Part 4
Bad Reputation
Now that the merry-go-round
of bar, club and bed hopping had come to a halt and I had a steady
job and apartment that I shared with a female coworker, I thought I
was finally on the right track. Growing up in New England and always
being known as “the good girl” while growing up, it never dawned
on me that I had a new reputation. And boy did it stick. To this day,
it has stuck. Oh sure, I go to church (where I pray for forgiveness
every Sunday and Wednesday and all the other days ending in “y”)
and I'm a Christian mom who teaches her kids the difference between
right and wrong. But there are still those women who never leave me
alone with their husbands-the ones who see the long blonde hair and
the sky high heels and assume I haven't changed at all in 15 years.
What they don't know is that
my hair is long because I married a man who doesn't like short hair.
What they don't know is that I haven't bought a pair of shoes for
myself in 13 years because he prefers to see me in heels. What they
don't know, is that for the first time after getting off the
merry-go-round, I decided to put someone other than myself first. (I
figured it was a good first step to putting someone else first the
way I knew I'd have to once the babies came along.)
But I'm getting ahead of
myself here.
I was still struggling (and
struggled until very recently) with the fact that I had no college
degree, no “real” profession. How could I possibly be a “good”
mom? Shouldn't I have a piece of paper that says I'm smart enough to
procreate? How would I meet a man who would respect me enough to
fall in love, marry and have children with me? And even more
importantly, how would I meet a man who didn't know about my
reputation? Would it matter if I told him how I got on the Carousel
of Lust in lieu of Love in the first place?
Part 5
The Carousel of Lust in
Lieu of Love
Here's the truth, the ugly
truth, outted for the first time to the world.
Remember that guy back in
Part 3 who impressed me with his desire for 3.4 kids?
I FELL HARD FOR THAT GUY.
And I was engaged to the
previously mentioned High School Sweetheart.
But I was too scared to try
a real grown up relationship for fear of it not working out and chose
to stay with the guy I figured would always stick around.
Step one to Bad Reputation:
Fall in love with someone when you already belong to someone else.
Step two to Bad Reputation:
Try to forget the guy you fell in love with by sleeping with every
guy who reminds you of him.
Step three to Bad
Reputation: Feel absolutely NOTHING for as long as it takes for the
hurt to go away.
Step four to Bad Reputation:
When someone points out your reputation act like you're proud of it.
So, it wasn't so much that I
was sowing wild oats, I just wanted to forget. I spent years trying
to forget before I realized I was hurting myself more and more and I
certainly couldn't become a mom until I healed.
That Carousel is still in
perpetual motion for so many men and women out there. It never stops.
You simply have to jump off and, trust me, it will hurt. It'll be the
first time you really feel how broken your heart is. Your arms will
ache from having held onto all the wrong things and your equilibrium
will be so off that, at first, you'll just keep spinning and bumping
into blurry sillouettes of all the others who've just jumped off too.
It will take a while to readjust your vision and when you do you'll
start seeing something amazing. You're no longer a walking, talking,
Bad Reputation. You're You again.
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