After I had my twins two years ago, I was ecstatic. I felt special for being one of the few women in this world to fall pregnant with multiples...naturally! I felt that God had a purpose for it all. I did not decide to have more children for no reason. I mean, we already had three other children and that was three more than what I wanted for myself in the first place, but you do your duty because God knows best.Just a year and a half prior to this, my foundation in Mormonism crumbled. My greatest fear was something the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints imprinted on us, which was losing the Spirit of God when you leave the church. So I prayed to God and told Him that I did not think the church was true anymore. I asked God to tell me if I was right. I got my answer through reading the Bible. I felt like God was o.k with me leaving the church and had confidence that I had not yet lost his spirit when I resigned. I clung to the Bible and Jesus to show Mormons that there are other reasons to leave the church than the usual labels they place on people like me.Fast forward to today. I am now an Atheist. Following the Bible and Jesus' voice lead us to make the best and worst choices of our lives. Where the worst choices are the ones we would have to live with for the rest of our lives, but if we did not walk that tough and crazy road, we would not have seen the results of extreme religiosity and we would not be where we are today and know what we know.We are free! We are free from being slaves to a God, servants to a church and inferior human beings to a judgemental social club. However, I may have become mentally free, but the freer I became in my head, the more imprisoned I felt. My eyes started to open up to reality. I started to become acutely aware of my disadvantages. Disadvantages I had no control over and those that I created for myself.I felt like I was playing a game of Monopoly and I could see myself already losing the game. It made me feel so depressed and disheartened. What could I possibly do to prove myself to the world? To my family and friends that have ostracized me? I had literally just experienced how little value I had for the people in my life and seen the skewed views they had about me. I had experienced so many things that most people will never experience.Some people will never know what it is like to be born and raised in an underprivileged family in a second/third world country. With parents who could not afford private healthcare in a country where many go to die in public hospitals with minor illnesses. Parents who could not afford their children's tertiary education and a government that could care less to give an equal opportunity to all citizens. Parents who rely on God for their protection against crime that is so violent and so frequent, with no safe place to live and you know it is just a matter of time until it hits you or hits you for the second or third time that you may not be lucky enough to escape it without injury or death.Many will not know what it is like to be a migrant that had to escape the torment of racism and the hope to provide your children with a brighter future. To leave your home country, your friends, family and everything familiar and comfortable behind for a new beginning. Many will not know how isolating this experience can be. How many hurdles one had to overcome, how much you have had to sacrifice to start over.People in your new country find it hard to understand you and you find it hard to understand them. They don't get you and you don't get them. You go shopping and see all these products you know nothing about. Which ones work and which don't? Many of the things you loved about your country, you will never find or experience again. Your family and friends back home resent you for your luck. You just try to be grateful for the opportunity to be safe.Many people will not know what it is like to have sacrificed your entire life to a religion or a cult that you were raised in and thought to be the only truth. Many have never had to make life choices based on what a God or a church would consider the right ones. Many have not had their hopes, dreams and lives ruined for a lie that was carefully wrapped up in a gift of promise and hope, just to be ripped out from under you when you discovered that the friend (church) that you had sacrificed your life for, was in fact, the enemy.Not very many people will look at their children and think, "I wish I never had you, because my plan for myself was to never have children, but what I wanted for myself did not matter, because only what my God wanted for me counted." It was my duty to have children. It was what I was taught is the purpose of this life. Even though I love my children with all of my heart I feel that my life was stolen from me. Like my freedom to choose for myself was stripped from me.Even though I try to be the best mother I can be, I still feel that I am not the mother my children deserve to have. I hate the fact that I cannot give them what most children in my country is getting: undivided attention (because they only have one or two kids), family and lifelong friends (because they never had to leave theirs), tutoring in music, dance, swimming or whatever else my kids will be interested in, because we are not financially capable of offering that to all