you sure you got the time to hear this, Wants? i gave up veterinary school for the first husband...his law school was more important. i sold the herd of mother cows that i had bred and raised, to pay his tuition...you know where this one is going, don't you? he outgrew me after he became the city attorney in a small city..
..second husband..when we married, i worked for willie nelson and wore jeans, tee shirts, halter dresses, long skirts..kinda hippy, sorta but cooler. he started buying my clothes and it was no time til i looked just like a brooks brothers catalogue model.(we looked like twins).i loved to dance. during the courtship, we danced and danced and danced...after the marriage, no dancing.....he hunted quail and dove..he bought me a shotgun and i trekked on a weekly basis with Richard and his friends to pastures and fields..
i had a radical mastectomy, with reconstruction, when i was 31..when i had to have a revision, he arranged for me to go to a doctor that he was in Vietnam with....that happened about 6 more times. the physician would have me sitting on the examining table, nude from the waist up, and he would talk to Richard about what i needed in the way of surgery..i got ******, because it was MY body and the surgeries weren't working and i sneaked off and found a surgeon at OU...i gave up control of MY body for awhile.
i took up photography again and took a workshop in New Mexico...it set me on fire and i proceeded to produce and direct workshops that attracted people from all over the U.S. i started getting phone calls from photographers from here and there just to chat or talk about techniques.i could never talk about those friends or the workshops...
all we talked about at home was surgery and fly fishing..we went on a trip and he told me that it made him really angry that my career was taking off on a national basis and that he felt stalled in his....he had three specialities, for God's sake.
what did i give up? i gave up on myself and left that marriage without a shred of self-esteem or confidence.
i approach dating now with a 20 foot long pole and all the trepidation that one would feel if you were stepping into a pit of live rattlesnakes that didn't have their mouths wired shut..