I had a post years ago elsewhere titled A Tale of Two Sisters. Without looking it up, I'm quite sure the content of the piece was substantially different from this one.
There's a book called My Mother, Myself. I've never read it though I've read magazine articles talking about it. It's apparently about women struggling to find themselves in youth and figure out who they are that is distinct from their mother.
I never went through that with my mother. I went through that with my sister.
She and I were both STAR student of our graduating class. I was inducted into Mu Alpha Theta, a math honor society, while she was inducted into the national honor society. We were National Merit Scholarship winners to the same prestigious university, UGA, one of the top two universities in our home state.
Well my home state. She's a German born bastard who had to be naturalized at age five. I'm born and raised in Georgia.
She accepted her scholarship to UGA. I ultimately declined mine and this is the start of our life paths diverging and me sorting out who I am other than the also ran STAR student living in my sister's shadow and following in her foot steps but with worse test scores and lower grades and not much liked by the same teachers who adored her.
I got married young to a guy whose only dream was a military career. I ended up following in my mother's footsteps without really intending to or initially realizing it in spite of my mother doing everything in her power to try to sabotage my desire to be like her.
My mom's first pregnancy was unplanned and the child was born shortly after my mother's 22nd birthday. My first child was unplanned and born shortly after my 22nd birthday. We both had a second child roughly 2.5 years later. We both were army wives a long time who ultimately didn't end up living where our husbands each planned to live post military retirement.
My parents were both extremely big on the importance of the welfare of the children, something touched on previously. I inherited their commitment to this value.
I met my sister's first husband when I was fourteen and my sister was twenty one and dating him. My initial impression was "He's a CREEP."
But I was fourteen, she was twenty one and in college and knew him better than I did. I said nothing and assumed that there must be something I was missing.
Fast forward a decade or so and I'm living in Germany as a military wife and talking on the phone with my sister and I say to her "I've known for some time you're a prisoner of your marriage."
She filed for divorce mere weeks later and eventually told me that was such a shocking revelation, she DROPPED the phone. And she also told me my one sentence remark is why she got divorced.
Mr. CREEP brutally assaulted her for leaving him and left her significantly permanently impaired with medical issues from the assault. I did my best to be supportive and not criticize her in the aftermath of this horrible event.
One year, I spent something like six hours on the phone with her on the anniversary of the assault so she wouldn't be alone. I told her once that I felt bad about not being there for her after the incident because I was living in Germany.
She told me "You WERE there!" And said that everything I shared with her about my therapeutic process protected her psychologically from the worst of it DURING the assault.
She said she understood that it wasn't really about sex. Whether it was his fist or his penis, the point was to hurt her.
She soon was seriously involved with someone else and her statements about that relationship do suggest that for a survivor of such a brutal sexual assault, her sex life was relatively only very lightly impacted.
So I said little or nothing about her new boyfriend who struck me as not much, if any, better than her first husband and I didn't try to talk her out of marrying him.
I figured that she was a grown assed adult and if my opinion about her personal life was wanted, she could ASK. And she never did.
So I mostly politely watched this debacle from afar, living elsewhere and getting reports by phone whenever she chose to dump on me at length about his latest garbage.
They met on the job while living in Middle Georgia. During her divorce, she got a new job, sold her house -- and it was HER house because, in order to qualify for a mortgage, her husband had to sign away his rights to the house because his credit was so bad -- and moved elsewhere.
Her new job was in South Carolina in the middle of fuck nowhere and the nearest development was small towns. Her new creepy assed boyfriend had lived in Atlanta and talked endless trash about rural people and small towns while being a monied uncouth hick due to his mother marrying her UNCLE for his money after her first husband (his father) died, so, you know, the guy had issues.
Not a blood relation. Just the former husband of a blood relation who used to bounce her on his knee when she was a kid.
No big.
Anyway, because her new boyfriend was a stuck up big city guy, she rented an apartment in Augusta, Georgia, one of the three largest cities in Georgia and had a long commute to work and paid taxes in two states for the next few years in order to play siren to this guy because her biological clock was TICKING LIKE THIS.
And when she needed to buy a house before some work based benefit expired, she found the perfect house for the two of them and asked him to move to Augusta. He declined and she bought a different house because she couldn't afford that house entirely on her own.
He later did move to Augusta and declined to move in with her. He rented an apartment and bought himself a huge bedroom set similar to a German shrank, a more masculine styled version of HER German shrank style bedroom set -- only queen sized instead of king sized like hers, subtext for who wears the pants in their marriage and always will.
