The Prodigal

Hey guys! Long time no see.

It’s been a few weeks.

I haven’t forgotten about you guys…I’ve just been praying on how to go about this next segment.

This was the beginning of the absolute hell I put my husband through. (Not hell in a bad word way, hell in a place sort of way)

This is a really important segment in my story, so I can’t skip over it…but I have a choice about how in detail I want to go about this, and after a lot of prayer, a long talk with Shane, and after thinking on it for a few weeks..I think I know what I want to share about this…and what I don’t want to share about this.

I left my husband standing at the door of our apartment.

I had every intention on coming back. I wouldn’t leave my kids for anything, and he knew that. He knew I wasn’t leaving for good. He knew I was leaving in another sense.

I walked away from our relationship.

Now not REALLY, because through everything you all have heard and everything you will hear….we never “broke up”.

I would bring it up. I would ask for us to take a break from one another and Shane would refuse. At the time, I felt trapped.

I know now though, that were the roles reversed now…I would do the same.

He would beg me to stay and I would beg him to let me go.

I don’t think I really wanted to go.

If I had’ve..I would’ve just left. He didn’t hold me hostage or anything. It was just like I was waiting on his blessing for me to leave…and he would not budge.

If I’m being honest…I don’t think I really wanted to leave.

Knowing the person that I was, I think I just wanted eat my cake and have it to.

I wanted to still have the husband and still do whatever I wanted to do. And I remember even saying as much to Shane.

No matter what I said, his choice stayed the same. He chose to stay with me…

And til this day I will never know why.

So we were never “apart” for the entirety of our marriage. There were no breaks, there was no packing bags, there was no on again and off again during this whole thing. We were very much still a married couple and very much still did married couple things.

So I left my apartment that day and I went to whatever the heck name we’ve given hims house,

Casper, wasn’t it? I think so.

The whole time there I tried talking myself out of it, but I just kept driving.

I told myself when I got there it wasn’t going to go a certain way. I told myself that it was going to just be a catch up and hang out sort of thing. But even I couldn’t make myself believe that. I knew I was going to dig my own grave with this trip and I did just that.

When I saw him for the first time since I watched the ambulance take him away… I didn’t have “butterflies”, I didn’t get excited, or anything.

I saw red flags and heard alarms.

I knew I was about to mess up.

It had been years, there was no sense of familiarity anymore. We were both totally different individuals now and farrrrr from the high schoolers we were.

We started out watching TV and then boom. I made the worst mistake of my life.

You might be thinking I did a certain thing. Often times, when I tell my testimony people assume a lot of things. And thats valid, because I usually leave a lot of details out just because I usually talk about my testimony and story on my channel and I like to keep my channel very tame. It’s sometimes hard to do that given my past, but I try.

I feel more comfortable speaking about it over here because you kind of know what you’re in for when you come over here to the blog posts. And I have alerts all over the website stating my blog posts are for ages 18 and up due to difficult subjects talked about, and just the nature of it all.

So forewarning, if you don’t want to know the details..don’t read any further. I’m not going to just lay everything that happened out there, but I do want to say something I’ve wanted so badly to say since first telling my story on YouTube.

Shane is my partner. And there are many things I’ve only done with him.

I let it go too far on this day. There were no sparks or anything, it was dull and lifeless. I’ve never told anyone this and never spoken out loud about it, but I remember thinking “this does not make me feel like I feel when I’m kissing Shane.”

Once that thought ran across my mind… I was out of there.

I stopped everything dead in its tracks, jumped out of that bed, and sped home.

I’m thankful I didn’t let it go any further than it did, but thats the only thing Old Merina ever did right. She doesn’t deserve to be praised for that. She had already done enough damage. Praising her for that would be like someone stabbing someone almost to death and then praising them for not killing them.

I called Shane on my way home and I was bawling. He knew, I know he knew. I was honest to God waiting for a blow…that never came.

He said “come home honey its going to be okay”

I almost ran off the road.

I pulled in and he was waiting at the same door I left him at and there’s not a day that goes by that that doesn’t replay in my head and torture me.

As I ran up to him he had his arms open ready for a hug

And that was the first time I ever saw Jesus in anybody. I REALLY met Jesus that day, and Shane introduced us. It was then that I realized Shane had a supernatural kind of love for me that directly mirrored the love that God has for me.

There’s no other explanation. If it were not true, he would’ve been gone a long time ago.

Besides a few argumentative texts afterwards that evening…I have never spoken to Casper since. A few months before I started YouTube, he sent me a friend request.

And there wasn’t a cell in my body that wanted to accept it.

I didn’t get it all right after that. In fact, I got a lot more wrong. This is just the beginning of my mess. But Shanes hug that day was also the beginning of my redemption.

Over a decade later, I can still recall it as if it were yesterday. I can still see that image in my mind as if it were right in front of me. Shane welcoming me with a hug. Sometimes that image haunts me and sometimes that image brings me to my knees overflowing with gratefulness.

I felt like the prodigal son that day.

I wanted to change. I don’t know why I didn’t sooner. But Shane would go through harder times soon. And it would make this situation look like a PBS episode.

I hate who I was.

Haunted

I’ve been averaging posts bi weekly lately.

I think it’s due to the fact that we’ve approached the part of my story that I really hate looking back on.

Even the thought of sitting down and typing all the things I put my family through, all of the thoughts that were going through my mind in real time, and just reliving those times makes me want to squall my eyes out.

I’m still showing up to post, but I know that God is giving me so much grace when it comes to this blog. He really is letting me post at a rate that won’t overburden me mentally and I need to remember that more often.

The only one putting a time crunch on me…is me.

That being said, I still make it a point to show up here, because I’m committed to this thing. I’m committed to the will of God. I’m committed to the task He has tasked me with.

So if I miss a week, just know I’ll be back. It’s more than likely because I have an upcoming post that I know will be particularly tough for me to talk about and I don’t want to put my mind into a rut.

I think people think because I am so positive, that I smile through everything and every thought. I feel like they think I smile through the really bad and sad times, and thats just not so.

I’m as human as you are.

I have emotions and thats normal.

Shoot, God has emotions.

The difference between the Creator and His creation is that while we both have emotions (because we’re made in His image)…Only one of us is DRIVEN by those emotions.

And that’s us.

So, it’s normal to feel all of the feelings.

People misinterpret the saying “the joy of the Lord is my strength”.

That’s Bible. It’s true. You won’t ever catch me arguing with scripture…but joy isn’t smiling all of the time… joy isn’t 24/7 happiness either.

The joy that is my strength— I interpret it as an inner peace. An inner joyful peace that is present no matter the circumstance. An innermost feeling that no matter what, in the end, God cares for me and wants the best for me.

That revelation alone, creates the inner joy that I have. It’s unshakeable, unbreakable, and utterly bulletproof.

Because God’s love for me (and for you) is all in the same. Unshakeable, unbreakable, and UTTERLY bulletproof.

I left you last time in a particular part of my story that was really hard for me.

I was working all of the time, I was surrounded by influences (not very good ones), and I was bitter.

I worked 3rd shift with people who didn’t like me very much until I became a chameleon and became similar to them. They started liking me when I started doing that.

I made friends with someone in particular that was around my age at the time. At this time I believe I was 22ish. We were talking while doing rounds on our unit and she mentioned she was talking to someone. Some way or another she said his name and when she did I was shocked.

Can you guess who it was?

I’ll give you three guesses lol.

Mike? No who is that.

Jefferey? Don’t know one.

Casper the ghost? I mean…you could call him that. I like that better than the Ghost of Christmas past name I’ve given him lol.

From now on he’s Casper.

But yes. It was in fact…Casper.

I tried to hide my face, but she detected something was off and inevitably I had to tell her why I had the reaction I had and how I knew him.

I kept it very brief, because like now, he’s never been a subject that I’ve talked freely on…I didn’t talk about him in detail back then either.

Even though I kept it as brief as possible, I could tell it made her uncomfortable and things weren’t the same for the rest of the night.

I’m telling you….you want to talk about “familiar spirits”?

This is something of the sort.

No matter where I went, who I talked to…that person was almost always brought up in conversation. It was absolutely a stumbling block that I fell right into.

The enemy knew the attachment I had to this person. That trauma bond I told you about. And he played those cards and played them good.

I wasn’t prayed up then like I stay now. I didn’t really have a relationship with Jesus. I believed in Him. I considered myself a Christian. But I knew Him as the deity of God. Not as my friend. Not as my Savior.

This is the part I’m really ashamed about.

After finding out who she was talking to I got into my head. I let my guard down. I finally accepted the friend request that had been waiting in the friend request folder for forever.

And I walked right into one of the darkest parts of my story.

We began talking back and forth. He asked to meet up somewhere and I agreed.

I can honestly tell you that I had no “bad” intentions for the meet up.

I knew it was wrong, because I was keeping it hid…but I didn’t go expecting to do anything “bad” per se.

We met up in the parking lot of a McDonalds one night before my shift (a McDonalds parking lot space that I STILL won’t let Shane park in to this day.)

He got in the passenger seat of my car, and I knew right then this was about to be a problem.

It had been 5 years since I had seen him, but you wouldn’t have known that. I think we were both stunted in our maturity.

The best way I can describe it is…. And it might sound awful but this is the best way I can explain it…

You know how you have a favorite toy when you’re little?

You know how it’s been years since you’ve seen that thing? And then you see it in a tiktok video or at a yard sale and you get a sense of nostalgia? Almost a comforting feeling?

That’s what it was like seeing him again.

I didn’t have feelings for him. I didn’t get butterflies or anything. But that sense of familiarity(nostalgia) was there because that trauma bond had never been broken.

There had never been closure.

One minute we’re sitting beside each other at lunch, the next minute it’s been 5 years and we’re sitting beside each other in a McDonalds parking lot…. One of us married, one of us playing the field, and both of us utterly DUMB.

He never settled down. I did, though. So I guess if we’re Dumb and Dumber…I’m Dumber.

It was a brief catch up conversation in the car that night, but it kicked off a frequent texting thing between the two of us.

I

Don’t

Want

To

Go

On.

I’m just going to type this in fast motion so I can get through this quickly and move on.

The day I left my house to go to his house is one of the worst memories in my entire life.

I told Shane where I was going. I didn’t hide it. Some people would say “at least you didn’t hide it” …no there was no “at least” to it. At this point I didn’t care to hide it. I wasn’t doing Shane any favors. I just legitimately did not care.

What haunts me to this day is the look on Shane’s face when I walked out our door. I will never forget it, it’s engraved into my mind. I can see it right now as if it were right in front of me.

That’s a price for what I did that day. It’s a price I will pay until I am dead and buried.

Shane was heartbroken. We had obviously been having problems already and I had already been playing around with fire by being too friendly with guys, but I hadn’t crossed that line and so when I finally did….he was destroyed.

I left him with our kids and I went to …Caspers..house.

If I could go back and change ANYTHING it would be this decision.

I would never cross that line.

I would never put my husband through that.

But I can’t change what I did. I just have to live with my decisions and the consequences of my actions.

In the next blog post I’ll be walking you through the situation.

I won’t be graphic, but I can’t skip over this part because I feel like my thought process during the whole thing is something that genuinely needs to be studied.

I tried rectifying the situation but I was too late.

I will say…that one decision changed everything

Certified Narcissist

I’m sorry I missed last week’s blog post.

To be honest I didn’t even realize it was Friday until it was Saturday lol.

I had been working over time to get a video to upload for you guys over on the channel and it was giving me one heck of a time lol.

Maybe my brain sabotaged last Fridays post on purpose because we’re entering the era I want to run from. I don’t want to think about it let alone write about it.

Someone asked me why my blog was so detailed, and suggested I hold back a little. This person doesn’t know me personally, so while I contemplated their advice…I had to inevitably disagree with them.

I hold back a lot of details, actually. The things I write on here are super touchy subjects and nobody wants to write everything out in detail…and nobody wants to read those details either. There’s a lot I omit from this blog. Just know I’ve been through worse than you’ve read. I’ve held back a lot for your reading experience and for the sake of family members feelings. I’m not here to sabotage anyone. I’m not here to make anyone look bad. I’m just here to brag on God. That’s all.

And in order to do that loud and proud, I have to add some context into this thing!

I spared some reputations.

— That’s the victim me.

However, now we’re talking about the villain me.

And I don’t care about sparing my own reputation. It is who I was, not who I am.

I’m not going to omit something from this timeline to make this more comfortable for me. I’m uncomfortable, absolutely, but I think that’s a part of this whole thing. It’s hard to grow when you’re comfortable. A lot of times my growth comes from me putting myself in uncomfortable situations.

I told you guys in the last post that I had seared my conscious and it’s so very true.

I find myself randomly thanking God for conviction and for my conscious now, because even almost a decade later, I’m so happy to have it back.

While reading this I want you to read about the feelings I felt during all of this. I want you to know my mindset during this time. I’ve always been super open with you guys and I don’t want to stop that now.

Back to my conscious…

I was in prayer the other day and I felt super convicted about something, and instead of feeling embarrassed or like a child getting in trouble… I felt so relieved. I literally said “thank You Jesus for my conscious.” I hear Holy Spirit loud and clear these days and I’m grateful for that. Sooo, so unbelievably grateful for that. It’s why I try to stay so sensitive to the Spirit and what He’s saying. I don’t ever want to ignore His voice until I forget the sound of it ever again.

I crossed the line.

If you’re reading this blog for the first time…I hope you go back and read prior ones before this so you’re not completely lost.

As of right now, I’m talking about a reoccurring “character”.

Somehow we made contact again. This was the first time we had actually contacted one another since I had seen him rushed away in an ambulance that day at school.

I had seen he was back in town, but I didn’t dare talk to him.

I can’t remember who contacted who, but that’s really irrelevant anyway. Regardless, we began speaking again.

It started out super innocent. A sort of “catching up” conversation and it quickly turned into a me hiding my phone at night, deleting messages sort of thing.

One night I had hid my phone under the mattress while I slept so Shane couldn’t find it. He had never been one to go through my phone per se, but my actions of late had been worrying him and I guess he figured out something must be going on.

