M Bug Lately

My sweet baby boy

hockey award night

insanity that included

pizza and an open skate

His first award with his name on it

He is so geeked for hockey next season

already!

Move over hockey

Level 4 Swim Class is now!

M Bug and I had a little Mother-son date day

Normally I would not call it this

it is kinda dorky, eh?

K actually dubbed it this... I am not sure why?!

Any who, M Bug wanted to see The Lorax,

Missy wanted a Daddy-daughter day.

We had a great time, we always do.

We got out tickets early,

hit up Penn Station because

they have fries and college basketball on TV

which apparently rocks my

almost 7 year old's world

He was pretty excited to get root beer

Look I am a mean, mean Mommy.

My kid has had soda like hardly ever

in his short little life.

His WHOLE flippin' face lit up when

I told him he could have this.

We went back to theatre where people

we LINED up to go into the show

so I made M Bug get in line

while I bought us some waters and candy

and in we went.

The Lorax was great,

made my greenie earth momma butt cry.

Then M Bug went home

and went straight into the backyard to plant

a flippin' tree.

He is awesome.

My sweet baby boy.

He totally gets it

and I love that about him.

Running Snippets: "The Rage"

• I ran 13 miles on Saturday afternoon... shit (so UNintentional I swear...) I cannot even remember if that is the right amount of mileage!? 
• My poor running partner was very patient as I had to stop twice to use the facilities plus a few slow walks because my gawd I felt rotten. 
  One stop at the port oh potty and once at a BURGER KING. 
• That second one was somewhat humiliating, I must admit.
• I thought 'wow this running in the afternoon thing really sucks hinny..." Oh my how puny!
• Then I discovered that lo, I had some kind of stomach flu that than rather simply raging in my tummy was only raging in my INTESTINES.
• GROSS.
• For three days and three nights, my gut raged.
• I ran last night for the first time since "the rage".  I was scared.  I did not feel like raging any longer.
• I successfully and happily completed four miles without any rage. 
• It actually felt great.
• It helped to have a kick ass b-ball game on the television to watch!
• This might be a good time to mention, I am "better" from the sinus infection and finished the antibiotics and yet?  the cough persists.
• This has been the winter from hell for me.
• K squarely blamed my being sick from marathon training... I could not even object.
• I am supposed to ramp up my mileage this week to: 4m, 8m, 4m, and 18m = 34m
• 18 seems so impossible and might remind my gut of "the rage"
• I shall ignore my tummy and tell my head I CAN DO IT!
• Which reminds me, I read a running blog and there was a girl who wrote a piece recently who spoke of her love for mileage. She even ran a half marathon SIX MONTHS PREGNANT. I was amazed.  I have to admit I was proud of the days when I was pregnant and I remembered to drink a few full glasses of water a day... HA!
• I have been switching off shoes between the new and older pair with positive results.
• I still need to work on getting to bed on time and eating better.
• Those are hard things for me to achieve.
• I desperately wanted wedges and I found these on... wait for it... freaking Pinterest! Yup.Pinterest. I love them so much they are worth mentioning here.

Crapstatic phone pic from work

Trust me they are SUPER CUTE!

I am pretty sure my co-workers

wonder what the hell

I keep taking photos of

whilst sitting down at my desk!

• That is all I have. The crappy new shoes photo will have to be enough to hold you over until my next running post, mmm kay?

Piggies

Most of these photos I have been

and will be posting are weeks old.

I think I took this one

the last week in January.

I just have not been in a

picture taking mood lately.

Enjoying the moments

rather then documenting them

or using my silly phone

which clearly is always

in hand as evidenced by this photo.

***

Olivia the pig

and dino feet.

Missy continues to be a ham.

She giggles and laughs

and she has recently

learned the power of making

us laugh so she tries

nearly effortlessly

to do this often!

Tuff

 

Missy took her first skating lessons this year.

She l-o-v-e-d it.

She called it "her hockey".

This Gig

Parenting. It teaches me about myself. It reminds me how much I have grown up and how much I have yet to grow. It makes my emotional state feel raw and yet oddly like I am wrapped up in a cozy warm blanket of love and happiness all in the same breath. It is hard, the hardest job I have ever had, yet so satisfying at the same time. It is filled with drama and laughter; tears and bodily fluids!

I hold their hands every chance I can get. One still chubby & sweet hand with nails gnawed down to nothing and one lean perpetually dirty yet still so soft hand. I put my hand on their soft swirling messy heads in the morning to gently pat and breathlessly whisper I love you’s to them because I still can.

