Word on the Street: The Mother's Day Edition

The greatest challenge for me has been to give them strength and stability in light of my diagnosis -- to not allow my fear of the unknown and perhaps a lack of the future color their worlds. I wanted to instill in them a self-confidence and self-love to not make the kinds of decisions that led to my HIV. I wanted them to feel loved and safe despite my periods of illness, and to remove them from the despair that I often felt living with HIV. For so long I focused on dying from HIV that I did not LIVE! Now I am trying to reverse this and pack 20 years of living into the next 20 (or more) years. I am trying to finish college and hope that by working and attending college, they will live by this example and not the past. I worry what I may have inadvertently taught them and hope that there are enough good moments to offset my bad ones. Sometimes I worry that having this heavy "secret" of HIV and hiding all the worry, anger, sadness and frustration of my life may have done more harm than good. I was so busy judging myself and living with a man who loved me but was not healthy in so many ways, how could I have given the best to them? Sometimes I felt so old and tired and sick, I would take the easy way out. This is the guilt and despair that I try to manage now.

I feel that the challenges I experience are not so unlike parents everywhere. I think that my HIV has changed me and it took awhile for me to get myself together. But how is this much different than someone who had to overcome addiction? Or mental health issues? Or poverty or so many other things that hold us back? I recognize that the stigma of living with HIV makes us different but I also see that we are ALL human and face the trials. It goes so much deeper than HIV, as to how we deal with these things and for me, I had to move beyond the strangling hold of the secret of HIV and become HUMAN again.