Don't Stop

Not too long ago, I wrote a blog about how tough parenting is.  Here’s the link.  Every now and then, I do go back and read the stuff I’ve written and compare those old words to see how they stack up to my current perspective.  Most of the time, I’m consistent.  There’s growth here and there, but overall, I would say that I’ve reached somewhat of a plateau in my worldview.  Today, I have to share a milestone. 

It goes completely without saying that trying to figure out how not to screw up our kids is a daunting task.  There are countless resources to compare your parenting with other bloggers, psychologists, doctors, inspirational writers, etc.  No one person has the right answer.  Because no one person is like the other, really all we can do is lament with each other!  Here’s a big learn:  if you are worried and talking/reading about your fears… YOU’RE DOING IT RIGHT!

Never in a million years did I think my family would look how it does.  For so long I was accustomed to an idealized version of family.  Fairytales are simply that.  Fairytales.  Real life is mostly glass slippers cutting your damned feet.  Those of us, who worry about our kids, simply stitch the cuts and trudge on.  The way my family looks today, is perfect to me.  Bloody Band-Aids an all.

Having an adult child, who is married, has brought one of the most beautiful educations.  We have extremely candid conversations.  Recently, we went over her point of view as a teenager with me as her mother.  It is sobering to hear what your child thinks of you.  I’ll fully admit these conversations could have gone so many kinds of wrong.  But, I believe I am in a space of hearing criticism without going fully ballistic. She said some stuff that quite honestly, still hasn’t fully sunk in.

Here’s how I know that if you’re worrying and trying to do what’s best for your kids is the right approach; she told me so.  Straight from the horse’s mouth, I heard these words, “Mom, I hope you don’t think you suffered for no reason.  I benefited from it.  I’m sorry you had to do that for me.”  Flabbergasted.

For so many years I ached for her to really know who I was and now, who I am.  I have wanted for her to recognize the reasoning behind the choices I have made and make.  Over ten years ago, Ricky Martin was quoted saying, “I want to be transparent to my children.”  Those words hit me right in the stomach.  The life my daughter had during her formative years, I was anything but transparent.  So many things interfered with her truly knowing me and understanding where I was coming from when I parented her.  My parents had the exact same struggle with me.  All that arrogant teenage wisdom can’t know it.

There was one particular area of discussion she and I had that addressed her feeling of being controlled.  She specifically talked about how betrayed she felt when her father and I would encourage honesty to ease the trouble she could be in.  When I told her that ease did not void consequence, she paused.  Then I explained that she won’t understand the difference between control and fear until she’s faced with the welfare of her own child.  Light shone over her as she reached a certain level of comprehension to that way of thinking.  It was pretty cool to see her calm her tits about the angst she’d carried with that opinion for so long.

She was making big adult choices with a tiny teenage brain. Her father and I were TERRIFIED she was going to have consequences that we could not shield her from. We lost our bloody minds trying to get her to understand choice and accountability.  She lacked the wisdom.  She saw us as controlling.  It’s going to be a cool day when she becomes a mother and has her first total meltdown over how helpless being a mom can be!  Of course… her becoming a mother can wait another ten years.

Fast forward to her now reviewing the life that put her where she is, I am blessed with a front row seat as she grows into a beast of a woman.  I can hear me in how she solves problems.  She is absolutely her own person.  But, I get to see the elements of quality she’s chosen to borrow from me and apply to her own life.  I am immensely proud of her.

I have two more tiny humans I’m trying like hell to show how to be good, ethical, kind adults.  These two little boys are exposed to a completely different kind of mess than their sister.  There are sections of their lives I have zero impact.  It is so hard to co-parent and provide consistency in the environment these little boys have to navigate.  It’s just as foreign to me as it is to them, even though it’s all we really know. 

Hope is the wind in the sail of my role as a mother.  I hope the example I set, the emotions they feel with me, and the exposure to my perspective grants them the ability to one day tell me half as beautiful as their sister did, their pride in their mother.  The hardest and most rewarding job we have as humans is raising good humans.  So, Mommies and Daddies of kids who just seem to buck you, grip that saddle.  They’ll break when they’re ready.  Just hold on tight.

