I come from a prodigious and relatively convoluted family. My mother and father were married before they met and got married. From these marriages come my two older half-sisters, one from my mother's first marriage, the other from my father's first marriage. When their first marriages failed, my father and mother met and married, and then myself and my three biological brothers were brought into the world. After fourteen years of marriage, my parents divorced. Shortly after their divorce, my mother and father found themselves in new marriages. When my father married my stepmother, I had two half-brothers. Eventually, once my mother remarried for the third time, my half-sister was born into the family. Complicated would be too mild a word to describe growing up in such a family. The end of my parents' marriage was due, in part, to my mother's infidelity. My brothers and I were caught in the middle of an intense marital war on a daily basis. My childhood was steeped in hostility and animosity. One would assume that with this type of environment and the obvious neglect of beneficial relationships, I too would struggle to maintain a healthy relationship with the opposite sex. This hypothesis would be correct. It wasn't until my mother-in-law came into the picture that I understood what a normal, healthy, loving relationship looked like. However, the damage was done, the trust was gone, and my heart was irrevocably damaged. The lasting effects of a nasty divorce on a child are pretty strange if you ask me. As if my mother leaving after the divorce wasn't enough, it was only a short time before my father and stepmother rekindled the romance they had had. lost almost twenty years ago. Everything...... middle of paper ......sively. I am proud to say that who I was in the past is not who I am today. I have spent the last five years of my life trying to reshape the way I think and live the life God intended for me, instead of the life I wanted for myself. It’s no coincidence that once I dedicated my life to God and chose to live for Him and strive to be like Him, my life changed. I am now more aware of what will happen if I choose to approach conflict with hostility. I see things in a new light and I have a role model who will always teach me the right way to handle people and situations. I also learned to take what was in my past and turn it into something much better. I will definitely make sure to raise my daughter to understand how to handle conflict in a healthy way and I will pray that she is better at relationships than I ever was.!