five of our children."I hate seeing how much I am failing my children. I compare what others have to offer to myself. My game is over. I have nothing more to give. I am a loser. In my country I was a little above average, now I am way below mediocre and my kids will have to live with it and it breaks my heart. They have "equal" opportunities here, that I hope will be enough for them to be successful one day, but I have seen the discrimination, it may be more subtle than back home, but it is there and it can be brutal.Unfortunately, we got out of our disadvantages too late. We are getting older, we have not been able to create the lives for ourselves and our children in our new country that we have hoped and the same lifestyle we had before we gave it up for what we had hoped could be more. We cannot see that happening any time soon, if ever. It makes you wonder if it was even worth it, even when you know it was, just to be safe and free.We are constantly bombarded with outstanding talent, people who have had exceptional training, practised a skill for a long time and mastered it. A privilege we can only dream of. People who have built nest eggs for themselves, who frequently go on overseas trips and buy investment houses like they are condiments. People who have had the choice of not having kids and can live a wonderfully carefree life.We have lived our lives in survival mode from day one, never had opportunities to develop skills or talents and now it is rubbing off on our kids because we cannot provide them with those opportunities even if we wanted to. It made me so angry at myself for not realising the fraud sooner. If we had only learned the truth ten years ago. Our lives would have looked a whole lot different. It is devastating to assess your life and to honestly see where it is going.People can be so harsh. They judge you on everything. Your looks, status, job, hobbies, clothes, skills, language or accents, friends, race, gender, the number of kids you have, the kind of parent you are, where you live, which school you went to, which country you are from, your religion or lack thereof, the list can go on an on. To fit in is almost impossible and when you have a list of "does she tick any of the boxes?" and you barely tick any, then it is enough to just quit on life.That is what I did. I quit. I quit cleaning my house (or at least the knitty gritty things). I quit being a parent to my children (the Internet took my place). I quit being a wife to my husband (he is big enough to take care of himself). I quit being a daughter, a sister, a friend (I was a disappointment to them anyway). The only thing I could not quit was my life, because out of all the things that I learned from losing my religion, I learned how lucky we are to be alive! We won the rarest of lotteries to be here and to be who we are. There will never be anyone like me.This unravelling of reality before my eyes have taken months of digesting, where my poor husband had to bear the brunt of it. Until I had another one of those lower than low moments that I thought of just ending it all (taking my stuff to leave and start over, with nowhere to go and no skills or resources to support me... I realised I did not even have that option). I was educated, but it did not count. I had skills but nothing the world needed. I was able to work but unable. I could leave, but had nowhere safe to go and no way of supporting myself. I had no family or friends. I was alone. I was exhausted. Tired of my responsibilities. Tired of even trying anymore. Wanting so badly to make up for the things I have lost in my life, but not being able to.I came across a poker game with a deck of cards and I thought to myself, "My life is like that", I was dealt a hand of cards. I guess it was the start of making peace with my reality. I knew that I had a shit hand and my possibility of winning was slim to none, but I am still in the game and I can call it a bluff, but at the end of the day, if that did not work, it could still be fun playing.I realised that my hand might not permit me to be a successful career woman or famous artist. The hand I was dealt with, was to be a mother and a wife, because I have no time or money to do anything else, and no matter how feminist I get, I cannot run away from that responsibility. I am still in the game and I can play this hand as best I can. Who knows! Maybe I can be pleasantly surprised by the outcome.We did some things right. We brought our children to a safer country where they will have the opportunity to get a tertiary education, if policies do not change. We got them away from a toxic environment of indoctrination that may very well have ruined their happiness, like it did mine and we can have kick-ass family gatherings when my kids grow up. Something that we are missing out now.At the end of the day, we only have one life and living it to the best of our ability is all we can do. We are lucky to be alive, we are lucky to be who we are. There will never be anyone like us on earth. We are all unique. We all have different backgrounds and stories to tell, and that makes life interesting and worth living. We have all been dealt a different hand, we can call it a bluff or just have fun playing it, no matter how badly we are losing the game. When we lose we lose, at least the only possible way to go from here...is UP!