by Monica L. Garrett

Created on: July 02, 2009

To acquaintances my mother's life looked ideal. She was married to a man who wanted only to provide for her and keep her happy. She had a nice home with a custom swimming pool, a nice vehicle and money to shop, dine out and attend events. She had never worked and she had nothing but free time. Women in the community envied her.

What could be better than this wonderful home and comfortable life that she was living? Happiness. Money can't buy happiness. I never thought that my mother would walk away from the comfortable life her husband had provided her. She had financial security for life and she seemed to have everything she could ask for.

To my dismay, my mother wasn't happy. I couldn't imagine how she could be unhappy. She had remodeled the house the way she wanted. Her hobby was interior decorating and her friend's envied how beautiful her home was. They often told her it looked like a home from a magazine. The swimming pool sparkled in the back yard. Frogs chirped from the small pond she had created nearby.

How could my mother be so unhappy that she cried herself to sleep at night? I didn't understand. I didn't think I would ever understand. As the events of the following years unfolded, I was amazed. I was in shock and I felt as if I didn't know my mother at all. Her crazy behaivor over the years to follow would all come down to one thing: her love for her boyfriend.

My mother, who had been married for several years and had spoke of never wanting another man in her life, had a boyfriend. She had fallen in love with someone she claimed took her breath away. Suddenly, my middle-aged mother was acting like a love-struck teenager. Friends and family looked at her life from the outside and couldn't understand the events that were taking place.

Friends were concerned that my mother was never happy. Family witnessed the tension in my mother's home. She was angry and sad and started fights with her husband. No one understood what was going on. I didn't understand. I just watched in dismay as my mother filed for divorce, packed everything she owned and moved it all to storage.

When my mother chose to sleep in her car in another county rather than come "home", I was confused. I was aggravated. How could she choose to be homeless when she had a home? Why was it that her belongings were in storage units in another county? What was happening to my mother's life?

It all started to unravel as my mother explained that she

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