I woke up to him standing over me with this horrible look in his eyes.

Pure betrayal. That man was HURT.

I knew right away that he had found it.

It was a knock out drag out argument that night.

At that point, I had never seen him so hurt.

I wish I could say that that was the worst it’s ever been, but this was just a precursor.

We argued and talked all night until way up in the morning.

Shane knew who this guy was, but he didn’t know the extent of my history with him. Like I told you before, I kept him and everything to do with him locked up in me. I can’t really tell you why, I can just assume it had a lot to do with the lack of closure I got from everything that happened between us.

As the sun was coming up, I remember promising it would never happen again.

I didn’t even know at the time that THAT was a lie. I really believed it wouldn’t happen again. I had every intention on it not happening again.

We moved, again.

We were always moving. We rarely stayed past the duration of our lease no matter where we were. It felt like we had no stability and I hated that.

Shane and I were both working. It felt like we worked in vain because we surely didn’t have anything to show for it. We were struggling bad and it felt like a never ending battle. McDonalds dollar menu was even out of the question. We sold everything we had to be able to afford the house payment, food, gas, etc. We worked as many hours as we were allowed to, but between the low amount of income coming in and poor money management….money was gone the minute it hit the bank.

We lost the house we worked hard for and we ended up moving into another trailer in a trailer park. It was here that I went from working at Food City to working as a hostess at a restaurant. I had been promised more money, but inevitably the owner never sent me the first paycheck. He actually got shut down a little while later after decades of business.

Shane was working in the lawn and garden area at Walmart. He had just transferred from a Walmart he had been at for like six years, and when he transferred to this one they quickly cut his hours and they couldn’t transfer him back to his Walmart… so we were in a pickle.

Shane had spent years working towards a position in Walmart and everyone loved him there so when he transferred and they started giving him less and less hours…we were like oh snap what are we going to do now? It put him in a bad head space because he had been working there for awhile and putting himself through college with that job. He would literally get out of classes, walk across the highway to his store, and clock himself in for an 8 hour shift.

Eventually, the new Walmart just took him completely off of the schedule.

I picked up a factory job to carry us until Shane could find something new. The problem was he only had customer service experience and the places that were wanting to hire him couldn’t pay him enough. He made pretty good money at Walmart because he had sort of climbed the ladder throughout those 6 years. Nothing any store offered him was anywhere near that amount of money per hour.

I sorted books at the factory I worked at. It was a packing plant so I would walk a billion steps a day while sorting and packing books into boxes. I actually loved it. I would work my hind end off Monday through Friday and sometimes Saturday’s. People can call me a lot of things, but one thing I’ll never answer to is “lazy”. I will do what I have to for my family every single time. I will work as much and as hard as needed if it means they’re taken care of.

I worked myself ragged at this factory for a $225 check a week. It wasn’t a lot, but it carried us for a little bit.

Shane eventually found a job at Home Depot.

We were really excited about it because they had taken his time at Walmart into consideration and they had offered him quite a bit of money. The schedule was super strict and he would have to be in the store at 4am every day, but it worked for us.

However, once he got to know the guys a little better…we soon realized this was not going to work out. Shane is very upfront and honest. He’s not easily pressured, and he sticks to his convictions no matter what. Things were going south because of how the store was ran, some stuff was going on that Shane didn’t agree with, and I told him to hold out just a little longer until I could figure out something.

It was only a few days later that I borrowed the money from nanny to put myself through CNA classes.

I actually just paid her back for that 4 years ago when I began making an income from YouTube. I can’t tell you how happy it made me to finally be able to pay nanny back for that. Nanny made an investment into me that day and I was able to make a good living for us for a long while because of her kindness.

I went to my classes every day. I studied from the time I got home til the time I went to sleep and I graduated as Valedictorian of my class. Some may find that hilarious, but I was proud of that. I got my little valedictorian certificate in the back of a goodwill where my classes were held lol. I even have the little award thingy still lol I was as proud of that as I was for the GED certificate I had on my wall lol!

I had a job before I even graduated that class and I began working third shift.

I wish this time signified the change we needed in our lives. It did change our lives, but it was in more ways than one…I made a lot of money while being CNA. It was BIG money to us back then. Between my wages and the overtime I pulled, we made it off pretty well. We had been used to scraping for change and going hungry, and we weren’t doing that anymore, so we thought we had made it in life honestly lol.

The medical field is wild though.

I can say that because I was in it for awhile and I worked in several different places.

It’s all the same lol

The things I witnessed while there is just unbelievable. Married male nurses out in the parking lot with married female nurses. Unoccupied rooms becoming…. Occupied.

Drugs deals behind the facility. ….Other deals behind the facility. Night shift was cake compared to evening shift. The evening shift employees were WILD.

It took me awhile to fit in with my fellow employees. We didn’t vibe at first and it was really taking a toll on me. They would be so mean and I would sneak off to the ice room and cry my eyes out. I’d call Shane and he would have to give me a pep talk to keep me going for the rest of the night.

I did that every night.

I promise you. EVERY night.

I did everything I could to make them like me. I pulled their weight…I did their charting, their call lights, their rounds. I went into contagion rooms by myself so they wouldn’t have to gear up. I thought if I made their work load easier on them by pulling some of their weight they would like me better. It goes back to me always feeling like I have to EARN somebody’s love.

I bought their lunches. I would take my 30 minute break and rush over to cookout at 2AM so I could pick them all up something and it still didn’t help my situation.

We were just totally different people. They had a whole dynamic and I was trying to be a really good person at this point so I didn’t fit into that “dynamic”.

After Shane and I had that knockout drag out argument a year or so prior…I had been trying really hard to just work and take care of my family. I didn’t have time to get sidetracked. I had a family to provide for. I was the sole provider for the 4 of us and that felt like a lot of pressure.

I admire those people who solely provide for their family. I know the amount of stress and pressure that comes along with that sort of lifestyle and it’s really not easy.

I’ve been on both ends, the sole provider and the stay at home mom and both are difficult in their own ways.

I tried everything I could to make my work experience a good one because my family relied on that job.

I realized over time that people enjoy like minded people. And I was not likeminded to those people.

So I became likeminded to those people.

What started out as a way to secure my job and make it a pleasant experience for me and my family ended up being a huge component into me almost losing my family.

Around this time I got on Phentermine to lose weight and lose weight I did.

I lived off of half a McChicken a week. I’m not exaggerating, you can ask Shane.

I lost almost a hundred pounds in 6 months. I looked SICK.

Shane was looking at me one day and was like “Rina you’re looking so sick”. I was staring at myself in the mirror and didn’t miss the hollow eyes that were completely enveloped by black circles and the skeleton like cheek bones. I covered it up with makeup so no one would notice but when I got home and took it all off it was unavoidable. I didn’t just look sick, I WAS sick.

I worked every night, no breaks. I worked 10:30PM to 6:30AM and was always on call for day and evening shift. I was needed for both evening shift and night shift so I started working 16 hour shifts Monday - Sunday. At first I didn’t mind because A) it kept my family taken care of and B) The more I worked the less I thought about food so it felt like a win-win for me.

I was exhausted, though.

I never got to spend time with my kids and that really began to affect me. I’ve always loved spending time with my kids. The minute I had Colton he became my little bestie and he was my favorite person on the planet. I loved that little boy with everything I had in me, so the 2 hours a day I got to see him didn’t feel like enough. My heart was breaking. I missed he and Cammy so bad. The longer I went without seeing him and cammy the more bitter I got. I resented Shane. Even though this was a part of our plan…I so badly wanted him to come in and save the day and be like “I got this”. We had agreed that I would work full time and over time to compensate for 2 incomes so that he could stay home with Colton and Cammy. We planned it that way because we could make more in healthcare than we could in customer service usually. So maybe I shouldn’t have been angry…but I just remember watching their relationships grow, and watching my relationship with them deteriorate and I came to hold a grudge. A ginormous grudge.

I’m holding a grudge.

I’m sick.

I’m working 112 hours a week.

I’m getting 4 hours of sleep a day.

I’m seeing my kids 2 hours a day if I’m lucky.

I’m missing key moments as a mother.

I have no life outside of work.

It doesn’t get passed me that Shane is living my dream life because all I’ve ever wanted to be is a stay at home mom.

And so begins my “I don’t give a crap” era.

This isn’t my excuse..this is my WHY.

Now listen to me when I say this…everything I have said until now is not an excuse for my behavior. But it does begin to explain my why.

My grudge had turned into full blown resentment. I had lost all confidence in Shane’s ability to take care of us. I began to have control issues because I was virtually in control of everything and that began to create a certified Narcissist. I was a CNA alright…in more ways than one.

I was a Certified Nursing Assistant and I was a Certified Narcissistic BAD WORD FOR BUTT HOLE.

I became the most self centered person I have ever known.

I was mean. I was meaner than mean

My Life Sentence

I left y’all with a declaration in the last post, lol.

I didn’t mean to sound mean. I have to be careful when talking about this person, because Shanes brought it to my attention before while talking about them that I sound really mean. It can sound like I hate them sometimes, and I don’t. I think the thought of him just reminds me of that time and it reminds me of me back then. That old version of me. And ohhhh I hate her. I have nothing but hate towards that old version of me and that’s something Jesus and I are working through. As it stands right now, though, I haven’t made much progress in that department. I can’t show myself grace because I feel like that lets me off the hook in a way.

And I don’t deserve to be “let off the hook”.

I mentioned something to that extent in one of the last posts.

I deserved so much worse than what I got.

I deserved to be left.

And I think because Shane didn’t leave, and because he did forgive me…it makes me want to hate me enough for the both of us.

It’s like I have two me’s. One is the old version, the mean version, the version of me that is so cruel. And the other me is me now. The one who would do anything for Shane. I’d lay my life down for him in a millisecond. I’d do anything that man wanted me to. I’m hooked. He has me wrapped around his finger. I hurt when he hurts, I’m happy when hes happy….when hes mad I want to make it better.

Those two versions are like night and day and there is so much conflict there.

I think I don’t let what I did go because I’m the me now. And I want justice for what was done to my husband.

The hardest thing is wanting justice for the hurt he endured, but I’m the guilty one.

How do you navigate that?

I wish I knew.

I just feel like I have to hold on to all of that because everyone’s let it go. And I don’t feel like that’s fair. I destroyed him. I DESTROYED him.

A lot of you are so loving, and show me so much grace in this area. I’m grateful you don’t judge me for who I was and what I did. I judge me for the both of us though lol.

I understand I have to move on. I try to make Shane think I’ve moved on just so he doesn’t have to relive that nightmare all over again and again.

But I have not moved on.

It’s easy to tell me to move on when you’ve just heard us recount the events. I think if you all had been there in real time, there would be less grace shown towards me. Understandably so.

I know that because I remember him collapsed sobbing. I remember the hurt in his voice when he was begging me to change. I remember how I continually manipulated him and emotionally tore him down til he was a shell of the boy I married.

I can’t unsee any of that.

And THAT is my life sentence. The death penalty would’ve been too easy on me. I have to live everyday with myself and what I did to him.

Every day that I see his drop dead gorgeous face, I’m reminded that at one point I broke him. I broke this mans absolutely beautiful soul.

I’m squalling while typing this right now because that is. So. Hard. To. Live. With.

And don’t get me wrong, I’m not a victim here. This isn’t woe is me. It isn’t “oh my gosh feel sorry for me” sort of thing.

When I tell you all this stuff it’s never for pity. I just try my best to convey how I feel about what I did.

I hope nobody ever mistakes that for me fishing for sympathy.

If you feel sympathy for anybody, feel it for Shane.

We are at the point in the timeline where Shane and I are newly married, new parents, and really just starting our life together.

I told you I came across the boy who I thought was literally dead on facebook. Not him in particular but a photo of him shared by a mutual friend.

I didn’t have anything to do with him then. There was no contact whatsoever. But somewhere in that time frame something in me went south. I went off the rails. I was losing the morale I had worked so hard to have. I had worked hard to build my conscious. I had put in the effort to be a good mom and wife and then boom. It all blew up.

I began playing with fire. People I used to date and talk to were finding their way into my life and I was beginning to entertain people I should’ve never given the time of day as a married woman.

On the other hand, Shane wasn’t allowed to even breathe in the direction of a woman. I was so insecure and he lived in constant fear of me making a mountain out of a mole hill. One time we were at the grocery store and a woman he had known was our cashier. They had never been romantic or anything, they were just friends, and I started a war because he said hi to her and asked her how she had been.

A knock out drag out fight.

I would shove him out of the way and get up on his face and act like a complete and utter fool.

He would never be out of the way with me and he’d just stand there and take it while trying to calm me down.

I don’t know why he was and still is that way with me. He never loses his temper. He never talks hateful to me. He is always genuinely so kind to me all of the time. Even back then, while I was acting so ridiculous, he kept his cool and did his best not to escalate the situation.

The problem is I wanted a fight. I wanted to make him mad because I couldn’t figure out why he wouldn’t get mad at me. In my mind passion was love. Even angry passion I guess you could say. So when he didn’t act a fool like I did when he saw I was talking to someone…to me that said he didn’t care as much as I did.

Is that not the most ridiculous thing you have ever heard?

It’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard lol.

But that’s how my 19 year old, 20 year old brain thought.

I can only guess its because every form of love I had received had been warped. I wasn’t sure what love really looked like. A healthy form of love anyway.

So he kept forgiving when I would do stupid stuff and i kept messing up. I purposely pushed his buttons to see how far I could push him and I would get so angry when I didn’t push him over the edge.

I was doing some hardcore projecting. Because If I was the only one losing control something must be wrong with me so I needed to see him lose control so I could sleep at night.

The thing is he didn’t lose control. Ever.

I didn’t do a whole lot in this time frame before Camron. I hovered around the line but wouldn’t cross it.

Eventually, we got pregnant with Cammy and nanny gave me the trailer I had grown up in. My dad had been living there and our relationship struggled heavily during this time because he didn’t think the trailer should be mine. He wanted to keep it.

But he wasn’t paying the lot rent and the trailer was about to be taken by the landlord so he didn’t put up much of a fight.

