On Being Emo and how it Affects My Marriage

February is a rough month for me. My skin is pale, my lips are dry, and my thirst for some sun and warmth is desperate to be quenched. I know there are ways to help the inevitable SAD that hits me every year. Go tanning, eat right, exercise, pop vitamin D3 like candy. I know these things and I do them and they help. They help me stay afloat, but I'm still drowning. They help like water wings in a stormy sea.

I'm embarrassed by it because it sounds so stupid to say "I am sad because it's February." Lame. At the same time, I have accepted it. Accepting it has helped me take the pressure off of myself to be happy. It's okay to not be happy all the time. It's okay to want to sleep until noon and fill up on carbs and Vampire Diaries. It will pass. In the meantime, it's okay to feed the SAD and maybe even enjoy it in the process. Sometimes I wonder if SAD actually has an intention. I wonder if it is a time created by the world and our minds and our bodies to reflect. Be still. Quiet.

It's not okay to indulge in stillness and self-reflection in this society. Particularly if there is a family depending on you to keep your shit together.

I'm not doing a very good job of keeping my shit together.

Our church is doing a series on relationships. Last week it was said that there are no marriage problems. There are only "he" problems and "she" problems (or "he/he", "she/she") that bleed into the marriage. I've been obsessed with this idea ever since. I have seen it at work in our own marriage.

Exhibit A:
Jordon mentioned a few days ago that I should get my hair done before we go on our mini-vacation. A benign comment? Most likely. I smiled and agreed and cried myself to sleep. I felt frumpy and worn-out, undesirable and old. I felt like a stereotype. The Housewife stereotype. The kind they bring on the Maury show in her husband's sweats and knots in their hair and no make-up. The residue of these feeling carried on well into Exhibit B.

Exhibit B:
Jordon passed up the opportunity to spend a month in New York to open a new branch of his job. Then he carried on about how cool it would be to spend a month alone in New York. Jealousy struck me anvil from the sky style, unexpected and unwanted. I wouldn't go so far as to call it resentment. Just jealous of the idea of the possibility of something different. If I left this house for a week, nevermind a month, SHIT WOULD FALL APART. I'm responsible for it all and that is of my own doing, but every now and then I wonder how I let it get that way. Jordon sensed my anger, took it personally, and didn't talk to me for the rest of the night.

Exhibit C:
Last night Jordon mentioned how excited he was to go on our trip so we could connect like we did before we had kids. Now... I'm already feeling ugly and suffocated, so imagine the idea that the Now me isn't good enough for him. (For me.) Am I only worthy of connecting with when I'm not being the ol' ball and chain?

At this point I cry, we non-productively fight, and go to bed without spooning.

It's a mess.

It's a mess because Jordon doesn't understand what it is like to be subject to intense emotional swings. He doesn't believe me when I say I can't control how I process his comments. He says I am always looking for a fight, which of course makes me feel even more like the bitchy wife every man dreads.

It takes me a long time to process my emotions. It takes me a while to realize why a certain comment or action hurts me. Jordon doesn't have that kind of patience. He wants it all to be okay so we can get back to our regularly scheduled programming.

I don't work that way.

I need him to be patient and kind. Mostly patient. NOT his forte.

Then I remember, marriage problems are just "he" problems and "she" problems.

So I take this and I think on it and I wonder what I can do to keep my "she" problems from creating "us" problems. THIS is where I get stuck. Where the damn record skips over and over and over again, creating the endless cycle listed above.  Maybe the cycle is just doomed to repeat itself every February to April. Maybe one day I will stumble on the answer and will I be cured. Or at least a be little more tolerable. Maybe I'll move to Florida. Maybe.

In the meantime...

I think I'm going to go blonde.

Birds, Bees, and PB&J

Braedon reads anything he can get his eyes on. Magazine headlines, Facebook updates, over-the-shoulder texts, labels, street signs, storefronts.

Storefronts.

