On day four, you wrote a post about losing something. Today’s Prompt: write about finding something.

So, I’m supposed to relate this post to the one in which I lost something, which can be found here.

Alright, I lost that very important box of things the day that my husband and I moved into that crappy little apartment.  Except that was before we were married.  So then he was just my boyfriend, and we were moving in together on a strictly temporary basis.  He was looking for a place for just him and our younger daughter, who was then just his daughter.  I just wanted out of this terrible apartment complex I’d been living in up until then.

There were obvious issues with my first apartment.  It was too small, the walls were so thin I could hear my neighbors shaving.  The landlady was a control freak that conducted inspections and threatened to evict people if their house wasn’t as clean as ‘she’ wanted it to be.  It was like living in a college dorm, with the housemother Hell kicked out for being too much of a bitch to the sinners.

It was also not an apartment that I chose.  I moved out on my own within one month of turning eighteen.  I wanted to stay in my mom’s place for another year, because I had a three month old and another year of high school.  I wanted to have a job, and a way to support myself.  Instead, my mom walked me by the hand down to apply for welfare benefits, and get an apartment of my own in the HUD sponsored housing that we were already living in.  I was still with my evil ex at the time, and he even got a job for a month or two.  My mom offered to watch my older daughter while I was in school, (if I paid her).  I thought everything would work out fine, because ‘smarter people than me’ had told me what to do, and I had listened to them.

Nothing turned out right.  My ex’s job didn’t last, and I couldn’t handle going to school, and raising a baby, and keeping a home of my own with no forethought as to how that actually worked.  The people that had been so quick to tell me what I should do with my life were equally as quick to not help me at all once I’d listened to them.  So there I was, in an apartment I hated, with no income at all, holding a baby that depended on me for everything, when I didn’t have anyone to depend on at all.

Now we get to the part where I found something.  My strength, and my spine.  I got a job, a really crappy one.  I sorted trash, washed cars, washed dishes.  Eventually I got a job at a local health food store, which helped me get a job at GNC, where I rose to the rank of manager.  That let me get a better management job at a shoe store.  Along the way, I kicked my ex out, and met my current husband.  And, I started writing again, like I’d wanted to when I was a kid.

When we moved into that first apartment together, it was just supposed to be me and my older daughter.  We thought we weren’t ready to be a family yet.  We both wanted to make sure we were okay on our own before we committed to being okay as one family.

Well, that didn’t work.  We found that it was really nice having the other person there when we woke up.  We got a cat, Harper, the one from my picture last week.  There was a pregnancy scare that didn’t really scare us so bad, and was a real disappointment when we found out it wasn’t real.  The girls went from ‘your kid,’ and ‘my kid,’ to ‘our kids.’  I found my voice, my strength.  I spent a lot of time deciding what sort of woman I wanted to be.  Then, my family sort of built itself around that.

We moved again a few years after that.  This time, we picked the home together.  We’re still there.  Three bedrooms, a bathroom I fell in love with on sight.  This fluffy shag carpet that I hated until I took my shoes off and walked around on it barefoot.

I lost so much of my past in the last ten years.  Most of it’s better off gone, but not all of it.  What I’ve found instead, is my place in the greater scheme of things, and my family.