First thank you to Effin Birds creator Aaron Reynolds. This was the perfect pic for my blog.

This is a little funny but not really funny. I spent almost 2 hours dictating editing and writing this blog. And then as I went oh this is perfect, exactly what I wanted to say. I looked back and it wasn’t saved. A big empty space. It was not there. And so this is my second attempt at how to screw everything up right from the start. LOL
When I was little no matter how stressed scared, lonely, guilty, or fearful that I felt, I knew there was always a chance to be happy. Although I could describe my childhood as quite a dysfunctional upbringing, the one thing that I can say is that I never felt unwanted. I never felt stupid. And maybe that’s what gave me that something that drove me to survive. That inner something kept me alive.
I met my first husband when I was 13 years old. He was a friend of the 15 year old that I was dating.
I would run into him at different parties and dances and we got to be friends. He was always eager to listen and flirt. He was very caring and protective. And he always had the sad stories. As dysfunctional as my parents were to me, his family was worse. His father was the town drunk. With a huge bulbous nose his dad was an embarrassment for him. And yet as I watched him with his father, all he ever wanted from him was for him to say you’ve done a good job boy. I never heard his dad ever say anything complementary to his son. In fact I more often heard, “You don’t know fuck all!! Shut the hell up. “ His mother and father were separated. His mother had become ill after his birth. She was timid and fragile. All she wanted to do was to make her youngest son happy. But it was where my husband learned manipulation at its best. I can remember his mom forgetting to make him cookies that he had asked for. His response was, “You really don’t give a fuck about me do you?” At 14 I didn’t have the insight to understand that a man who has no respect for his mother, never learns to have respect for any women. Yeah bad boy reputation. His horrific teen acne caused all kinds of other self image issues. And although he had top marks in school, leader of the chess club, he became a high school dropout.

I spent the next 20 years trying to convince this man that he was capable of being loved. But all I saw was a young man that needed to be loved. I thought I could heal all the pain and make him so happy. He was funny, hard-working, intelligent, and a great friend. He could build almost anything. He took great pride in his skill with heavy equipment. His ability to be precise was phenomenal. He was skilled at hunting and fishing. But if one criticism came his way he would crash. Like his father he was an alcoholic by the time he was in his teens. He drank every day. A beer in the morning. Three or four after work. Until his mid-thirties I never ever seen him staggering drunk. He just drank all the time.
When something went wrong that was when we would hear, “ Everything always fucks up for me!! Why the fuck can’t anything go right?? Why the fuck even try?”

All of his thinking developed into self -fulfilling prophecy. He always said everything is going to be horrible, so even when things were going right and wonderful he could not handle one small thing going wrong. It would defeat him which would again result in his actions and behaviour causing all kinds of havoc. It got to the point where he depended on me to give him his sense of validation. That he was worth being loved. But he tested those limits at every turn. This is a good example of some of the insanity that ensued because of his self fulfilling prophecies and the way that his thought processes went about how he felt about himself. He liked peanut butter and toast. So one night he is watching TV and he asks if I can make him some toast and peanut butter. Sure I can, I said. I brought him a toast and peanut butter on a plate and he says, “What the hell is this?” I looked at him really confused. “Look at how you spread this on here! This is too much butter so that the peanut butter didn’t even spread right! Jesus fuck!! Married for 15 years and you can’t even remember how to make my toast. You really don’t give a fuck anymore do you ? You really don’t care about me at all. I work my ass off and you do nothing?”
So in my emotional state I cried, begged forgiveness, and told him how much I loved him.

We are all valuable human beings. We deserve to be loved. We deserve to feel good about ourselves. We deserve to be able to forgive our weaknesses and our mistakes. This poor man believed that he wasn’t worth loving. He believed that he was useless. If you believe you will fail , you will fail. I have always chosen to see the good amongst the bad. The pretty amongst the ugly. With only those two things I was able to survive. I was able to accept great love and return it freely. My heart still goes out to the little boy who never felt he was great, that never felt good enough to love. The little boy that didn’t have that something inside that said, “I am good.”