We moved in and we began raising Colton in the trailer I was raised in which was really bittersweet. It was the trailer my papaw died in so living there again really brought back memories.

The only thing was…I knew we wouldn’t be staying there long. I had come back to the lions den, surrounded by all of these people who hurt me again, and this time I had someone other than myself to protect. So we stayed for only a little while, brought Cammy home to that trailer, had some issues with the trailer (it was falling apart and literally caught on fire late one night). It was going down hill because it hadn’t been taken care of so Shane and I began looking for a new place.

We found this house a few miles down the road that was entirely too expensive for us. It was owner financing and the payment was ridiculous, but it was in a good neighborhood and it was ideal for raising a kid.

In order to keep it we both had to work, though.

Shane would work mornings and I would work afternoons. We didn’t see each other a lot and that was becoming a problem. While living in the trailer I had built up my resolve and had been doing better. But we moved to somewhere we really couldn’t afford and were stressed all the time. We weren’t getting to see one another a whole lot and we didn’t get to spend much time with the kids as a whole family.

It was all a a recipe for disaster, but then the ghost of Christmas past pops up.

Again.

I can’t remember how we came to be in contact with one another again. I can’t remember who reached out to who. All I remember was it wasn’t long before I became the very person I did not want to become. And before long, I crossed the line for the first time as a married woman.

And when you sear your conscious for long enough, it becomes easier to ignore it.

That’s what I did. I ignored my conscious for so long that I couldn’t recognize its voice anymore.

That’s a position I never want to be in again.

That’s a dangerous position to be in

It’s a slow fade.

So, I almost called in sick today lol

I did not want to be here writing this.

It’s weird because I WANT to fulfill what God has called me to do, but showing up is hard sometimes.

Blog posts like the last one are easy. I could write about Shane all day long. But as far as timelines go… we’re about to hit a rough patch and I don’t want to revisit that.

But for God, I will.

I left y’all at the wedding in the pajamas, lol.

What I forgot to mention is that throughout our entire dating relationship…I did not cheat on Shane. That was a first. I was actually quite proud of that as a teenager. I remember trying my hardest to not fall back into old habits because he really made me feel loved for the first time in my entire life. Now someone may say “Merina if you love somebody it’s not hard to be faithful.” And I would agree with that to an extent, but what IS hard is breaking a habit. I was a serial cheater. I’d cheat on anybody with anybody. I had 0…ZERO…self respect. While that’s hard to admit, it’s true. Blatantly true. I won’t sugarcoat nothing about my story for you guys. I want to be totally transparent and honest with you all. That’s the whole point of doing this. If I’m going to water it down and play the victim the whole time… why are we even all here.

As a child I WAS the victim. As a teenager and a young adult I was the VILLAIN.

It’s easy to start a habit, it’s hard to end one.

That’s why everybody picks up a cigarette and only some put it down.

And before you say “That’s different. That’s something physical!”

The adrenaline from cheating felt physical.

The (false sense of) dopamine felt physical.

It felt like a sort of high and I was forever chasing that high. I didn’t ever do drugs. I saw what it did to my whole family. I saw how they were ruled by it all. As a kid I sat and watched the drug deals happen. I stepped over the strung out bodies. I got used to seeing my loved ones bent over and lifeless. I knew I didn’t want that life, but what I didn’t realize was I just traded in that addiction for another kind of addiction. I was addicted to the feeling of being wanted. The feeling of being needed.

I thought I was the black sheep, the odd one out in a family full of addicts, but I wasn’t. I was an addict that just didn’t partake in their brand of drug.

I hate to put it that way. I hate it so bad. Like rereading that makes me mad.

I feel like sugarcoating this for myself sometimes lol.

I could give you so many excuses as to why I might’ve wanted to feel wanted and needed so bad, but what I’ll never do is excuse my actions. Even if there is some logical reason I was driven to do the things I did, or even if there’s science behind the way my brain worked back then. No matter if the trauma had anything to do with it…I won’t let that be my excuse.

I say it on the channel all of the time, but plenty of people go through what I’ve been through and WORSE and they could still remain faithful to their loved ones.

My trauma is my trauma, not my excuse.

It’s not an “if she wanted to she would.” Sort of thing…cause I wanted to change, I really did. I promise you I wanted to change.

It was a “FIGHT HARDER” sort of thing. I could’ve fought harder. I didn’t fight for much of nothing back then. It felt like I just didn’t have it in me. The fight in me was missing for so long.

It’s all here now, though. And it’s how I’ve remained faithful to Shane for almost a decade no “slip ups” or mistakes in all of that time.

I fight for him like he fought for me. I realized I wanted to LIVE because I wanted to spend my life with him. I wanted to FEEL genuine feelings….not the high, not the adrenaline…I wanted to feel something full of SUBSTANCE. All that other stuff left me feeling empty in the end. What Shane made me feel lasted. It has left a lasting effect on me. Once I received it….REALLY received it…it changed me.

That’s because Jesus was using Shane as a funnel. He was funneling His love through Shane into ME.

I was raised in church my whole life, but the first time I ever truly saw Jesus was in Shane.

Don’t get me wrong. I had prayed in my adolescence. A LOT. Lord knows I prayed. I was actually baptized with the Holy Spirit at only 14. (If you’re not Pentecostal, you might not know what that is and thats okay! I plan to go over it in the podcast.)

Everywhere I went as a kid God had a word for me from somebody and it still stands true today. The amount of times God has used an individual to relay a message to me is baffling. I always say I must be hard of hearing or something LOL cause everyone’s got a word for me EXCEPT me! I have plenty of words from God for other people, but I can probably count on one hand how many times God has spoke something to me for me lol.

So I wasn’t a stranger to the faith. I knew of Jesus, and I KNEW Jesus to an extent. I knew parts of Him. I just hadn’t been introduced to a lot of the fruits of the Spirit.

So when I met Shane and he harbored them all I slowly began to come to know the sort of love Jesus had for me.

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control.

As a child I hadn’t met many Christians who showed any of those off.

We took a detour to tell you this, because it’s important in the future. There comes a time when I meet Jesus again and it’s in that moment you’ll see that THAT’S when I become Fearfully CREATED. I had always been Fearfully CREATED, but it was within that moment that I accepted the title.

That moment is further up ahead in my story, though.

Let’s get back on track.

So I had remained faithful to Shane while we were dating. The closest I came to being unfaithful was keeping a male friend that made Shane uncomfortable around for far too long. He had asked me to sever contact with him because the boy was beginning to catch feelings, and I didn’t for a long time. I didn’t do any cheating per say, but I’m not innocent in that either because I knew he was developing feelings for me and it came back to that “me feeling wanted and needed thing”. I wouldnt cross the line, but I hovered around it for long enough.

Right before Shane and I got married I ended contact with that friend.

Shane and I got married without having a house to live in. So for the first few months we actually lived separately. Neither of our families were fond of the idea that we were married and they didn’t want both of us living together under their roofs. Surprisingly the one person who offered their home to us was none other than….

My mom.

She was the only person who offered Shane and I a place to stay together. She helped us work on our broken down car, she eventually gave us an older car she had, she helped me get my GED, and she helped me prepare for Coltons arrival.

That’s why I don’t tolerate mom slander.

We healed something between us during that time and while parts of us are still broken, and our relationship still struggles…I will never forget her welcoming Shane and I into her home and helping me better myself.

The enemy thought he had that relationship in the bag 33 years ago. God knew we were both.broken, and He was willing to fix us in the right timing. It took 19 years for me to begin healing in that department, and it’s been a long one lol 15 years later and I’m still healing. I think she is, too.

After getting on our feet we were able to secure a low income apartment.

I was on cloud 9. I remember Shane and I walking into that low income apartment and seeing it as a mansion. We were beyond ready to start our lives together. We thought it was the coolest thing because it had stairs lol. I think one of the bedrooms was haunted so we kept the door to is closed lol but other than that it was heaven on earth for us.

Everything was going great. I was having gallbladder attacks frequently though and sooner than later a gallbladder attack sent me into labor with Colton. It was one of the most severe pains I had ever felt. I projectile vomited green goo it was a whole Ghostbusters ordeal.

They were able to remove my gallbladder before it fully ruptured though and I came home with a baby and without a gallbladder lol.

I put Colton first in everything. We were dirt poor, but Shane and I did what we had to to make sure he had what he needed and fun things too! His first Christmas he was only a few months old but I remember wrapping all of his little presents with Shane and putting them under the tree. He had no idea what was going on but we did lol. It’s a core memory. I remember his first Halloween, too. Shane and I carved pumpkins in the living room while he laid there switching between watching us and napping. Later that night I picked him up and held him above my head oo-ing and ahh-ing at him and all of a sudden he projectile vomited soy formula into my mouth. Lol. Shane loves telling that story.

Things were going good. We were barely making ends meet but both of us were used to being poor so we knew how to make things stretch and last until the next pay day. Sometimes nanny would help us, too. I try to give nanny anything she wants now because back then she helped us stay afloat a lot of times. I don’t know what we would’ve done without her.

It wasn’t long after Colton was born that I was scrolling on facebook and saw a familiar face.

You would’ve thought I’d seen a ghost.

In my mind I practically did.

One of my high school friends had posted a photo of them hanging out with *him* and a bunch of our friends at a local park. I remember I was holding Colton in my arms when I saw it and I got such a pit in my stomach.

I didn’t act on anything then. I wanted to keep it out of my mind because I didn’t want Shane to know about him. It was a sore spot and I wanted those two worlds to be separate.

The irony. I know.

Something snapped in me the day I saw his picture on facebook, though.

I began talking to old “friends”, old “flings”, and people I used to know. People I had separated myself from for months and months and months. I had separated myself for a reason, but I forgot about that reason.

I think the snap happened because I didn’t know how to process my feelings as a 19 year old. I just saw someone I thought I’d never see again. Shoot, for all I knew they were dead. I thought everything tied to that was gone. When I saw it wasn’t, I had feelings I needed to work through.

I’m an all or nothing person. I’ve always been. So I’m thinking the snap happened when I realized that. It was almost like a “ oop! I just thought about this person, there goes my faithfulness down the drain!I didn’t have a particularly bad thought when I saw him I just think it stirred up something old and buried.

Or maybe the return of him subliminally brought out the old version of me, I don’t know. I can’t even tell you if seeing him was 100% of the cause. Maybe it had nothing to do with it, I don’t know. Maybe I was looking for a reason. But I slowly watched my resolve disappear and I slowly became the person I was always terrified of becoming again.

You want to know why I stay in prayer? Why I live, eat, and breathe Jesus? Why I work on my marriage 24/7? Why I take every little thing regarding Shane into consideration? Why I’m hyper vigilant about our peace?

It’s because I’ve been down that road. I remember the slippery slope. The out of control falling. The wanting to climb up the slide, but you just kept sliding further and further down. The dark place I landed in. I remember it.

I remember everything.

I remember it all too well as Taylor Swift says.

That was a pivotal tiny, little moment in my story. It’s that little moment that set the stage for everything to come.

As we get further along in this I want you to know…

It’s going to look like I really loved this person. God forbid it gets romanticized.

I’ll set the record straight right here and now.

We did no share love. We shared a trauma bond.

I never loved that person. I liked the broken company.

I’ll say this before God and everybody…Shane is the only man I have ever loved. The only man I have genuinely cared about. The only man who I’ve been ROMANTIC with. Shane has a part of me nobody else on the planet has ever had. I’ve not shared it with anybody and it’s for good reason. It was his all long. I adore that man. I always have. Even in my mess, God in Heaven knows, I loved him. It’s so backwards, I know. People will argue with me til their blue in the face, I know. It makes no sense, I know. But I would not stand before God and tell you a lie. I’ve loved him since the moment I met him. I just didn’t love me

Summer of ‘09

Howdy y’all!

I want to wish y’all a belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Years!

I was originally only going to take a week off from the blog for Christmas, but I spoke with you on my other social media about extending my break one more week cause I just wasn’t feeling it guys.

I’m nearing the part of my story that I despise..even more so than my childhood.

Honestly, I would relive my childhood over again if it meant I could go back and change this upcoming part of my story.

I despise it. I try really hard not to despise ME because of it.

I try to show myself as much grace as I show others, I really do.

But I was there, I was HER…I played the bad guy. I WAS the bad guy.

And all that is bad enough, but throw Shane in the mix and it just makes it so much worse. I’m telling you some days…. I wanna fight her.

It’s those days I need Jesus the most. He always brings me peace during those times. It’s the kind of peace only He can provide.

Before we get to that dreaded part of my story though…we get to relive one of the best times of my life. The summer of ‘09 will be running through my mind when I’m on my death bed…I’m sure of it.

I believe I had just introduced you to Shane the last time I talked with you. How we met and sparks instantly flew. How there was really no “like” or “puppy love” stage with him and I. We moved FAST.

After that initial meet up at the mall… Shane and I became inseparable. We virtually dropped everything but each other. We lived and breathed to make it to the next time we could see or talk to one another and talk to one another we did! We talked ALL day every day. We were constantly texting or on the phone from the moment I opened my eyes to his good morning text til the minute my head hit the pillow and he told me goodnight on the phone. There were many nights we fell asleep on the phone. Those were my favorite. I felt safe when I was talking to him and that wasn’t a feeling I was used to.

During these first few months I didn’t tell Shane about the things I was going through within the house I lived in. I didn’t tell anyone. I learned a long time ago the people I thought I could confide in really didn’t want me confiding in them because it made them uncomfortable….and making them uncomfortable made ME uncomfortable.

Not only was I experiencing pure hell (actual hell not the bad word hell) during this time, but I was also cut off from my family. You’re probably thinking “Merina, we read the first part of you story how could you miss that family on that hill?!” And to answer that…I don’t know. I think it’s because my childhood abuse didn’t compare to what I experienced as a teenager. I missed my mamaw and papaw, too. I didn’t get to see them often. I hardly ever saw my dad. My brother was smart and had chosen not to come with us when we moved so I didn’t have him either. My mom had only popped up on MySpace here and there when she thought I was out of control or something and wanted to parent me so I really had no family outside of this house. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. I hid what happened there and I hid it well. In fact, I hid it so well that I was 25 years old when I finally told nanny what all had been happening under that roof with proof and receipts. She couldn’t believe anything like that could’ve happened without her knowing.

