A Change of Needs Read Online Free Page B

certain activities, but for whatever reason, he wasn’t allowed to do much, to pursue natural inclinations. Needs and wants can be squelched, but are difficult to eradicate and just as the roots of a stout tree will push up the sidewalk, like the weed that appears in the cracks, he would begin to assert himself as a teenager.
    When the people who are supposed to provide you the things necessary and particular to your individual development don’t, as a matter of survival and necessity one learns to persuade others, individuals who are not obligated to do so by ties of blood or family to do them for you instead, and he became very adept at the skill and grew from a very endearing boy to a genuinely endearing man. It was a quality that would prove to be a great asset. While it’s important to instill confidence in a child, like anything that is given, it can also be taken away, but the confidence that comes from within, from surviving, with overcoming obstacles, born not only of success but of trying and failure, is much more enduring, and that is the confidence which would come to him, even if only realized much later in his life as a man.
    After High School he attended a small Liberal Arts college, it was a school that had a reputation as an elite academic institution, and the curriculum, combined with his lack of discipline and abundance of appetite for all things, made his stay short. He bounced around from job to job, trying a bit of everything, in small doses. He would prove to have a short attention span when it came to many things, and employment was among them. Like many young folks, he knew not what he wanted to do, but he was quick to learn what he didn’t.
    He would meet his wife, Rene, when he was home one weekend for his 10 th High School class reunion. He was twenty-eight and she twenty-four, a hostess at the Country Club the event was held, and nursing student at an area community college near Greensboro. In typical whirlwind fashion they fell in love and successfully carried on a long-distance engagement for a year until her graduation before getting married and moving to Raleigh. The boy came two years later and solidified the union for a time, but as he was finding to be formulaic in his relationships, it would have an expiration date, and those married couples that don’t grow in the same direction grow apart. Five years into it they would part before irreparable animosity took root. He would readily concede she had been a good wife and a loving mother, and he would prove to be at best a dedicated father and great ex-husband. The period following the split and leading up to our story characterized by efforts to improve on his shortfalls, and the romantic landscape littered with one-night stands, brief, invisible and meaningless relationships. At which point our vixen enters stage left …and everything was subject to change.
    He would spend the next day trying to focus on the tasks at hand, caring for his son, on auto-pilot regarding work, it was after all generally mindless physical tasks. He was conflicted about the situation, the only time he had ever been involved with a married women was unknowingly. She had told him she was legally separated …but apparently neglected to tell her husband, and that oversight had resulted in a very awkward conversation with an irate man on his doorstep while she lay naked and concerned in his bed.
    On this instance however, still in the conceptual phase, it presented a different problem on his proverbial porch so to speak because it was inherently at odds with the image of the straight-up kind of guy he thought himself to be. But sometimes in life, situations arise where we are forced to make decisions … difficult decisions that require us to make a conscious choice to either abandon some aspect of our principles or personal code, or abandon those things which we desire with such fervor that it’s simply reduced to a question of betraying oneself, or committing