After five years of being with the same person and having two kids with him, I am now officially, at 25 years old, a single mother. Now, I never in my wildest dreams imagined I would one day be this young, have two kids and not married to the person I had them with. I saw myself as being happy and taken care of. Life, unfortunately, never seems to turn out how you expect and hope it would.

I personally blame karma for this. I knew that after being wild and crazy as a teenager, doing whatever I wanted whether it be drugs or partying, I would one day have to pay for my carelessness.  The sad thing is, I felt like I had already paid enough. After being cheated on by my boyfriend, I too made the same mistake and let myself get caught up in the attention other men were giving me. I felt horrible afterward, and truth be told, the guy I chose sucked in bed, so it really was worthless that I went looking elsewhere when I was getting what I wanted at home. So after three unsatisfying meetings, I realized that I might have a problem, and behold my intuition was right. After taking a test, I figured out I was pregnant again.

Sticking to my feelings from when I was pregnant with my daughter, I knew that despite having relationship problems I would keep and have this baby. This is when hell pretty much started. The guilt I felt over my infidelity ate at me from the time I woke up till I went to sleep. It was all I could think about, it was making me miserable and unhappy at a time when I shouldn’t have been.

About five months after I found out I was pregnant, the truth finally came out. I already knew about when he had cheated on me and felt I took it well, so I was hoping he would do the same. I was wrong. He couldn’t handle what I had done, and the next few weeks were a blur of me staying up with him all night and day talking it out, over and over.

Instead of coming to terms with it and working together to rebuild our trust, he turned to drugs to numb his pain and escape from what our reality had become. As weeks went by, he started to become angry, and in turn started becoming violent. Our fights turned into harsh words meant to crush the other person, and hitting. I kept telling myself that we would get better, that given time we could work all this out and be alright and become the happy family I so desperately needed us to be.

As we became more disconnected from reality, my due date was quickly approaching, and in a weird way things started to get better. He was getting help, and we were finally figuring things out. The few days we spent in the hospital following our son’s birth were amazing, things felt normal and happy again, and I was ecstatic. Like most situations like this, things don’t stay happy for long. After we left the hospital, our reality became too much to bear, and the cycle started all over again.

Bath salt, for those who don’t know what it is, could be found at that time in any local smoke shop, it was essentially legal methamphetamine. I swore I would never touch it, I was pregnant and held my ground, but after my son was born I couldn’t handle the sleepless nights fighting and tried it. Starting that May, my life became a downward spiral that I still can’t fully recollect. Those five months I lost myself and started living in a world that didn’t really exist.

Feeding off each other, we kept doing bath salt and kept promising we would stop. We got to the point where we would stay up for a week, not eating, and after sleeping for one day, would start all over again. I knew that I wasn’t this person I had become. I looked in the mirror and saw a girl I didn’t recognize, she was a stranger. I lost 40 lbs in three weeks and was slowly driving myself to die. I know that now. If I hadn’t stopped I would probably be dead, and that thought terrifies me.

The last few months were the roughest. He started becoming more violent, and I would have to hide my bruises and make excuses for what we had become. This life was not what I wanted for my children; I knew that and yet had become too weak to do anything about it. I saw rock bottom coming, and instead of doing something to stop it, I waited for it to come. Every day he became more disassociated from reality, I saw that this drug was killing him from the inside out, he was sick and getting worse. At first I ignored the paranoia and delusions. He would see people that weren’t there and think everyone was out to get him. I tried over and over again to help him see what was real and what wasn’t, while I myself was slowly losing my grip on reality.

Watching someone you love and care about start to exhibit symptoms of a disorder such as schizophrenia is terrifying, you can see movies portray it ,but until you see it in real life it doesn’t become real. The drugs were triggering a problem he had, and it was terrifying. I was living in hell day in and day out. It got so bad that I just expected it to happen and went along with it. I knew the people he was seeing were not really there, but I appeased him and acted as if they were there. I kept trying to reassure him there was no one else since my mistake, and no matter how hard I tried it fell on deaf ears.

It got to the point where I had no phone, no computer, and couldn’t go to the bathroom alone. I was a prisoner in my own house, and I let it happen. Looking back, there were several things I could have done, people I could have talked to. I felt that by asking for help I was going to show everyone how vulnerable I was, and they would see all the mistakes I had and was making. I prayed our neighbors would call the cops, something, anything, so that I would have my savior, and it would not be my fault. They never came, despite all the fighting and screaming no one ever called the police.

