I don't remember a time when I wasn't sick. In first grade blood volume was already pooling in my right foot, but no one knew what to make of it. The doctor decided I must have sprained it and ordered it elevated, so I sat at school with one leg propped up in a chair. By high school I was fainting, and rumors ran wild throughout the school as to why. I was a very shy and quiet kid, and very few people even knew my name, particularly since I was not allowed to participate in extra curricular activities. Speculation was that I was either on drugs or pregnant.
I skipped my junior year in high school and graduated a year early. I was married a week later, to the only boy I had ever dated. I know that sounds insane, but in the bible belt of the south girls do marry early and are expected to stay that way. I turned seventeen that year, and had always done what was expected of me. Believe it or not, that was to marry, raise babies and go to church. No one in my family had ever gone to college.
The marriage lasted just short of two years, and we had a beautiful baby girl who was born just two months after my 18th birthday. When she was three I married again. Being young, most boys my age just wanted to party, and I needed a stable home and father for my daughter. I chose a man thirteen years my senior who was going back to college to become a teacher. He neither drank nor used drugs. What could possibly go wrong?
Two more daughters and eleven years later we were taken to a battered women shelter and the following day I filed for divorce. My husband was bipolar, and he had passed this illness to one of our daughters. He was also an alcoholic and drug abuser.
I worked as a waitress and went to college, finally earning a BSS degree in psychology. I knew I had serious health problem by this time, and thought a degree would allow me to continue to work in a less demanding physical setting as I got older. My father was disabled by lupus in his early forties, mother had never worked and had no marketable skills, and I vowed as I watched them struggle that my children wouldn't grow up poor with a disabled parent.
I worked for 6 years after my college graduation. Then I hit the wall shortly after losing both my parents. I am an only child.
And so here I am, disabled for four years and once again a single mom. I am raising my granddaughter with the help of a wonderful man who has been in my life for 6 years. She is two and quite a handful. It a a huge challenge for me to care for her everyday, but she is the sweetest little thing and I can't imagine life without her.
I miss my daughters; the oldest lives 300 miles away and the youngest is about an hour away, both very busy with their lives, just as it should be.
I am 46 years old.
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