When you get more than you could have ever imagined you expect to be happy.
I used to dream about the life that I have now. When I was a lot younger, I used to wonder what the person meant for me was doing in that exact moment. Was he happy? Alone? Maybe, wondering about me too?

I grew up believing in the power of love, despite not being raised around it. It was something very foreign and intangible to me for several years, but I desperately wanted it. I looked for it everywhere and in many of the wrong people, family members, friends, and lovers. I had a lot of losses and after a while “love” started to become something that was childish, dishonest, and simply not in the cards for me. I had come to terms with the way I would be spending the rest of my life, on my own, filling it with travel, and music, and dogs. There would be a lot of dogs in and out of my house. I knew I could still have a home and create a space exactly how I wanted it. It could be enough. It had to be.

Life had other plans. It brought me someone who had been in the background of my life for a while and that person found the simplest of ways to help me put my guard down. Love had never been so natural, and steady, and painless. It had never felt like a choice and this choice was one I was so glad that I was making. I found myself becoming best friends with this person, before realizing that I could love him forever if I wanted to. His path was leading him in a direction that would create a stability for his future and the future we could have together, but things had to drastically change. I had never felt that safe walking into the unknown with someone that I knew that I could trust with everything that I had. At the time, leaving the home that I had always known wasn’t hard. Even after learning that I was pregnant. I had never planned on staying. There were things and memories that I was more than eager to leave behind and I was finally going to be happy now. I was supposed to be happy now, but without the pieces of my heart that I had left behind with the friends and family I had grown to love and need so much over the years, my transition into this dream life stopped feeling natural, and steady, and painless or feeling like it was even what I wanted. I suddenly closed myself off. I built a wall between the rest of the world and myself, my son, and I forgot to include my person on the side that we were on. Instead, I blamed him for all the things I was giving up and all the ways I was giving up on myself, us, and our marriage. Fighting became the natural order of things. I became the voice that I had resented so many years growing up and it always left me feeling more alone. I was supposed to be happy, but instead I became compulsive and anxious and incapable of sitting still, of being held, and of accepting my person’s love.

If he ever reads this, he will say that there were a lot of things he could have done to stop everything from getting this far and in some ways, he wouldn’t be wrong about that, but truthfully, he would mostly be wrong. If there is anything I have learned in the last decade of my life, it’s that there are several things out of your control, no matter how you feel about them, but your own decisions, your choice to love or walk away, your choice to forgive or to hold on to all that pain, and your choice to live is not one of them. You have control. You choose every day.

I spent a lot of the last two years and specifically 2019 choosing wrong. I have been self-sabotaging my life in ways that I was sure would never be a problem because I had gained more than I could ever imagine. I was supposed to be happy now, so nothing could ever really go wrong or pull me into a dark place again, right??

I think back to all of the years that I grew up seeing my mother live unhappily. I used to wonder why she was still holding on to so many of the things in her past that had nothing to do with her present. I knew she had survived a lot of things that many wouldn’t have. I knew that she was still in pain, but she was supposed to be happy now. She was my mother now. What else could she possibly need? I remember feeling like there were probably several things that I could have done, but the truth is that there wasn’t, because her happiness was never up to me. I understand things better now. I understand her. I have my own child now. He is the biggest dream that I have ever had in my life and I get to wake up to his little body on top of mine with his arms wrapped around my neck, his cheek on my face, his way of telling me to get out of bed. I get to see him grow up and help him become whoever he is meant to be in this world.

From the moment he was born, he ripped my heart wide open and has given me more purpose than any “epic love story,” career, or success could have ever given me. This is the dream and I’m supposed to be happy now, but I forgot that it was a choice. Life changed and things happened and there were several things that I could have done to make things better, but I didn’t. I expected happiness to automatically make an appearance and to stay on its own. When it didn’t stay and love started to become a stranger again, I didn’t try to stop it. I let my darkness consume me. I let myself get sad and then I got angry and I forgot my vows.

To tell you that I’m completely okay now and that I’ve moved on from all of this, would not be honest. In fact, I have not felt okay, for quite some time, but I am thankful to be alive. Today, I feel hope. I have real love in my life and I have my son and I am so lucky to have people to miss this much. To be happy is to choose to be happy even when things are not wrapped and shaped the way that I wanted. I have to work at it, to wake up and move, to count my blessings, and to remember that love can be the most powerful thing if you don’t give up on it.