SaltofThaEarth 🥀

What is the ego? Is that the emotional side of us or the mental? I have heard of a bruised ego, inflated ego and practice of keeping your ego in check, and I wonder if it is a whole other entity within us? Maybe it’s a scapegoat that we use to blame when we have to face our shortcomings!
I imagine the guy in the movie “Animal House” with the good angel on one shoulder and the devilish angel on the other trying to decide if he should take advantage of the girl whose passed out drunk. Is that what ego looks like?
There’s one incident that happened years ago and I keep going over it in my head. It was very late at night and we (my then husband and I) had just been awakened by our daughters having a shouting contest. He was being his typical self-serving self and threatening to put my minor child out of the house for this fight while allowing his adult daughter to stay in the house. I keep analyzing this incident and trying to figure out how I let him get by with threatening my baby with homelessness while allowing his adult daughter to stay? I was being victimized and at that time I was unable to defend myself! Let alone make valid arguments about how his adult daughter could sign her own lease and live independently… while he evidently didn’t care about my minor child or me I continued to endure the abuse because “God hates divorce” and I wouldn’t have to wait much longer for them all to be grown and gone out on their own!
I believe that it’s my ego that wanted to say that they were both wrong at the time, but I was determined to wait it out because they not getting along wasn’t my husband’s fault…I kept blaming the kids for their behavior! I didn’t understand that they couldn’t learn appropriate behavior from an incompetent parent! Hindsight is definitely a lot clearer. I think my ego wants to make it right somehow but I can’t go back and stand up for myself or my daughter on that day. What I can do now is tell the world that you must pay attention to how people operate and decide for yourself what is going on behind the lies they tell. He didn’t care about me or my family. Not then, not ever. He wanted a collection of trophies and I was the softest, warmest and prettiest one! He needed a warden for the juvenile delinquent kids he created. I was the perfect choice. A widow with low self esteem and a desperation to be loved. I believed that he was my last chance at love. I thought that he was a good guy! SMH! Before today I never really had a chance at love because I didn’t love myself enough. If I had enough regard for who I was he would’ve never got past my front door!
I didn’t know that I was a prize to be won! My mentality was so bad then. Thank goodness for growth! I now know that “Ego- my conscious mind- had checked out due to my inability to cope with the abuse that I was suffering and now I understand that I didn’t have the tools that I needed.
I failed to protect myself and my family because I didn’t know how at the time. Everything happening to me was too overwhelming for me and I looked to others to guide me, and they had hidden agendas that I couldn’t see. For a while following the dissolution of that relationship I would say that it was a waste of time. I have the gift of wisdom and experience that says that no one is going to look out for me. I must do it for myself! My baby had to learn that lesson too soon and I know that he lost a good woman that he never deserved to even know.