03/31/98

**I'm pulling this verbatim from my journal. I'm not sure how I can paraphrase it or make it sound any better than it was already written to be.**

Well it's been about four months since I last wrote anything. Four months of pure hell might I add. Yes, DH and I are still together. However he's not clean. Then why am I still with him? I ask myself that once a day, really I do.

But I love him, more than anything else in the world. But there are so many times I just think, I want out, God help me. But then I see him or I talk to him and I fall in love all over again. Without him I don't feel whole, but with him I often feel empty.

Right now I don't think he's talking to me because of the latest pot incident. I just wish so much he'd get his act together and at least stop lying to me. I love him, and nothing he can say or do, besides cheating on me, will make me love him any less.

Who knows, maybe that's the wrong attitude to have. Maybe I should just do what MIL says and drop him and find myself. But I don't want to. I want to love him, I do love him. And so life stays complicated, at least for now.

************************

If only I could go back. If only I could leave the journal where my mother could find it or someone... ANYONE who could shake that 17 year old me and tell me over and over that I am worth SO much more than that.

Somewhere, somehow I convinced myself that love was all that mattered. If I loved him then I HAD to stay with him. Oh how I wish I could take that back now....