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Email of the Day

Breaking The Cycle
05/07/2018

I used to be a feminist.  I met my husband at 16 and married at 18.  I had a career and so did he.  We spent little time together building our lives.  Instead, we built a huge house and we were never home.  He soon turned to drugs.  I got pregnant at age 23, but I didn't want a kid at that time.  So, at 6 weeks, I stuck him in daycare and went back to work.  Then I turned to drugs in to keep up the pace of my life.  By age 28, we were bankrupt.  They took the house, the car, and our whole lives.  We had nothing.  But still, I continued to work, pop pills, and drop my kid off at a daycare that opened at 6 AM and didn't close until 6 PM.  We thought moving would be a fresh start, but the cycle continued.  I had one affair after another that my husband didn't even know about.  My life was a mess, but I was the best employee you could ever hire at work!  

Then, one day my company closed its doors and I was unemployed.  I spent that first day at home at age 32 wondering what to do.  Then I turned on the radio and heard you for the first time.  The next day, I called a treatment center and my husband and I got clean.  My son never went back to daycare, and I never worked outside the home again.  That was ten years ago.  My whole life changed that day because of you.  I'm now clean, a great girlfriend to my husband, and I don't just listen to you, but I practice what you preach.  

I know the first years of my son's life were awful with having a mom like me, but each day now I try to show him how to make good choices and why.  I know why I made the choices I did - my family was divorced and very "messed up," so I talk to my son about the impact that his life will have on his children, and how HIS choices will affect them just as the choices my parents made affected me.  You truly changed our family's life and saved my son.  We are now healthy, happy and back on our feet.  We have never relapsed, and I've never had another affair.  The environment that we've created in our home is the reason why.

Arabella



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Tags: Marriage, Motherhood-Fatherhood, Parenting, Raising Boys to Men, Stress, Women's Point of View
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