"Mom," he asked me as we drove down the strip we drive down nearly daily, "What kind of store is 'Mr. Peeps'?"

I let out a subtle giggle-sigh before formulating my answer. At least I THOUGHT it was subtle. But Braedon, the boy with the wise mind and old soul, he caught onto my expression of nervousness. I need to be more careful.

"Braedon, that's a good question but it's hard to answer." Stalling. Still thinking. Too much time has passed.

"Don't answer Mom, I'm embarrassed and scared now."

Shit. How can he know to be these things? It was my damn giggle-sigh. I should have known better.

"Yeah, I'm a little embarrassed too, Braedon and that's okay. But I'm not scared. I'll never be scared to talk to you about anything, and I don't ever want you to be scared to talk to me about anything either. Even and ESPECIALLY when it makes us feel embarrassed, okay?"

He agreed.

"There are times that you are going to hear things at school and you aren't going to know what they mean. Your friends may thing it means something it doesn't. And those things will be weird and probably embarrassing but I want you to tell me. So I can tell you what they REALLY mean, okay?"

I remembered back to my own childhood, when in 4th grade my best friend told me that she gave a classmate of ours a boner. I thought it was some kind of haircut.

He answered excitedly, always on the quest for knowledge. "Okay, and I can go back to school and tell my friends that my mom taught me what those things REALLY are."

Er... I just let that one go. We'll cross that road when we get there, I suppose.

Back to the question at hand, Mr. Peeps.

I launched into this horrible food analogy about babies and how they aren't really interested in PB&J's like he is because their body is too little to eat them. Their digestive system can't handle all the fancy stuff PB&J's are made of and they don't have teeth to chew them with anyway. All they need as a baby to nourish their body is milk.

free-falling into big kid-dom

I told him that when you're a baby, you don't even know that one day you will want that PB&J. Your body isn't built for it yet. I told him the same goes for his body. He has a boy body right now, and while it's changing every day, it is very different than the man body he will one day possess. I told him his man body will want different things than his boy body, and that Mr. Peeps has some of the things that his man body will want. Then I told him (this is where it gets really good/awful) that the stuff Mr. Peeps has is like junk food for his grown-up body. And that there are better ways to help his grown-up body out than feeding it junk food. But the junk food, it won't kill him or anything.

"It'll just make me unhealthy."

Astute observation.

We went over again how I want him to come to me with any questions he may have about anything, and sometimes that will be hard. I told him I will check in with him every now and then to see if he has any questions he's been saving for me. He liked that idea.

Then we continued on our merry little way, waving to the giant plastic Harvey the Bunny, staple of my childhood and now my childs', Braedon's mind obviously back on to kid things like video games and lunch.

Of course my mind was still on our most recent conversation. I felt like congratulating myself on a job well done, celebrating with my head in the sand, my fingers in my ears, while singing "la la la la la laaaaaa..."

I felt like having a beer.

Instead, we stopped by Mc Donald's for a quick lunch on a hectic Sunday afternoon.

So much for that metaphor...

Why I Haven't Been Blogging

Growing pains.

Sometimes they ebb as my world manages to temporarily balance itself. It's easy to blog then. I have enough cute kid anctedotes, domestic comedy, grade school woes and under-the-bus spouse-throwing stories to fluff up the glowing internet pages of this blog for days.  It is never long, though, before those life-bits start to pile up on the scales again, first one then another, before the weight of it all sends everything crashing down, life-bits tumbling all over the place.

Namely, under the rug.

I've never been a wave-maker. After struggling to make friends in junior high and high school, once I finally managed to fall into a group I could call my own, I was desperate to keep them. Listen up, kids, here's a little tip for keeping friends: Don't make waves. Controversy, opinions, disagreements, outside-the-box thinking, that stuff will lose you friends right quick. Best to just keep it to yourself. That way no one has to take sides, question your loyalty, or like, totally lose their buzz.

It worked for me for years.

