I just put baby down for a nap and really should be cleaning right now.......

But you know how that goes.

We had our second anniversary a couple of weeks ago and I bought my husband a new bike. He had left an old rusty one locked up (we didn't have the key to the lock anymore) at our old cruddy apartment in Englewood. I told him that it wasn't worth the effort to get the lock off. It was an old rusted out piece of junk with a bent pedal that squeaked everytime he pushed. It was also way too small for him, he's 6'5", and his back hurt him whenever he rode. He was sad and told me that it had been a good bike to him these many years, but I felt that it was a good way for us to de-junk and move on. Well, a year later I suprise him with a new one, nothing special - just a Schwinn that I got at Target, not as expensive as my old one, just your basic mountain bike. He finally took it out for a spin this last weekend and came in beaming! He said that he loved it, and kept saying how nice it was, which made me very happy. But then he said something that made me pause, he said "I'm not used to having such nice things." You see when we got married he had an awful car; rusted out, smoking oil, thrashed interior, etc. etc. And when I got some money from an accident settlement we bought a used Volvo. Now he has a new bike and we are going to be moving into a nicer apartment. He grew up poor (I did too), and his parents have apparently never had a nice car, or things like that. But the thing is that we didn't spend a ton of money on these things, and believe me we are still living poor, and we have used cars, don't buy a lot of things all the time and try to live within our means. I guess the idea that has been going through my mind is that sometimes I think that we don't allow ourselves to have nicer things if we grew up without money. I think that this kind of feeling that " I don't deserve better" or " This is all I can get" can really limit people. We could have spent the same amount of money on a junky car believing that that was all we could get, instead of looking at other options and finding the deal that we did.
It makes me think of the relationships that I have had in the past. I used to think that I only attracted certain types of men because that was all I deserved. I dated men very similar to my father, carless and or reckless with money, arrogant, demeaning to me and manipulative. I would let these men, one in particular, take over my life and wreak havoc. Then one day while bemoaning my fate I realised that perhaps the reason that I seemed to only attract these jerks and not the good guys was because I thought that was all I could get, or all that I deserved, because I wasn't perfect. I decided to change my attitude about what I deserved, and started trying to convince myself that I deserved a nice man because I was a nice woman. And wouldn't you know it, within a month really decent guys began to ask me out. I don't know what changed, was it how I carried myself, or did my whole aura change? I had some nice boyfriends and was even engaged to someone for a while, and though it didn't work out(painfully so), he never treated me badly.
A few years later I met my husband who is one of the most decent, talented and hard working men I have ever known. And though I constantly fight the urge to self-loath, I remind myself that even though I grew up poor(bad example of a father), and am not rich now ( my imperfections ) I can still find a good deal If I am willing to look in new places and open my self to new possibilities.