**My name is K and I am a 24 year old Mother to a beautiful 2 year old boy. My life is in a wonderful place right now, however life was not always so easy for me.
I was born with a mother who was addicted to crack cocaine and heroin by the time I was 2 years old, and a father who was not truly aware of my existance. Though life from birth should have been very hard for me I was blessed with the most loving and compassionate Grandmother who brought me up in my catholic faith and always kept God in our life and in our hearts. It was through my Grandma that I learned everything I ever could about life. She was more of a mother to me then my own mother who was in and out of my life constantly. My constant was my Grandma and it was through her that I learned even though I did not have the greatest parents on earth I had a Father (Jesus) and Mother (Mary) in heaven who loved me more then life itself and would never leave my side.
When I was a little girl I truly loved Jesus and God. I was always trying to do things to make him happy and to keep strong in my catholic faith. I prayed day in and day out for my own mother to one day see the error of her actions and to come home for good. However due to her free will she continued to abuse drugs and grow farther and farther apart from me and our family. I stayed strong always because I had my Grandma by my side who day in and day out showed me unconditional love. The same very love that Jesus shows us. Those years could have been the worst years but because I was brought up so well they were truly the happiest years of my life.
When I was almost 13 years old I woke up one day to find that my Grandmother had been taken from me due to a massive heart attack. She was in heaven now and I became angry and hurt more then ever. The first few months I begged God to send her back to me. I begged him to keep me strong and I pleaded and asked him why he had to do this to me. Without her I was all alone. My mother came back into my life and so did the drugs. Our family was consumed by her evil addiction and my support systems crumbled in front of my eyes. I was confirmed in May of 2003, just a few short months after her passing. I remember being so angry and depressed that day on what should have been one of the happiest days of my life. I selfishly struggled with the idea that God could exist at all if he would take away the one person I needed more then life itself. I decided I was an atheist, and if it were true that God was here that he hated me because he gave me this painful life.
Life continued to get harder and harder. My mother drained all of our family’s money and so we lost our house in the only town I had ever been in and moved down to Florida. Things continued to escelate as drug dealers were in and out of the house, cops knocking at the door, crack addicts, stealing, lying, and abuse became the norm. I became more bitter and more bitter as time went on. I was a troubled child but in all of this I decided that I would never choose to touch the very thing that destroyed my family so much. I vowed to never touch drugs or to abuse alcohol or smoke ciggarettes. I vowed to stay clean and to never turn into the woman my mother chose to be.
Through all of this I met a young man named R who was 7 years older then me. I was 15 and he was 22 and while I knew in my heart this relationship was wrong he was the only one to pull me out of this hell I learned to know so well. By this time I had a 2 year old sister T who was living in this very hell with me. I loved her and wanted to get her out of this. I knew for sure that neither of us deserved this so I begged R to please get us out of Florida. And his parents did. When I arrived back in NY I knew I needed to get my baby sister and aunt who was her primary care giver out of that hell. My aunts friend was able to loan her enough money to get back to NY and we went apartment searching right away. I found them an apartment not far away from us where they would continue to live until we would all move in together down the road. I quickly found that I was in an abusive relationship. I was being hit weekly and emotionally abused almost daily but I had such little respect for myself that I truly felt that this is all I deserved. This is the man that got me out of the one hell I knew and put me into another.
The older I got the smarter I got and realized that I must leave this relationship if I cared about my future at all. Through these 6 years from the age of 15 to 21 I had deep depression and hurt to work through from my past and from the current life I had been living. I turned to all sorts of religions but the main one i dabbled in was wicca and witchcraft. I just wanted to find purpose and direction in my life. All along knowing that this truly was not the right path for me. But i was terrified to come back to the church, terrified for how long I’d been away and all the sins I had tallied up over the years.
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