Oops....did not mean to leave him out

I felt bad because Monster has not had his photo in the blog. So here is a picture of my 16 year old boy.
(He likes to make odd faces at the camera.)

I am soooooo very lucky to have such a great kid.

All my kids are great!! They are what truly makes me happy in life.

I Hate Day Care and my Job

On Wednesday 10-14-09 Bean started full time day care. The first day, she marched in there and loved it; all the toys and things to do. She waved bye-bye and seemed fine. By mid afternoon, my mommy senses felt a strong pull. I knew she was really worried we were not coming back. When I went to pick her up at 4 p.m. she kept hugging me over and over again. You could see the relief in her eyes. She was so happy to see me and I was equally thrilled to see her.

For the next week she was in a huge funk. She was crabby and disagreeable all the time. She cried when dropped off at school and cried during the day at school too. She was clingy and needy at home and extra temperamental. She was fighting getting dressed, fighting diaper changes, and everything made her upset. This all upset me of course which added to the stress of it all. She also came down with a cold which I’m sure aggravated the situation, but overall, she has not been happy about the change to day care.

When you think about it, it makes total sense. She has always been with me or a close trusted person. She came to work with me for the last two years and on the days I could not keep her she stayed with Grandma or my good friend Elissa. Both are people she knows well and trusts. We all gave her a lot of one on one attention and the security of knowing that we were there for her. At day care, there are many kids and many people and no ONE person is in charge of her. What a total change for her. No wonder she feels scared and insecure.

She seems better now that it has been a while longer. I have been taking her with me to work on Wednesdays so she only has day care two days in a row at a time. The school started letting her keep her blanket with her all day which has also helped. But now she is ridiculous about having her blanket with her even at home; it MUST be with her 100% of the time or she goes nuts. She still cries like crazy when you drop her off in the morning and they tell me she still cries during the day when they are in transition. When she is busy, she is fine, but when there is down time, she thinks too much and gets upset and starts missing her loved ones. (She may take after me!) Other than the blanket, she has been in a good mood at home which is a big relief.

On top of the stress created by the fact that I feel like I am torturing my sweet little innocent girl by packing her off to spend the day with a bunch of stranger, I am also dealing with my own issues associated with my job and not having Bean at work with me has only brought those issues to the front. I have been unhappy with my job for a few years now, but being able to take her along made it well worth staying. Now that she is not there, the “ridiculousness” of my job seems so much more glaring.

I miss her too. I miss feeling like I had my fill of her during the day and was relieved that Daddy played with her all evening. I miss being here for her ALL THE TIME. I feel really empty without her. She filled a lot of my intimacy needs.

I could still bring her to work if I wanted to but she was starting to get very bored in my office. It really is not the best place for a 2 year old to spend all day. Ideally, I wish I could be with her and have her in a more stimulating environment. I really don’t want to work…….not career minded at this point. I wish I could dream up a way to make money and be with Bean and have Bean be happy. I guess that is every parents dream.

You know the more I try and blog stuff about my life the more I realize how it is all interrelated and it is hard to understand all the details of this without the background or details of that. Life is complicated.

Keeping it Real.......but not too real!!

So this morning, while I was jogging with one of my running partners, I suddenly just started telling her everything. I told her about Friss and the baby……..I told her about how my husband was such a jerk for so long it is a wonder I hung in there. How he saw the other women when I was pregnant and I caught them together. As I was telling her all this stuff, it felt sort of good, like I was being real. Like normally, I hold back and put forth an effort to appear to have a more perfect life than I do. I am sure most people do this as well. But once in a while, it is nice to just tell it like it is. It is nice to not hold back or walk carefully around the dark spots in your past. I have known Julie, my running buddy, for a long time now and there is something about a running partner that builds trust. At the time I was talking I felt that trust. Besides, she is a great person and I really like her and she has not had the picture perfect life. She should not be too judgmental.

The minute the run was over and I got back to my car and she left in her car I felt terrible. I felt I had made a huge error. I felt I had been way too open. I felt so exposed. Now I am just worried about the whole thing and thinking it was a bad idea.

