Where do I start?

I always said that I would never post my life sagas on the net, but times have changed. If my experiences, my stories, can touch one person’s heart or help a single soul then it is a worthwhile exercise.

I grew up in a suburb about five kilometres south of Adelaide in South Australia. It was a nice, quiet suburb, probably middle class. Both of my parents worked full-time, so I was a latch key kid from a very young age. And when I say young, I mean five or six. My brother is ten years older than me and my sister nine years older, so they weren’t around much when I was growing up. By the time I was eleven they were both married and out of home.

I was a typical “good kid”. Didn’t get into much mischief, had good grades at school and was terribly afraid of authority. I guess that’s why I rebelled a bit when I was in my mid teens. You could say I fell off the rails. In the greater scheme of things, I didn’t do anything really terrible. I never got in trouble with the law. Probably the worst I did was to smoke a bit of dope, have sex before I was married and drink regularly and heavily. Underage of course!! But coming from a good Christian upbringing these things were absolutely taboo.

My Dad passed away when I was nineteen. I had been with my first real boyfriend for the previous eighteen months and we broke up a week after Dad’s death. I don’t think he understood my grief too well, but I’ve never held that against him. I went looking for love in all the wrong places, as we often do after a trauma, so the next few years were spent with a couple of regular boyfriends and many more one night stands and short term boyfriends.

I met my husband to be in 1986 and we moved in together after being together for about a month. We had our first two kids together before we married on Anzac Day in 1992. Our next four children followed fairly quickly afterwards and by the ripe old age of thirty one, we were the proud parents of six kids under the age of seven. Our relationship was always fairly volatile and occasionally violent, but I always applied the theory “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t”. So our several separations ended up with us back together again.

It was like this when my husband died in November, 2005, after almost twenty years together, well mostly together anyway. We had separated earlier in the year, and once were again working toward reconcilliation when he died suddenly of a heart attack after being told three weeks beforehand that his heart was fine.

This is my journey. It has been long and painful. Some days I wonder why. I know there are plenty who are worse off than myself, but many have not experienced as much as I have, either. How much more can one woman take? Follow my journey as I move into the future and revisit the past. Will it get better? I don’t know, but surely there will come a time when the powers that be decide that enough is enough and allow me some peace at last.