Didn't Expect

I used to think I'd be a great singer and tour the world with Michael W. Smith or Third Day or someone equally appealing. I also thought I'd be a famous writer, with writings of my heart and soul plastered on the pages of crisp white paper for the whole world to see.
Then, as time went on I thought I'd be a wife to an amazing man who treated me like a queen and worshiped the ground I walked on. Together we'd have a few children and maybe a dog. I'd stay home caring for other's children while my husband went off to work every day and I'd be the craft goddess of the world. 
My husband and I would love each other through every smile and tear, every good time and struggle. We'd love our children even more and give them a quality life full of experiences that families have; without spoiling them rotten and with making sure they were disciplined but loved...
Never did I imagine that I'd marry a drug addict/alcoholic who offered nothing but lies and cheating, and would choose everything over me and our children.
Never did I imagine having the children and having to raise them myself while fighting off demons in a war against myself (and the husband's too). I didn't imagine that instead of experiences, my children would get a mother who, some days can barely function and who would be perfectly content staying in pajamas, watching Netflix, and cuddling with her pillow all day.
I didn't expect to struggle with how to work, who would be with my children? How to support them when I couldn't even hold my head up. I didn't think that the piles of craft stuff would sit on the shelves beckoning me with my children to "let's do a craft mommy" and I say no because, my body just won't move. 
I didn't plan to be avoiding and angry because of the mental abuse I endured while trying to get some semblance of that imagined marriage I promised myself. I never desired for my dreams to come crashing down and leave me so cold, lifeless, abandoned, and hopeless. I didn’t mean to suffocate myself with so many hopes that promises I knew would be broken, would come true. 
But… I look at the face of my youngest son. His cheesy little smile and I hope that he never has to endure the pain and heartache his big brother has had to go through. While hearing my oldest, so engrossed in anger and pain- the yelling and fits that I never considered my children would have; I cry. Sometimes to sleep because I can’t help but think how I contributed to that hurt. 
I never thought that dreams I’ve made moving on, wouldn’t happen but, when they don’t I press on and make new ones. When the voices and chest pains tell me I’m not good enough for goodness I try even harder to tell them to go to hell, you won’t destroy me. You won’t destroy my children either.
And I look, I read, I struggle to find a way to take away that pain. And I know that on the day that I’m barely making it through my day and hanging on by a thread, I manage to get through because God is carrying me. Someday, he is going to set me down into the most glorious life he has planned for us and he’s going to remind me to continue to use all these lessons I’ve learned for good. And maybe if it’s not the amazing life I had thought of, it will be something even more wonderful because it’s his plan and somehow, someday, I will feel completely free to believe that there is something perfect for me, that all this struggle was for something.
Someday I’ll be healed and so, hopefully, will those little lives I’ve created; and I know that it wasn’t me: It was God that gets me and takes me exactly where he wants me to be.