A short time after my husband and I moved in together, I conceived our first son. I was enormously excited, and so was my husband. But, of course, my neighbor and her husband will enter this little tale. They were constantly trying to convince my husband to have an abortion. They kept telling him things like, 'Well, you have a kid now, you're trapped.' This was entirely offensive to me because just having a kid with somebody does not make you trapped. I have four kids with one person, and I still don't feel trapped. We had moved in together, and at that point, it should have been obvious we weren't breaking up. This was offensive to me because we had our stuff together, we had a place we paid for, a place we called home, and we both had a job. I still had a good amount of money saved up from working all through high school, believe it or not; I never spent any of that money.
I've always been a bigger-picture type girl, and I knew that life doesn't end with high school. That's where it begins. So I saved up money and I didn't go out partying, and I just tried to stay on the correct path. In my life I wanted to be successful, it was something that I always envisioned.
As I have mentioned before, part of being successful is having a realistic fantasy of what success is. It's making personal goals that are reachable and believable, and it doesn't have to be based on anyone else's opinions or what they want for you. So, part of my goal was just to make sure that I was financially ready in the real world. That is enormously important, and probably one of your most important goals.
So, to have my neighbor try to convince my future husband not to have children with me was incredibly hurtful.
My whole life, I have wanted to be a mom. I always thought about what It would be like and all the fun things I would do with my kids. So, having a person try to take that away from me is a pain that I will never forget. I mean, not that she can force me to not be a mom, but she can take away the partner that I picked? Yeah, that crossed my head, but I don't think that she had that much of an influence on him. I think that's what she would like to have, and that's always been her goal: to have complete control over him. But now she wants complete control over us.