I guess there is some sort of fine line between being open and honest and real with your friends and just being a crazy person with a fucked up life. I don’t want people to think I am just a total head case and steer clear of me in case I will suck them into my vortex of lunacy.
Actually, I think I am pretty sane at this point. I have my head on pretty good. I have made some poor decisions in my life and I have had some bad luck, but overall, I think I am a fairly likable and decent and good person. God I hope so anyway.

I read a lot of blogs on line and different people share a lot of different things. I think when they are open and honest about their ghosts and demons it makes them more human and thus easier to identify with. I have been reading this one girls blog, she lives in Australia which is just super cool anyway, but I feel like I sort of know her……..like we are friends. I truly care about her and her family and her life. It is funny the way just knowing about someone can make you care. I have never met her personally and probably never will (Australia) but I feel like my life is richer for having found her blog and her blog friendship.

Anyhow……the gist of this post is this; I sure hope I did not freak out my running partner this morning and I sure hope I can find a balance between being myself, open and honest and not being a scary crazy person.

Father responds to Letter

So my father and his wife sent me a note back. It was on note card that they obviously had around the house. They are old so I should not be upset if they don't make any big effort to get a proper wedding type card. Hell, they may not be able to walk around Walgreen's unassisted for all I know.

The note said congratulations; said the kids and husband are cute and handsome; thanks for the note and that was about it.

No gift. No comment like "you should come visit sometime" or "give us a call once in a while".

As usual........blah.......
I will now forget all about them until the next major milestone in my life!

Friendship

In the past few weeks, I have had two people I would have called “good friends” decide they no longer want to talk to me. This has made me sad mostly, but a little angry too. I have spent way too much time fretting about it.

I have been “unfriended”! (One of them literally unfriended me in Facebook.)
One pretty much told me that they no longer wanted to speak to me and the other just quietly went away. Not something I would want to do to any of my friends.

I personally, just don’t understand what good it does to “unfriend” someone. Don’t we all need as many friends as we can get? Isn’t being a friend a good and admirable thing? I was a good friend to them. It is not like I was doing anything wrong to these people. I have wracked my brains out trying to come up with a good reason why these people should not want to be my friend any longer and can’t come up with anything. I have been here as best I can for them if they needed me. I have been an ear, a shoulder, supportive, etc., and all those good friend things.

After much thought and contemplation on the situation I think I finally figured it out. These people were not really my friends in the first place.……they were acting like a friend for the wrong reasons and now those reasons have been removed, so they have no need for me anymore.

One of them was a man and, as we all know, men pretend to be your friend in hopes that they will someday, somehow, be MORE than friends. They hang around day after day and tell their precious dick to be patient “I’m working on it big guy…….any day now we will get her in bed.” Some hang around longer than others, but most, if they don’t have some success getting sex, eventually move on because they can’t seem to just be friends with a women. Their valuable resources are being wasted on unfruitful activities.

I guess getting married finally drove this guy off. It makes me sad, I will miss him.
It is not like a big change that I got married. I have been with BabyDaddy for almost 4 years now. I have been with him through my whole friendship with this guy.

I refuse to feel bad about losing these “friends” for one more minute. I have done my best to be their friends and now they have decided to end it. It is out of my control.

Well, so be it, I will except these “ends” and realized that it is for the best because they were not REAL friends anyway.

Remember……TRUE FRIENDS are very rare and should be highly valued. Most people we call friends are not really going to be there for us in the long run.

My Husband!!

I think Daddy looks so hot in his ring!!!

Very sexy :)

A letter to my Father

So today I wrote my father and letter and told him I got married. I guess I feel he has the right to know my name changed.

I composed it all nice and friendly like and enclosed photos of all the kids. Just because he is a jerk does not mean that I should not try to be a good daughter as best I can at this point.

What I really wanted to say was, “Why don’t you care if you are part of my life? Why do you alienate your family, your kids, the people you should hold close? Why are you so detached and self centered that I feel more comfortable not having to actually talk to you? You are a sad human being and I will never be like you. What’s worst of all, you are happy with your life and the choices you have made and would probably do it all over again if you could go back in time. I will never understand why you want it this way.”