On Purpose

Lately, I have been making a lot of new friends.  I love it.  That being said, this might be the first blog of mine you’re reading.  Welcome.  Intermittently over the past 11 years, I’ve chronicled what I have considered significant moments in my life.  I've also mixed in some poetry and general opinions about the world in which I perceive.  These past 11 years have been ripe with experiences, lessons, and ultimately growth.  Today, I am staring down the final year of my thirties and feeling a lot of satisfaction with what lies ahead.

Purpose drives the majority of the decisions I make.  It might have been Oprah who said something brilliant about living a life on purpose and then you’ll have fewer accidents.  Perhaps it’s the wisdom of living so many years on accident, that this mantra has garnered more impact.  The past five years have shown the benefits of living on purpose and shown the repercussions of flippant choices.  It’s not lost on me in this phase of my evolution.

One specific thing I’ve been doing on purpose is focusing my attention on my self-worth, self-esteem, and overall self-image.  It’s not a rarity to admit that I’ve been significantly tormented by the opinions of others when it comes to those definitions that truly shouldn’t waver based on anyone’s perception of me.  Alas, being a supremely self-conscious person, a chronic over thinker and people pleaser, I have placed my value outside of myself.  It’s been a fairly enlightening education discovering my vulnerability to other’s projection.

Five years ago, my dad died and I had my last child.  When I delivered him, via emergent C-section, I was underweight for the stage of pregnancy I was in.  The stress levels I was experiencing were severely impacting the health of the pregnancy.  Within mere weeks of the belly birth, I didn’t look like I had even been pregnant.  Nearly a year after he was born, my body reflected a much different state.  The battles with grief and depression had set in and I gained weight like it didn’t matter.  I will NEVER forget the first time I saw a number on a scale that I had never seen in all of my 35 years. 

The terror that shook my psyche to see 194 pounds staring back at me from between my feet was nothing short of sobering.  That was it.  Something had to change.  I had a few ideas about what I needed to do, but truth was, I didn’t realize how much of my mental state had contributed to the pounds I carried.  There’s certainly some kind of metaphor between those words.

I immediately cut soda out.  I started counting macros and watching every single calorie I consumed.  There was borderline obsession with what I ate and drank.  About a month after the commitment to change, I had lost about 15 pounds.  But then that damned plateau hit with all the power of a Mack truck.  Now, at this point I had not yet started working out.  I knew that the bulk of the results were going to come from eating right.

Because I’m such a nerd, I researched my fat ass off trying to figure out what I could do better, different, anything to start seeing more results.  Good Lord, there is a lot of biological chemistry involved with successful weight loss and maintaining the loss.  For shits and giggles, I took a quiz about my body type and eating habits.  I was Internet diagnosed with a food phobia.  Um.  Alright.  I was under eating by about 700 calories a day.  Just the idea of increasing my intake that much gave me anxiety.  That anxiety proved the validity of the test results.

After another couple of months of adjusting and readjusting, I found my happy balance.  I also fell in deep love with free weights.  Within about six months, I had lost nearly 40 pounds.  The size 14 jeans I was sporting were no longer fitting.  I was happily in a size 10/12 and feeling great. 

I was able to keep the weight off.  The alchemy (because let’s face it, staying on a diet wagon sucks) of balance began to manifest in spades.  Cheat days were less and less enjoyable.  My body let me know, violently, when I ate trash.  Those cheat days took different approaches.  Instead of the double quarter pounder with cheese, I found the love for pistachios by the quarter pound.  The shift towards healthier stuff seemingly took over.  It was weird, but cool!