THAT is how well I hid it.

The only person I couldn’t hide it from was Shane. After awhile he began to notice red flags and he started noticing things until finally I told him everything.

I just knew he was going to break up with me. He wasn’t damaged like me. He wasn’t like the others. We didn’t bond through trauma. He deserved someone whole. He deserved someone mentally and emotionally stable and that was NOT me then.

The more I told him though, the closer we got.

He knew I hated it there and he knew I felt unsafe so he would drive to my house as soon as he got off work (work clothes and all!) and he would stay with me til 3 and 4 in the morning. Having him there with me was the safest I had ever felt.

I didn’t have to sleep with one eye on the door when he was with me. I didn’t have to set boobytraps up before I fell asleep so that if someone tried getting into my door I would hear them and they wouldn’t catch me off guard. On nights he wasn’t with me it was awful. It was like they were making up for the days they couldn’t do anything to me because Shane was there. It got so bad that the boobytraps and the stuff in front of the door no longer worked. They busted through my door one night and broke the entire thing. THAT was when I knew I was out of there the minute I turned 18.

Shane stayed longer and longer after that. He came almost every day and he would either stay with me and we would watch movies all day or he would come and get me and get me out of there for awhile. I always hated to turn onto my road at night. Shane says all the time he still has nightmares to this day when he sleeps about having to leave me there without him.

This man has kept me alive his whole life I’m not even kidding you.

He’s always been that kind of person. He’s always been good to his CORE. There used to be a website called Topix and it was basically a gossip forum for your local area. He was all over that thing! lol it used to make me so mad. Someone was either talking about how he was so cute or how he was polite and kind. The last entry I ever read on there before they took the website down was about him being married now and they were so upset.

I hate that for them lol

After only three months of dating, Shane asked me to marry him.

He didn’t have a ring. He couldn’t afford one he was spending a fortune on gas to drive 40 minutes to my house and back every day but I couldn’t have cared less about a ring. I had him and that’s all I wanted. I’ve never said yes to something so fast.

Fun fact — He was being super secretive all day that day and when he said he was coming to my house that night I got worried because we hadn’t planned on it. He showed up  and I had no makeup on and i was in pajamas. I just knew he was breaking up with me. I thought “He’s finally realized how much better he can do!”

When he got down on one knee I was F L A B B E R G A S T E D.

I never want to make it seem as if Shane is perfect. To me, he absolutely is. But realistically no one is perfect. He’s probably the closest to it I’ve ever seen somebody get though lol.

He’s always been such a gentleman.

He knew a lot of my past so when we first started talking about waiting til marriage I was floored. I won’t lie and say we were completely successful with that, we had our moments, but the fact that he even brought that up and we strived to be that way most of our relationship is just amazing to me.

I can’t even begin to explain how considerate and respectful he was to me without being TMI or airing our laundry out here lol but he was always just so kind and respectful.

There was one time I made him so mad. I was trying to make him mad. I had this thing I did up until I was in my mid 20s where I would try my hardest to push him away. To make him mean to me or something. It wasn’t until I began looking back on those years when I realized I had been doing that. I wasn’t just being a butthead or moody..I was actively trying to push him away. Almost as if I was trying to see how far I could push him til he showed his true colors…cause i thought there’s no way this is how he reacts to me being hateful. There’s no way he stays this calm. There’s no way he doesn’t lash out.

I can tell you after 15 years with this man…yes way.

He is not run by his emotions. He’s so level headed when it comes to that kind of stuff.

Anyways I had tried making him mad…I mean I did everything! It was enough to make the pope furious…and all he did was park us in a church parking lot get out of the suv and walk away.

…..if I’m lying I’m crying and I ain’t shed a tear.

I was tearing the man apart and he parked me in a dang church parking lot and walked away….not even far LOL.. he walked to the other side of the parking lot so he wasn’t leaving me alone LOL

Things got worse at the house but they got better and better with him. Our relationship, as new as it was, survived so much. His crazy ex girlfriends, his mom hating me, me being a butthead and emotionally unstable, my trauma responses, me being actively abused during it, Shane having to pawn his favorite things for gas money to make it to me…like we went through it! And I still consider that to be one of the highlights of my life.

On our 9 month anniversary we got married in a living room while I was wearing pajamas lol (I wasn’t lying when I said I do everything in my pajamas lol i even got married in them lol!) We got pregnant with Colton within the following month.

I thought my life had turned around. I thought I had made it through everything I went through and came out unscathed by it…but I was wrong. It wouldn’t be long before I became the bane of my existence. The person I despise even more than all of my abusers…if you were to put old Merina in a room with all of my abusers in it and ask which one I want to punch I would choose Merina. And thats something Jesus is to this day working on me about. He’s helping me work through it and I’m slowly but surely learning that I can forgive her like Shane forgave her.

I have to refer to her as HER or I can’t hardly take it. If I say she almost ruined Shanes  life, I can continue on with my day. If I say I almost ruined Shanes life…I just can’t hardly stand it. I can physically feel my heart break. So I refer to her as her…because I’m a new creation in Christ Jesus and the old me is deader than a door knob.

I would lay down my life for my husband.

I would do and will do anything in my power to bring him joy.

I actively love him like there is no tomorrow.

And that’s how I sleep at night. Knowing that I will be making up for the heartache I caused him for the rest of my life…and I’ll be doing it GLADLY if it means I get to spend my life with him.

Trading in my Sorrows

So I ended the last blog post, talking about the moment I entered into the highlight of my life. I feel like everything before this time period was dark or even in the good moments, tainted. I can honestly say, that without being dramatic, I was honestly happy for the first time in my seventeen years of existence. Shane responded to my friend request on MySpace as fast as lightning. By the time I had refreshed to the home page, my friend request was already accepted. I made a game plan in my head that I was going to do what I always did—play hard to get.

But he made that so hard.

I’m convinced that 99% of the boyfriends I had or the guys that liked me was due to how I knew how to play hard to get and how good I was playing it. I learned at a young age that guys like a chase and they like what they cannot have. Even though most could’ve had me, I pretended like they couldn’t. I’m sure a lot of people on the outside wondered how I got some of the guys I had. I’m sure they probably thought “Wow I’m sure she is good at conversation!” or “She has a great personality.” But neither of those things could be further from the truth. Nobody knew if I had a good personality or if I was good at conversation because I never showed them my personality…and my conversation skills were just me being a mirror. I know how to read people, and I knew how to read them back then, too. I could gauge the type of person I was talking to and I could in a sense mirror them.

That being said I wasn’t good at neither of those things.

People saw who I wanted them to see. They didn’t KNOW me. They didn’t TALK to me. They knew who they wanted to know, and they talked to who I felt they wanted to talk to after I got a good “read” on them.

That didn’t work on Shane.

As soon as I saw he had accepted my friend request…I went to go look at more of his pictures lol. I was coming up with a “game plan” as I scrolled through them and wondering how I was going to initiate conversation without looking desperate. I didn’t want to be the first one to like a picture, but I also didn’t want this to be a “he accepted my friend request and we never actually spoke to each other” sort of thing.

However, he didn’t even give me time to hardly think about all of that because before I knew it I had begin to get the notifications that he had already started liking my pictures…then BAM! He messaged me first lol. I remember thinking….he’s a 45 year old man in a basement somewhere because that was TOO easy lol. So I actually went back through his pictures and found pictures of him with other people. I saw where those people were tagged in the post and I went to their profiles to make sure they were actual people and to my surprise…they were lol!

In his first message to me he said “Hey thanks for the request! If you want to text me sometime here’s my number!”

He fell into my lap lol.

I played it cool and wrote him back “I don’t text guys first…here’s MY number” but on the inside I was already SMITTEN lol.

He texted me right away.

Now…the awful part about this situation was I had already been “dating” someone. After the whole last year and the chaos that whole situation caused…I just wanted to move on. I didn’t want to be swooning over a guy I didn’t even know was dead or alive. Selfishly, I just wanted to forget about him and the time I spent dating him, so I was talking to EVERYONE. I was dating around a lot. I was going in between people. I still had no sense of loyalty, I saw no value within myself, and I was honestly cruel. I could use a lot of things that had happened in my life up until this point as an excuse, but I won’t. I hold myself accountable, because many people have went through the things I have went through and they didn’t pull the stuff I did. They didn’t disregard human beings feelings. They didn’t become the hurt people that hurts people.

During the short period between Shane and my last relationship…I really became that hurt person who hurts people.

And boy did I hurt people.

Shane was so respectful that I felt bad about the idea of tagging him along. I didn’t want him to be another victim of me and my issues (boy, I wish married Merina had thought that way, I can’t tell you why I didn’t because I really don’t know)

So I did something for the first time, something I had never done before…. I friend zoned him. And he kind of friend zoned himself, too lol. The chemistry was there…we texted all of the time, but neither of us crossed the line. We talked 24/7 and I began developing some serious feelings for him. Feelings that began changing my whole mindset about men. I knew I had to break it off with the other guy because it wasn’t right to string him along when I finally knew what —or who— I wanted and it wasn’t him. I wanted Shane.

And there were so many reasons I wanted Shane but one of the biggest was I quickly recognized that he was making me a better person already. I liked the way becoming a better person felt.

So I broke if off with the other guy (who did not take it well at all)…

He was a “frat boy”. He was full of himself and some would say he had every right to be. He was considered extremely attractive, so I heard anyway lol. Any time I had mentioned I was dating him I would always get the bug eyed look from people like…HIM? Or anytime he would post on my page or write something about me on his I would have people call me up and be like HOW. WHAT IS YOUR SECRET. My brother knew him and I still saw the shocked look on his face when he told me at school this guy finally told him we were dating. He thought I was so cool because I was dating this guy.

So I guess I understand why he was so cocky, but I didn’t like it. Cocky has never been my thing, it’s always been a turn off for me.

I ended it with him in a cowardly way. I called him up (cause I refused to do it in person), real quick said “hey, it’s over”, and hung up. I declined his calls for the rest of the night. This guy was a narcissist in the making. I know because I was one. A narcissist knows another narcissist and two narcissists together will never work out.

Because of that it was doomed from the start. I didn’t see a future with him anyway. I was merely passing time.

Shane and I began talking on the phone and texting. We would talk for 8 straight hours. I lived for the moment he would call me and I was devastated when I couldn’t talk to him.

It took THREE months for us to finally meet. I put it off for so long and came up with every excuse I could come up with. I just knew the minute he saw me in person he was going to drop me. In my mind I was able to secure all of these other guys with my “play hard to get card”…and I hadn’t played that on Shane…so I didn’t really know how I was keeping him and because I didn’t know how I was keeping him, I was terrified of losing him.

Finally, we agreed to meet up. I took my step-uncle-brother with me as a witness in case I got kidnapped lol (I wasn’t the brightest, but I wanted a witness there just in case lol) and we met up at the mall.

I was standing in the granny panty aisle in belk when I saw him walking towards me.

Literally the definition of tall, dark, and handsome. I mean everything I had ever found attractive in anybody rolled up into one 6 foot 2 person walking straight towards me.

I didn’t know what to do so I did the first thing that popped up into my brain lol the minute he made it to me, I stole his beanie.

As he was laughing and kind of fixing his hair, I saw in his eyes something different. It sounds mystical or like something from a movie, but I promise you, PINKY promise you, that the look in his eye right then and there told me he was never leaving me.

It was a God thing, because someone like me doesn’t end up with someone like him. I’ll be the first one to say he’s too good for me. And he’s always been too good for me.

I don’t know why God chose me for him, but I know exactly why He chose him for me.

Shane loves telling this story and I may have him tell it on the channel one day. He always laughs when we remember that first day we met each other. Our first kiss was in Kohls and SPARKS FLEW. I had never in my life felt the way I did in that moment and it was the HONEST TO GOD first time a man ever came near me or was intimate with me and I didn’t flinch or cringe. Everything went blurry and when I opened my eyes he was looking at me and time stopped. We both said “where. Are. We.” At the same exact time and over the intercom a lady said “thank you for shopping at Kohl’s”

LOL

I hope that on my death bed my mind plays that memory over and over again.

I think if I ever got Alzheimer’s or something, that you would be able to bring me back to earth for even just a few minutes if you recounted that story to me. My brain may try to forget that one, but my heart could never let that happen.

It was all up hill from there. For the summer anyway.

The End and The Beginning

I’m back y’all!!….and look at me I didn’t run away, delete everything, and pretend like God didn’t tell me to do this whole blog thing lol. We’re growing and glowing, baby!

I’ve been talking to Shane about this next blog post. He knows that I’m talking about a very touchy subject, and I wanted to be sure I was doing it in a respectful way. I’m very careful not to disrespect my husband while talking about this. It’s only going to get deeper and uglier as we go, though. And thankfully he knows that. He’s given me the okay to just tell it as it was and while I’m grateful for that because that means I can walk out this task God has given me…I secretly was hoping he would tell me to shut it all down lol. Even then, I wouldn’t. If God tells me to do something I will do it. No matter what it is. No matter the cost. I’m thankful I have a husband who understands that and is the exact same way.

The first couple of blog posts I didn’t let Shane read. I felt like they were super vulnerable and while he knew the majority of what I wrote, He didn’t know details.

And the details are super embarrassing.

Nobody wants people to know the bad things people say about them, or the very vulnerable situations one has been through. Sometimes even I myself have to pretend that this is a journal and forget that I have thousands of people reading this. It helps to write this out as if I were writing in my journal or writing a letter to God. I think that’s why it’s everywhere. If this were all put together, without any hiccups, retracts, or weirdly phrased phrases…no one would believe this is written by me lol.

So I try to tell it in story form while also talking through my feelings on the subject. Whether their current feelings or feelings I remember feeling back then.

My feelings aren’t always right, but they’re honest. Someone could say “you could’ve reacted to that a different way.” Or “you shouldn’t feel that way about said person.” And that might be true, but I’m not writing this to make it seem as if I’m all perfect and all forgiving and so graceful. .I just described God, not me I don’t always do things the way I should do them. I don’t always react the way I should react. I wish I could tell you that I always get it right, but that would be an outright lie.

