Job Hunting. Anxiety Overload.

Here I am. 

Thirty years old. 

As a female I've been told I was supposed to be angry or afraid of turning thirty. I am neither. I'm happy to be older. Getting older means I lived longer. I want to live for as long as I can.

I've been meaning to blog again for a few weeks now. My life has been tossed into the air. I have mixed feelings about it all. Our water got turned off again a few weeks back and it was decided that I have to go back to work. The smallest BabyG is almost 2. The biggest BabyG is so not a baby anymore, she's nearly school age. I guess it's time. Hubby has solely supported us for as long as he can. It's time for me to bite the bullet and get a "real" job.

Turning 30.

I often laugh out loud when I think about what being an adult would entail when I was a teenager.

I pictured soft jazz playing. Either being married or single (I was never too attached to either way of life so I could be satisfied with either) and both my SO and I would be successful people. I would be a history teacher and I would get a degree in anthropology. My SO and I would take turns cooking and cleaning. I would not have children because I was going to travel every chance I got. All of my money would be thrown into travel and fancy drinks with fancy meals. I would see the world because being worldly helps when you're a historian and successful anthropologist. I read all of these books about these people being approached to drop everything and go on these big important trips because they knew things. I wanted to be that person that knew things. I wanted to be published by 40 and settling into my dusty library-looking office by 50 as a world renowned historian/specialist on... SOMETHING. 

Community College Still Counts

Since becoming a student again my life has changed substantially. 

If you are a stay at home mom and you feel overwhelmed, depressed and similar to an underappreciated slave-- I advice taking ONE college course. If you can't afford it, fill out the FASFA information this coming tax season and see what you can do. I'm serious-- It's life saving.

I started school this August. I had my second child last september. That's right, I went back to school with two kids under 4. I enrolled in three classes. To my terror, that first week was a nightmare. The juggle of chores, kids and husband just wasn't working for me. 

I just had to take a step back and set my priorities right. 

My Hospital Bag: Second Pregnancy

First off, I'd like to say I'm a minimalist. I try to be, anyway. I call myself a minimalist parent too. My first would've gone naked without handmedowns and even her toy collection was bought second hand or given to her by friends and family. The only thing new we made sure to buy was her infant car seat and stroller (it was a package deal).

I can't stress enough the importance of packing light for the hospital visit when delivering your baby!!!!

Ask yourself:
- How close is the hospital to your family and friends?
- Will someone be able to run to your house "real quick" and get anything forgotten?
- Do you live in an area that provides late night food options if the hospital cafeteria is closed?
- Will people come to visit you and the new baby? Have you hired a photographer to take your first pictures?

PUPPP sucks.

PUPPP or Pruritic urticarial papules and plaques of pregnancy, sucks. Doctors know very little about why it happens but some researchers in the UK found a connection to dairy consumption, having multiple babies in one birth or it being the second+ pregnancy and mothers pregnant with boys. They think it's a conflict between the male DNA and the already established female DNA--- but that's all speculation since it wasn't a formal study.

Couponing + 30 Weeks + HOTHOT Summer

Ah, normalcy!

We have our own place now and are living with our heads barely above water with one paycheck. It's awesome.

I know... I know... Awesome to live paycheck to paycheck? Crazy talk, right? Well, At least we manage to get our bills paid with one source of income and still manage to eat on the regular. I can't be more thankful. Hubby always seems to provide everything we need. He may be stressed out about it and I drive him crazy because a hundred dollars in the bank account doesn't scare me enough to not spend thirty dollars of it on groceries. In couponing terms, that's atleast seventy dollars worth of groceries anyway... so I don't see the issue.

Did I tell you I'm pregnant?

I have been pretty well immersed in my own life for the last few weeks. For those of you that don't know, I'm pregnant (and halfway to my due date already!) and we finally got our own place again.

The new place has given Hubby a new kind of confidence that I haven't seen in quite awhile, BabyG has developed a rash while I'm just pregnant and bitchy.

I keep telling myself it's pregnancy hormones and that I'm not actually depressed. I keep assuring myself that I'm not actually a horrible person. It's not working. Watching mutual friends meet up while I'm uninvited on Facebook brings me back to high school. "Sorry... Didn't know you were available..." And "Well, [random name] kind of just thinks you're a bitch." Yeah, well... I guess I am. I'm just lonely. I'm at that place where I want to invite people over to our place now that we have one but when no one shows up it will crush me.

I've stopped unpacking. I am slowly just shoving the boxes to the spare room and shutting the door to hide the stacks of boxes and bags of clothes. I can feel my blood pressure go up just thinking about that room.