Then I got pregnant and I had to start making tough decisions. The coasting was over. I had to educate myself and pick sides and delve into topics foreign and scary to me. I began to develop resolve. I found myself with all these opinions in my lap, strong opinions that were my own, opinions that I wished weren't a big deal but were, and I had to find something to do with them all. So I applied all of these lovely, liberating opinions to my life and kept mum about it. Best to not make waves.

Then those kids of mine, they began to grow. It became harder to hide those pesky opinions of mine, and I started to get a reputation. Shit, I'd think. Reputations make waves. So I made sure to over-compensate. I had to let everyone know that what I thought really didn't MATTER, 'cause they were just my ideas is all. That is all. No big deal. I am not a big deal, don't mind me. Don't ditch me, don't leave me, don't gossip about me, don't abandon me, stay with me, please, be my friend anyway. This worked for years as well.

Back to the kids again, and all that damn growing they keep doing. All of the sudden I had a girl to throw in the mix. A girl who was born under-privileged (statistical fact) just for being a girl. Then my first born, he started school and that little product of my ideas and opinions joined the outside world. At first, I would think don't blow my cover. 


Now, I think baby... make the world your bitch. 


Isn't that what we want for our kids? To make a difference? Find their calling? Follow their destiny? Change the world?

I have never heard any famous anyone credit his success to "not making waves."

All of this to say that I am growing, and sometimes it hurts. Just like it did when I was a kid. Just like it SHOULD. Growth is painful, and that is okay. Maybe painful isn't the right word. Productive discomfort fits. I compare it to that tight, debilitating pain after exercise. That pain, it sucks, but even in the midst of pissing myself while jump-roping I know I'm doing myself good. Because the next day, when the ache wears off and my loins are dry, I will be stronger. And, despite what the world may say, strength is good.

I haven't been blogging because it has taken me this long to reconcile who I am and what I believe. Yes, they are different. What I believe, that can change. AND THAT is okay too. It SHOULD change. I hope to change what I believe or how I understand my beliefs until the day I die.

Growth.

I am still the same set of characteristics. I still love the crap out of everyone. I still see past differences. I still love hearts. I still think most of us are doing the best damn job we know how to do. I still think we can't take it ALL on, and I still believe we all need our own causes. That's how we keep the world afloat.

But I can no longer sit with the discomfort of not making waves. Over the last year, I have made waves and it sucked and I recovered and my conviction and resolve has been strengthened. Because even though sharing my identity hasn't always been comfortable, it has been IMPORTANT. I am important. And that is what I will teach my kids.

....

I was thinking about my batch of friends across the board. It's amazing how, while we all overlap, I am not aligned with any one person on every topic.  Not one single person. And I love them anyway. And if they love me anyway, well then, that means they love me in spite of my beliefs. Yes, IN SPITE of them. That's what love is. Loving "even though."

It is not okay to spread my ideals to offend or to judge. It is okay to spread them to share.

If I am going to blog again, it's important that I am allowed to talk from my heart, about the things that I have passion for.

So let me share a few things about me. Things I have been afraid to make public because of all of the friends I hold too dear to make waves with. Silly me... It finally dawned on me that if they hold me just as dear, THEY WON'T CARE. And we will both grow, because of each other, in spite of ourselves. And that is good.

Here goes.

I am a Christian. I am a political liberal... most of the time. I am a moral conservative... most of the time. I believe in holistic healing. I also believe in science and technology. I don't like big-business, particularly marketing and advertising. I let my kids play violent video games. I hate Disney Princesses. I love pink and sparkles. I believe that circumcision will soon be a thing of the past. I don't vaccinate my children. I am too cheap to eat the foods I would love to feed my family. I do not judge you on your differences. Upon further inspection, it's not entirely unlikely that I may adapt those differences as my own.

I am thankful to have learned that.

Who knows what else I will learn and SHARE, a midst the ones I love.

I can't wait to find out.