I get it wrong. A lot.

The truth is, I’m messy. We know this. My feelings are always everywhere. I cry at the drop of a hat. Tears are present during every emotion I feel…sad, happy, angry, joyful…shoot even when I’m at peace, I cry lol. I think it’s because I went so many years not feeling anything, not being able to cry. I think the tears I should’ve cried are just catching up with me lol. I don’t mind it, though. I’m just happy to FEEL something.

Along with crying at the drop of a hat.. I also still can’t process my emotions sometimes. I struggle living in my own brain. I’m open to a fault.

I give everyone the arrows they need to hurt me with.

I’ll be the first one to say something that I know will be used against me, but if I feel it needs said, I’ll say it anyway.

See. I’m a mess.

I’m a lot of things, but I’m not a coward and I’m not prideful. I don’t have a lick of pride in me and I think that’s how I can remain so authentic and transparent on our YouTube channel. If I had any pride in me I wouldn’t say half the things I say LOL.

So. Back to high school we go!

Back to the boyfriend I was talking about in the last blog post.

After being apart for a little bit, we started gravitating towards one another again. I remember coming back to school the next semester with turquoise hair. At this point I was WILD. The ONLY thing I didn’t do was drugs. I still had some sort of moral standard in me, because I wouldn’t touch any of it. I like to think it was morals, but it could’ve just been the fact that I knew from experience that drugs were not fun. They might look fun at first. They might even be fun at first. But I saw what it did to people. Once the crowd was gone, once the party was over…you were left with yourself. And that’s when your demons would come out to play. I watched it completely destroy my dad’s life… I was not about to go there. I remember thinking “I don’t care to go out, but I refuse to go out that way.”

At one point I really wanted to “go out”. I wasn’t sure if I would go to heaven and I remember being concerned about that, but I really just wanted to take a trip on a rocket ship and get the heck outta here. Back then I thought if reincarnation was true that I might come back as a gerbil. If you don’t take care of a gerbil, it dies. In my little mind I really thought of stuff like that. I really remember thinking “the gerbil has it good”. I remember oddly being jealous of the gerbil for its quick escape.

That’s DARK and I don’t wish that thought process on ANYONE. Especially a little 16 year old. That’s still considered a baby to me now.

So I came back that semester with my blue hair and began talking with the boyfriend (or ex boyfriend) again. I remember sitting at a lunch table and him coming up to the table and sitting beside me. I swear the entire table got silent. Someone had the nerve to quietly ask him if we were back together and he shook his head no. We had every intention on getting back together though, and we both knew that. We had created a trauma bond and both of us were so messed up that neither one of us was going to walk away from it. As we were getting closer again, I began pulling away AGAIN

. One day I was sitting at my desk in math and heard someone behind me say “oh my gosh! Look!”

I turned around in my seat as everybody was making their way to the window to look out of it and there was an ambulance in front of the school. The paramedics were rolling someone into the ambulance. I didn’t get a good look at them, but the person in front of me turned around and said “uh Merina…it’s ***”

My heart sank. So many thoughts ran through my mind. I knew he had it REALLY bad at home. He was adopted and they were really cruel to him. I didn’t know if he had done something to get hurt on purpose or if it was an accident. I had NO idea what could’ve happened. I just remember hyperventilating and telling myself to calm down, because I legitimately couldn’t see straight.

I somehow made it to the next class (I don’t even remember the bell ringing and walking to the other building”. I shared that class with his ex girlfriend (and my ex friend) that I spoke about in the last blog post. She stopped me and said “I HEARD. Was it him?”

All I did was shake my head yes because I had four or five people around my desk wanting answers that I didn’t have. “What happened?” “I heard he overdosed.” “I heard he was already pronounced dead.”

“Someone said it was Merina’s fault. He did it to himself because of her.”

If my heart wasn’t stopped by then it was stopped now. I knew right then what was about to happen. I’m good at reading the room and telling the future lol. It didn’t matter what REALLY happened…people were already making up their mind about it being my fault.

I quickly became the villain.

And he was my victim.

I’ll break in and say this much…

I did’nt truly know what happened that day until I was in my 20s and he told me. I went so long thinking it was my fault. I carried some guilt, man. I didn’t know if he was dead or alive. It was always in the back of my mind. I thought about it even being in my 20s and being a full blown adult. When I saw him again as an adult and he told me that it wasn’t my fault, I felt such a release inside of me. I had really convinced myself whatever happened to him was because of me. I was convinced it was my fault.

Watching him being rolled into the back of an ambulance was the last time I saw or heard from him as a teenager.

Just like that this person who had been a huge part of my life for awhile, was gone. And I had no answers.

It wasn’t long before I was practically being shunned by the friend group. I remember the principal calling me into his office and I got pulled to the side on the way there and threatened. I went on to the principals office where I was questioned about the boy. His “mom” had accused me of some stuff and they were going to get the police involved. I was innocent so I didn’t worry about the accusations, but I knew why she was doing what she was doing. She hated me. The boyfriend and I had got into trouble several times for PDA and even suspended once….so she was not a fan lol understandably so.

While leaving the office I heard someone say a sly comment about me being a “wh*re and ruining someone’s life”

It didn’t surprise me, but it hurt. He had a notebook that passed throughout his friend group because they didn’t have a lot of classes together. They kept up with one another by writing entries in that notebook. It’s super smart actually. Sort of like an exclusive forum on notebook paper. Sometimes one of his friends would see me in the hall and give me the notebook to give to him when I saw him…so I passed it back and forth a lot. One day he left drivers ed early and I was left with the notebook and bored. Drivers ed was not my favorite. (Fun fact the drivers ed teacher made both he and I kiss in front of the whole class when he found out we were dating….is that not weird? I feel like that would get somebody in trouble these days lol it should’ve got somebody in trouble back then, too)

I read through the notebook while sitting there bored in drivers ed. I read an insert from him talking about how it bothered him that people made fun of my weight. That he didn’t like people being mean to me.

I never told him I read that.

I remember the little comments made in that book from his friends, though. So the sly comment while leaving the principals office didn’t come as a surprise.

It all happened exactly as I thought it would.

Every day it got worse. I would leave school, go home, and experience pure hell at home, too.

There was no peace in that home. I come to hate my nanny’s husband…no, loathe is a better word. Out of respect for nanny, I’ll omit the details, but it was pure hell.

Not only was I dealing with those feelings, I began being abused again.

I’m telling y’all I had an invisible sign on my back that said “abuse me, please” or something. IT FOLLOWED ME EVERYWHERE.

I thought getting off of that hill would stop it when we moved.

But I guess there are more cruel people in the world than just on that hill. I was abused and blackmailed constantly. It was evil and I had no one to talk to about it. I had become friends with one of nanny’s husbands sons, but I still wouldn’t open up about certain things to him. I didn’t open up to anybody at this point. Everything I said seemed to be used against me and the person I did open up to had disappeared off the face of the planet so I just kept it all in.

I didn’t move on for awhile. I mean I flirted here and there, and had little flings, but I wasn’t seriously interested in anybody. Eventually things got so bad at school that nanny suggested pulling me out and putting me in a Christian private school, and I jumped at the idea.

Boom. That was it. That whole era of my life was over. No more football games together, no more lunch dates, no more notes back and forth, no on again off agains, no good-bye…it was gone. That fast. I get sick writing it like that, it makes him sound more significant to me than he actually was, but this is super important to note, because I feel it plays a major part in the future. See. I still get that mean mentality when speaking about him. I don’t mean to and I’m trying to do better about it.

Life was the worst it had been ever.

And overnight EVERYTHING changed.

I was on sitting beside my nanny’s step son ( I have to keep calling him that because I’m not sure what he is to me lol nanny raised me so step brother? But she’s not biologically my mother so step uncle? WHO KNOWS lol)

That’s besides the point anyway, but I was sitting beside him while he was on MySpace. We were going through his friends on there and then their friends and all of a sudden I saw someone that caught my eye.

I cannot explain the feeling I felt when I saw his picture. It wasn’t solely attraction, it was something else. It was such a strong feeling that I literally memorized his name and said it over and over again in my head so I wouldn’t forget it while I ran to my phone and opened up MySpace. I hunted down the step sons friend, went to their friends list and I found exactly who I was looking for.

Shane Reynolds. Right there. In the flesh on screen. With his 6 pack on show for the world to see and his shirt in his mouth LOL

I’ve never hit send friend request so fast in my life.

The Dark Ages Before Shane.

HOWDY Y’ALL :) Long time, no see lol. I mentioned over on my other socials that there wouldn’t be a blog post or shop update on the week of Thanksgiving. As you probably saw, I was trying to make it through hosting Thanksgiving and I had to prepare for DAYSSSS. I can’t wait til stuff like that comes normal to me one day. I can only hope it will anyway lol. I really, REALLY want to be that superhuman grandma that gets it all done in a house dress with rollers in her hair lol.

In the last blog post I mentioned an introduction to a “returning” character in my story. I hate that I worded it that was because I feel like it might add a sort of anticipation for this person…like sort of a special reveal. I have stayed up thinking about going back in and erasing that part of the blog post. I ALMOST did, but I promised myself I wouldn’t go back and change anything. After I say it, I consider it said. It’s the only method I have that keeps me from chickening out and retracting ALLLL of this information I’m giving you guys.

I don’t find this blog posting thing fun. It’s not fun to revisit the kind of memories I have. It digs up a lot of emotions and to be honest, I find myself dreading sitting down and writing these posts because once I’m sat down and in the writing zone…I’m taken back in time to the moments and situations I’m telling you all about and girlfriend wants to hop off that train lol. I want to pretend that I didn’t hear God tell me to start this blog. I want to erase everything I’ve written and act like nothing ever happened.

But I can’t.

If God says “do something”. There is a reason. Even if I never know what that reason is on this side of Heaven..I can rest assured that God never has me do anything in vain. There’s always purpose in the hard stuff. I believe that with my whole heart. I don’t know whether this thing is helping you, helping me, or helping the both of us.

Maybe the whole point of this thing is so that I can get all of this off my chest. I’ve told you the beginning parts of my story, though, and it still feels like it’s on my chest lol so I don’t think that’s it.

Anyway, I really lost sleep after writing it out in the way that I did at the end of the last post. I really had a pit in my stomach for a solid week. I bet you I won’t do that again lol.

The truth is…it’s not a *grand reveal*. This person isn’t special. I mean they’re special to God, of course. God loves them just as He loves me…but this person is not special TO ME. I actually have a really hard time with my emotions when I speak on this person. I feel a lot of anger and resentment when they are brought up which is why I’ve only spoken of them a handful of times in the past ten years. The only time I ever speak about them or any of this part of the story is when Shane and I are talking about it. Every now and then the guilt still eats me alive and Shane has to bring me back down to earth and remind me that I’m not that person anymore. He teaches me a new level of grace every time that he does that. I don’t understand how someone can be so forgiving. I like to think that when God gave me a heart transplant, that He gave me an extremely forgiving heart. As a matter of fact, I know he did. I have successfully forgiven every single person who’s ever done me wrong. There’s only one person I still can’t forgive. And that’s me. And that’s because while I did do myself wrong…I REALLY did my person wrong. I don’t like Shane being done wrong. It’s the most backwards thing on the planet, and I have some audacity saying that considering what I’ve done to him, but it’s the God’s honest truth. I would fight a MMA fighter over that man. I would wrestle an elephant, I’m not even kidding. Even to this day, Holy Spirit has to keep me in check when someone is mean to him. My first reaction is to throw hands every time. Instead…I throw my words…like I would throw my punches… REALLY hard…that way they make it to Heaven real fast lol.

I’m afraid that if I try to forgive myself for doing what I did to my family..to my HUSBAND…that it will feel like I’m letting myself off the hook. I’m afraid it will feel like I’m moving on…like all of that never happened.

Do you know how it feels when you lose a loved one and you’re in active grief? Those first few weeks are brutal and there comes a point where life just keeps going and you have to jump back into the swing of things…almost like nothing ever happened? Like your whole life wasn’t just altered? Like you don’t have a pit in your stomach every waking hour of every waking day?

That’s kind of how it feels when I think about trying to put what I did behind us.

On the other hand, another way I think of it is…when someone commits murder they have to carry that guilt for the rest of their life, right? They have to live out their sentence, their consequence, that was given to them as a repercussion of the decision they made.

In my mind, I killed something in Shane when I did what I did…over and over again. He was able to revive it within himself, but the guilt I carry is still there. It’s my life sentence.

I’ll catch up to where we left off in the last post now. I just really needed to make it known that this person isn’t someone special to me. He isn’t someone to romanticize or anticipate. I’m trying to find a nice way to say I couldn’t care less about them at this point in my life lol. Shane always tells me to pray for them and I do, but it’s hard. I admire Shane so much because he prays for this person probably more than anybody does.

He. Prays. For. This. Person.

For the person who has a history with his wife.

For the person who knew his wife was married and still pursued her.

For the person who was half of the problem.

He wholeheartedly, sincerely prays for them.

I ain’t never seen Jesus in a person like I see Him in Shane.

At this point in my story…I’m a teenager living in this house with people I can’t stand. I feel the ultimate betrayal towards the person I loved most in this world. I’m failing school. I have friends, but I’m nobody’s favorite friend. I’m going down a rough path. Drugs are heavily present in my circle of friends.

It’s not a good time.

I finished up my freshman year on a prayer. Nanny’s prayer, I’m sure. I can’t tell you a single thing I learned that year, because I genuinely don’t think I learned anything. I was in the counselors office a lot. They were worried about my arms. (If you know, you know) but I somehow kept them from calling nanny about it every time. I hid my arms from the elbows down. A lot of times I wore long sleeves. The times I didn’t wear long sleeves I wore sweatbands lol. (You’re probably like ….huh. Sweatbands with band logos on them were big at that time and I had ones from like HIM, Bullet for my Valentine, Blink 182, and a bunch of other more alternative bands) I layered them down my arms. Everybody thought it was a fashion statement.

