When I decided to go back to school and become a real estate agent, I still envisioned it as a part time endeavor, with my role of mother taking precedence. The tumult of that first foray towards reclaiming my independence from my husband and children probably hastened the demise of my marriage, but I knew deep down that it was doomed anyways. I recognized I could not be happy living someone else's life and dreams. I needed my own. So with a child on one side and a baby in the other arm, I went back to school. I studied at baby group, with the maelstrom of toddlers and babies, racing around me. I studied during nap time, in 20 minute stretches, while I mopped, did laundry, dishes and the yard work in between. I did homework, changed diapers, potty trained and spent countless, unpaid hours helping my husband expand his business. Mine was the thankless work, the drudgery, the dishes and clean up. A job I'm truly grateful belongs to some one who truly deserves it, and is actually paying for the opportunity. Even through all that I accepted that my primary role was wife and mother, as long as there was a small corner of my world for me, but as often happens, my husband's needs eclipsed my own. The marriage ended and he found someone willing to assume the role he wanted and I have scraped and scrambled up a seemingly insurmountable number of hurdles in an effort to make a life for myself and my kids. I've accepted that so much is beyond my control. I have limited time with the eldest child as he is my stepson, even though I've been there since he was 6 months old. I've chosen to stay in a city where I have very limited support and the economic prospects are not great, so he would never feel abandoned by me. I chose the hard road to keep the boys together as much as possible. I faced the public scrutiny and whispers every day as I struggled to reign in my darker impulses, successfully, I might add. No one's tires were slashed and the posters I had made to let the city know the truth of what had happened, never got distributed, there were very few public blow outs. It was a close race at times. Some days all I wanted was to get even. It would have been epic fun. But I didn't really see a future in being an evil queen, so I chose to walk through the pain. No giving up, never stopping. It's a year and a half after and I'm a single mom, working two jobs, and finally feeling like things might just be ok in the end. I haven't managed to get divorced yet. I've had to use the money for that to renew my real estate licence, so the closure is going to have to wait a bit yet. I realized how far I'd come when I actually realized that I didn't have a picture to use for my Facebook profile in which I wasn't just an accidental inclusion in it's composition because someone was taking pictures of the kids. And I realized, I'm not okay with that. I deserve to be the focal point, at least part of the time. For now my profile picture is a little out of date, but I will have a new one soon enough. Besides, it was kind of nice to hear how great I looked in the photo, I thought the fact my bangs had magically grown out over night would have been a dead give away that it was 15 years old, but apparently not.
