So I am Ashley. I have had an....interesting life. I am going to tell you about it, and then I am going to basically make this my journal and certain people can sift through it, experience my life, and then maybe give some good advice or idk maybe not treat me the way they do.

So as a child I grew up in Bradford, PA with a mother who was a dancer(exotic kind), and an estranged father whom I only know his name. I had a "Dad" (guy who raised me) named Darren who I love dearly, and then later had a step dad who was a big fat pile of garbage and I'll touch on that later. So as a child of a dancer you can imagine that I only really saw my mom for a few hours a day. Basically she woke up in the early afternoon and I saw her til shortly after dinner time. I didn't learn at that age what she was doing, she didn't tell me til later. We lived in a two bedroom house that generally housed a large number of people. Mostly family, or random teenagers who needed a home and my mother would adopt. Before she married d-bag she was a certified foster mother. I vaguely remember having a nanny...she was nice I am pretty sure, and that's when I knew that my mom was making some pretty decent money dancing.

I assume she left due to husband of doom but still I am kinda glad she did. So she married the asshat. Everything went to shit from there. He moved in the second they started dating basically, she brought him with her to meet me when I was in DuBoise, PA visiting my uncle. Didn't learn that he was a fucking asshole til a few months later. He put on a pretty good show at first, but then slowly he made sure I had very little contact with my mother. I was made to play outside or upstairs, never aloud to just watch cartoons or hangout with my mom. If I asked her a question, he answered. Then they got married and it got worse. He left for a while to look for work and that meant he left the state sometimes. This made my life get somewhat better. I had kind of forgotten how much he used to take from us. Then my mom got a call from him saying he got a job in Minnesota and that he has bought us a house. This ruined my whole world. How did this man get the right to take me from my family? My Dad, Grandma, Aunts, Uncle!! Why is it his choice?! So me being 8 years old didn't have a say. I was uprooted and moved to MN all because he was more important. We never left, still in MN as we speak, I am not bitter anymore because I have a great life now but at the time and for quite a long time after I was a very pissed off little girl.

So we lived together in St.Peter, MN for about 10 years and as stated before he and his d-baggery continued to ruin all things good in my life. He started lying to my mother, telling her I did things that never even happened to try to get me in trouble. He would still answer any question I asked HER, and she let him. I will give her credit that she stood up for me a decent amount of time but the times she didn't made me slowly start to hate her. He made a very good amount of money and yet when I needed something he made damn sure I knew how little I deserved it. When we had to go school shopping I got the bare minimum and the worst clothing ever. Eventually I got to get somewhat nice clothes and that's only because Wal-Mart didn't make jeans or shirts that fit me anymore because I have insanely long legs and a weirdly long torso. Basically, beam pole. So it was nice that one of the higher end stores in the mall was the only store that made pants to fit me. Very feminine clothes that made me finally feel good about myself.

Its funny looking back at these times and thinking, gee Mom did you ever look at all this and say "Oh hey, I'll bet this is why she acted out as a teenager." ? No probably not. So where were we? Ah yes, so when I started getting nice clothes was also when I started finally going to middle/high school which by this time I had already started acting out, going out to my friends houses all the time (not the good kind of friends either), lying about where I was, started smoking cigarettes at 13 so basically it was no surprise when I failed 7th grade. She switched me to a different school because St.Peter refused to hold me back. I should definately note that through about the 2nd year I was in MN to now I was spending a vast majority of my time with my best friend Bonnie. She tried to keep me out of trouble but when she couldn't she endured my bad decisions with me. She also had a shitty mother so we became sisters and helped each other through life.

So in the middle of my Cleveland high school career my mother finally divorced the monster. The reason for the divorce was because one night she was out with my Aunt Laurie and she had previously told me that I could go out with friends, he decided after she was gone that I could no longer go. We got into a huge argument and he pushed me into the stairs. He realized that I was pissed and that I would call my mom and tell her what he did. I got up and ran out of the house freaking out. I ran to the park that was a block away and called my boyfriend at the time first (another poor life choice of mine) and told him what happened and he came there. I tried calling my mother and finally got through to her as I was walking to my brother's apartment. I told her what happened and she told me to stay at my brothers. I few weeks later she was divorced and we were all packed up to go. Since she didn't let me help her pack I lost alot of my stuff because she left it behind in her attempt to get out as soon as possible.