I noticed my hand the other day and it looks so much like my mother’s did when I was young… that was it looks old. How did that happen? Slowly the tide of gray is coming in blooming out of the center of my scalp so that I cannot keep up on it. And those two wee tots are growing so fast I cannot stem the tide of that either. Nor do I want to though some days I sit very still and watch them quietly to see how they are, how much they have changed. I remember every moment in my mind’s eye as if those moments are happening right now. Sometimes that is weird like when I was a kid and I would get out the slide projector. Sometimes, the slides would end up on top of each other making a mish mash of photo memories on the large white screen in front of us. That is what it is like to look at my kids now and remember them as they were when they were first born or the first, second, third years…

Standing before me are big kids, long limbs and intricate word tracks and emotions beyond hungry or tired or change me. I sit quietly with them and I remember those first moments when those sweet screaming purple faces were laid down next to mine or those first steps and that beaming chubby baby face filled with glee at learning to walk; there are simple expansive moments and words and giggles and late nights that all goes by so quickly. Early on in the first year we as parents are practically forced to look at growth and milestones and rarely do we stop and really enjoy those moments deeply on a different level. It can feel like a blur, those early years and it is but if I stop, truly stop, I see it as less of a blur and more of the simple happy moments. I would not go back but going forward I am trying harder to be aware, in the here and now, because I am so obviously aging just like them. Before long they will be pushing out the door to be away from us and spending more time with their friends then us.

I have my moments. Lord knows I do. I get so angry sometimes… ‘Listen to me, why are you whining; why on earth do you find it so funny to spit the toothpaste on the mirror THAT I JUST CLEANED?!’ I cannot fault myself for those moments. Those are honest moments that we all have. It is not always roses and sunshine. I think kids learn from that as much as anything else. We have trauma and temper tantrums and good god eat the bloody carrots they will help you see better in the dark when you are trying to sneek out to that party when you are sixteen!

This parenting gig is hard work but so worth it. It is a blessing in disguise as the saying goes. It is not what you think it will be when you start out. You are not who you believe yourself to be when first embrace your spouse and say “we are pregnant!” It is not like those damn parenting magazines try to tell you how to be. None of it is what you expect… it is better and sometimes it is worse but in all it is an amazing transforming experience.

Eight years ago if you asked me about parenting I would have made a face at you, scowled, said “never…” Now I know it is what I was always meant to do. My kids took me down the path that was always there for me, to learn to be a better me, to learn to be more patient and calm and to care less about how clean things are (OCD be gone!), to live in the here and now because it so very fleeting. My kids are amazing and beautiful and brilliant little creatures, just as all parents think their kids are! Every parent I meet beams about their child, how advanced and amazing that child is. And they are, in our eyes, they are.

Parenting is about a lot of things but more and more I am finding it is about pride. This is the hardest job anyone will do, ever, but if we do it with pride accompanied by compassion and happiness and we can learn to leave our egos at the door, wow, what we can all gain from this parenting gig! Enjoy the moments, they are fleeting.  Do not rush through it all.  Take it one day at a time.  Temper frustration with laughter.  Review my actions, determine how I can do it better next time.  Sit quietly, watch and enjoy as best I can.  Do not overachieve for my kids, let them find their own pathways.  Stay away from helicopters, they are harmful or better yet do not compare my kids or myself to other kids/parents.  We are all doing a fine job.  We are all in this together!

I am a mother and I so proud of that fact.

Paradigm Shift: Destiny

I hardly ever think about the fact that I am a mother. Not any more anyway. It is like I always have been a mother but I have not always been one which I am thankful for. I would have been one of those seemingly unfit type mothers portrayed on MTV has I decided to have children before the age I did.

In fact, in the months before Matthew’s conception, in the time before I became a mother, I changed dramatically from the party girl into someone else.  Possibly starting down the long road to me, now.

I rocked the party scene. I liked to drink. I like to stay out late and I did not much care about my free time nor did I like my job so I was perpetually hung over. I found in alcohol the ability to hide my severe anxiety and shyness that I felt when I was around “people”. I believed that alcohol would get me what I wanted, that I could manage it well and still be successful. Largely all of these beliefs were wrong.

Then the year I turned 30, I made an extravagant discovery. I was not an alcoholic.

There are two main things I would say my mother did poorly in my life. One had to do with coming out of the closet and the way she foisted that upon us. Just to clarify, I could give a rat’s behind that she came out of the closet, it was the WAY in which she did it and her inability to understand what we were feeling about that which sucked. That is another story for another time… or maybe I have already told that one? Oh well, it might be worth retelling some time.

The other is the nonstop nearly constant nagging of her children that we would fail miserably because we were children of an alcoholic. She became heavily involved in AA around the time COINCIDENTALLY that she came out of the closet. She now has some obscene amount of sobriety, 30 years? I believe it is something along those lines. While I used to feel immensely proud of her for being sober I think it sort of angers me that she could not see what she did to us with her nagging about becoming alcoholics and how that had fairly negative consequences in our lives. The irony is that her words, her prophecy, became the fabric of my life. I believed her, we believed her. I will let my brother and sister tell their stories but mine goes like this.

