Sweet Shoppe Designs

credits: Land of nod kit by Dani Mogstad (SSD)
done for the SSD Sugar free Challenge (uses product new this week)

(I can't believe I am putting this out there for all of digi-land to see, but it was very cathartic to scrap about this)

Journaling: If I had only known....it’s complicated to say that If I had only known what kind of person Darin would turn out to be when I met him that I would have stayed FAR FAR away from him, because the end result of meeting Darin, was having Joshua. Meeting Darin turned my life upside down and caused me to do so many things I would never have thought to do before, I defied my parents, lied to them, snuck out of the house, did many desperate things to “keep” Darin. I should have known better, growing up near the Air Force Base what some military guys can be like. They are in strange towns, with no family or friends and they tend to latch on to people quickly and hard, and then things can change in the blink of an eye. I sometimes wish I had never met Darin, because he showed me just what cruelty is. He paraded other girls in front of me when I was pregnant with his child. He abandoned me. The first time he came to my house to see his baby, he brought his new girlfriend (one of my EX-friends) and HER Child with him. He hardly ever had anything to do with Joshua in the past 16 years and my heart hurts for what that may have done to Joshua emotionally. There are MANY times I wish that I had not gone to church that day (Oh yes I met him in church!), or that I had looked the other way. That my last relationship had not ended so abruptly, that I was so desperate to feel loved that I would accept what anyone would give me. I wish that I had put a higher value on myself as a person and not been so desperate to be loved and my life would have been so different. My first baby would have been a cherished event with the man I loved and not a situation that caused so much heartache and shame. I can only say, that if anything good could have possibly come out of this whole fiasco, it was that beautiful baby that gave me a reason to go on, when I didn’t even want to BE anymore, after what his father did to me, so no, I will never say If only I had never had this baby, because he is MINE. But some- times I think I could have done better as a mom if only Darin had not been the one that shared that experience with me.