We lived with her friend Carissa for a while and that was shitty, but I wasn't there most of the time being that it was summer break and I was out with friends, not really seeing my mom much. My brother had went back to PA to live til this all blew over because he can't live alone it turns out. (The apartment didn't work out since he couldn't really remember to clean) So finally she got an apartment there in town and my brother moved back. She got a job in Mankato and eventually we moved there to a better apartment. I was still acting up, Bonnie and I drifted apart for a little while since she still lived in St.Peter, went to a different school, and neither of us drove (well one of us didn't and one of us wasn't legal to) so we didn't see each other much. My bad behavior turned into illegal acts. 5 driving without a license tickets in a short period of time, lots of court for it, fines which I had to work off in community service hours, and partying alot. I also had a narcotic addiction to a medication I was prescribed for my anxiety and depression problems. I had two medications for it, one a long term, and one a very fast acting downer that helps get rid of panic attacks. As you can imagine I was addicted to the second. I spent about 3 years of my life high.

I dating some unsightly people one of them being a man named Zach, to call him a man is kind of an insult to all men but I guess it is what it is. We spent 2 years on and off basically ruining each others lives. We lived together in the begining (not to my mother's knowledge being that I was a minor) which brings me to another point I forgot to mention, the only reason I was able to live with him is because if my mom got pissed, instead of parenting she would just kick me out. Don't know what mother can live with making her daughter homeless but I guess mine can. So anyway, we lived together for about 5 months til the cheating and stupidity became too much on both our parts. I left with his roommate and he went to jail for got knows what. His roommate Jeff and I were together for a few months til my mom found out his age and I found him with a "friend". Zach and I got back together but didn't live together. I was living with a "friend" for a very long time, Zach would come to "visit" (aka come for sex, promise he would spend more time together and then only come for sex again) We never hung out at his house, which was because he was living with his girlfriend that he claimed was only a friend (im not stupid) and my friends didn't want him at their house because they we trying their hardest to get me to leave him.

My drug addiction continued and so few knew about it. My friend Gina's boyfriend knew, he walked in on me snorting pills off my window sill, but Gina didn't really know she just thought me being a weirdo was part of me. Which i suppose it was but when fighting the calm of downers it gives you an intense high that makes reality a wholly different place. Zach never knew and I made sure to keep it that way since he would get pissed at me for just smoking pot. Gina and her boyfriend Dale had some issues in their relationship, he didn't like her friends which was understandable, they were mostly all stoners, liars, and thieves, but Gina didn't care she just wanted to have fun and basically forget the fact that she was a teen mom to a child she never wanted. I helped raise that child with Dale's aid and Gina's mother's too. Gina eventually started cheating on him and they broke up off and on. Eventually Dale broke it off for good (or so he thought). By this time I had started going to therapy to help make myself better, to stop lying and stop doing things that were against the law. We connected on MSN Messenger (who the eff uses that anymore lol) and I went to hang out with him.

However, taking a step back a few months..... I had hooked up with a guy named Josh (I will hate that name for life.) and he gave me some horribly shitty tattoos, and then got me pregnant at 17 years old. When I finally told my mother she kicked me out again, then told me I would never have a place to live if I didn't get an abortion. I thought it over, knowing that if I stay pregnant there was no way I could give her up (she's a girl in all my dreams of her named Isabella Rose Yost) so I let my mother bully me into an abortion. This is and will always be the biggest regret of my entire life. So my daughter would be 4 years old now in September, and in my mind I celebrate her day all by myself.

