From the moment we met, Joshua has shared everything with me. Everything about his past, everything about the person that he is, everything that he dreams of and his goals. I've always kept that side to myself. I never fully put my whole heart and soul into our relationship because I was afraid of getting hurt, then I was afraid of losing him because of the type of person that I was in my youth. Then, when he got truly sick, I became afraid of losing him to something that I had absolutely no control over.
My entire life I had to have control over everything, and so I would create personas and alter them to whomever I was speaking with, spending time with, or even imagining myself spending time with. Family, friends, beaus. I always shut myself off emotionally to deal with whatever feeling that I conjured up in my mind. I became so shut down emotionally that when I met Joshua, I had no idea how to be any other way, how to turn that part of me back on again.
When I was 5, my mother had gotten remarried. I was adopted, and had always felt unwanted my entire life. After all, I justified to myself, I was unwanted when I was born, and what had I gained since then. I was a smart kid. I had figured out that there was a flaw in the design of our mini van that allowed you to unlock all of the doors from the driver's side without a key. My mother was always asking me how I did it, but I wanted to keep it a secret. Finally I asked her if she promised not to tell anyone else, not even dad. She promised. I showed her and the next day I saw him do it. That's when I stopped trusting people. When I was 8, I woke up one morning feeling sick. I went into the kitchen and told my mother I didn't feel well, and couldn't go to school. She took my temperature. It was 98.6, spot on. My temperature typically runs around 96 or lower. I insisted something was wrong. She walked me to the bus, for the first time ever, and told me to go to school and stop whining, she couldn't deal with it. I went to school. 3 hours later I woke up in the hospital. I had a fever of 103 and even when I was conscious my body wouldn't stop seizing. I was soaking the bed with urine and sweat, constantly peeing myself, and my tongue and head were swollen and I couldn't breathe. They finally had to give me a shot to knock me out so they could insert a breathing tube to get oxygen into my lungs. I spent three weeks in the hospital. That's when I stopped believing anyone would listen to me or care. So when I was raped later that year, I told no one, and I never did, until Joshua. (The contradicting part is that part of me has always known that he was not like anyone else that had ever been a part of my life, and I took that for granted every day, but also took advantage of that. He has always loved me, and will always love me, but I didn't want to believe that my entire life I had spent living wrongly, because of an idea I got in my head on a whim.) When I was 12, I began worrying too much about what other people thought of me. My mother had been trying to get me to wear make up and have a boyfriend since I started school, and I simply wasn't interested, but around the age of 11, I woke up one day caring what people thought, and then it became an obsession. Puberty I suppose had a large part to play in it. I went to her, confused and concerned that there was something wrong with me, and when I confided in her, she began crying and said to me, "Why are you doing this to me? You are going down the devil's path and straight to hell." I never spoke to her about anything personal again, nor anyone else.
None of these things truly matter, but are simply excuses as to why I have treated my husband as badly as I have, after all of the love he has shown me. These ideas that I had allowed to become embedded in my mind, heart, and spirit at a young age have never had anything to do with Joshua. At the beginning, possibly justifiable as a childish act, and needing to grow up.
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