Then again, I really don’t even care enough to complain. He means nothing to me at this point and I could really care less. I may be a bit frustrated that I feel the need to even tell him I got married.

OUR WEDDING DAY

The Newlyweds!

Ramone, me, husband, Bean and the preacher guy.

Feeling sassy!


We got married on a bluff in the Mark Twain National Forest. It is a scenic spot we used visit together back when we would venture out into the woods to bike and run before we had a baby. It was a simple ceremony and we each wrote our own vows. It was perfect really.......I couldn't have asked for anything more.

Except a honey moon.........sadly, we can't afford one right now.

2 Days to go and 2 Disasters

Can you believe it.......wedding is only 2 days away and I have a huge zit on my chin! It totall reminds me of Chris Griffin's talking zit.

I hope it doesn't make a comment during the ceremony!!

Also, it is raining and has been for over 12 hours. There is flooding. The forecast for Saturday is great, but the trails will be muddy as hell. Oh well, a little mud on the shoes isn't that bad.

But this ZIT!!

Just shoot me now before I see the photos!!

My life's Journey - part I

I am still amazed at what has happened to me…..where I went and how I got back. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that life would be like this; that it even could be like this. I spent a few years so very depressed. I spent many days during that time contemplating suicide; wondering if I could do it, how I would do it, how nice it would be to get out of my life, out of this world. In the end I decided I could not do it because it would ruin my kids’ lives and I didn’t want to harm them. Then, I spent a lot of time avoiding the easy way out…..for my kids. Later, I fired the psychiatrist and the therapist and flushed all the meds and things started to improve. I found it easy to quit smoking once I quit taking all the prescription medication my doctor had prescribed. I finally started on the road to recovery, once I got rid of all the professionals who I had gone to seeking help. I now know; they only made it worse, not better. But, hind sight is 20/20. So, my actual recovery, which I consider starting in spring of 2005 when I fired the professionals, has taken years. It is now, fall of 2009 and I finally, for the most part, feel like a whole, sane, normal, person again. A person much like the person I was before all this happened. However, I will never be the same. I have lost a lot of faith. And, I will never know exactly which things did the most harm or what factors caused the most damage. Was it the betrayal, the loss, the medications, or the fear? I am almost 10 years older and that changes a person too.

Here is my story…..well part of it, in a rather condensed format.

I was living with my x-boyfriend. A man I dearly loved and wanted to spend the rest of my life with. The person that just felt “right”. After 3 years of dating and one magical year of living together he started to act different and I had no idea why. I spent the next two years in a constant state of anxiety trying to figure out what had happened to our perfect love. Later I discovered he was seeing a girl that worked for him, a very beautiful, younger woman. She got divorced and they are now married! The last two years of our relationship were emotionally devastating for me since he would not explain to me what was happening. I just felt things slipping away…..farther and farther away and I seemed powerless to save it and it was tearing me up. It was a very confusing and hard time in my life. I thought to myself “I can’t live without him. He is my soul mate…he is part of me…I can’t lose him.” But I did. He moved out in the spring of 2002.

This breakup was right on the heels of another devastating event in my life. Days before Christmas in 2001 my oldest boy hit his 11 month old son and mortally wounded him. Friss was sent to prison for murder, sentenced to 20 years. The day I got the news that the baby was dead, I learned where the saying “bouncing off the walls” came from. It is the saddest event I have ever lived through.

The next big blow, the one that really sealed my fate, took place in the spring of 2003. In an effort to build a social life and meet new people, I had joined a rock climbing gym/club and on a climbing road trip I broke, well shattered, my heel. I had to have my heel reconstructed surgically. The doctors did a great job and I will always be grateful that I have no lingering issues from that injury. On the flip side, I was now spending the summer on crutches and the couch and I was already lonely and depressed. I am an active person and cycling is my favorite pass time…..it is my therapy and my social life. Being sentenced to sitting still was horrifying to me. This is when I got completely hopeless and asked the psychiatrist to help me. This started a two year, multiple doctors, and multiple medications fiasco that totally screwed my life up.

Oh, and add in there that the company I worked for was going bankrupt and making everyone that worked for them do 3 peoples jobs. I was working 13-15 hour days in an extremely negative and stressful environment. I was desperately looking for another job, but I live in a smaller town so finding a new job can be a time consuming trick.

