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Best Birthday Present Ever

I love my sons. I know I love my sons because I CHOSE to get over my crap for their sake, something I didn't know how to otherwise do.

I got married at nineteen and learned I was pregnant like a couple of days before my second wedding anniversary. I had married the man in question in part because I was clear I wanted to have kids with him, so I never considered having an abortion. I philosophically just decided this meant I would "rearrange my schedule" and have kids "in the morning" and a career "in the afternoon" of my life instead of the other way around.

I was molested and raped as a child and spent my youth making nasty jokes about "ALL MEN." I would say things like "A woman has to outperform men to get any credit at all. Fortunately, that's not hard."

And then I had a surprise birthday present from the universe around the time I turned 22 years old. I was gifted a bouncing baby boy.

And I realized that if I spent the next 18 years talking trash about men in front of my son because someone else hurt me, if it didn't royally fuck him up from the get go, it would someday. Maybe the day he turned 18, stopped legally being a boy and technically became a man and knew what his mother thought of ALL MEN having heard this corrosive garbage all day, every day from birth.

So I stopped that shit and went back into therapy in my mid twenties and figured out how to make my peace with my sexuality.

I once told him about how I mostly liked my life in my early twenties and really liked being a MOM especially. I liked everything about it except having a sexuality.

He laughed. He got the joke. I think most people wouldn't.

He had always been told he wasn't planned. He had always been told his mom "was just trying to have a good time."

He facepalmed when he got old enough to understand what that meant and so he laughed without me having to explain it, though I did anyway and, yes, he did understand.

Someone who knew me well once said to me "Everything good about you is because you had a son."

I worked for that compliment. Making my peace with my sexuality is the single hardest thing I have ever done and it probably wouldn't have happened if I didn't dearly love my children.

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