Being a grown up...

We all want something...love, a home, a family and friends, a good job. The list goes on and on.

I want my innocence back. I want that moment where I realized how fucked up the world is switched off like a light so I can go to sleep at night without thinking about the women in other countries who are being raped and murdered simply because they are female and weak. I want to enjoy this short time on Earth without seeing what everyone else pretends doesn't exist. I want to drive away from my kids school and not see some guy walking his dog and ultimately think...predator. I want to see the good again.

I want back my rose colored glasses.

All of us suffer from some pain at the loss of our innocence. Divorce, death, bullying, lost love, and the unrequited. We all have that moment where we realize our last shred of innocence has died.

I remember mine. I was twenty one. In love with the man that eventually became my first husband. Not long into our relationship something significant happened...we moved in together...got engaged...ended up pregnant. Before my twenty second birthday I was married and a mother for the first time. I was a baby still. So foolish...so prideful. I didn't think anything bad could ever happen to me.

While I was pregnant and he worked late...I didn't ultimately think he was screwing his co-worker in the break room. I didn't think those late night inventories were code for booty calls. I was a child having a child. I was inexperienced. A small town girl living in a much larger city. I was naïve...still so innocent.

Later I found out the truth. Not only was he a cheater during my pregnancy...but it was worse. A family secret...inched it's way out sometime during the whirl wind of our relationship. That reason he had to go to the Police Department and register...wasn't for assault and running away. No one get's a felony for pushing down his sister.

I was naïve.

I should have known better. I can hit myself all day with the things I didn't see. I wish I were smarter....more world wise. Less ridiculous. I believed him when he told me why he had to register. I believed him when he told me he had to work late. I believed those lies because I wanted to see the best in him....the way I wanted to see the world through that beautiful pink colored hue.

It was an accident that I found out the truth. I wasn't smart enough to dig for it on my own. I was not who I am now. It was fate really...or God trying to give me a heads up. If I'd only listened...

It was not assault in the way I thought...but it was assault...he didn't lie completely. It was his mother who erroneously told me what was really happening. She asked me if I knew about why he had to register in California. I told her that yes he had told me the truth. She tried to lighten the blow by saying that she thinks it started as a misunderstanding...that his sister had lied about it being unconsensual...it was that word that made me realize that something wasn't right. I wish I could slap the girl of then with the reality of her situation.

His mother thought it was initially consensual. A massage that got out of hand. Two horny teenagers who didn't quite realize what they were doing. Self-exploration. Whatever. All I could do was run the word assault around in my mind. Redefine it. I thought assault meant injury. A punch, a push, a broken nose. Violence of the angry kind. Not sex. Not Incest. Never in my mind had the thought of him fucking his sister entered into my idea of what assault meant.

I didn't see the ugly in the explanation. I saw what I wanted to see...him loving me. Him being beautiful...him being good. Him being honest. Him being a person who wouldn't lie, wouldn't cheat and certainly wouldn't rape his own biological sister.

I didn't see it.

Even after...I didn't want to. I lived in a bubble of numbness well into my third trimester. After my sons birth. It all aligned in an insane way. The world burst open. I was no longer walking in a black and white world. There was color everywhere. Green for envy...red for lust....black for sorrow...and an ugly grey yellow was the color of his lies...and they covered everything.

His explanation for his past...his reason for registering in the state of California. The late night inventory. The lies...the deceit. The truth covered everything in a puke tinged brown. My life fell off it's axis. The world was changed. I couldn't raise a child with a man I didn't know. He was a figment of my imagination. A phantom.

We divorced.

It was ugly. I caught him fucking his now wife while I was at work. I came home early you see. To a house with a whore in it's bedroom. Now I have to smile while she hugs my son. I have to pretend like it's okay for his benefit...not hers. I want to scream at every teacher meeting where his lies and fake personality win over every red blooded female that he's a sick sack of shit who raped his sister. I want to spew the ugly hatred from my body. I want to tell my son where his fathers money was going when I was raising him without financial support from his father and barely making ends meet while his dad paid for hotel rooms so he could screw his mistress. I want to tell him that she his step mother doesn't respect me because she knows that I know the deep ugly heart that beats inside her fucking chest.

But I say nothing.

Because it will only hurt him. But someday. Someday I'll be so knocked down by fake smiles and laughter at my back and teaching my son to disrespect me that I'll spew the brown vomitus truth all over their ugly yellow lies and the world will see what they really are.