My Mother 's First Marriage

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I come from a prodigious, relatively convolute family. Both my mother and my father were married, previous to meeting and marrying one another. From those marriages came my two older half-sisters, one from my mother’s first marriage, one from my father’s first marriage. When their first marriages failed, my father and mother met and married, then myself and my three biological brothers were brought into the world. After fourteen years of marriage my parents were divorced. Shortly after being divorced both my mother and father found their way into new marriages. When my father married my step-mother I gained two step-brothers. Finally, once my mother remarried for the third time, my half-sister was born into the family. Complicated would be too mild of a word to describe growing up with such a family.
The ultimate demise of my parents marriage was due, in part, to my mother’s infidelity. My brothers and I were caught in the middle of intense marital warfare on a daily basis. My childhood permeated with hostility and animosity. One might assume with that type of environment, and the obvious neglect of advantageous relationships, I too would find it hard to sustain a healthy relationship with the opposite sex. That assumption would be correct. It was not until my step-mother came into the picture, that I understood what a normal, healthy, loving relationship looked like. However, the damage was done, the trust was gone and my heart had irrevocable damage. The lasting effects of an odious divorce on a child are rather uncanny if you ask me.
As If my mother leaving after the divorce was not enough, it was only a short amount of time before my father and step-mother rekindled the romance they had lost almost twenty years prior. All...

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...tive manner. I am proud to say, that who I was in the past is not who I am today. I have spent the last five years of my life trying to reshape my thinking and to live the life that God intended for me, instead of the life that I wanted for myself. It is by no coincident, that once I devoted my life to God and chose to live for him, and strive to be like him, my life turned around. I am now more cognizant of what will happen if I choose to confront conflict with hostility. I see things in a new light and have a role model that will always teach me the right way to deal with people and situations. I have also learned to take what was in my past and turn it into something much better. I will definitely make sure that I raise my daughter to understand how to deal with conflict in a healthy manner, and pray that she will be better at relationships than I have ever been!

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