From spring of 2003 until spring of 2005 I went to 2 different psychiatrists, 3 different therapists and tried countless prescription medications all in an effort to feel better. To feel less hopeless, less depressed, less lost, less like my life was now over but I was not allowed to die. I know they all meant well…..it is not their fault. I know they help some people. I found out the hard way that my depression was not a chemical imbalance in my brain and therefore medication did not help. In fact, many of the meds they gave me had negative effects on me such as weight gain, paranoia and depression. I switched doctors and therapist thinking that maybe I just needed another person. That the next one would have a better idea that would actually help. In the long run none of them helped…..at all.

Tired of it all, I fired the doctors and quit the meds in the spring of 2005. I think the real reason I did it was because I felt it was impeding my cycling ability. I decided that quitting all the meds was the only answer since I had tried to quit one or two at a time and failed. I found out that I was actually taking meds to counter act side effects of other meds. Not uncommon, but not good.
I started to feel better right away and things in my life started to get better as well. However, it is not all roses from here on out. No, you don’t climb up out of a deep depression that has lasted years over night. The only way to describe it is gradual. Over the next few years, things slowly, but surely got better and better. I had honestly thought that I might never feel whole again. When I was seeing the doctors and therapist I kept telling them “I have lost my inner peace and I can’t get it back!”

Last weekend, for the first time in almost 10 years…..I felt peace………I actually felt, deep down inside myself, a warm, peaceful, calmness. It was amazing. I never thought it would happen, but it did. It took year and years to get here, but I am back. Or at least a big part of me is back.

The Four letter word - F.E.A.R.

Here are some thoughts about fear from the book Positive Energy by Dr. Judith Orloff:

"Fear is the biggest energy thief there is. A master seducer, it shamelessly robs us of everything good and powerful, preys on our vulnerabilites. Many people become mesmerized for a lifetime, letting negative attitudes seize control. Enough! Though some fears are intuitively protective... we can't let the irrational ones bamboozle us. Fear never stands alone; it inflames every vampire emotion from worry to shame....

Most fears are self-induced. We don't mean to, but we inflict an emotional terrorism on ourselves when we let our dark side run amok. The self-sabatoging messages we send, including the 'I'm-not-good-enough' harrangue, distort reality. To ensure we're perceiving ourselves accurately, we must look through the lens of love....

7 Tactics for De-Engergizing Fear:
1. Name your Fears So They Can't Ambush You
2. Listen to Your Intuition
3. Say a Prayer to Lift Fear
4. Make a Gratitude List
5. Visit and Energetically Uplifting Place
6. Heal Energetic Scars
7. Avoid Absorbing Other People's Fears"

It's so important to try and live our lives on a daily basis from a place of love rather than fear. We especially need to be aware if we are making decisions from a place of fear, as our decisions are essentially creating the tapestry of our lives. If we want a life we love, we must choose to act from love. Get rid of that four letter word once and for all!

The List

So, as I contemplate my wedding vows……and actually marrying this person who has, in the past, done some pretty nasty, mean things to me. I find myself asking what is good and what is bad about our relationship.

What is good?:
1) I respect his intelligence level: A very important and insurmountable thing for me is being stupid. I have dated more than one guy who turned out to be just plain stupid. Nice does not make up for stupid. And, I really can’t love or live with a person who I think is stupid and I have this family that is fairly well educated so my “stupid” bar is pretty high.
2) Health conscious: This may actually go along with intelligence, but my fiancé knows how to take care of his health and does it for the most part (we are all human and eat junk food from time to time (or beer)). I totally appreciate the fact that he is not a couch potato and he is not going to pack on 10 pounds a year until he gets a bad back and high blood cholesterol. And, being in shape is pleasing to the eye as well………yea, he’s very hot naked!
3) Similar interest and hobbies: We both like to cycle and run and are active and outside people. It is important to me that we share these hobbies so we understand why each other wants to do these hobbies and we can do them together as well. You know the saying……“A family that plays together stays together.”
4) Fiscal responsibility: This may go with intelligence too…..but my fiancé and I both live within our means. We are not racking up debt in order to live some materialistic life style that the media has convinced us we need to have to be happy. We don’t have cable TV, we don’t have fancy new cars, we don’t collect things (well, except bikes). We both want to live a modest and simple life and save up for retirement or a rainy day.
5) We are both morning people. We are both organized and fairly neat. We like similar music. We both enjoy traveling. We are both hard working people. We are both educated and articulate.
6) He is willing to marry me even if it is not important to him. He says that we are already a family and he is committed to me and our child and he does not need a legal document from the government to validate it. However, in my mind, the flip side of this is that it sure makes it easy to change your mind later and say I was never committed or I would have married you. I guess it is a pro that he is willing to do it for me even if it is not important to him. And I don’t think he is the type to plan on a divorce someday…………his parents have been married for 50 years! I assume this is proof that he is actually committed.