Now, here’s the really interesting part.  Simultaneously with my diet and exercise routine, I was finding some inner peace.  The balance wasn’t only shifting with my lifestyle; it was shifting emotionally and spiritually.  So, when people would ask me what I was doing to lose the weight, I would always answer with being genuinely happy.  It was a fact.  I was at the beginning of what I can now see as the pendulum swing towards a trajectory I’m so proud to say has continued to thrust forward.

The past five years have not been without some challenge and pain.  My weight reflected it.  I gained back a few pounds.  Some blows to the ego hit my waistline in addition to my inner peace.  I recognized it a lot faster this time.  It didn’t take me long to hitch up the wagon again and climb on.  This past winter, I started hitting the power lifting again and refocused my purpose. 

My purpose transitioned with even more fervent introspection, I’ll be honest, I sort of freaked out.  Like a switch had been flipped, suddenly I saw the rest of a dimly lit room that was Me.  Today, I found myself looking through old pictures and seeing the way my body reflected my emotional phases and evolutions.  For fun, I used one of those apps that collage images into one.  One side was me five years ago and the other was taken today.  Of course I had seen the picture several times.  It was the picture that shook me (collaboratively with seeing the scale tip far too close to 200 pounds).  However, seeing it next to the image from today, it was so clear to me how valid my purposes are in my current position.

Like lightening, the journey I have been on spliced through my mind.  All the ups and downs flipped through me like watching a slide show on hyper speed.  The intention I try to foster and mature is what I believe to be correct for the life I’ve built and been given.  The smile I wear, I’ve earned.  The glow I shine, I made.  The joy I feel, I postured myself to receive.  At this moment, I weigh 155 pound and wear a size 6/8 and feel lighter than I can even describe.  All I can do is hope and persevere that the purpose I feel so much conviction to follow, continues to bear, at the very least as much joy as I feel right now.

Deserve

“You deserve to be happy.”  “You deserve to be loved.” 

Who decided this?  What criteria determine these types of entitlements?  Perhaps I am exposing a little piece of self-deprecation here, but it doesn’t matter.  I truly want to know how we came to blindly decide these things for humanity.

“You deserve to have nothing less than what you put in.”

That seems to make me more comfortable.  I believe I’ve mentioned a quote from the book, Perks of Being a Wallflower, in a previous blog.  “We accept the love we think we deserve.”  Combine that sentence with what I feel is a more accurate entitlement and how does that make you feel? 

It is curious to me to figure the aspects of balance with varying expectations within a relationship.  I’m not even talking about a romantic relationship.  This is just as much applicable to friendships, work relationships, parent to child relationships, etc.  Feeling deserving has become this widely subjective verb.  What I believe I deserve is unique to my own points of view.  So, how can we adequately deliver any entitlements to each other when they’re so diverse?

Enter compromise.  Or, what I like to refer to as “the slippery slope.”  If we all minimally expect people to treat each other the way they want to be treated, where’s the baseline standard?  For example, if I really want a person to take an active and supportive role in my passions, then I should do that for that person I am setting an expectation of, right?  And, yes it is absolutely an expectation.  As that relationship evolves and reaches deeper dependency, we start to address those expectations with the other person.  Now, in a healthy and communicative situation, that conversation is productive and receptive.  If love is the root of that relationship, each person will want to provide the other with his or her needs and it will be of little or no consequence.  The more typical relationship (one with a heavy dose of selfishness at play) one person will start to minimize those expectations in the almighty name of compromise.  The baseline opportunity gets squandered and the definition of deserves shifts.

For the sake of this subject, lets focus on the less perfect relationship.  Honestly, it’s really the one most of us can relate to.  The way I perceive a “supportive role in my passions” is specific.  Come to my gigs.  Read my blogs.  Listen to me ride the highs and lows of those creative expressions.  There is my baseline.  Because I will treat the other person with as much translatable action to match my expectation, I’m meeting my own standard of treating the other the way I want to be treated.  The other person has a different idea of what “supporting” looks like.  That person may believe they are satisfying me “their own way.”  The typical way to resolve that difference is to compromise.  Ideally each person rises and/or reduces equally in effort to achieve a successful outcome.  Likely, the disappointed person will reduce the expectation and in the moment feel satisfied.  I hope the slippery slope is evident here.

