“I remember my mom on the phone telling me to ‘Get out, get out. Close your eyes, don’t look’. You knew I was coming home first that day. You knew.”
‘Keeley?,’ you whispered. I peeked back in. You were grinning that huge grin. ‘I love you, Keebee.’ I’m not happy to admit I got annoyed. Now, I think you were just preparing me.’
‘My daughter, who is always listening, said, ‘I bet she will say, ‘OH, NO! It’s fine!’ But deep down, she will be angry at you.’ That is what my 9-year-old daughter has already learned. From me.’
“I lie awake after parties and wonder if my joke was taken the wrong way. Whose feelings did I hurt? I apologized to my daughter for my actions that lead her to think women had to hide. That pleasing people should be a top priority. The truth is enough.”
‘Since I was 12, I wanted to be Mrs. Chris. He was my first kiss, my first love. Only there was one problem. Chris was older than me. We had to sneak around. I was obsessed with him.’
“My little sister and I were talking about our pasts. Of course, Chris came up. I made the comment that I needed to call him and see how he’s doing. A few hours later, the phone rang. I recognized the name on Caller ID right away. It was Chris! I was so excited that I jumped. However, it wasn’t Chris on the other end. It was his stepdad.”
‘Then Rob messaged me. And everything changed. We decided to go out on a date. For the next few weeks, Rob and I were each other’s world. Or so I thought.’
“We stayed at his parents’ house several times, but never his. I began to suspect Rob had a wife or a girlfriend, and that’s why we never went to his place. He always had an excuse, and I always believed him. Then one night, he told me he had something to tell me.”
‘My boyfriend closed-fist punched me in the face, knocking me off my feet. My 230-pound boyfriend split open my face. The past 6 months of my life have felt like a slow torture.’
“My boyfriend of almost 2 years came home from a 7-month deployment. Two days after he had been back, I found out he had not been faithful. When I found out, I proceeded to ask him to leave. He refused.”
‘It’s the mom who won’t look at you because she’s afraid she will say something stupid. It’s the girl who sends 50 text messages in 1 hour because her thoughts tell her you don’t like her.’
“The photo on the right was a week after I got out of psych ward that I posted to social media with a hashtag #happy.”
‘I ran across an old boyfriend’s picture today. Not just any ole boyfriend, but the one who broke my heart, who shattered it into a million pieces, the one I was certain was ‘the one.”
“I cried over him. I lost weight over him. I stayed in bed for a week over him, and then went out every night for a month over him. I kept running it over and over in my head, completely melted into my mess thinking, ‘God, why? I don’t deserve this.'”
‘I saw the fear in his eyes. He knew. His heart knew. His girl wasn’t ok. Both his beautiful girls were in the fight of their lives.’
“We sat there watching our beautiful, vibrant, sassy girl waste away. The shower was for sobbing. Then Kylie’s mother got an urgent phone call. The labs taken revealed something unimaginable. I held that 6-foot, 175-pound boy. I rocked him as he asked if he would lose her.”
‘Maybe he doesn’t hit you, but he makes you apologize for getting upset after something he did to hurt you.’
“He brought you flowers on Tuesday and made you feel like a princess. Yet caused you to cry yourself to sleep on Wednesday over a ‘suspicious’ guy liking your picture.”
‘I had my first alcoholic drink at the age of 10. I deployed to Afghanistan in 2015. I drank to calm my nerves. The drinking kept escalating.’
“I returned to the States. I started drinking even more. My marriage was falling apart. When I woke up from the coma, I was still hallucinating. The VA had no inpatient treatment facility spot open for me.”