What is bad?:
1) My fiancé can be very moody and depressive. Throughout our relationship he has had hours and days where he just shuts me out and won’t talk to me at all. It is very odd to me and I hate it. It hurts my feeling and I find it very difficult to deal with. Lately he has been much better and he says it is because he is so happy……..which is great. I just worry that someday it will come back and mental illness is a tough battle to fight.
2) There are huge trust issues. The first 8 months we were dating he was on again and off again and sending me a lot of mixed messages. On more than one occasion, when we were together, he even acted like we were not. This lack of respect is hard to put behind me. Later, when I got pregnant, he wanted out in the worst way…….pushing hard for abortion or adoption. Again, I felt he did not respect me at all. He did not even tell his parents about me and the baby until a month before she was born. I know, up to the day I delivered, he was hoping some miracle would still save him.
3) He said things I will never forget. Cruel and inappropriate things………things he can never take back. He once agreed that I was his “dirty little secret”. He once lamented that our fetus was probably healthy and would survive. He has told me before we would never get married……with the underlying message being “I would NEVER marry YOU!”
4) Then there is the other women……….yea, I found out, after I was pregnant that he was also seeing a women who was married and lived about 100 miles west from us. She was an old flame from high school that he had rekindled with. He once told me she was the love of his life and he could not live without her. She wanted to leave her husband for him and he said “No, we can’t do that to him”. They did however; sneak around behind his back plenty. (Not sure why that is better??) And they did behind my back too. When I was about 6 months pregnant I actually caught them in bed together!! Thankfully, I do not believe they have been together in the past year or two…….since the baby was born.
5) He is 10 years younger than I am. That puts a lot of pressure on me to stay young or feel young and I am afraid it will weigh him down more and more as time goes by. When he turns 40 I will be turning 50 and he will still be able to catch women of 30 or less. How will he handle that? How will I handle that? It is scary.
6) My fiancé likes to be purposefully non communicative. He likes to keep people guessing and not tell what is on his mind or how his day was or anything that is going on. All this secrecy plays into my trust issues and insecurities. I know it is not a healthy thing. I feel it is very close to lying and I think it sucks. He justifies it by saying he is a private person or he is an only child or that men are not big talkers.
7) I know he is capable of being heartless…..he has done it to me before. He can watch me hurt and just ignore it. This is hard for me. If I love someone I can’t turn my back on them when they are in pain.
8) He doesn’t really want to marry me………..BUT, why doesn’t he want to marry me. He was married before. He told me he believed in marriage back when we were dating. His latest idea that it is just a government; legal thing seems new and strange.


I guess I just hate the fact that I am not getting married to a person who wanted to marry me, who asked me to marry him and is actually excited about it. This is my perception of how it normally goes down. Instead, he invites no one to the wedding, tells no one we are getting married and is admittedly doing it only to appease me. Seems he wants it to be a secret that we are married.

On the other hand, I don’t want to be alone. I want to be married to him. We have child and if he says he is committed than why not make it legal. I will feel more secure if we are married. I will definitely feel better when hanging with his family or my friends if he is actually my husband and not “The Baby Daddy”…….which, I think just sounds humiliating and embarrassing.

To sum it all up:
If he has all the benefits of a marriage then by golly lets have all the trappings to go along with it.
No more eating your cake and having it too.