Frustrations & Blessings

I am so grateful for things like fans, air conditioning, and heating, as well as hot and cold water. It's amazing how far things have come and how much we might take these things for granted. No, nothing happened to have these things break, for me. However, my son didn't have air conditioning in a packed bus today and it just made me think.

When I was extremely sick for all of those years, with late-stage Lyme disease, I started to practice daily gratitude. It became very basic. I was grateful for being able to get out of bed. I was grateful to breathe. I was grateful to be able to walk to the bathroom. I was grateful to be able to remember my own phone number. Very basic.

Over the years, as I have been on my road to recovering from this disease, I have continued to practice this. It has happened often on my daily walks, as I see blue sky, see and hear birds, see bees flying around flowers, and realize how far I CAN walk. 

Daily gratitude removes (or at least reduces) the influence that negative things have on me. It surrounds me with positive energy, which is at least twice as powerful. It adjusts my reality so that my perception of things is not tainted by interactions with negative and manipulative people, or negative media. 

​I am grateful for positive energy and the practice of gratitude. 

continued from last post...

It was the night before the wedding. We were staying at my parents house. I was in one bedroom, my fiance was in another. He came down to say goodnight and that is when the nightmare started.

He started to lay on some new rules in our relationship and ask things of me while I was under pressure. He wanted me to convert to being a Catholic and denounce the faith that I was born into. I would not do that. I told him no. He said that I had to so that we could be married again down in Mexico. I still told him no. He got brutally mad and started talking down about my religion. No, I was not active at that point, but I knew I wasn't done belonging to my religion.

He bad mouthed my parents, saying that they had been teaching me wrong all of these years. That my religion didn't matter. That his religion (which he never actually attended meetings for) was all that mattered and that what his family thought was all that mattered. 

More taking advantage of me and manipulation. He said that his family was staying in my apartment while on their way up to Utah from California. I had not given permission for that. When I tried to counter, he said my opinion didn't matter. He had an apartment also. 

My fiance had also said things about his father paying for our honeymoon to Cancun in a couple of months, but that never happened, and I doubt his father even knew about that. He said that he had houses in California that were rentals. I would find out that those were really owned by his parents.

He didn't tell me that he had been married before and that he already had a kid. I would later find that out on my own, and because his brother planted the seed for me to think about whether the same situation had happened before.

So it began. The lies and lies and lies. The manipulation became stronger and more threatening. The motives became more and more evident.

After the wedding, I found out that he was not actually legal to the United States, and neither was his family. I found out that his social security number and birth certificate were purchased on the streets in Los Angeles California. I found out that he fenced stolen goods. I found out that his "degree" from a California university was not legitimate. 

It was not long after the wedding that I found out that I was pregnant. At first, I thought the symptoms were mono again. But, I kept having dreams of having a baby, and kept hearing my name clear as day, as if I was being given a message of sorts. 

I had always been very sensitive to spirit and to knowing things before they happened. It was the same with going home to help my mother during her divorce. I had repetitive dreams of a map leading me back to the Chicago area, and that my parents were getting a divorce. 

This situation was no different. I was being given this major blessing, this gift. This child was the Universe correcting my path. This child (who has been a blessing to me throughout his life) would make me see things so differently than I had previously seen them. 

But first, I had to go through hell. This would be a trial by fire. 

...continued in next post...