Hit after hit in my life has left me rather debilitated in an emotional sense. However, I wanted to write this blog to mentally go over all of the good, bad, and ugly. I joined this site years ago, and had to delete my account because BM found out about it due to my grievous mistake of making my username too recognizable. This site is a sanctuary for women (and some men) like me. I have had to lurk in the shadows; been afraid, even on here, to post true thoughts and feelings. Not tonight. For my sanity, this needs to happen. Hopefully it won't be too epic lol.

I married at a very young age; a naive 19 year old girl marrying a naive 21 year old boy. I caught hell from my family for that, and did for years till we made it to our five year anniversary. We eloped to Vegas, so of course there was even more hell to catch from that. I went into marriage blindly. Not only was I marrying a service member, but he found out (while we were together) that he had fathered a child as a result of a one night stand. I knew this before I accepted his proposal. The egregious misconceptions I carried about military life and being a stepmother are almost laughable. I don't think it would have made a lick of difference if we had waited longer to get married; NO ONE KNOWS WHAT IT'S LIKE TILL YOU'VE WALKED THAT PROVERBIAL MILE IN YOUR OWN DAMN SHOES.

To those that love to throw it in the face of people like me, and utter those despicable words "...well you knew what you were getting into", the only thing I have to say to them is to suck my imaginary {insert explicit genital name}. No one knows what it's like, and you have no clue till you've literally been there and done that. Even if you move from one similar situation to another, it's never the same, and you never know what life will throw at you.

Here's a fun fact: my husband (obviously) slept with BM. It may have been a drunken night of debauchery that fails to register on a cognitive level, but it sure as hell did happen. What's interesting, is that my DH caught HPV from this woman. Men weren't tested with this, and he turned out to be a carrier. We married 13 days before my DH headed off to Afghanistan. Bless his heart, he wanted to take care of me when he was gone. Two months later, I get an abnormal pap result. Within two months, it turned into cancer. Not only was I suffering gravely with the idea of losing the very possibility of EVER having children at the age of only 19, but DH was in combat (also survived a house fire, and dealt with two family deaths during this time). BM infected my future DH with the very virus that almost robbed me of ever having a family, and quite possibly could have taken my life. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Gardasil, you didn't "work" with me.

It took me years to deal with this, but I got over it. No therapy, but a lot of nights of crying, chain smoking, and drinking myself stupid so I could go to sleep.

DH found out he was a father when SD7 was 9 months old. He had no idea then that he was actually the 5th person to be tested for paternity out of 8. That's Maury Show shit right there. I have contemplated giving BM a pair of suspenders for Christmas...ya know, to help keep her drawers up. She does have two other children by two other men. I digress, but winner winner chicken dinner did DH make a royal mistake.

Is my SD a mistake? Well, she sure wasn't born out of love. I can't say that she was a "mistake" per say, but given the events that have unfolded before my very eyes at the expense of my family and our ability to even eat at times, I can definitely put that into a gray area when involving my personal opion. Try having a one income household unexpectedly have to survive off of only 51% of a paycheck. That's fun. But you know what? We did it. We made it. Miraculously we even improved our credit scores (yay first world problems!), and supported our DD.

Now, time for my confession for tonight. It is relative to the whole "surviving" of that year of living very poorly. I may elaborate later how that came to pass, but here we go.

When we first found out that they were going to "catch up" with the modification, "they" took 49% of my DH's monthly income out of ONE of his every-two-weeks check (it's normally half on the first, half on the second). I couldn't buy diapers or baby food for our DD at the time. We literally had less than $80 to live off of for two weeks, with bills that had no option to go unpaid. Extremely shitty situation. I got on a webcam, and made money so my family could eat. Our credit cards were already maxed out (something that will never be repeated), and family couldn't help us. I literally degraded myself in a form of non-contact prostitution for my family, all because of a beautiful trick BM played with her timing of modifying DH's CS. I was so sick of what I had done, it made me vomit. What I had to do to make some very quick cash, is something that no one, save for my DH, knows about. I did this multiple times, but I made enough to get us through. Even attempting to get a job at McDonalds wasn't going to work; the money wouldn't have been able to come in fast enough (I tried for two years to get a job, during the worst of the recession and despite my background. I was a SAHM because I quit working due to the cancer, and my miracle baby came to be when docs said I would never carry to full term. Found out I was pregnant, and I fought to keep my baby). My DH found out about it later when he discovered an unlabeled source of income. He cried, with me. Worst of the worst though...I found out a year or so after this incident that my husband spent money on webcam porn once we had stabilized. I was devastated. I love my DH with all my heart, but that effing hurt. Bad.

We've had a few more issue with this over the years, and to be honest, that's the worst part of our marriage, excluding outside influences. I'm lucky that we worked through that, and that in spite of our past, current, and hopefully future difficulties, we're here to stay.

There are many more things I need to confess in the veil of anonymity, and I'll elaborate more, but for now...my head feels a wee bit more clear, and the soft song of wine and a bath are calling me.