I was still getting made fun of but by then I learned to stay out of the way. I didn’t want people to notice me. If they noticed me, it gave them an opportunity to find something about me to make fun of. I got smart about that and begin to do everything I could to draw the attention AWAY from me.

Despite me getting made fun of for my weight, I never had an issue getting boyfriends. It’s the weirdest thing..boys either REALLY liked me or were REALLY mean to me. I had a lot of little boyfriends here and there, but none too serious. I always cheated on them. Even the little two week boyfriend/girlfriend things as a young teenager…I could never stay “faithful” to anyone. I had no loyalty..no sense of it at all.

One day I came across a boy who really DID NOT like me. He was looking for a girlfriend and he and his friends were outside at the front of the school and as soon as I realized what was going on I tried my darndest to get the heck out of there. Before I knew it someone had grabbed my arm and pulled me over to the table this guy was standing on and said “here! Found your girlfriend!”

In that moment I tried to do what I had done as a little kid…I tried to dissociate. I knew the blow was coming and I knew it was gonna be a hard one.

Go figure my brain wouldn’t cooperate and I got the privilege of standing there for a solid 5 minutes under God and everybody being pointed at, laughed at, made fun of, called names, and God knows what else while this guy continued to degrade me and point out everything that was wrong with me. By this point I was so over being called fat that I WANTED people to get more creative,

Be careful what you wish for. There was a lot more creativity that day lol.

That’s a day I don’t like to look back on. Something clicked in me that day and it wasn’t something good. My brain had a response to that situation that it didn’t have with any other situations leading up to that…even the worst of the worst situations haven’t stuck with me like that thing stuck with me.

To this day I get sick when I have to pass a particular gas station to get into town and the sign out front has the kids last name on it. It’s not a well known name, it’s very different so it sticks out to me like a sore thumb and I have to actively try not to have a mini panic attack.

After that situation, I stayed away from boys. You would think the other things that happened to me would’ve made me do that. I don’t know the science behind my brain or why it took something like that to make me swear off boys but that’s what it took apparently. I had no interest in guys for the rest of my freshman year.

I went into my sophomore year with the same mindset. That whole ordeal had put me in a deep state of depression. There were just so many people out there when that happened. i mean it was shoulder to shoulder packed and not one person stood up for me. I got a ton of pitying looks, but no one stepped out and saved the day. I guess that’s why I’m adamant on taking up for others now. I’ll be the odd man out, the first person to stand up for someone. Whether others follow suit or not, I won’t stand back and watch someone publicly get torn apart or broken down by others. My heart can’t handle that.

It was towards the beginning of sophomore year and I went to the county fair with some of my friends. This friend group was pretty large and even though it was one large group, it was separated into a bunch of little groups. Every one kind of knew of one another though and everyone was friendly with each other. While at the fair, MY group kind of broke apart and went different ways, to different rides and games, and stuff and I found myself with this one boy. I knew of this boy, he had dated a friend of mine for a good while freshman year ….and he was at this time dating another friend of mine (I told you, I really didn’t understand or want to understand the concept of loyalty at this point). We hung out that night and from then on..we were a thing.

I really liked this boy. And this boy really liked me which I thought was bizarre. I had went from being openly made fun of and called names to dating this really well known guy in my circle. He was considered conventionally attractive and a lot of girls liked him…which put a lot of targets on my back. I don’t think I’ve ever been so hated by so many girls as I was then. The internet might rival that now cause I do have a lot of little women who reallllllllyyyy hate me now, but I still think the high school girls were meaner lol.

My weight was never a problem for him, though, and I think that alone is what made me get so attached to him so quickly. I can honestly say I tried to be loyal to him and was for the longest time. But eventually, I did what I always did, and I got messy.

He had a lot of patience with me, but I wouldn’t communicate so we inevitably split apart.

School went bad real quick after that. We shared the same friend group, so it got awkward fast and there became a sort of split in the friend group. It was Junior year at this point and so I tried talking to other people, but I couldn’t find someone I *vibed* with like I had with him. Eventually, like magnets, we began gravitating back to one another again. It was literally like an omen or something…you’ll come to understand. He was never disrespectful, even given what I did, but he was hesitant and so was I . I really didn’t know what I wanted. I was a teenager, I had no clue. I had a hard time processing my emotions even then. I was very cut off from people. I would let myself feel a little bit, but I would never allow myself to feel anything big. He felt stuff BIG. I should’ve known the two of those things would make up for a bad situation.

It was a recipe for disaster.

And at that I’m tapping out until next week, lol.

Hi, my name is Misery.

Starting this post with a super quick recap, lol.

• Papaw died

• Kids are mean unless you pay them not to be

• Nanny married a FRIEND (lol i can laugh about it now thank You, Jesus)

• I had a couch to myself

  Moving forward lol

  I went back and forth about who I was going to live with (like I had a choice lol) At first, I wanted to stay with my dad. When nanny got married she left the trailer I grew up in to him and it was familiar. My dad and I didn’t vibe, but I was willing to deal with it rather than go to the unknown. Living with my mom was out of the question because I barely knew her at this point. Our relationship had always been so on again and off again that I really didn’t even know who she was. I also didn’t speak to her at this point so even if I had wanted to go live with her, I didn’t really know how to go about asking. I really wanted to live with my mammaw and papaw (nanny’s mom and dad who lived beside us) but when I brought it up to them I could sense their hesitancy…so rather than pressuring them to make a decision I knew they really didn’t want to make…I made the decision to not bring it up anymore.

  I’ve cried OVER my dad a million times in my life, but I’ve only cried FOR him one time. The day I left everything I knew to move in with nanny and her new family…I cried like a baby for my dad. I remember him not saying much and all I wanted was for him to say “STOP! She can stay with me!” If he had said that I would’ve been out of the car in half a millisecond and my life would have probably been a lot different…good different or bad different, I’m not sure. Instead, I got the look I knew all too well. I call it the this is uncomfortable I want this to be over already look. It’s my dad’s signature look bless his heart lol.

  So I went with nanny to the hell that was called the double wide. This place gave me the creeps. It was in the BACKWOODS and it got so dark at night that you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face while outside. It felt like a whole days trek to get to town and I was used to living right outside of town so that took a lot of getting used to.

  I knew how my life was going to go after my first night at the double wide when my nanny’s two step sons had their room all decked out and decorated. They had their beds and furniture all nicely fit in their room and it looked so cozy. I walked past their room to the end of the double wide and opened my door to find an air mattress sitting on plywood flooring (nervous laugh).

• I should’ve ran away right then lol.

  It was all down hill from there. I never saw my neurologist again.I can’t really tell you why. I didn’t go to the doctor regularly. If my glasses broke, I didn’t have the privilege of getting new ones, I had to tie them together with fish wire and live with it. As a matter of fact, I didn’t see a neurologist again until I almost went blind from a pseudo tumor flare up right after the girls were born. I didn’t see the family I left on the hill much and regardless of how they felt about me, I missed them. The only silver lining in moving was I got away from the creeps that liked me TOO much. It was always either people didn’t like me at all or liked me TOO much. It was never in between.

  I was still on homebound when we moved but the county we moved to was really poor and it didn’t have the resources my old county had so eventually after the homebound teacher was a no show for a solid month, the school made the choice to do away with my homebound and require me to come to school.

  I tried everything I knew to get out of that one lol. I pretended to trip and fall down a hill. I made my it look like a gnarly injury with purple eyeshadow. I would’ve got away with it, too, if the school hadn’t threatened truancy so nanny took me to the office to prove my foot was basically broken and when the teacher touched my foot glittery purple eyeshadow came off on her finger lol. Nanny was shook. She had no idea that I was faking it lol.

  I ended up going to school, but still got in trouble for truancy because I couldn’t get to school on time. I got smart with the judge while in court so he ordered me to ride the 6am bus 2 miles to school every morning to ensure I would be on time. I didn’t know he was doing me a favor at that time. I was mad cause I had to wake up earlier but I’m glad now that he did that for me.

  I’ve never understood why the kid gets in trouble for truancy. Shouldn’t the person responsible for the kid get the stern talking to? Lol I mean I was 13 I couldn’t drive myself to school lol.

  After awhile I realized that the new school wasn’t as bad as my last one. It was much smaller and had less kids so there were not near as many bullies at this school. The worst thing I got called at this school was “Merina McDonalds” and I couldn’t even get mad at that one lol. It was so stupid that even I laughed when they said it lol. These kids’ vocabulary wasn’t anything like the kids’ from my last school. For some reason, most of the new kids at the new school ended up liking me. One time the bullying was brought up to the principal by a kid who felt bad for me. The principal called me in to ask me about it and I denied it all. I lied and told him nobody made fun of me and that everyone was super nice and welcoming. I think they came to like me because I didn’t rat them out. I had learned that telling on kids like that only made it worst for me when adults weren’t around.

  I thrived at that school fort a short while and found myself excited to get to school and not excited to get home in the afternoons. My nanny’s husband and I didn’t vibe at all and at first I didn’t get a long with nanny’s step sons either. Eventually I came to really like one of them and we became pretty good friends but it took awhile to get to that point.

  That school semester went by far too fast. Before I knew it, it was time to go to high school. Things changed even more then. I hated home and did anything to not be there. I showed my tail all the time and I’m sure I made everyone around me miserable. I was miserable myself and I loved the company. Me and nanny were always butting heads. It was me against everyone in that house and I did everything I possibly could to make them mad. I ran with the wrong crowd.I was very into the alternative thing and I wore black head to toe. I searched out troubled people to befriend. They understood me more than anybody at this point in my life. My whole freshman year was a blur. I’m pretty sure I passed my classes because my teachers didn’t want to deal with me or see me again. I had F’s all across the board all semester until the end and somehow I made it out of freshman year with straight D’s….

  While freshman year was an interesting year for me…It was my sophomore year that really paved the way for me to meet Shane. My sophomore year was rough and I hate looking back on it. The only good thing I can take from it is it directly led me to Shane. If the things that went down hadn’t have went down, I might be in a totally different place…with a totally different person right now.

  We’re about to get into the deep part of my story. The part that’s hard to tell. And you’re about to meet someone who is like a reoccurring character in a book. There’s nothing I want more than to skip over this whole era, but if I really want to tell my whole story…I gotta tell it all.

Grace.

I ended the last blog post vaguely, and I did that for a reason.

I didn’t want to go in to detail just yet, but I didn’t want you contemplating all the bad ways my story with nanny could be headed either. I wanted you to know that no matter where this part of my story went…that nanny was good. Nanny IS good. Nanny just wasn’t NANNY for awhile after my papaw died. Understandably so.

When papaw died, we were left with nothing. I told you that not long after his death, nanny and I left the church she had pastored for my whole life. Not only did we leave people I had known my whole life, nanny also left friends she had fellowshipped with for longer than I had even been alive at that point. Everything we had grown accustomed to over the many years was gone in a matter of months. It felt like everything was just always up in the air. Were we going to be ok? Were we going to lose the trailer? Where would our next meal come from? The questions were endless.. We lost people and we also lost the little income nanny had from pastoring. This was devastating to our livelihood.

We were left with NOTHING.

Being an adult now, I can see how this put nanny in a massive fight or flight mode. She was probably thinking “how in the world am I going to take care of myself let alone Merina and her brother, and now her dad and his girlfriend, and his girlfriend’s daughter. I can’t imagine the pressure she felt. I can understand now why she made the choices she did.

I was ANGRY…beyond angry with the decisions she made during this time. Looking back, I don’t feel anger anymore. I can’t even feel it if I try. I just feel an overwhelming amount of grace towards her…and that HAS to be God, because for awhile I was angrier with her than I had ever been with my parents.

Trust that doesn’t exist can’t be broken. I never trusted my mom and dad. Nanny on the other hand, I trusted her with everything in me.

Like everything else at that time,,,that too was gone in only a matter of months.

I’m probably going to be everywhere in this specific post, and I apologize in advance. I’m running off of 2 1/2 hours of sleep but I really want to get this blog post up today. I think its a huge part of my mission to be consistent with this blog spot no matter what..

I began getting really sick only a couple of months after my papaw died. It wasn’t long til the ER visit I briefly told you about and the psuedotumor cerebri diagnosis I got. At this point I had already lost a significant amount of vision in both of my eyes, and it was only getting worse. I was throwing up in the school bathroom daily from the pain the headaches caused me. I threw up Mini Wheats so often that to this day I can’t even think about them without gagging.

I learned that the teachers didn’t believe I was in that much pain simply because they didn’t want to believe it. If I cleaned the bathroom stall after I threw up I was “faking it” because there was no evidence that I had actually been sick. If I didn’t clean up after myself I was “making myself throw up” ORRRRR my favorite…..I was “overeating breakfast and may want to skip breakfast entirely before”…LOL ….I have to laugh or I’ll cry. Do you think they would have ever said that to an average sized student? No way,

So every day I would start my day with a headache, throw up all over the school bathroom by late morning, have splotchy vision for the rest of the school day, get yelled at for not paying attention in class, make it home to the couch by the afternoon…and live there with something over my face to keep the light out of my eyes until I fell asleep and stayed asleep….only to wake up and repeat that ALL over again. I was 13 and had no quality of life.

School was brutal at that point, too. Not only was I barely making it through the school day, but I was getting bullied so bad. I was in middle school at this point and as I got older, the bullies just got meaner. I come to miss just being called “fat”. Middle schoolers were so much more cruel.

I was fighting for my life in math class one day. I had one of the worst headaches of my life. Beginning in middle school I began wearing a girdle every day to school. It didn’t make me look skinnier, I was morbidly obese after all… a girdle wasn’t going to change that. I guess it just made me feel better about myself. I can’t really tell you why I began wearing a girdle to school at such a young age, if you want me to be honest. I just know I wore them religiously. I wore them so tightly that I couldn’t roll it down by myself, meaning there was no using the bathroom for the whole eight hours I was in school. I would hold my pee til I actually cried. I wore them this tightly for all of my teenage years. Later on, I even began wearing THREE at a time.. I’ll explain that one in a minute,

ANYWAYS

So I was in math class with one of the worst headaches I’ve ever had and I hear kids behind me openly laughing. I learned VERY young that if you even suspect someone is making fun of you… DON’T bring attention to it. It only makes it worse. Act stupid and naive, they eventually get bored without a reaction. So I tried to ignore it until it got so loud that it disrupted the teacher and the whole class took a pause. Come to find out the girdle I was wearing was so tight that it caused me to have INSANE “back fat”. You know how I say I have a front butt and back butt now? Well back then I had front boobs and back boobs lol..

