Eleven

The courtship started around New Years. We'd been casually seeing each other for about a month. When my birthday came around shortly after, Short & Squatty bought me a gold watch. I was impressed, flattered, and floored at the same time. So he likes my kid, he remembers my birthday, *and* he buys expensive gifts? This was sounding better and better. Then Valentine's Day rolled around and this time he showed up bearing matching gold earrings and a big box of candy. What's this? He remembers holidays, too? *And* buys more expensive gifts? C'mon! How can this guy be bad?

Besides the obvious, I was also smitten with the attention he was affording me. Nobody had ever invested that much thought in me and, honestly, I was scared. Aside from not knowing how to react to it, I was also scared of never experiencing it again. I was scared that nobody else would accept me and my daughter ever again. I didn't want to lose this new and lovely thing I was feeling because it was so different from anything I'd ever known. It wasn't love. I think it was happiness. Or relief. I don't know, but I liked it very much.

Given that people had laid so much shit on me during the previous three years about how my daughter would never have a normal life with a single mother caring for her, I was genuinely convinced that Short & Squatty was my only hope. People had told me so many horiffic things that I believed them. So I couldn't do anything else, but latch on to this guy in an attempt to prove them all wrong. To show them that somebody would have me and, more importantly, somebody would give enough of a damn about my kid to make a life for her. I knew, or I thought, that I had that chance right at my fingertips and there was no way I was going to pass it up - regardless of what it cost me.

I pressed him to get us out of my parents' house. I lied to him and told him that I loved him and that I wanted for us to be a family. I didn't do it out of malice. I did it out of love - for my daughter. I was trying to do the right thing for her instead of doing the best thing for all of us. Complete tunnel vision. All I saw was her future. I didn't have time to realize that I was giving up my own in the process.