At least inside my head the house is clean…

I was going to start off with a funny post about how when I went to have my eyes checked (and subsequently had to get glasses) my glaucoma test came back borderline and I was all joking with my husband about how I wasn’t going to share my medicinal cannabis with him… but I just wasn’t in the right spirit to joke about my impending disease and drug habit tonight…  being all introspective in your own head kinda sucks sometimes and takes me back to places I don’t like to go and person I don’t really like being.  The flip side is I can remind myself that the past is the past for a reason and I don’t ever have to be that person again. What I can be is someone who learns from her mistakes and grows (hopefully) into a better person.  It’s tiring re-living mistakes, I wish there was some way sometimes to forget what happened and truly move on.  It’s a terrifying and freeing thought all at the same time. Who are we really without our memories and experiences… at least if I had a clean slate I’d pick an exotic location to be from that featured a cool accent ;)

I’m tired… or cranky… or whatever!

I’ve been MIA for a little bit and while I like to blame being “busy” and by busy I mean making my own granola and searching for a new American Girl doll for Audrey on Ebay partly I’ve just been blah and didn’t feel like writing anything. Some of my last posts have been during a crappy part of my life and while I feel like they are cleansing and soul healing, it still sucks to vomit all those words onto a page and make them not only make sense but to try and see past the tears blurring your vision to make sure they are spelled right.

Last week I cut my hair, not super short but something I had wanted to do for a while for just me… because I wanted a change and something new. Like a metamorphosis for a new person I have become.  A person who I’d like to say is less selfish and more willing to live life not from fear but with an honest intent to be the best person I can be. I’d like to say that and hopefully it’s true, only time will tell. In the mean time I have a rocking new haircut and a desire to not hide from old wounds and old ugliness.  Fingers crossed.

* sorry for the crappy pic, taken by myself from my phone in the weird way my brother loves to make fun of ;)

This should be a month just like my birthday!

Happy International Woman’s Day to you all (at least for a few more minutes) I had kinda wanted to comment on what a D-Bag Rush Limbaugh was and what the BFD was about birth control pills, but I saw of all things a Facebook post that seemed more important…

“What are some important pieces of advice or lessons you've learned in life that you would pass along to the young women and girls you know?”

And it just seemed like a much better idea. There is ALWAYS going to be a D-Bag who is going to try and call you names and knock you down because they are threatened by you, sometimes they are other women which is the real suck part.

I don’t know if I have just one lesson I would want to pass on to other women… Never let anyone tell you “you can’t do it”, never let anyone treat you less then you deserve, never change for anyone… the list goes on and on… at the end of it though I think I would have “ Be you and own it”. Never let anyone make you feel less then, you are wonderful and powerful by just being you.  I’ve seen my friends at the lowest of lows and it never ceases to amaze me just how strong my sisters are.  I love the lessons I can learn from them and that is what I would tell anyone.

“I believe that all women are pretty without makeup-but with the right makeup can be pretty powerful.” – Bobbi Brown

A blog about a blog about some articles, possible black hole forming by just writing this…

So a little while ago I was perusing Facebook and I came across a blog someone else had read and posted about. Now I have some super smart friends and I always enjoy reading what they find interesting and this was no exception.  A woman was blogging about the topic of purity balls, which if you don’t know is an abstinence ball for fathers and daughters where the girl is pledging to stay abstinent from sex and the father is supposed to support that and do what he can to make that happen… which judging from most fathers I know they pretty much do that anyways, my own husband included who has told my daughter she can’t even wave to a boy until she is 30…

With that said though I’m wondering that message we are sending to our children, but mostly girls… for starters the double standard of boys… yes girls can get pregnant and yes it affects their life more, but I remember being in sex talks as a teenager where it was almost portrayed that boys were always going to try something and it was up to the girl to always be the level headed one. Where is the responsibility of the boys in this!  As a mother of a boy I would teach him and expect him to always respect any girl he was dating… but more importantly to have respect for himself and the choices he was making.  That goes same for my daughter, it isn’t her father or mine’s responsibility to hold her chastity in check, it’s our job to teach her sexual integrity same as our son. The biggest problem I see with this is we are teaching our daughters that they have no control over their own sexuality, nor are they responsible. I want my kids to make well informed choices not only when it comes to sex but in all aspects of their lives.  It might sound harsh but I want my daughter to know she is worth more than “being a virgin” when she gets married. If I can’t raise her to know she is worth more then what is between her legs, then I might as well have raised a stripper because while its opposite ends of the spectrum it’s the same message.  What happens to the girl that was attacked or molested, what about the girl that maybe makes an unwise choice with a boyfriend, are they worth less now because they are lacking the “purity” that is so sought after?  Of course they aren’t, a hymen doesn’t a wife make.

