Changes

The same year I moved us into the in-law apartment and found a job, I made some other big changes in my life. With the small income of my job I was able to furnish our apartment, cheaply but cozily. I mastered the art of lay-away and purchased many things I both needed and wanted for us.

I was taking adult education classes. Wanting to further my education, and I struggled. Every week day, I put Deana in the stroller and took an hour walk to the YMCA to take my classes. Then we'd go off to play group. At night, I'd study when she was playing or sleeping. I wasn't retaining much of the knowledge.

To work the weekend, I had to make numerous calls and balance babysitters, sometime having to set a small sum of my paycheck aside to pay my younger brother to watch her.

Then a met a guy. I tried to avoid guys for the most part, with the exception of those I kept as friends. I had dated one briefly when coming home but kept him at a distance. This guy was different. He won me over quickly. The first time he came to see me outside of work, he brought me a rose. He also brought Deana toys and a balloon. I avoided him for a few weeks but he was persistent. He was also wonderful to us.

When we weren't working, he spent all his free time with us, occasionally even coming to playgroups with us. He signed up for the adult education classes with me. The relationship would last a year or so. It wasn't that it couldn't have worked, or that he was wrong to me or my daughter in anyway. We had stresses, like Deana's dad, who decide to give him an awful time for being in our lives. There balancing parenthood, work, school, and then the added relationship. It was a lot on me. I just wasn't ready. We were engaged for a while, he'd bought me a beautiful little ring. I was happy and yet terrified.

To say I wasn't ready is an understatement. When ever I looked at that ring on my hand I felt the warmth of love and the terror of commitment. The idea of another life long commitment when I was already committed to my daughter felt like a whale swallowing me down under the water. Marriage , commitment to a seventeen year old felt like someone had cut off my air supply. I felt horrible, it was the whole "It's not you..it's me" and how lame was that? Because it wasn't that it was him at all..and so whenever he pulled  I pushed. I picked fights to gain space because as much as I wanted the relationship, my own fear consumed everything.

After a year together, working together..going to school together..I called it quits with him for the last and final time. I'd picked up a second job at Red Lobster by that time as a hostess. I didn't have a real reason. I needed space. Shortly after he started seeing someone else, and I found out I was pregnant..again. Even though I wanted him back, it was too late. I'd burned a bridge I would never have back. I was beyond consolable. I was near hysterical. I wanted him in my life so badly suddenly that I became stuck on him as my ultimate goal. I lost focus on what I was trying to accomplish. I'd also failed my first try at the G.E.D. test. My world began to crash down. I would fall and hard. It would take a long while to get myself back on track. I would only do it, again because I had family and friends to hold me up.