In that moment of failed “compromise” what really got compromised was the definition of deserving.  It might take a little while to fully recognize the ramifications of that shift, but it does take root in the mind and births resentment.  A passive conditioning began the erosion of how a person baselines what they believe they deserve.  Which further illustrates just how subjective the perception is.  There are several ways this kind of experience impacts an individual.  Some will learn from this and become more assertive in protecting and demanding their expectations until they find the right match to have a satisfying relationship.  Some will erode so deeply, they give up to expecting anything from anyone.  There are a million other outcomes in between.

Being a lover of takers, I’m in the introspective stage of how I move forward defining what I deserve.  It’s particularly tough for me to wrap my head around this, because I’m a believer in the good in just about everyone.  I have this vast threshold of patience and tolerance intertwined with hope.  My definition of deserves becomes a frayed thread.  I find myself constantly seeking people I hope recognize what I deserve.  I have been counter-productive and ultimately self-deprecating.  I give my definition to someone else.  This has royally screwed me up.

On two separate occasions, a mental health care professional informed me that I expect things from people that are not capable of providing the expectation.  I either needed to learn to lower my expectations to reduce my disappointment or change the relationships.  Twice.  I heard that twice and I did not like it.  I thought it was absolute bullshit that I could not demand what I needed from those particular individuals.  Fast-forward a decade…ok.  I get it.  Dammit, a lot of time was wasted.

I have been learning to understand what I personally deserve.  What has been fascinating to me during this evaluation is my slightly cynical perspective is based on real life.  Now, I can look myself in the mirror every day and not doubt the justification.  In all my human imperfection, I consistently try to be a good friend.  I am finding foundation in my education in knowing what a siphon looks like and I avoid those toxic people as much as possible.  I am learning to not so freely give myself away.  This is tough for me.

The last thing I want to do is expect anything from a relationship that is unrealistic or based on an inflated sense of entitlement.  Once upon a time, I told myself I would never reduce myself for the comfort of another.  I almost did.  I am learning the art of the compromise.  The last thing I want to do is run around this existence with an entitlement based on something I can’t substantiate.  I want to accept a better love than I have previously believed I deserved.  I think I’m in a space now where I am pretty solid in demanding better.

I would love to discuss this with you.  What do you think?

Just Maybe

I’ll let you take

Take everything I am

I’ll offer myself fully just in case

Just in case maybe, maybe you might

See what I’m giving you and see the treasure. 

I’ll swallow you

Mold my world around your passions

Everything you show me about you

Becomes my obsession

Just in case maybe, maybe you might

Become obsessed with how I make you feel. 

I’ll dull for you to shine

Sit back and support your dreams

I’ll cheer and root for you and quietly pursue mine

Just in case maybe, maybe you’ll look behind you

And see the foundation I’ve laid at your feet. 

I’ll see you completely 

Better than you’ll ever see yourself 

I’ll ache for you to know you how I do

Just in case maybe, maybe you’ll notice 

That you’ve never been loved this deeply. 

I’ll fight for us

Even when you don’t see how much it’s for us

You’ll hear me as a complainer but I won’t quit

Just in case maybe, maybe you’ll hear 

My pleading for you to love me back. 

I’ll come out of my depths

To wade in the shallow with you

To make you feel safe while losing who I am

Just in case maybe, maybe you’ll miss the caves of my mystery that once lured you. 

I’ll eventually figure it out

All that I’ve compromised without reciprocity

And I’ll weep over the loss of a dream I saw in you

And then, that is when 

The dim from grief is exposed

I’ll grieve for me

I’ll withdraw all that you took and 

You won’t recognize the fault in your part

And then, that is when 

I’ll reluctantly take the blame. 

I will break

From the weight of carrying your soul and mine

My eyes will darken, my skin will become sallow. 

And then, that is when 

You’ll lose me and feel empty again.