She still couldn't get a commitment out of him and her biological clock is getting steadily louder and she tells him "I don't want to see you this coming week. I need to think about my future." and shortly thereafter she's got an engagement ring and marriage proposal.
So he proceeds to buy a stupidly big house with giant bedrooms to accommodate their TWO insanely big bedroom sets and in line with the fact that she's been through fertility treatments for years without conceiving, so she may never have a child. Besides, like his skank ho mother, he married for money and was rapidly running up the credit card debt that TWO salaries could service.
They still owned the other house. They rented it out and eventually moved back to it after finally having a child.
My opinion: She should have thought about her future when her asshole boyfriend told her "No, I'm not moving to Augusta and living in a house that would be perfect for the both of us because my skank ass mom with money from an incestuous marriage doesn't really approve of you and her weirdo version of events is that you killed your first husband and you'll kill me too."
Because following the brutal assault, her first husband shot himself when the police showed up to arrest him and -- oopsie!! -- shredded his heart into little pieces and died because he bought hollow point bullets to hunt down and murder my little sister -- I'm taller than her and outweigh her and I'm more athletic -- and that's what hollow point bullets do. They shred and rattle around inside the body and do a lot of internal damage rather than going in, going out and having a clean exit wound.
He fancied himself a writer. She's certain he didn't intend to commit suicide because there was no twelve page suicide note.
The cops ran the test on her to see if she had recently shot a gun. No, she hadn't. She didn't kill him. He accidentally killed himself while trying to poetically say to the world "This evil bitch who paid off all my mountains of student loans while I delivered newspapers and played at someday being a famous writer, has SHOT ME THROUGH THE HEART by bitchily divorcing my ass and you need to understand my pain here!!!!!!"
Because some people are NUTS.
So then she does a SECOND round of fertility treatments with husband two and it's not working so her doctor skips to the chase and rather than spending several more years cautiously increasing dosage, jacks up my sister's ovaries like there's no tomorrow with high amounts of drugs. She don't play.
Result: Pregnancy.
But also a baseball sized ovarian cyst that could have cost my sister her life or the baby and for which she spent much of her pregnancy bedridden in order to try to keep the baby. Her other option was surgery but that likely would have resulted in miscarriage so she said "No, just leave a softball sized bag of poison in me and let my muscles wither away while my asshole husband can't be arsed to call me on his cell phone to ASK what I wanted when he goes to pick up takeout for me since I can't leave the bed and my welfare and the welfare of our unborn child matter so little to him."
Here's the thing. She's college educated and used to routinely send me papers via snail mail before the Internet ate my life about fertility studies because she went through fertility treatments with her first marriage and she ended up going through fertility treatments with her second marriage as well.
So I know from MY SISTER that a vastly more effective way than modern fertility drugs to get pregnant is to sleep around with multiple partners. If you roll the genetic dice often enough, odds are good you will get a MATCH and the result will be a BABY.
And given that she made money like a man AND was brutally assaulted by her husband for trying to leave him, I think a wiser move less likely to ruin her health permanently would be to go bar hopping, cry on the shoulders of random men about this giant sob story and end up letting them comfort her in bed... until -- OOPSIE!! -- she's knocked up. Then like "get religion" and clean up her act and stop acting like the town ho "for the sake of the baby."
I eventually got divorced and I used to dream about my job as "my husband." I was working for the man and I was married to the job because basically my paycheck from work replaced my husband's role of providing for me financially.
I have no fucking clue why successful career women who make money like a man put up with shit from men. I know for a fact if you aren't paying my bills and I can pay them myself, I'm not putting up with the kind of shit so many women put up with.
Pro tip: if you are a White American woman poisoned by "You can never be too rich or too thin" culture, studies show that if you skinny White bitches GAIN FIVE POUNDS you may be able to get knocked up without fertility treatments.
And a word to the wise: Maybe luring some guy into MARRYING you "because I want a baby" isn't necessary nor the best move ethically, practically or health wise.
In a heteronormative world, random men you barely know will sleep with you FOR THE SEX.
Rest assured, if you turn up pregnant unintentionally, many men will be happy to tell you "Get an abortion! Not my problem! I was just trying to have a good time and don't care at all how much damage my orgasm does to YOUR life, stupid ho."
So maybe not your problem if man whores can't figure out where babies come from, prefer bareback to using a condom but would object if they knew ahead of time "Honey, I'm just using you as a dirt cheap sperm donor."
If you aren't planning on asking them for child support, why the hell should anyone care?
Though perhaps think about what you will tell the child who may want to know who their father is someday, if only for medical reasons.