I come from a prodigious and relatively twisted family. Both my mother and father were married before they met and got married. From those marriages came 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, then my three biological brothers and I came into the world. After fourteen years of marriage my parents divorced. Shortly after getting divorced, both my mother and father got married again. When my father married my stepmother I gained two stepbrothers. Eventually, when 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 a family like that. The final end of my parents' marriage was due, in part, to my mother's infidelity. My brothers and I found ourselves in the midst of an intense marital war on a daily basis. My childhood was permeated with hostility and animosity. One might assume that with that kind of environment and the obvious neglect of beneficial relationships, I too would find it difficult to sustain a healthy relationship with the opposite sex. This hypothesis would be correct. It wasn't until my stepmother came into the picture that I understood what a normal, healthy, loving relationship was like. However, the damage was done, the trust was gone, and my heart had irrevocable damage. The lasting effects of a hateful divorce on a child are quite disturbing in my opinion. As if my mother leaving after the divorce wasn't enough, it was only a short amount of time before my father and stepmother rekindled the romance they had lost nearly twenty years earlier. Everything... in the middle of the paper... creatively. 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 is 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 direction. 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 approach people and situations. I also learned to take what was in my past and transform it into something much better. I will definitely make sure to raise my daughter to understand how to deal with conflict in a healthy way and pray that she will be better at relationships than I ever was!