Читать книгу Finding the Sun Through the Clouds - Dawnmarie Deshaies - Страница 18

Chapter 13

Christmas Day

We dated for a year, and he proposed to me again on Christmas Day. I remember it as if it were yesterday. It was Christmas morning at his mother’s house. As Robert was giving me my presents, he handed me this giant teddy bear. With glee in my voice, I was so happy to have this cute and fluffy bear to cuddle with. Little to my awareness, everyone in the room was staring at me. I looked at Donald, then Judith, Robert, and he glanced down at the velvet bow on the teddy bear, and I saw the most beautiful diamond ring. With an enormous amount of joy and pure delight in my voice, I said, “Yes, I will marry you!” Life was good.

I would see my friends every now and then. I was the only one engaged to be married at that time. All my girlfriends were still single. My work was going well, my love life was going great, and I felt like I was living in a dream. I moved into Robert’s mother’s house to save money. This made it easy to plan the wedding together, even with us both working sixty-plus hours a week. I started to notice I was feeling off again. The phantom pains were coming back, and I was having trouble holding on to things like a cup of coffee. My hand would go numb all the time to the point of my not being able to hold anything. It was crippling, but Robert was always there, holding me if my phantoms attacked too much. I was getting a lot of headaches behind my eyes. I continued to believe they were migraines. The clusters of black spots in my vision distracted me a lot, forcing me to rest.

I decided to go visit the eye doctor, and they said I had twenty-twenty vision. I told Robert about it, and we both thought maybe it was just stress. Remember, I was working overtime, planning our dream wedding, and running on little sleep. Thank the Lord for caffeine!

So once again, no real answers were brought to the fold. The crazy phantoms of pain and fatigue going on in my body continued to run amok. Robert and I were planning the wedding when my stress continued to increase. My phantoms were always lurking in the back of my mind. They were getting worse. My moods were all over the place. I remember we were fighting over silly things. I was so emotional all the time, a warning of what it was going to be like during pregnancy. Robert was worried about me and continued telling me not to stress; this would make me so mad because he didn’t understand what was happening to me. Unfortunately, with all the misplaced anger, I couldn’t explain it either. I didn’t know why—well, yes, I do, after years of self-perception and analysis. I didn’t like people telling me what to do. I was so stubborn, and I always wanted to able to do it all. We are all human. We carry flaws with us since childhood. Learn to recognize your shortcomings, and instead of feeding them, understand them and correct them. Self-analysis was and has continued to always be helpful in my life. The feelings of others trying to hold me back from or controlling my decisions will always be one of my biggest transgressors. I was like a black stallion, wild and free, but hard worker and loyal.

Robert also didn’t like it when I wanted to go out with my girlfriends for a drink. His flaw, much like my own, was his need for attention and consistent love. Jealousy, an all-too-human trait, meant Robert wanted me to be his and no one else’s. He has improved dramatically over the years, because jealousy is a young man’s game. Loss of control in my life was forcing me to feel confined; everyone was telling me what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. I never really understood this about me at all, but I have continued to figure out my inherent flaws. All I knew was when I felt pushed into a corner, I would push back even harder. I moved out of his house and moved in to an apartment with my friend Elaine. I felt this would be better for us, without my living in his mother’s house. I needed my own space to think and to feel like Robert and everybody involved in the wedding weren’t trying to control me. He was always good at fixing broken things, but you can’t fix everything. I knew I needed to have my own space to think things through and plan our future.