Any minute now, I'm about to help facilitate the creation of a new life in this world. Literally any minute since I have been in prodromal labor for 3 days and the 'due date' was yesterday.
With such a looming event about to take place I can't help but think about all the things that brought me to this moment in my life. The most important aspect of all my reflections bring me to contemplate the importance of the partnerships we make.
I gave birth to my first child when I was just a child myself, over 17 years ago. It was 11 years later, I had my second child 
Kidding of course, I know all my circumstances in life are because of my own choices. In all honesty the reason this child is coming into the world was because I didn't feel like having the crap beaten out of me that night so it was just easier (at the time) to give my body up to my ex than to spend time healing physically and emotionally from yet another traumatic experience. Everything happens for a reason though.
If you read any of my posts, then you know I have a LOT going on from my past that I'm working through. So far I am an iceberg, you have only seen the peak above the surface but there is much more below.
So how did I get here? Did I just wake up one day and say, "I can't wait to be a single parent to one child for over a decade. Then I can't wait to raise another three children by myself. I can't wait to have a ton of emotional baggage to work through, and I really can't wait to battle a toxic environment to heal my body!" Hell no, no one ever says that or thinks that, yet we put those actions in place in our life with our energy.
So first thing I had to do was take a look at my history and energy. My past examples of what life and partnership should be were awful! My parents fought all the time when I was a kid, and I'm not talking about just yelling or being upset, I remember some of their altercations getting very violent. My dad frequently broke things, I remember going down to the basement where my dad set up his drug dealing "office" one time and he was choking my mother. My mother told me stories about how she almost shot him when she thought he was cheating on her while she was pregnant with my little brother, which apparently I got to witness at 4 years old but I don't actively remember this event. The list goes on and on.
I remember the day I did the math and realized my parents got married when my mother was 3 months pregnant with me. I felt so guilty as if my conception was the cause of all the horrible things we all had to experience. I remember saying something to this effect to Rose one day and she claimed her and Mike were 'so in love' they would have been married anyway. So then there I was thinking their crazy dysfunctional behavior was anything even close to love… and it didn't make me feel any less guilty either.
I felt very alone growing up. It was hard to even had friends because I couldn't bring them to our house to witness these events, and apparently most of the kids I went to school with (and their parents) knew exactly who and what my dad was so they weren't allowed to play with me. As with most families where the parents are addicts, I grew up super poor. You would think that would have been enough for kids to tease me about at school, but they also loved tearing into me about my family. The used to tell me things like my dad was either going to die of a drug overdose or end up in jail, then my mom would have to be hooker to pay the bills and she was so fat that no one would pay her and we would all die or end up in foster care. From what my mother had told me, foster care was a place where children were molested and burnt with cigarettes. One of the main reasons I never told anyone about how horrible our home life was because I thought foster care would be worse then what I already experienced.
I used to wonder to myself why my parents would have ever made choices that very well could have led to any of these events taking place and how much hurt it was causing their children in the process. It took me decades to figure out just how dysfunctional and broken people are, and how very little thought was probably put into how much it hurt me and my brother as they played out their selfish dysfunctional games with each other.
Regardless, these are all things I would think about when entering a relationship with someone. In spite of Mike and Rose, I actually had a pretty stellar set of values I put in place for myself when I was a kid, with my main goal of not EVER ending up anything like them. Honesty, responsibility, kindness, and many others were the basis of who I was then. I still have no idea what love was/is or how it fit into anything though.
Just to be clear, I am NOT blaming my parents for who/what/how I am now. I said before that my energetics are my own, and I didn't have to fall into the bad habits of their relationship as I did later on in life. I'm just sharing that I did NOT have a good example, and I do think those experiences impacts us.
From the first relationship I voluntary entered into, to my last, I can look back at this history of mine and see the very progression about how I ended up where I am today. Starting with a constant compromise to find someone who would love me, and ending up with a complete loss of values to just try and survive from one day to the next.
Everyday I view social media I see people who are compromising/settling/becoming complacent not only in the relationships they choose, but life in general. I'm really hoping that if I share how easily it happened to someone like me, even for something as great as a search for love, it can happen to anyone for so much less. I also hope it inspires anyone in a situation that does NOT lift you up or is part of you thriving in life to help create a better world, to make a change!
Join me for Part II tomorrow!