I've pissed my family off. Well, my sister has always been very critical of me and even her positivity can only be met with curiosity. Why is honesty so bad? Why am I the bad guy for saying how I feel? My mom kept asking me, "Have you thought about my feelings in this?" In something that didn't even directly involve her. Obviously, I left my grandmothers house in bad terms. It didn't have to be that way, I so desperately didn't want it to be that way. I still have a handful of things there that I need but am too agitated to go back and get. I guess when you become old and senile you can do no wrong. Even me expressing my anger (not directly at my grandma) is some big disrespectful thing that I shouldn't have done. Do you even know how suffocating it feels to be told you aren't allowed to feel a certain way? How robbed of free will and disgusted it is to be told you aren't allowed to feel a certain way simply because of whom it is you feel that way towards? I called no names or made any remarks that weren't based on facts but yet I was the one who was told to feel guilty and wrong for my simple act of feeling. It became clear to me, through the actions of everyone in my family that there is a clear line between me and them. I guess because of my relationship with my family I have always approached all of my relationships with people on thin ice. The only time I remember my mom telling me she was proud of me in my adult life was after having a kid. My sister and grandma began to warm up to me after I had BabyG. I became worth something by joining the unspoken Mother Club. Such a thin string I dangled on with just that.

Well... Anyway.

I'm just bitter and pregnant, I guess. Yes, being pregnant is an absolute explanation not an excuse. If you've never been pregnant before you'll never understand the draining, guilt-filled, bitchfest that is carrying a lovable leech in your womb. I have begun to feel actual kicks now, especially when it's been 20mins since my last bathroom visit. According to the scales at the doctors office I've only gained 8lbs (that's been about a month ago, though) which is on track in the "healthy" weight gain chart for my size/height. 8lbs is a substantially smaller difference than what I had gained with BabyG at this point (30lbs... Yikes!) and it seems to be primarily in my torso area. I catch myself lifting my gut and carrying it. Elastic bands are my friend! My belly is so heavy some days. I can't avoid it. I remember feeling this twisted and alone while pregnant with BabyG but I lived thousands of miles away from everyone I knew... This time is different, I live just mere minutes away from the few people I call close and the same amount of minutes for those in the ripples of the friendship scale. I'm probably just being neurotic and needy but I can't help it. Hubby says all the right things and caters to my insecurities to the best of his ability, I am very lucky in that way.

I guess you could say this blog is a cry for help. A passive aggressive bitchfest that I hope will turn into hugs and sympathy. Just being honest. 

Painful Truth

I have been mulling this blog post over in my head for days. 

I mainly want to talk about the most heartbreaking news I've had this month without sounding like a complete cretin bitch. Especially when a heartbreak also happened with my sister and the situations are so different and so brittle it's hard not to take notice of the obvious.

Hey Look, it's January!

Are you annoyed by all your friends facebook posts about going to the gym yet? How about their new sobriety? Or the most annoying... "New Year, New Me."

Yeah... none of that here.

I have one goal for 2015: 

Getting out of my grandmother's house.

Last time we went to the storage unit we did a lot of throwing away of things and finding things we could give away or sell. I sold another $10 Surprise and it's got me all excited about the coming year. Hubby says we can buy the trailer by valentines day... so you know what that means? No shiny things for me, just the foundation to our house! It's cool though. I hate valentines day (see previous post) anyway so it's whatevs.

Goodbye 2014: May you rot in hell.

This past year has been tough. The struggle seemed never ending. The bills never stopped. The guilt of the impending year anniversary of us living with my grandmother came and went. Sadness, panic and dismay was the theme of 2014. We spent over a thousand dollars this year on storing our material possessions. Just thinking about that alone makes me want to hurl.

I don't want to dwell on the most terrible of this past year though. I try not to let the gloom and doom consume me. I try not to feel like I'm waiting in line for something to happen. Earth is not a big waiting room for some mystical place after we die. I loathe that paused feeling. 2014 was more or less my screeching halt and reality check. I'm happy that it seems to have brought Hubby and I closer instead of farther apart. As a newly married couple (Fuck. We were pretty brand new in the whole relationship thing, much-less the marriage)  I feel like we came through pretty clean. There was some definite rough patches and we had our first real arguments ever but beyond that we still love each other and still want to be married... which says a lot in today's approach to marriage.

Nose Dive

I keep bringing myself back to the times in my life that I've pulled up to a dumpster and just threw up to 60% of everything I owned. The only things I really kept throughout these years were my many books. I always dreamed of having a room in my moderately sized mansion that just had walls and walls of books. I was going to have a personal library. A library to me was hitting the big time. To not only afford all of those book, but to put them on a shelf like little trophies to show off. I would invite friends over and have tea in my library. I would cozy in with a warm beverage on rainy days to be surrounded by these stories of adventure while I traveled elsewhere in a book. When I was in elementary school whenever anyone asked me, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I'd quickly respond with historian. The questioning adult would give me a puzzled look and I would give my practiced speech of becoming a teacher of history or English while I got my PHD and as soon as I accomplished the Doctor title I would then consume my studies with whatever fit my fancy and read books all day long and do interviews for the history channel. Those historians always seemed to know everything about something. That was my dream. Books.