And the kids just thought that was hilarious.

I didn’t miss the quick hand-to-the-mouth-quick-turn-around-before-anybody-notices-you-laughing thing the teacher did. That one hurt because that teacher knew my family and they thought very highly of him. I secretly called him “turd” under my breath from then on out. I saw him not long ago on social media and still found myself calling him “turd” under my breath lol.

After that situation I did two unhinged things.

-I wore a second girdle to go underneath the first girdle. The first girdle resembled biker shorts which is what caused the back fat, and the second girdle went around my waist like a corset of sorts. They were the dream team of girdles. The corset one took care of the back fat and the biker shorts one made sure the corset one didn’t roll down lol.

-The second unhinged thing I did was I found the master bully. The really well known, popular one, and I made an agreement with him that I would pay him my lunch money every day as long as he didn’t openly embarrass me anymore. I figured skipping lunch wasn’t going to hurt me. I didn’t eat lunch in the lunch room anyway because that just made me a walking talking target so I always just saved my lunch money and used it for something else. Surprisingly, he agreed AND he stuck to his word. As a matter of fact, he even began taking up for me in class. When someone would say something mean he would say “Hey now Merina is cool! Leave her be!”….they never knew I paid him to be kind to me. They thought he saw something cool in me or something, and in return, they began to talk to me like I was a human. The teacher started being kind to me too! Somebody had said something really mean out loud about me, and the master bully openly took up for me…the teacher chuckled and said “Well Mr.**** It seems you have a crush on this here lady. I didn’t think she was your type.” The master bully did what I paid him to do and said “naw Merina is my friend. Leave her alone.”

I thought that was the best $5 I ever spent because nobody ever bothered my in that class anymore. Not even the teacher!

Little did I know I was creating a warped mindset during all this. “Paying” for friendship was something I kept doing all the way up until I met Shane. Nobody could just like me for FREE. Their friendship, their kindness, their “love” always came at a price. I still struggle with this in my adulthood. That mindset is basically engrained in me at this point.

I eventually had to leave school because of the psuedotumor cerebri and how aggressive is was attacking my brain and eyesight. I don’t remember being worried about myself. I remember being sad that I couldn’t pay anybody to be my friend anymore.

That makes me want to throw up.

The school put me on something called “homebound”. That’s when you’re too sick to go to school so a teacher comes out twice a week to give you new lessons and pick up your completed lessons. I would do school with my teacher in a nightgown sitting at the kitchen table. I didn’t have it in my to get dressed. I got used to wearing pjs around the teacher and he got used to seeing me in them lol. Maybe that’s why I’m still always in my pajamas who knows.

I liked this teacher. He was kind, and he was GOOD at teaching. He had me understanding things like math problems within 15 minutes. I thoroughly enjoyed school during my homebound days!

Not only was I on homebound because I was too sick to go to school but I was also on it because I had to be in Knoxville ALL the time. My neurologist was one of the best in the state. He was brutal and had no beside manner but he knew his stuff. It didn’t matter that he sent me home feeling like dirt…he put me to sleep during the spinal taps so I liked him lol.

He would grill me about my weight, make me feel like my blindness was all my fault for eating food, send me home crying, caused me to develop a gnarly eating disorder, and had me running laps around my trailer til I almost had a heart attack…but I overlooked at that because I didn’t have to be awake during the spinal taps. I felt like that was a pretty good trade off for the emotional and physical damages my appointments with him caused me lol.

I had to have several back to back spinal taps. A spinal tap is when they insert a needle into your back and drain excess fluid off of your brain. Essentially, psuedotumor cerebri is a false brain tumor. It’s an excessive amount of fluid on the brain that mimics an actual brain tumor. When you have the fluid drained off of your brain, it relieves the headaches for awhile. I hated the spinal tap part but I loved not having headaches for several weeks afterwards. After every new spinal tap, the headaches came back faster though. The relief periods in between spinal taps got shorter and shorter so the neurologist was suggesting I have a shunt done. The fluid was just accumulating so fast that the spinal taps were mostly in vain at this point.

I never had the shunt done. I really needed it done, but it never happened.

This is where the word GRACE shows up.

Nanny had began seeing someone during this time period. I didn’t like it, but I dealt with it because I figured she needed a friend.

That’s what I thought they were….friends.

They began going out together a lot and I began to have my suspicions that this wasn’t just a “friend”. But I ignored those feelings cause surely I would know if this person was more than a friend, right?

Not only were they going out very often, but he began coming over to the house a lot too. I hated that. In my 13 year old mind that was my papaws house, and nobody else was welcome there. I didn’t have a say, though so just lived in my room that wasn’t really my room anymore because it had been taken over by my dads girlfriends daughter…..lol. I pretended it was still my room though and was only reminded it wasn’t when she kicked me out because she didn’t feel like company lol. He also was showing up to my spinal taps. Jesus, keep me near the cross…..but I hated that.

Let’s do this rapid fire, cause I’m not sure I’m healed from this or will ever be healed from this… but GRACE, Merina, GRACE,

RAPID FIRE KEY EVENTS

• Nanny comes home with a “friendship ring”.

• Nanny is getting ready one day and asks me if I want to go with her.

• “Where you going nanny?”

• “I’m getting married today.”

  BOOM. CUE THE VIOLINS. READ THE OBITUARY. MY LIFE IS OVER.

  dramatic, but really though lol.

  I can’t put into words the feelings I felt at that moment. I had never before felt those feelings and I haven’t felt feelings like that since. All I can tell you is that is a core memory for me, and that core memory absolutely taints every day of my life from that moment up until SHANE. I can assure you I was devastated every agonizing moment up until SHANE walked into my life. Call it a trauma bond, call it whatever you’d like to, but Shane saved my life. I would not be here if I hadn’t met him. I promise.

  I stood at the top of our driveway and watched nanny drive off to get married to her friend, lol. It didn’t slip past me that I now had nobody that stayed.

  My mom chose her life and left me.

  My dad chose drugs and left me.

  My papaw died and left me.

  And now nanny had left me.

  The only silver lining I could find there is at least my papaw was taken from me. He didn’t choose to go. I kept that in my pocket and thought on that often. For awhile it gave me a reason to stay on earth cause shoot, at this point..I wanted to leave me! It told me that I wasn’t so insufferable that EVERY person I loved wanted to leave. One wanted to stay. One would’ve stayed. One did stay til he couldn’t anymore.

  I honestly believe God showed me so much grace in my marriage because of this….this pivotal moment in my life where I officially realized everybody had left. I think that’s why Shane found it somewhere in him to stay through everything I did to him. I TRIED to push him away. I tried everything I knew to do to push him away. I wanted him to leave. EVERYBODY left me.

  But he stayed. I owe him everything, because for once SOMEBODY STAYED.

  After her car was out of sight, I walked next door to my mamaw and papaws house. Apparently they knew what was going on, and they didn’t go to the wedding either. Apparently everybody but me knew what was going on. I guess everyone else was smart enough to put the pieces together. I didn’t think I had any pieces to put together though. I thought nanny told me everything, but I can’t blame her for keeping things from me. Lord knows, I kept plenty from her. The only difference is I kept what I kept away from her FOR her. She didn’t keep what she kept away from me for me. Nanny doesn’t like conflict and never has. I’m a lot like her in that way. I just wish I would’ve been worth the conflict that one time.

  Its tough to look at her wedding pictures and know that everyone was there except for me.I try not to think about that when I see them. I try to find happiness somewhere in me for her. It comes a lot easier these days.

  Nanny came back a married woman. She left for her honeymoon that night and I stayed on the bathroom floor until I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore, I moved to the couch in the living room because that’s the only thing I had that was mine anymore.

  Next post 11/22/2024

The hill is STEEP.

I got called naive a lot as a child. I was always a dreamer. I had to be. I’m convinced that dreaming kept me sane as a child. I was always dreaming about things getting better, or dreaming about having a lot of friends. It was always hard for me to cope once I got thrown back into reality, though. Because I spent most of my time daydreaming about a better life, I developed something called “maladaptive daydreaming”. Maladaptive daydreaming is when you spend so much time in your mind, that you begin to recognize it as reality. It became a a trauma response for me. If I was getting bullied, violated, or hurt in some other way…I would flip what felt like a switch, and I would retreat into my own mind. It was an escape, and at the time it felt like I was doing myself a favor. Little did I know that the more I did it, the more I unknowingly numbed my brain. It got to the point where I did it so much that my real life emotions began to not feel real at all, and my emotions while daydreaming felt TOO real. I always felt like i was in the twilight zone.

Maladaptive daydreaming took over my life. My grades bombed even worse, because I was in the classroom…but not really IN the classroom. I was sitting at my desk, but I was somewhere else. I would be daydreaming about being a straight A student that got all the teachers questions right. I was the brightest person in the class….except, I wasn’t. I was getting straight F’s and teachers were constantly threatening to hold me back. As a matter of fact, I got held back in kindergarten and had to go to a transitional class rather than move on to first grade. At the time, nanny and the teachers made me feel like I had a choice. They made it seem like a fun and exciting thing, so when they asked me if I wanted to go to transition instead of first grade….of course I said yes! Little did I know they were only making it seem as if I had a choice, because they knew and had been told by my therapists that my mind was fragile, and they needed to be careful with how they transitioned me.

I would be being violated, but daydreaming that I was getting married, and my husband asked me what my favorite color was, or asked me if I liked my pretty wedding dress. I was dreaming that he asked me questions. I always thought that was weird and I’ve never really told anyone that. I realize now that I was craving for someone to ask permission, instead of just taking what they wanted from me. It’s a weird concept, but if you look in the mind of a child that has been abused in that way…you would find some really odd thoughts and feelings. I learned things I should’ve never known at only 5 and 6 years old. Because I knew things most children my age didn’t know, I couldn’t relate to kids my age. While they were playing with dolls, playing dress up, and watching cartoons…I found myself disinterested in that stuff. I would try to be interested in it, but It was almost like I didn’t know how to be a kid at times.

I can count on one hand how many board games I played as a kid! Nanny bought me Yahtzee one time and I played the heck out of that game. I would beg nanny to play with me, but even when she was busy I would play it by myself lol. I also remember playing Candyland. I played that with a therapist. I didn’t know at the time he was a therapist. I just knew nanny had taken me somewhere and a really nice man was there…and he had boardgames in his office lol. I remember being frustrated because he left the room with nanny and I wanted to keep playing Candyland with him. It wasn’t until I was much older that nanny told me the real reason I was there and the real reason he walked out of the room that day. He had been playing Candyland with me while casually making conversation to try and get me to open up…because I didn’t talk much as a kid. I was always told “don’t tell anybody”, “you better not say a word”, “nobody believes a liar”…so I listened and I didn’t say hardly anything at all to anybody. I learned early that if I didn’t talk at all, nothing could slip out.

I think that’s why I talk so much now. I’m making up for lost time LOL

I don’t remember what I said to that therapist. I don’t even really remember what we were talking about. I had Candyland on the brain. Whatever I said was enough for him to remove himself from the room to gather his emotions and give nanny specific instructions to never let me out of her sight. I never saw that man again. I don’t know why. I just assume my case was too much for him. I wish I could go back and thank him for trying to watch out for me and for reporting what he learned.

I think all the horrific things that happened to me, in addition to the maladaptive day dreaming, broke my brain. It became really difficult for me to feel emotions….ANY emotions. Anger, hurt, sadness, embarrassment, joy, excitedness….I couldn’t feel any of it. It was very muted the few times I did feel one of those things. The best way I can explain it is when an emotion broke through that barrier, it felt very watered down.

That is until my papaw died. Boy, I felt every bit of it all. It HURT. I have yet to experience anything like that since. It wasn’t just grief, it was fear. This is one of two people that took care of me and tried to watch out for me…. Now we were down to one. And if two people weren’t enough to keep me safe…one definitely wasn’t and I was not too young to realize that.

My papaw was significantly older that nanny. He was her second husband. Nanny’s first marriage was very abusive. She got married when she was 16 and her husband beat her every day. He broke her nose, held weapons to her head, taunted her, made her think every day was her last…the things that man did were horrific. He would get drunk and open the refrigerator and pour a whole gallon of milk on the floor. He would pull nanny by the hair and demand her to clean it up. She did it every time because she wasn’t just scared for her safety, she was scared for my dad’s safety too. My dad experienced all of this firsthand. It’s why I show a lot of grace towards him for the things he’s struggled with. He was just trying to cope. I chose maladaptive daydreaming to numb myself and he chose substances to numb himself.

Thank God nanny met papaw. He was so good to her. He loved her with everything in him. He worked hard in the mines to take care of us. Every night I would stand at the glass door and wave while he would drive down the hill to head off to work. I would pray the whole time “Jesus please keep him safe.” He was my person and the thought of something happened to him paralyzed me with fear.

His health started declining FAST. He struggled with diabetes amongst other health issues. One day he was sitting in his chair watching TV and he said “I can’t see.” Nanny and I thought he was playing around because he was always known to cut up. He never took anything too seriously. We quickly realized he wasn’t joking. His eyesight was there one minute, and gone the next.

It took a toll on my papaw to not be able to work. He had always provided for us. I think it really messed with him mentally. That paired with his age really affected his mind and before long he was showing signs of Alzheimer’s. He had open heart surgery and after that it just all went down hill. One day I was sitting at a middle school football game with my brother and I watched a helicopter fly across the sky. In my right ear I heard “papaw”. This was before cell phones so I had no way of knowing he was on that helicopter except for the fact that I had noticed the helicopter and heard “papaw”.

While I had been gone he had tried walking through the house looking for nanny. He fell on a vase, broke the vase, and bled out alol over the floor in a matter of minutes. God really used the medical professionals to save his life that night. He should’ve died then, but he was a fighter and he fought to stay with us.

