That moment when...

... a long-running joke is no longer funny.

None of my [official] friends who have kids have plans to have any more. I count myself among them. I cant tell you how many times we've joked about wanting to rip our uteruses out and sit them on a shelf between our Holy Bibles and the last Mother's Day card we got with glued-on macaroni noodles. That shit stops being funny when you find yourself faced with the reality of having to have it done - minus the shelf.

Friday I had what felt like menstrual cramps, only I had been off my period for like a week already. Had some spotting the day after and thought maybe all the stress I had been under recently had caused my period to double back before its time, but it never came. The spotting was over as quickly as it started. Fast forward to yesterday and Im at work doubled over at my desk in pain. I don't know if its cramps or I just need to move a bowel (pardon the TMI lol) so I go to the bathroom and am overrun with this instant nausea. Body goes weak, mouth fills with saliva and Im dry-heaving. Once again, as quickly as it comes, it disappears. This happens a second time a couple hours later, only that time, the pain is so bad, I cant even move and end up sitting in the stall for 25 minutes. Every time I tried to stand, the pain travels down my leg or my entire left side goes numb. Either way, I cant walk. By the time I finally can, the pain is so intense, Im crying. I tell my boss I have to go home and I find myself in bed with a heating pad for the rest of the night.

Now prior to all this, I was aware of the possible fibroid in my uterus but it had never caused a problem before now. I decide to see my doctor today and the ultrasound he does showed that I had a cyst which had ruptured and my pelvis was now filled with fluid (this was why I was in so much pain yesterday). Along with that are 2 fibroid tumors, one of which is the SAME FUCKEN SIZE AS MY UTERUS! Doc tells me he could remove the fibroids but if he removed them, I'd just find myself in the same situation a few years from now. He wants to remove my entire uterus. MY ENTIRE UTERUS.

Now granted, I had no intention of having any more kids, despite my statement that if I got married to an awesome man who wanted to have a baby with me, I'd consider it. That being said, Im 37. You want to remove my entire uterus? I had considered having my tubes tied or burned or whatever 2 years ago and when the time came, I couldnt bring myself to do it. Its just so.... final. I had spoken to a friend of mine who had done it and she regretted it, had it undone, and had another child. I aint having nobody's other child (LOL) but I related to her feeling of it being too soon at our age. I didn't go through with it. Again I say I in no way do I WANT another child but I wanted to come to that place on my own terms. I wanted to make the decision myself. Now that I am having all these other issues that somewhat require me to make that move, I feel like.... Im having my womanhood just wrestled away from me. I guess the silver lining is that I would still have my ovaries so I wouldn't be in menopause and need to take hormones or anything, and I'd no longer have periods (hallelujah!) but still. And the main reason this is such an issue for me is because I am TERRIFIED of going under the knife. Yall know I have this thing about borrowed time. I had the risky open heart surgery when I was 4 and didnt have to do it again when I was 14 like they thought. I came within a baby's breath of dying in a car accident back in 1995 and nearly bled to death when having my son 3 years later. I kinda feel like.... what if I've used all my gimmes? What if my luck runs out and I die on that table? Im down here by my damn self, no support, no family.... just.... what if? When I tell you I am paranoid about this shit I mean PAR-A-DAMN-NOID. But I guess all I can do is pray about it. It would really be awesome if you guys would pray about it too.

Retrospect

I was talking to a guy I met recently and he said he couldn't believe that I wasn't married. "Just waiting for the right guy, I guess," I said. "Not in a relationship though?" he counters. "Well.... I've learned not to rush into relationships. Men don't tend to be who they tell me they are," is my response. Of course, this spawns a plethora of other questions, the guy wanting to know what I meant and what my experience has been. The conversation, as casual as it was, made me concerned about what he might be thinking but whatever. The important thing was it got me to thinking.

I've only been cheated on once in a relationship - to my knowledge LOL. I tend to be the woman a man is cheating WITH. And its not that Im some home wrecker on the prowl. Men tend to approach me as single and unaffiliated and its not until later that I find out they are married or have a serious girlfriend. It pisses me off just to thinking about it but in analyzing the situation, that man is always gonna come off like the perfect guy to a woman looking to be wooed. He has nothing to lose by being everything you want him to be because he's already got "reality" at home. He will feed the fantasy because he's looking for the fantasy himself. So he will be flowers and sweet nothings and random text messages during your morning coffee. He wants you to think of him in the way his wife or girlfriend doesn't anymore. He wants to get back what he's lost at home, only in the ridiculousness that is the male gender, he somehow doesn't see that he cant get it back in his home by looking for it out in the street. But of course that doesn't explain away every cheating man's actions. Some of them just aint shit. They could have Claire Huxtable at home and they would still be in the street looking for Lisa Bonet LOL.