I started drinking heavily when I was 13. I learned to hide it. I hid it very well for the most part. I modeled my world after my Dad who is indeed an alcoholic. He did it so could I was my attitude. I surrounded myself often with people who drank heavily and there was always a steady flow of people. I proceeded to drink heavily until I was almost 30.

Now looking back on that statement makes me shudder. It seems so profound. I drank away a lot of time that I could have better spent doing almost anything else but I so firmly believed I was an alcoholic that I lived my life as such. I was a heavy drinker and I was fairly mean drunk. I was fun to a certain point and then I would become mean. My demons would come out at that point. Most of my drinking involved blacking out. Much of the time it put me in extremely dangerous situations that somehow I managed to either stuff down so deep inside of me at this point or simply I survived somehow without harming myself and those around me. I am not being overly dramatic here. I am just being honest.

If the one person who raises you tells you in nearly every conversation that you will grow up to be something… guess what, it will happen?!

Now the fact remains I made this choice out of freewill but in the back of my head I would hear her voice telling me that I was a child of an alcoholic therefore I would become one too, I better watch out. I also felt that being an alcoholic was not bad. My Dad was very successful in his heyday. He was a Nuclear Engineer and my hero. He was very intelligent, well read, and just a kind man.  He travelled the world. He made a ton of money. He had a nice house and a lovely family. He supported all of us through good and bad. I believed in her statements so deeply and I saw my father as such a success, I bet if you asked some of the people who knew me back then they would tell you I told them this fact: “I am an alcoholic” and I might have even seemed proud of that fact. Most of them would laugh and tell me to shut up, I was not. But the thing is I believed it.

Then I turned 30. I have this belief that your 20s these days are just a merry extension of your teens or that is the story I go by. I think there were a lot of moments before this one particular moment that lead me to this moment. Regardless of the situation, I had an epiphany after one particularly incredibly drunken night. No details needed. As I lay shuddering under a blanket on a green couch sick and pale in a tiny apartment in Fort Wayne Indiana I made the decision for real to stop this madness, to grow up and act my age and stop believing in the story I was told and make my own story. So I did.

To come full circle on this whole story, I do drink now. I know several truths. Most importantly, I am not an alcoholic. I drink fairly infrequently and when I do drink I feel no desire to have more than 1-2 drinks. I have no interest to go back to the person I was all those years ago. I wonder how I did that back then. I am so aware of alcohol and the effects it has had on my life that I have zero interest of passing along that legacy to my children. When I do drink more, I remember why I stopped doing that. I am in control but most importantly I control my own destiny, only I can tell myself who I am going to be in this life.  That is one powerful thing!

Doubting Thomas

'I feel like I am not doing the job I was meant to do.'

That "attitude" has often been trouble for me.

I half-ass things thinking this.  I talk myself into believing there must be more out there for me 'to do'.

The truth is I am in the best place doing the best thing and I need to remember that.

I need to change my attitude about the job I do because I truly enjoy it.

Sure it stresses me out, it can make me feel tired/angry/frustrated at times but mostly it is an amazing opportunity that I take for granted daily.

I know when I turn that little voice off in my head and throw myself into this job; I do better at the job.

It actually pays off and I am successful.

That little niggling voice in my head that say “you can’t” rises up and wins.

Dammit.  I have to stop that... or I will fail. every time.

I am good at what I do in my job without a doubt. 

I am good at what I do in general. I need to stop the doubt.  Stop the glass half empty 'tude.

Life is SO full, so amazing, so wonderful.  And I am lucky for all that I have.

I am a good mother.

I am a good wife.

I am a good recruiter.

There are always things I could do better. I could make a list so long it would make our eyes hurt and bleed to read!  Friends I do not stay in touch with and things that I not accomplish around the house, blah blah blah.  Turning off that noise is so hard.

I need to be great at the above three things (work, my relationship and my family/kids) and stop beating myself up for all of the other things I feel I am failing at. The perfectionism that I grew up believing I needed is so unfounded and it has done nothing for me.

This post… these lines… they are tiresome. I have been trying to tell myself this for years. I have let this 'I could be better than I am being' mindset ruin me over the years.

But the times I have let it go, I have done so much, I have been great and achieved greatness.

I think we humans are our own worst enemies. We torture ourselves and most of what we torture ourselves with is in our own pretty little heads.

I need to own who I am and trust and believe that I am good at what I set my mind to being good at.

I need to make these changes now for her as much as for me.

{{Pony Party!}}

So she has a role model, a strong vibrant happy role model, that she is proud of.

I need to stop with the old belief that there is more to life, that I could do better, that I not doing what is good right now.  I just need to be and believe I am great... that is hard, these are old things I have lived with my whole life.  To take a stance and change them now is a step but it is only a step if I actually do it.

I need only look into those amazing sea blue eyes and see this, know this and finally at the end of the day, it is all lip service if I do not believe this.

DOUBTS BE GONE!