The last time I saw my papaw alive, I was sitting beside his hospital bed in the far back room of the single wide that I grew up in. I kept telling him I loved him. It’s all I knew to say. I was 12 years old, but I was crying like a baby. Every time I said “I love you” he would try his hardest to say he loved me back. He would only get “I lo-“ out, but I said “I love you” a thousand times and he tried saying it back a thousand and one times. After awhile I felt bad that he was trying his best to say he loved me back but couldn’t so I stopped saying “I love you” and just thought it. As the day was wrapping up, I began singing that one song “I willll remember youuuu. Willll you remember me?”. I whisper sang that to him for what felt like hours. That evening my uncle who was a Pentecostal preacher (I told y’all I come from a lonnnnng line of Pentecostals) came down to the house and told my nanny God had told him that by 8 that night, my papaw would be home. He told nanny God had told him that she and I had to let him go, and we needed to tell him that it was okay to go home because he was fighting hard to stay out of fear of what would happen to us if he left. My uncles brother (another Pentecostal preacher) came down about the same time to tell us the exact same thing. I knew my uncles didn’t lie, so I knew it was coming.

Telling my PERSON that I would be ok when he went home was the last lie I ever told him.

Around 8 PM on the dot that night my papaw took his last breath. Nanny passed out from grief and I was left by myself in the living room staring at the hallway that was between me and where my papaw died. I knew my life was about to get so much worse so I did what I always did to escape, I daydreamed until I fell asleep that night.

The following months were rough. My dad divorced the really nice lady I told y’all about on page one. He moved in with nanny and I again. I had no idea where my mom was, I hadn’t seen her in awhile at this point. Not that I can remember anyway. Nanny met someone new and was voted out of being pastor at the church I grew up in. We had no money. Dad brought a new woman into the house and she had a daughter. I was eventually moved out of my own room and the daughter was given my room. One night, I was lifeless on the couch and rushed to the er only to find out I had something called “pseudo tumor cerebri”. The ER doctor tried giving me a spinal tap which is a big no-no. THAT was awful. Within only a few weeks of being diagnosed I lost my eyesight in my left eye. I had been going to my primary with headaches for months before I ended up in the ER and lost my vision. He would accuse me of trying to get out of school and he would tell me to lose weight. Everything was because of my weight. If my nose was running it was because of my weight. He actually slipped up one time while lecturing me about not lying to get out of school. He told me my head was fine and he said “being fat takes a toll on your body…THATS what we need to get control of. Your head will be fine.” After realizing he called me fat, he back tracked and apologized, but I never forgot that. I went home and ran from one end of the trailer to the other while drinking glass after glass of water. I just knew I’d wake up skinny lol.

This is the part where it gets really hard for me to talk about. I don’t like talking about this part and only Shane knows my feelings about this next situation. I still have to process a lot of hurt when I revisit these memories. Just keep in mind nanny has always loved me. Nanny went through a lot within those few months after papaws passing. Nanny is not perfect, but nanny is a good person. I love her with my whole heart and that will never change…..

But I told y’all it went down hill after my papaw died and honey, that hill is STEEP!

NEXT PAGE WILL BE POSTED 11/15 <3

He turned my woe into WOAH!

I mean it when I tell you the joy I have today is the product of God being ever so present in my life. While reading some parts of my story you might begin to think “HOW was ‘God ever so present’ in this girls life?!” …. Just wait, you’ll see. The bigger the trauma, the bigger the testimony. Trust me.

I want to turn this section of my website (OUR website — it belongs to both God and myself) into my life story. I plan to tell it all…in 20 blog posts (which is the most it allows me LOL ) Because I have so much to say, I may have to omit some details and sometimes be quite brief with what I’m telling you. I’ll try to be smart about it and leave that for the particular topics in my life that are extremely hard for me to talk about or really difficult for me to recount. I feel like some details need to remain hidden for the sake of my sanity AND for the sake of your reading experience. Try not to expect too much when it comes to grammar, vocabulary, and punctuation while reading these blog posts — remember who’s writing this lol!

So, I’m 33 years old and in the prime of my life. Some people don’t realize when they’re “in the good old days” until the good old days are over…that’s not the case for me. I realize I’m in those days right now, and that can be a double edged sword. All at once you feel blessed to be hyper aware of this stage of life because you can enjoy it and soak it all in — but on the other hand you feel a sort of panic throughout the entire season, because everything has an end and your slowly watching the end of what you know to be the prime of your life slowly approach. Honestly, I don’t know if it’s better to know or not.

Being the adult I am now, I often look back at my early childhood and cry for myself (your girl can throw a pity party LEEEEMMEEEE TELL YOUUU). And i hate it lol.

As a parent, it’s hard for me to understand the decisions the adults around me made. I forgive them, I forgave them a long time ago, but boy do I struggle to forget.

My parents were very young when they had me and their relationship, from what I know, was pretty toxic. While their story isn’t mine to tell, I can tell you the parts of their story that directly affected me…because that’s a huge part of my own story. Please, try not to judge them. It hurts my heart when I tell my story on the channel and then I have to read mean comments about my parents. I know those comments come from a good place, I know you’re hurt for me because you love me….but please try to remember that I love THEM. That’s my mom and dad I have to read those comments about. I’ve never wished anything but the best for them. I’m a product of my own life experiences, and they are the product of theirs. I can’t be mad at them for not having their life together in their late teens and early twenties….HAVE Y’ALL HEARD MY STORY?! I don’t have a single stone to throw, your girls pockets are EMPTYYYYY. Thankfully, I learned from their mistakes and even throughout all my mess in my early 20s I didn’t leave my kids. I’ve always been all about my children. They are the apple of my eye. But who knows what could’ve happened if I hadn’t lived through and learned from the mistakes they made. In a really weird and confusing way, I’m glad they left me. Because they didn’t keep me, I know what it feels like to be abandoned and that in turn makes me never want to abandon anybody. I wouldn’t wish that sort of pain on my worst enemy (I don’t have a worst enemy but if I did I wouldn’t wish that on them lol)

I say it all the time…hurt people hurt people. They were my first examples of that. My parents were the first hurt people to hurt me. So I found that saying to be true at a very young age.

My nanny always says I came straight from the hospital to her house and I believe it lol. I have very few childhood memories, but the memories I do have mostly revolve around nanny…and my papaw of course. He was my favorite person on the planet and the only male other than Shane that I could completely trust with my whole heart. When he died my life went even further down hill. It was honestly a nightmare and I wish my brain would’ve done me a favor then and blacked all of THAT out LOL where’s the amnesia when you need it?! One time I was told by one of my many childhood therapists that my brain did me a favor and blacked out most of the bad memories. Apparently, it missed a whole whacked out season of my life lol because I remember EVERYTHING from that time.

Let’s start from the beginning, because I can already tell that my (lovely) brain (that blacks out only when its convenient for it apparently lol) is wanting to get ahead of itself and skip around. I’m going to start from the beginning and try to get as much as I can into chronological order.

Like I said, I was born to really young parents. If I’m not mistaken, my mom was only 19 when she had me. I don’t make excuses for her because of her age though because well… I had Colton when I was 19 and things went a lot differently for me as a “teen-ish mom”. But I do make excuses for her because of her upbringing. People tell me not to make up excuses for her…but they don’t know the — h e double hockey sticks —she went through growing up. If our trauma is rated on a scale of 1-100…mine would be an 82, hers would be a million. Hands down. I said I “make up excuses for her”, but I should’ve worded that differently. It’s not that I make up excuses necessarily, it’s more so that I understand. I get it.

I remember seeing my mom off and on as a child. I feel like it was almost a pattern…sort of in and out of my life. I remember her coming to the door one time and she had dyed her hair blonde. It had been so long since I saw her that I didn’t recognize her and for some reason I was absolutely petrified of her. That night, I had a really hard time sleeping. Even as a small child my heart was conflicted. That was my mom, my heart knew that I loved her..but my brain didn’t know if she loved me. And that scared me for some reason.

I lived with nanny, but my dad lived with nanny, too. So I saw my dad way more than I saw my mom. Not because he made more of an effort to see me, but because we lived under the same roof and he had no choice but to see me lol. My dad fought his own demons much like my mom. He fought addiction my whole childhood. It was nothing new for my nanny to be dragging my half conscious dad across the driveway while me and my brother were at the bottom of the hill making mud pies or driving the lawn mower in circles til the tires were bald lol. Nanny went through so much with both my mom and my dad. I honestly don’t know how at her age she had the energy to go through all of that AND take care of my brother and I. I’m telling you…nanny’s a rockstar.

My dad would try his best to get clean and my mom would try her best to consistently come around and see us more often, but both of them failed over and over again. I think my dad really wanted to get clean, but he was so deep into the addiction that it probably felt like he was trying to climb his way out of a hole full of peanut butter . And I think my mom really wanted to have a relationship with us, but because we weren’t around her often and we weren’t comfortable being around her..I think she felt like she was fighting a losing battle. I can’t imagine how it would feel for your kids to be scared of you and not want to be around you. Plus, my mom recounts that time in our lives a lot differently than nanny does. Their versions of the stories clash so bad. So I really can only believe what I saw and what I felt as a child. The rest of it I learned a long time ago to just let it go. I came to the conclusion that nanny had her truth, mom had her truth, and I had mine.

Eventually, my dad got married to a really nice lady. I really loved her, and so did my brother. When dad married her he moved out of nanny’s house and my brother went with him. I’m not sure if he chose my brother to live with him or if my brother chose to live with him. I just know it went completely against the custody agreement, but they did it anyway lol. Little me was convinced that dad picked him to live with him. if I’m being honest with you…at 33 I still think that.

When my brother and my dad moved out, all that was left was me, nanny, and papaw. My nanny’s mom and dad (my mamaw and papaw2) lived right next to us on a hill that was named after them. I loved my mamaw and papaw2. Some of my best memories have them in them! Shane loved my papaw2 and still talks about him all the time. They were good people…especially my papaw2. We lived on land belonging to all of my papaw2s (nanny’s dad) family. So I was surrounded by cousins, aunts, uncles and other distant relatives. Sounds like a good time, right?

Nope.

Before I was out of elementary school, I was running from men. I wasn’t safe from relatives. I wasn’t safe from strangers. It didn’t matter to me if they had the same bloodline as me…I still was not safe. It seemed almost as if every man I came in contact with (minus my papaws) wanted to take something from me. It was something an 8 year old, 9 year old, and 10 year old should never have to give. They stole my peace, but worse, they stole my innocence. I would always watch out for myself. I would always make sure I wasn’t in a room alone with somebody. I would always stand or sit at least 3 feet away from anybody. I did not do hugs. I did not wear dresses. I did not ride in cars with people. I did not go outside by myself. I guarded myself as best as I could. It wasn’t enough, though.

Things might’ve been different if I had’ve told somebody. But the only people I had to trust were nanny and papaw. Papaws health had started to rapidly decline. Nanny was his caregiver and a pastor. I didn’t want to disrupt the little peace we had so I continued to look out for myself. I continued to watch my own back.

As I got older and became a preteen, somehow running FROM men turned into running TO men. I wish I knew why. To this day, that logic doesn’t make sense to me. I searched for attention all of the time. I would take it from anybody who would give it to me. I would be up all hours of the night in AOL chat rooms talking with grown men. I had one friend at that time and she introduced me to the chat rooms. We thought it was funny, but looking back I realize how dangerous it was. We were playing with fire.

Because nanny was so preoccupied with papaw, I basically did whatever I wanted to. I was up all hours of the night, my grades were awful, I was talking to grown men on the internet. I was giving my address to people all over the web. I was talking to people on my little Nokia phone (after 9PM of course, because back then there was no such thing as unlimited texting and calling) you either waited til 9 to talk on the phone or your phone bill was out the roof lol.

I found ways to keep myself occupied and none of those ways were good. I had this thing where I was a magnet for troubled people. I think it’s because, ironically, those were the only people who accepted me. They say “you are the company you keep” and that became true for me. I went from hanging out with the troubled kids to becoming a troubled kid myself.

During all of this I went to church every Wednesday and Sunday. I was raised in a little white Pentecostal church that my nanny pastored. I didn’t listen a lot, but I watched EVERYTHING. I never liked church people. I was around them all the time. I saw how they acted and heard what they said. There were very few times that I “saw Jesus” in any of those people. It turned me off from church entirely, and I come to LOATHE going.

Even though I “didn’t like church people” per se, there were a select few that I grew up around and I really came to love those. They had been church members for years and years. They had held me as a BABY, so when I said I didn’t like church people just know those few individuals were excluded from that lol. Don’t get me wrong, they still did everything the other church members did…but 12 year old me had a soft spot for them because I grew up around them.

I told you that there was nobody I could trust myself to be around and that was even true at CHURCH. I have faint memories from the time I was probably 3 or 4..they’re very faint, but I can remember the hands, and I can remember the smell. I didn’t remember who it was until I was older and they had left the church, but once I remembered.. it wrecked my world. I was alone with that person a lot as a baby…as a toddler…and as a small child. I don’t even want to think about situations that might’ve happened that I just don’t remember. What I remembered was enough, I didn’t pry my brain on that one. My brain felt broken after that anyway.

If I were to list all of the times I have been abused, exploited, and violated we would be here all day and night. Just know, it continued through my whole life up until I met Shane. Sunday school teachers, deacons, cousins, family, family friends…it was anybody and everybody and it went on for so many years. Shane always tells me he feels like the devil had a target on me for that kind of thing or something, cause it followed me wherever I went. It was like a shadow. A really dark shadow. And if you had told me it could get worse, I wouldn’t have believed you.

Oh, but it did.

This is not a “WOE is me” story. I slayed my dragons a long time ago. I’ve forgiven and I’ve let go.

But I have never, not for a second, forgotten. except the moments my brain forgot entirely of course lol

I don’t want pity. Goodness gracious, pleaseeeeeee don’t pity me. There’s nothing I hate more than that. But every part of my testimony is important, and all of this leads somewhere. And at the end you’ll be like “WOAH”.