The Heroine's Adventure

As I begin my reflection on my first divorce, my first thoughts go to my childhood.  This is what created my personality to some extent, right?  How I learned to see myself and life determined how I came to everything.  I can get very metaphysical here, such as, I chose my next life to be a certain way thus my parents were there to help create that for me.  Which is probably true, but I don’t want to get that deep and complicated right now.  I came to be a perfectionist and that perfectionism made it impossible for me to even think about divorce for eight years, because divorce was something that non-perfect people did.  Not me.

 In the beginning…

I have often wondered if a child is not really wanted at conception or during pregnancy, is it born with that knowing sub-consciously?  Will the child go though its entire life feeling somehow unwanted even if it grows up in a “normal” environment?  Or is it impossible for the parent to hide that deep dark secret and somehow confirm what you sub-consciously already know?

I think I have lived my whole life believing my mother did not really want me, or she wanted something else…freedom…a life of travel…excitement….not shitty diapers and 3 am pukings.  It affected me as a child; I constantly strove for perfection and for the compliment that was rarely there.  I was always the good girl.  I always made the smart choices and I desperately wanted my parents to be proud of me.

So, for my entire adult life, I thought that these “smart” choices were what I really wanted:  be financially stable, get married, stay home and raise children.  It was an almost robotic decision because it was the best thing a girl could do and I was all about making the best move.  It was also the safest move.  How could I screw that up?  It only took me 20 years to figure this out; I think that is pretty good. Some people never do, right?

I went through the period of blaming my parents for everything bad in my life.   I think many people go through that in their 30’s because this is an age when one should be fairly set in life and if you’re not, well, then we need someone to blame.  Also, we start realizing that we are so much like our parents and that really pisses us off!  I also went through that psycho self-analysis business where I needed to understand why I was the way I was because of my parents.  After all  that, I  realized…who cares?  So what?  Am I going to sue my parents for not being perfect?  Most people love their parents no matter what. Why is that?  Parents could beat the crap out of us, commit crimes, treat us like dirt and we still love them. We love them without judgment, unconditionally.  We want to believe they love us in return.  We need to believe that.  Why can’t we love everyone else like that, without judgement? I think the world would be a better place.

So there I was, in my perfect life that I had so proudly created.  Then along came the internet.

Up next:  My decent