Large Aspirations for Tiny Living

Have you ever thought about selling all of your stuff and then living in your vehicle while you're on the go until you find somewhere you think would be cool for awhile?

Well, I get that itch about every six to twelve months. My husband knew this coming into this relationship. I had known him for three years before we got together and in that three year time span I moved numerous time. I've thrown away and re-accumulated material goods various times in my life. Never before have I acquired so much crap since I had a baby. Let's face it, babies get a LOT of crap. People buy a lot of crap for babies. It's ridiculous.

An Open Horizon

Okay, Okay... so I just wanted to drop a quick note to all my lady friends.

I've noticed a shift in the last year. I've stopped watching talk shows and only read Parenting magazine, so that may be the shift I've seen.... but still. The shift is an empowerment amongst us gals. I partially blame the gay movement. Why? Because you pretty ladies are emerging with your chopped off hair, boy pants and no make up. You are kissing your partners and the world took notice to how damn sexy you tend to be while doing it.



Lesbians are making hetero women realize they were mislead on what "real" beauty is meant to look like. Well, labels aside... you can tell the shift is style. It's kind of 80s grunge and I love it. Our teenagers are showing us adults how it's done. Tegan and Sara are setting a prime example of beauty beyond the magazines. Hell, the phenomenon of the Philippines Transgender Pageant have shown us that the beauty of a women is an open horizon.

So lets take this moment to smile at our beautiful bodies and faces. Let's caress our stretch marks from birth like honor. Let us make cosmo and other fluff magazines sell us health food instead of quick fix creams. Ladies, take a look around you. Skinny isn't in-- being healthy and loving yourself IS!

Now that I have a daughter I realize more and more how critical my mother was of my sister and I growing up. My mother is a bit of a control freak (she's gotten a lot better since my adolescence) so she just wanted us to be like her, which is understandable... but even with that said, I'd much rather my daughter be with the fringe crowd and dress in clothes from goodwill than be with the cool kids in the name brand clothes. It takes more confidence to overcome the Mean Girls than to join them.

In middle school I use to come home and cry for hours because of what was said to me. I would leave the house with my sister teasing me and then spend hours at school hearing about my appearance from others. I'd hear about who was wearing make up and who had sex over the weekend. One of my close friends was going to the tanning bed every day with her mother. I felt consumed with my outsides and it made my insides twist with confusion.

"If I wore lipstick maybe he'll notice me."
"If I wore different jeans maybe she'd be nice to me at school tomorrow."
"If I bought different shoes maybe I could sit with the cool kids at lunch."

By the time I turned fifteen I had already had sex, began painting my toe nails and would spend hours in front of a mirror trying to fix my hair just right. That is entirely too young to have had sex already. I had been sexualized by peer pressures about my appearance. It seems a lot of people don't see that connection. If you start out your child giving them stern gender barriers:

"No, Timmy, only girls play with dolls."

"No, Dana, only boys like the color blue." 

You make them define themselves purely by their gender and not by their interests. You are restricting them from expression and forcing them into roles that are way past due to be shattered.

By forcing your kid into the role of "male" and "female" instead of "baby", "child" and "teenager" you are telling them to act out roles of "female is submissive to her male counterpart" and "have sex to keep your man interested" because those are the examples we are giving our children at home and in the media. If you make your daughter define herself as a girl instead of a person, she'll follow all those Top Girl fashions and Girls Guide to Sex lists. Now, I'm not saying that it won't happen regardless and preteens are already developing their personalities and have their own opinions about things already. I'm just saying-- maybe it'll show our teenagers that finding themselves and loving themselves is more important than finding what's in each others pants?

[Quick Disclosure] I'm speaking purely on personal experience and theory.

Maybe it was because I was raised in a very religious home. Maybe it's because I grew up in a small town and there wasn't much else for young people to do but explore other people's bodies, get involved in drugs or get a job. Luckily, I chose the job route. I pulled my hair up into a ponytail and no matter how many showers I took I swore my hair still smelled like cheeseburgers. I didn't respect myself though, I sought love through affection because I knew of no other way. I had been taught that love comes from the outside in, not the inside out. That is what I wish to never impose on my daughter. Why did it take me years in my twenties to realize that I had to love myself first? Why didn't someone tell me before hand?