Our bodies are gifts to us from God, the universe- however your view and it’s the only one we get (at least in this life J) it’s our job to take care of them the best way we can emotionally and physically. I hope that my children will embrace that and make smart decisions with their bodies including who they will share them with.

Life is a bowl of cherries

Living well is the best revenge… I heard this the other night watching TV and while I’ve always heard it before and actually thought it wasn’t bad advice ( because let’s face it karma is a nasty beotch )until recently I’m not sure I ever contemplated if it was possible.  Can you live well and still even want revenge… maybe that’s the point of the saying, that if you are living well you can’t want revenge. I’m not so sure that’s true though, I think you can live well and even be happy but still want a nice little f-you to some people. I’ve struggled to write this and mulled it over again and again in my mind because as much as I want to move past my hurts and have my live well revenge, an equal part of me wants to lash out and punch people. 

I’d like nothing better than to be able to move on and forgive or even just forget and feel completely indifferent, but unfortunately it’s not always that simple.  Time heals all wounds or so they say but I think the reality is time scabs over wounds and allows them to heal, but even wounds that are healed can still scar. I hope to reach my living well revenge, I hope to get to the point where it’s just reality and not revenge. Where I can look back on my situations and say that was just that moment in time and now it’s past. If we can’t we are no different from the bitter Miss Havishams of the world locked away with a rotting wedding cake… and that I refuse to give into.

updated: I posted this a little while ago and struggled hard because I didn't want to wrap my head around things that were happening in my life. I have finally reached my living well revenge and I am happy to report that it did take some time and clarity but it is also possible. I never really thought that not caring would be a great feeling, but my time to grieve and be angry has passed and at the end of the day it's just not worth my energy.

Greener Grass

Several years ago I read an article about a woman who divorced her husband because they never fought.  She felt like they were lacking the passion to fight and therefore she left him and found someone that she regularly argued with.  At the time when I read this I was pretty floored, this woman left her husband and broke up the home of her kids because she felt like she was lacking the passion enough to fight?? To this day this article has never left me but as time and age normally do, my opinion on this has changed. I thought then and I still think she was wrong but for different reasons. 

When I first read this as a young married woman having a marriage where no one fought sounded perfect and while I understood her complaining about a lack of passion to fight I didn’t really get it. To me her choice to rip apart her family because of something so benign as not fighting was ridiculous.  Fast forward 9 years and I get it, but I still think she was wrong. I think she didn’t get what her problem was and probably never solved it. I would love to know if she is still married to the guy she now argues with. I don’t think she was married to the wrong guy, I don’t think it even really had anything to do with him, I think she was being disingenuous to herself and was blaming the lack of passion and fighting in her marriage on him. I think like us all she made choices and settled for what she thought she wanted and gave up things that she shouldn’t have. I would bet that if she realized what she was doing and started asking for what she needed instead of settling there would have been plenty of arguments and fighting. Maybe she was married to the wrong guy that certainly does happen, but I think what is more likely is she lost sight of who she was.  

It’s so easy to let the stuff go that shouldn’t be, to let yourself not care because it just takes so much or you’re so tired of being the one that does all the fighting but you can’t be untrue to yourself it will never serve anyone and it steals who you are what you can offer.

Can’t see the forest for the trees

I’ve often heard this phrase and up until about a week ago I really thought I understood what it meant. I thought it meant that you can’t see the big picture in something because you were lost in the details, where all the branches and the leaves were muddling you and keeping you from seeing that you were in the middle of a forest.  Like if you could just step outside of yourself and get an aerial view of the forest you would see the pattern and understand what was going on.  Maybe that’s true to an extent, a rudimentary view , something easy to say to describe someone or something… but I have a different opinion now.  I think that the leaves and the branches are so overwhelming and confusing that you can’t make out one tree from another. That you are so lost and confused that you don’t give a crap where the forest is, you just want out of the stupid trees and roots and leaves and branches that all look the same. You want to find a nice clearing where there is nothing around to confuse you and make you feel like you don’t know where you are and what you are doing.  Well I’m in the middle of the trees now and while I have no idea how to get out of here and which way I’m going, I know that even the most massive of forests have an end. Somewhere there is a stream, a river, a mountain, some sort of landmark that I’m going to latch onto and use as a guide. I don’t need an aerial view to make sense of the big picture; I just need to get to my clearing.