Sometimes it's hard for people to understand that there is a difference between the past and the present. To see the truth from illusion, or fact from fiction. To a certain extent, I kind of can understand how that happened, and I suppose that some of the fault is mine.

This: the image I gave of not wanting anything to do with family, with hearth and home. I didn't want the white picket fence lifestyle, and I had no compunctions about verbalizing my belief in not being tied to the barefoot and pregnant image.

And while that's all well and good. Not wanting to be co-dependent, and not wanting to be stuck at home making babies and waiting hand and foot on someone?

I ask for all of you idiot men to stop, sit down and think about the *actual* reality of the person that is me. Not the words that I say. Not the image you think you have in your heads. The *actual* reality, of the person who actually ended up being me.

Because that person? Was, in the end, not the person you seem to think that you knew. I've spent the last six months fighting tooth and nail, being sick with hormones swimming in my bloodstream, to insure that I can have babies. Healthy babies. This, from a woman who has mocked, heavily, for years the idea of children. As is common knowledge. But I spent months making damned sure my reproductive system works now, because it just about destroyed me to lose a child, because of the damage to my only working ovary. Not that I'm infected with baby rabies, and looking to get knocked up. But I'm not sitting here doing the 'children are worthless and a waste of oxygen' song, either.

I never chased the verbal dream of marriage and family, no. Never espoused the burning desire to take care of a man. But I got up, every morning, and made sure someone ate. Did laundry. Kept the house clean. And not in a halfhearted, half-assed fashion. Kept the whole place clean, and cooked meals, and took care of the person I loved. Made certain they had what they needed so they could go to work, every day. To keep them in good health. To try and make them happy.

But I never said the a word about wanting to be married. Spoke against it, in fact. My actions and my words, they didn't match. My failing, perhaps. I can write, beautifully, if I need to. But when it comes to verbalizing what is going on, with a partner? I fail.

And no one ever looked at my actions, to see that I was doing all of the necessary things, to be a good partner, that would have made a good wife. That in the end, given time, things would have smoothed out. It doesn't matter who that person would have been, because they never look and see me. They always see some type of shade of who I was, or who they remember. Or worse yet, who they expected me to be, and not the reality of me.

Part of that, that's my fault. Because I can't get those all-important words out. But part of that is a lack of actually looking *at* me, and seeing who I am, and not who they expect to see, or who they wanted me to be, because it was easier for them to cast me aside if I was still someone else. Someone they were still angry at. Someone I wasn't anymore. It doesn't really matter anymore, who it is they were looking at, that isn't me.

The point is, that person? Isn't me. And none of them looked. A lot of people don't.

People, and it isn't specific to me, tend to look at their loved ones, their friends, their families. They see what they expect to see. It isn't fair. It isn't right. People change, they grow, they mature, and become something different with time and changes in circumstances. And when nobody bothers to look to see if something has evolved, they're going to get what they always got.

And not necessarily because it's accurate. Simply because they never bothered to look at reality, instead of the illusion they placed there, themselves.