O yeah, that's right, I was told jesus would make me happy and that's the only way I could find love. Way to give everyone insecurities and not let them trust their own instincts, jesus. What a douchebag. I didn't know of anything else. I was told if I put on my sunday best (outward appearance), gave my heart to god (outside source), and love him first (outside source) maybe I could be happy (inside) the rest of my life. Instead, it took me reversing that list and omitting religion all together before I felt comfortable with myself and began to love myself full on. I worked hard on getting to where I am today with my body. I'm still thirty or so pounds over what I was when I made this revelation but I realize I've had a baby and I don't let a little thing like baby weight make me reconsider my love for myself. I remember what it took to get to where I loved myself and I plan on revisiting those things to nurture my love.

Every relationship needs attention, even the relationship with yourself.

That's just my insight for today. Pass this on to someone you know struggling to find love through someone else. You can love yourself and still want to change things about yourself. Only you should be allowed to make those decisions about yourself anyway.

In the Rip Current

The funny thing about depression is that it isn't funny.

Okay, crappy joke... but you get my point.

I've been struggling with depression since I was a preteen. A lot of reading and self awareness has kept me alive this long. Some could say that it was just regular teenage angst or "everyone gets sad". Both of those could be true, I suppose, for someone else. What I'm feeling is debilitating. I keep telling myself to not be sad about what I haven't done but for what I've tried and failed.

An Open Letter to my Brother-in-Law and his Mistress

How do I begin a letter to someone that has caused my family such distress in these last few weeks and my dear sister for half of my lifetime? What do I say to begin a blog that I have been forming in my head for days? I've got so much material I'm almost buried in the filth you have so easily tossed my way.

I guess I could address why an open letter. Why I would choose such a public domain for all to see and revisit often? Why would I blog about something so personal and not pertaining to me? I've often said in my blog that my one major rule is to only blog about myself and my problems. This isn't Gossip Girl and I'm not out to whine like a teenager about adult subjects.

Truth is, this is a situation that pertains to me; my mother; my grandmother... my family. You see, when you enter into a family as close as ours, you marry all of us. You become our brother, our son, our grandson and nephew. I was just thirteen when my sister brought you home for the first time to meet us. When you got my sister pregnant that pretty much concreted you in to our family. No matter how that pregnancy happened or how young you both were, that did it. After thirteen years of being in our family how do you expect us to act? My sister has done an amazing job keeping your actions private. Believe what you want but we all had formed our own opinions of you without her validating your worth amongst us.  My mother sobbed because she felt not only robbed of a son but violated through her daughter. I cannot overlook that.

Unplug.

I am on my phone entirely too much.

I am watching television entirely too much. 

I'm neglecting life by senseless distractions. I worry that I'm missing my daughter's first years because I'm too busy matching up three or more vegetables or candy or whatever. 

I've burned out three phone backlights. You know that thing that makes your phone light up so you can see what you're doing? Yeah, that. I kill those. With my constant googling of celebrities and idle gaming. I feel controlled and consumed and it's stifling. I'm addicted in a bad way.

Bury it in the backyard

Anger takes so much out of me.

Its exhausting to be this angry all day. Sleep is but a whisper when I need so much if it. Coffee just stirs the acids in my stomach and gives me cramps. My lack of sleep just makes me more angry.

The Medium in the Candle Shop (Dream)

I had a weird supernatural dream last night.

It was set in New Orleans (I miss that place so much) and I was a medium. I was going to different shops and had an appointment with a young woman that worked at a candle shop. As soon as I walked in one of her co-workers recognized me and hurried me to the back to the lady I had the appointment with. I suddenly felt very sad.

"It's your lover that passed away." I said without the lady telling me. She nodded solemnly and her coworker took a seat behind me.

I turned to the coworker,  "Excuse me, Miss, but this is a private appointment." As I blinked I saw the deceased lover in a family embrace with the coworker. The coworker had bent her head down and softly began to cry, "If its okay with the miss here you can sit in. I didn't realize he was your brother."

Push Play

Okay, Okay... I'm so tired of teetering. I lose ten pounds and then I gain it back. I lose fifteen, then I gain it back.

Since we've moved into my Grandmother's house I've felt like my life is on pause. My baby weight, our living space, my work out schedule... everything. Everything has come to an abrupt halt. I thought, "It'll just be a few months. No sweat."

Five months later... it's a different story.

Valentine's Day is for schmucks

Okay, okay... before you just write this off as yet another anti-valentine's blog hear me out.

First off: I think every gift giving relationship "holiday" is complete bullshit. Yes, even anniversaries.

Why? You ask.
Here's why. Those days weigh so heavy on men and Significant Others. Those specificed Hallmark-fuelled days socially sets them up to fail. So much hype and comparisons make for a lot of disappointment.