A week after the abortion is when Dale and I started talking, he knew I was pregnant because he was still with Gina when I had told her the news. Josh had left and said he wanted nothing to do with me or the child so I was alone. I told Dale finally when I went to his mothers to hang out with him for the weekend. He wasn't very happy, saying that he would've helped me had I stayed pregnant but I knew it wasn't his burden to bare. We were together for two months, the entire time Gina was emailing him telling him she changed and wanted him back (blah blah blah) and he left me to go back to her, needing to make sure that there wasn't something there. I couldn't blame him since he loved her for a year and a half and for it to be over you have to know for sure. They were only together a week and she couldn't choose between him and the man she was cheating on him with. Dale came back to me. We got married on March 3rd, 2011.

In April of 2010 I got a blood clot in my lung and almost died. Dale saved my life by rushing me to the hospital when I started having chest pain. He had to give me blood thinner injections for two weeks and I had to take blood thinner pills for a few months. They found out that there was a tumor in my back at that time as well but after MRI's and scans decided that it wasn't cancer. I started getting better and eventually after we were married in 2011 I became pregnant with my beautiful son Achilles. I had to take more blood thinners during my pregnancy because of the higher risk of another blood clot but still my son was born very healthy. He is almost 2 years old now and is very big and very healthy. Now the only problems in my life are depression and unemployment.

We currently live in my mother in law's living room because we got kicked out of my mother's house. (Sound familiar?) She claimed we weren't paying her enough money when I gave her money for propane, I paid up her electric bill which she hadn't paid in months, I paid for her to get a new IPhone, and I put $545 in food stamps into her house. I then finally got a job at Home Depot with her and I was only there a month when she kicked us out. My life was finally starting to look up, I was going to be able to pay her rent soon, but first I got Dale and I phones because my mom couldn't pay to keep ours on even with a job because she decided to add a car payment onto monthly bills that she already couldn't pay. I needed a phone because I had a 1 year old at home and if something happened to him and no one could get ahold of me I would've killed someone. So she got mad that I paid for phones before I paid her.

I knew the money wouldn't go to bills because I already knew she was hiding money and not paying her bills. She would tell me that she paid them but then I would find hidden bills in her car. I would find texts on her phone from the phone company, not paid, the loan she took out, not paid. So we came back to live with my mother in law and there were no rooms open anymore due to a big rearrange so that Deb wouldn't fall coming down the stairs anymore. I knew we had no where else to go so I sucked it up and took it. But after 5 or so months here I've come to realize that I am always angry, I am depressed, I am alone. My husband and I rarely spend time together. We only talk a few times a day. My son has developed an attitude problem because his cousin (Mariana 6 years old) has no discipline, doesn't do what she's told, talks back, and is just all around not very nice. So he has that to look up too every day. I try to tell her not to do the things I don't want him to learn and she will listen until an hour later she's back to doing the same thing.

No one seems to get this fact because she hits her dad all the time and kicks him but then when my son his her, he's the naughty one. My husband play fights with both of them, he's the naughty one. I try to say I don't want him to do something, they tell him he can. Don't eat candy, here have some candy. Nothing I say matters. My goal is to have the surgery next month (April), get better, get a job, and have our apartment by June or July. I have had this goal for 4 years.... Maybe just maybe it will happen this time. If it doesn't I don't really know what will happen. I just know that I can't take much more. I feel like a ghost here. Like no one cares about my needs or wants. Dale acts different here because his mommy gives him whatever he wants, follows everything he says, and cares about no one else besides her kids and her grandkids. She never liked me from the start, she said we would never get married. Then when we did, we gave them a days notice and they didn't show up. Eventually she came around only because I was carrying her grandson.

Well that pretty much brings us up to current life for me. That's my story, maybe some of you will understand me better. Maybe when you think of me not working you'll know that I try every single day to find work even when I know I have a surgery in a few weeks and will be out for 3 weeks, I still try in hopes that I will have work to go to the minute I am healed. It's a vain hope, but I sitll try. I try HARD for everything I do. I try my hardest to be a good mother, I try my hardest to be a good wife, and I try my hardest just to be a good person. So think what you will, but learn about me before you judge.

Ashley R Nelson 2014