God is good to me and I am happy to have faith for this new year 2010

I still don't have the skills to make a really beautiful blog with all the bells and whistles but I do ty to speak from the heart. I have had a difficult start to the new year but I am relying on my faith in God to pick me up so that I can be ready to take care of my grandchildren and my daughters have a mom to come to. I lost my mom when I was in my early 20's and I remember praying to God that I could live long enough for my children to reach age 20. I had a very abusive husband and I just couldn't leave my 2 precious girls with him because he was a sick man and he couldn't do it. I kept praying for him and hoped for 25 years that God would change him but I finally believed that as long as I stayed there with him my husband would never turn to God. It is kind of a strange thing that I was married to him for 25 years and 2 years later he is dying with lung cancer and I end up going back to the home we worked on for 6 years together and I stayed with him to care for him until his last day. It took about 3 months for him to pass away and during that time I never saw my husband happier in all my married years. He was so extremely happy to have me home with him that he would look over to me and say how nice this was to be together with my daughters watching a movie on a Saturday nite. I am so happy that it did end this way because I did see a change in my husband and I got to sing to him every nite that he was scared and layng in his hospital bed which we had set up in the living room. It was a terribly hard thing to do to watch someone you love leave this earth and watch cancer eat him up as he tried so hard to live. Even the hospice nurse that came to the house to check on him couldn't believe how hard he fought to live and she cried when he died. It is too bad that you don't realize what you have until it is gone. My husband had loved me even though he never came home, and he treated me like a trained dog and I don't want to go into details on the years of abuse. It is just too much to dwell on the bad. I just want to concentrate on the good that did come out of this. My 2 wonderful daughters and my 2 gtrandchildren. I learned that my husband wasn't mean and the way he was because he was an alcoholic but he had a real depression and mental illness issue that he never realized and of couse I didn't either. I just thought he was a very mean man who treated our daughters horribly. Many people would say how lucky I was to have a husband to help me look after my children but I wouldn't say anything but inside I would think if they only knew how hard it actualy was for me to have a husband that hurt me and my girls so much!!! I know that people don't undersgtand. I was from Canada and when I moved to Chicago with my husband in 1985 I had no money, no green card to get a job with and of course without any money no way to move my girls back to Canada. I certainly couldn't see how my children would go through that big change in schools and live a much different economic life that we had been accustomed to. My husband did well in his job because I helped (enabled) him to keep it for 25 years and he climbed the ladder to making a very good income and I didn't want to fight with him over what he loved the most, his money. He would always threaten to take my children and leave with them and I would never see them again.

I just am sad that my husband never got the help he needed to be a happy person but it is the mentally ill that will never seek help because they don't believe or see that they need the help. When I left my husband after 25 years he had never opened a can of soup, ran the dishes or clean his clothes or go to the grocery store. He was so totally dependant on me to do everything in his life for him. I cooked, cleaned, paid the bills, hired the maintenance men to fix whatever was broken in our home or with the car, and even packed his bags for him for his business trips. the trips were my girls and my relief from the stress of life with an alcoholic with mental issues. I have fibromyalgia now and 8 percent of the people that have this disease have been abused in their life. I hope to shed some light on this disease and the disease of addiction and to help those who need hope to find it in a God that is ready and waiting to hear their prayers anytime they want to. God is good and without Him in my life I don't know how I would have made it? God saved my life so many times and I will write about this as time goes by this year! It is kind of healing to jsut write about my life without the worry of it being perfect and just being honest in what I write.

Good night and God bless you if you are hurting emotionally or physically!!!

Joni :-)