Ten years ago today, I was eighteen years old and one month married - a child bride, an Air Force wife. I'd just moved into a tiny two-bedroom trailer, walking distance from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, North Carolina. We had no car. We had nothing, really. He was eighteen as well; we'd just emerged from high school and, afraid to go and be adults alone, we entered into this ill-advised marriage.
He was Mormon and I was rebelling, so we celebrated Christmas and not Chanukah. We had a small plastic tree. No ornaments - we decorated with ribbons saved from our wedding gifts and trinkets from around the house. Some mardi gras beads.
Ten years ago... I hated my parents for having condemned me to several consecutive mental institutions, six months of wilderness survival camp, a year in a group home in Utah... for having given up on me at the age of fourteen. Ten years ago I was convinced, after my second, quieter, miscarriage, that I would ever bear children. I did not love my husband, but I liked him well enough, and figured that that was as good as it was likely to get. We'd had sex several days after the wedding night - my first consensual sex - and it was painful and disappointing (it continued to be so throughout the marriage. My head turned so he couldn't see the tears at the corners of my eyes. My face pinched with sorrow and grim resolution - I would be a good wife, as good as I could manage to be).
I don't remember what he gave me. I gave him a copy of Gray's Anatomy. He was an artist. I was a writer, always a writer, and my typewriter was set up with ceremony on milk crates in the second bedroom.
Ten years ago today I was lonely, and resigned to being lonely all my life.
If you had told me ten years ago that, ten years hence, I would be a happy person, I wouldn't even have had the energy to scoff. Had you told me that I'd have a 7-and-3/4-year-old daughter, that I was a good mother and a good friend, that people cared about me, that some even loved me - that I'd eventually make up with my family and realize that I was more mature than my parents - that I would have a support system like I have now - I'd have called you a liar and evicted you from my dingy living room, weeping.
And yet today, I dodge cousins and dogs to fix lunch for my goofy, sweet daughter, help my birth mother set out food for the extended family's Christmas lunch... and on Friday, my birth family will meet the family that raised me, and I'll see two of my dearest friends, and meet many more friends for the first in-person time. And today - I like myself.
I wonder what another ten years will bring.
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yendi and I, jointly: