Personal "Retro Wednesday"

So many creative folks out in the land of blog. Plenty of support for those looking for recovery or for those surviving someone else's issues! It would be wonderful if I knew of away to link or call them all up with one word.

Makes me wonder if there is more addiction or more awareness. I feel there is more addiction. It hits younger and harder and most families are made of survivors that never learned or admitted they were co dependant.

I was the one that never admitted. The day I married and moved 1500 miles from family was both the best day and the most difficult day. I left my support system! but I wanted to do that, right?

Being the youngest of three daughters, and raised by a single mom, I thought the "magic" was the mother/father team. Which is sort of funny because I didn't really contemplate who I was marrying and we NEVER discussed anything, NOTHING, except the work we were both involved in. Often my niece was a topic because she lived with us at the time. Or maybe which drive in movie after I got off my shift at the private mental health hospital. (Again, I was going to save the world)

My husband started asking me out after the 4th of July , 1978. Fortunately we had grown up two houses apart since forever but I always had seen him as untouchable. He was very smart, very handsome, very weird LOL, very much from a "normal" family. Even at his 22nd birthday in August I had no idea he was thinking of asking me to marry him. So some where between August 23 and September 1 he asked. We were married September 16, 1978.

Do you know how I chose that date? I thought about my family and his required start date in his new profession. The entire thing was really going to upset my mother who would be left alone when I left. So the date had to be workable for me to calm her AFTER the wedding as well.

The only thing I truly fought for in those weeks were the words in our wedding vows. Yes, we wrote them ourselves, and they were all windows of leaving if need to. Themed in friendship, I mean lets face it we were more friends that met in late nights as lovers. The words were to encourage us to be the best we could be for each other and included a default of sorts. When we realized we were no longer the best of friend for the other it would be best for us to let go than to tear each other down and destroy who we were meant to be.

As a mother of two sons, I know that his family had to wonder what he had gotten into. I had to have this clause because I knew there was NO way a couple could stay together a life time without destroying the other...I knew this for obvious reasons but also knew I was different, I was not "normal" in the social norms. My life was to be torn up if I didn't protect myself.

Such was the beginning of a couple that started 31 years ago this September! We have four children. So far the three oldest have really pushed themselves into the realm of addiction. THANKFULLY, they seemed to have returned to a road filled with goals for their lives now. But one thing I have always always reminded them is what their own gene pool has already been imprinted with!!! Addiction! Thus started my road of co dependency as an adult.