The last weekend we were together the kids had gone to spend the weekend at my parents, we did the usual and escaped into our world. This time he didn’t come back out of it. Watching someone you love pretty much deteriorate in front of your eyes is brutal, words can’t even express how terrible it is. I knew our rock bottom was coming, and it would be coming sooner rather than later. We fought like never before, he hit me and didn’t even remember doing it. By that Sunday, I was too sore to move. Covered in bruises, I watched as he finally had enough and wanted to end it all.

I did the only thing I could think of. Our house was a mess, our life together shattered, I knew we had nothing left to lose except our lives. I got him into my car and started to take him to his mom’s house. Sadly it wasn’t that simple, he fought me and hallucinated the whole way. At one point, he got in the driver’s seat and I said my goodbyes. I truly didn’t think I would live to see my kids again. I have never been so helpless and terrified in my life. My saving grace was him getting out of the car to walk the rest of the way. I just let him go, and as much as it broke my heart I knew it was for the best.

I went back to his mom’s house a few hours later and learned that in the morning he would be moving to his dad’s house, out of state. I was heartbroken, but there was nothing I could do. That was the last time I saw him. We had been together for four and a half years, and the end had finally come. I would love to say that last day we hugged and left on good terms, but we didn’t. He was sick and didn’t know what was going on. It has been two months now, and I am living back with my parents and my kids. As hard and terrible as it was, I know it was all for the best.

Being apart has enabled us to both grow and heal. He is doing very well and has a job and a new girlfriend. He is happy, and that is all I can ask for. I still have days where all I want to do is cry and give up, but I have come this far and giving up now isn’t an option. Shortly after moving back home, I found out that I was pregnant again. I had to yet again make another hard decision, and even though it killed me I had an abortion. I wasn’t in the right state of mind to be pregnant again, and do what I needed to do to get back on my feet and be the mother my children needed me to be.

I know I made the right decisions. Things needed to happen this way, and I am thankful that we are both still alive and there for our kids. I felt that I had to write this, to get all of what I went through out in the open for myself. I need to heal, and keeping it bottled up inside will only damage me further. I hope that after reading this you take a look at your life, and the world, and realize how beautiful and precious it is. You have to live for today because you don’t know if you will have tomorrow. Cherish everything in your life, the good and the bad, these things are what make you the person you are. I am now a stronger person because of what I went through. I have learned more about myself than I ever thought possible. I can now be the parent I need to be, and maybe one day a wife. Until then, I am going to embrace all the things in my life.

I’ve always wanted to have kids young, I felt that by having them at a younger age I would be able to easily keep up with them and be a hip, fun mom. I got my wish now at 24, with an almost 3 year old little girl, I just last month had my son. I had always heard the complaints women had about getting pregnant then having trouble losing all the baby weight afterwards. I never really worried because I felt being young would make it so much easier. Oh, how naïve and wrong I was.

Not being super skinny normally, I’ve always been at a weight where I was happy and felt good about myself. After having my daughter, my stomach looked like a war zone. Instead of my normal outfits, I took to wearing loose clothes that did nothing but make me look like I was still pregnant. Depressed and busy being a new mom, I didn’t do anything about my weight gain, I ate what I wanted, gained more weight and tried to forget that I weighed more than I ever had before.

My family started pressuring me about doing something to start losing the weight, which only added to the frustration I was feeling about my body and weight. My family has always been the type that cares to an extreme about their weight. They’re constantly dieting and nagging me that maybe I need to start watching my weight too. After having my daughter, and letting myself stay unhappy at the weight I was, I gave into my family’s criticism and joined Jenny Craig. Over the course of about five months I lost 25 pounds, and even thought I only joined to placate my family, I ended up realizing that I can achieve what I (not my family) want my ideal weight to be.

After working hard to lose all the baby weight and become the old confident person I used to be, I found out that I was pregnant again. Again, I let my family bully me, telling me I needed to diet with this pregnancy to make sure I did not gain as much weight as before. Instead of giving in and letting their words depress me, I let go of any worries for those nine months and put all my focus on having a healthy son, rather than how much weight I was gaining.

Now, after having my son, my perspective has changed. I have come to accept my body. I have realized that if I feel the desire, I can and will do something to have the body I want and restore the confidence I lost. I realized that if I could lose the weight before, then with a little bit of work I could do it again. I used to let my family, and even television and magazine, influence how I felt about myself. I used to believe that at 24 I was no longer sexy because I had sacrificed my body to have my children. Now, I can proudly say that, yes I have had children, and I honestly love every stretch mark I got because of them.