ago. I want to tell you all just how much I love you. First of all my son. Thank you for saving me from a life of pure distruction. You will never know just how much I love you and thank the Lord for you. My mom. Thank you so much for crying with meall those years I was teased and had no one else to turn to. Daddy. I can't thank you enough for everything you have ever done for me. You are the man in my life that I have always been able to count on and let me know with every tear just how strong a fathers love for his daughter was. Cori. My beautiful sister. I love how strong headed you are. I see a strength in you that I have never seen before in anyone. You are a wonderful mother and wife. I only hope to be like my little sister one day. Casey. I am so proud of you. You went from a bratty little brother to someone that would lay his life on the line for anyone. Even the enemy. I love you for crying with me when you saw me hurting. Thank you for wanting to beat up the men who broke my heart. I couldn't imagine my life with none of you in it. I want to make you all so proud of me. I want to be the daughter, sister, and mother that you all will be proud of. Thank you all for believing in me even when I was letting myself crash.

My life in a very large nutshell...

So I have decided to try this blogging thing it seems to be so popular and I think I am the last person on the planet to do it. I am 23 years old and I am the single mother to a wonder little boy who has made it possible for me to want to continue living on this earth. Yes I am a single mother. Not by choice. I grew up all over the place my family moved a lot so there isn't one place I could really call home until I was about 13 and yet it still doesn't seem like this is where I am supposed to be. I have 2 very wonderful parents who have been there no matter what I have been going through which for being 23 has been more then I would have wished upon myself. My life has never been perfect. Whose has been? My parents didn't always have the perfect marriage. I was so young when my parents seperated. I would say I was about 6. I remember living with my grandparents for a while until mom found us a place to live. Hill House is what we called it. Blue apartment buildings in Oregon. I know I was young but there are certain things in your life that stay with you and have a permenant impact on your life. I remember thinking, "Why isn't daddy here?" I remember him coming to visit us every once in a while but I don't remember the visits as much as I would like to. I used to watch my brother and sister a lot when I was little because mommy had to work now that daddy wasn't home with us. I also know that I wasn't very nice to my siblings and I was bossy. I know I was angry that my dad wasn't there anymore and I couldn't understand why mom had another boyfriend. I hated that he was nice to me because he wasn't my dad. All I wanted was my mom and dad to be at home, together. My grandma keeps telling me that I was such a happy little girl and always had a smile on my face. And maybe reading the rest of my blog you will find out why no such smile can be found on my face anymore. I hate to ramble but I have never been good at this writting thing. Anyways, I don't know how long it took but my parents got back together and now have a wonderful marriage. The kind of marriage anyone should have. Things are kind of blurry the next couple of years I don't remember there being too much to talk about. Eventually we moved to Montana because my dads job transferred him there. That is where I think this all started. This image of me not being good enough. I look at pictures of myself when I was little. I think to myself, "where did this tiny little blonde thing go?" I was so skinny and happy and full of life. Now I am almost 24 years old, a single mom, over weight and the only thing that makes me smile is my son. Anyways back to Montana. I started going to elementry school at Devlin Elementry right across the street from our house. It was recess time and I was so shy. I remember this big kid Dallas Thompson. I didn't know him and he didn't know me but yet he found some reason to pick on me. My new nickname in school was now Andre, you know that seal that was so popluar? Oh yeah. The kids would bark at me like a seal and call me fat. I hated myself from that day on. This went on for more then 10 years of my life. I tried to make friends with everyone but I already had the reputation as being the fat new girl. I went on to middle school where I found my passion in music. Talent shows and singing groups that you had to try out for. Thats where I got compliments. My voice. It was my one escape from everything and everyone. I was more of a teachers pet and didn't find kids my age that interesting because I was so tired of being teased. I think that the only person that could understand how I was feeling was my mom. She was like my rock and sometimes she would cry with me. I think I started my first diet at the age of 10. Yes I said 10. I think that's when the big carbohydrate thing started so mom started me on that. I remember losing some weight but something would always happen and that's where it ended. I continued to gain weight and lose more and more of my self esteem. I didn't know what depression was at that time but looking back I am pretty sure I had it. In the middle of my eighth grade year, we moved again because dad was now a truck driver and mom wanted to be closer to family. Great! This was my opportunity to start over. Go somewhere where no one knew me as the fat girl who could sing. I proved myself wrong once I started school. You can't escape being over weight. Of course I made friends. I kept to myself with that small group of friends that were never popular. I got teased from day one. So now I was in a new school, I was already the new fat girl, and I didn't have my music. It took me almost a year to join a music group in school and once again I had found my escape. This whole time there was always a new diet to try and I am pretty sure I tried them all. This is going somewhere I promise. I will skip some things and get right down to it. I got to high school and lost music completely. I couldn't get into choir. There were already the choosen popular people who had there place with the teachers. I hated school and everything about it. I no longer had anything to look forward to. High shcool is where I found the internet. Chat rooms. This is where I can be anyone I want to be. I wasn't the fat girl. I was popular. Everything I had ever wanted. This is where I met EJ. My first love. Someone I still think about to this day. We won't get into details but that is where my path to distruction started. I was so obsessed with the internet that my grades were failing along with the relationship I had with my parents. The internet was my drug. I would sneak on in the middle of the night. Go on as soon as I got home from school. I wanted it, I needed it. After things with EJ failed I continued to search. Search for that one person who would love me for me. Or the me I had created online. I met Lamar. I fell in love, or you know what I thought was love. He didn't know the real me. The fat me. It took me almost 2 years to finally tell him. And what do you know, he didn't care. We finally met when I was 18 and he moved to Idaho right after graduation. We got married in December of 2005 when he came home from his leave from Army training. He left and went back to training. It didn't take me even a month to find out that he was being unfaithful. I confronted him and he told me how sorry he was and that it would never happen again. I believed him. After he graduated he informed me that instead of coming back to Idaho to see me, his wife. He was going back to Indiana because he wanted to see his dad. I tried to understand how someone who had not seen his wife in 5 months wouldn't want to come home right away to see her. I let it go and drove all the way to Indiana to surprise him so that we could finally start our lives as a newly wedded couple. I had this idea that marriage was supposed to be this wonderful thing. I was wrong. It was a disaster from the moment I step foot in his dads house. I spent my days cooking for him and his dad, cleaning his dads house and then spending the rest of the time locked up in the house because Lamar had somewhere to go. He almost refused to introduce me to family and when he went out, I wasn't allowed to go. And through all of this I still stuck around because I had no where else to go. I thought that when we finally got stationed in Kentucky things would get better. We got base housing and had a place of our own. We didn't have furniture so we went out and bought a bed the second we arrived in Kentucky. Things never got better, they got worse. I never got furniture so I spent my days lying in bed watching tv while my husband took my cell phone and my car and went to work sometimes not coming home until late at night. When I finally got to use my phone my calls were always interupted by some girl calling asking to speak with Lamar. Once again I confronted him and with the promise that the affairs would stop, I stuck around. One day as I was cleaning our bedroom I found a folder that he had forgotten to put in his backpack. In that folder I found a picture. The picture of the young girl that ruined it all. I had enough. I couldn't pretend that things were going to get better. I couldn't pretend that my husband would one day decide that he was going to be faithful to me. I acked up everything I had and waited for my parents to come rescue me. I fell into a deep depression and didn't know how to get out anymore. At one point I wanted to completely end my life. I didn't want to wake up anymore and nothing mattered at all to me. I went in and out of relationships. I tried to fill my life with sex and alcohol. Party after party. Night after night. A lot of my family is going to be very shocked to read this and I am sorry you are going to find out this way. I have been lying to everyone for a long time. I am not the sweet innocent girl that my family would like to think I am. I slept with men and got drunk because I thought it would fill this hole in my life. That it would fix the depression. I tried filling my life with God. Most of my family seemed so happy to know God. Why couldn't I do it? I wanted so bad for God to fix everything and yet I didn't see it happening. Nothing ever happened fast enough. I wanted it to be fixed right away and it just wasn't happening. Then I met Ryan. After turning him down time and time again and him not giving up I finally decided that maybe it was time to trust someone again. Everything moved so fast. My family loved him and I found myself falling in love with him too. We moved in together and five months later, we found out that I was pregnant with Killian. And instead of everything getting better. They got worse. A misunderstanding ended everything and Ryan moved out. I moved back in with my parents. So now I was pregnant and alone. I cried myself to sleep every night. I begged Ryan every night to come back so that we could work things out. I loved him and knew that I wanted to spend my life with him and our son. On December 7th, 2010 my life would change forever. Ryan was in the delivery room with me when Killian was born and that sweet chubby little face changed everything. Ryan and I got back together. Things seemed to be so perfect. I had this amazing little boy and an amazing fiance. Something still wasn't right. I wanted to be married. Or so I thought I did. I let everyone convince me that what I was doing was wrong. I was happy. I was tired of hearing that I needed to be married. And you know what? I didn't need to be married because if I would have married him right away at that moment it would have failed. I'm sorry. I know that your parents and family only want what is best for you, but marriage wasn't best for us at that moment and me trying to convince Ryan that it was ruined our relationship. I was happy being engaged and working on things slowly and building a stable life. What is right for someone else isn't always right for everyone. Maybe this blog went nowhere and you are no closer to knowing who I am then when you started reading. I need to work on my life at my own pace, no one elses. Don't keep telling me that I need to lose weight because I know I do. Don't tell me that I need to be married to be with Ryan because I don't. It's not what is right for me or him at the time. Please don't pressure me into becoming a devote Christian because I know that is something I have to do on my own. When I am ready. I love you all. You are the ones that have gotten me though everything in my life. Please let me do things on my own time. Mom and dad, I know I am not the perfect daughter and I do things that don't make you proud to be my parents and I am sorry I am not doing things the way you want me to do them. One day I will make everything right, but today is not that day. I love you and I am sorry.