I mean this to be a cautionary tale but not to the extent that you blow a good thing you got going. If you can cross all his T's and dot all his I's then by all means, rock on. I mean nobody would be married if it wasnt legit SOMETIMES. But if things seem sketchy and you cant reach him at certain hours and he's always coming to you rather than you going to him and there are things that don't add up.... and I mean things that if your girlfriend called and told you about her new boo would make you tell her how stupid she's being.... maybe you should take a step back and make sure he's who and what he says he is.

I know Im not the only woman who has dealt with this time and time again. We love to feel special. We love to think somebody could finally see the good in us. We love to have something to hold on to... something that makes us smile while we drift off to sleep at night. We love love. And we love it so much that when we think we've found it, we don't want to see anything that might derail that train, even if our gut tells us that train is headed off a cliff in flames. But you better believe when that shit is over.... oh we see it. Boyyyyy do we see it.

End of the night he told me he's real and he'll never tell me he's anything other than what he is. That's yet to be seen. Don't mean to sound skeptical but I've heard it before. That being said, I wont hold him accountable for the BS I've dealt with from anybody else. He could be legit. Hell, anybody could. But he could also be fulla shit LOL.

We'll see.

God is good!

I was talking to my friend last week about how recently I find myself broke again on the same day I was paid, you know, trying to pay everything all at once. This week wasn't looking good to be any different and to make matters worse, I apparently missed a bill last time around because I woke up to my Direct TV being off. I shook my head and told my son I would take care of it, but on the way to work had basically convinced myself not to because keeping it off for a while meant one less bill to pay and would free up a little money for us to try to get ahead.

Typical of pay day, I get to work and start going to all the websites where bills needed to be paid, checking due dates and balances and mapping out my game plan. Expecting it be a hundred and something dollars, just for shits and giggles, I went to the Direct TV site to see what the situation was. As I figured, the total due was something like $142 but a second look revealed that $37 of it was past due. So I hadn't neglected to pay it last time, I just somehow managed to short pay it. Then I thought to myself "Did those motherfuckers shut off my service for $37?" LOL...smh. The other weird thing is that the note above it said that my service would be interrupted if I didn't make payment by 11/15. "So...... why was it cut off this morning?" LOL Long story short, I paid the $37 and the service was reinstated.

I also had another bill that was supposed to be drafted from my account on Friday, but it never was. I call them like "Whats up?" and am told that they have been in the process of going from ACH drafting to a debit network and have been emailing me to contact them with my debit card information in order for the payment to be made. Guess those "select all" deletes aren't always such a great idea LOL. Anyway, the chick tells me that since I called in to update my information, they were going to enter me into a daily drawing for an IPAD mini AND take $50 off the $150 payment. #score

On top of that, I got a card in the mail for $145 worth of groceries. God is so good to me, I'm about to cut a step!

#hallelujah

Prose Unintended

Something scared me today.

It wasn't a "Boo!" scare but a slowly creeping quake that got bigger and bigger until it settled into my bones and I didn't find myself shaking until ten minutes later.

I didn't find myself crying until the moment I tried to articulate to another relevant party what it was that had scared me and I heard the words out loud, which seemed to all at once breathe life into what had previously only been a thought.

Nothing makes me more uncomfortable than not knowing what to do but knowing what NOT to do is nothing.

An hour after a desperate call that Im still not sure I should have yet made, the only thing I can think to do is turn my focus away from what I cant "unsee", giving it to God and turning my focus on me.

I only came in here to open a window to throw my pissed in pot out of.... release this nervous energy that has me pacing around my own house as if I don't live here.... and it turned into this.

18 Things Every Person Must Do In Their Lifetime

Reposting this because I feel its kind of the message of my blog, though colorfully delivered....



18 Things Every Person Must Do In Their Lifetime



Oct. 6, 2013

By Brianna Wiest info


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1. Accept that there will be whole swaths of you that will always seem like a mystery. There will be things that may never make sense. There will be questions that may always go unanswered. Despite this, you must stop questioning the steady sense of knowing your body somehow delivers to you anyway. Even when logic would seem to defeat it, and your mind is combatting it furiously. That knowing is your truth. That knowing is what you have to act on without sound reason. We call this the leap of faith. Learn to take it.

2. Learn what it means to have radical empathy. Realize that underneath it all we are the same. We have all suffered. We have all known loss, heartbreak, grief, sadness, tragedy and misfortune, all in the uniqueness of our own experiences. You may not know what someone’s story is but you do know what it feels like to have a knife going through you when you lose someone you love. What it’s like to be completely alone and thwarted from society. You always have the ability to understand people at that very raw, human level. It’s only a matter of how much you’re willing to see yourself in them.

3. If you love someone, freaking tell them. Write it on notes next to their bed and in journals that they’ll one day find and interrupt their sentences with it if you have to. There is nothing more important than being vocal about loving someone. You want to know the truth? We are all starving for love and acceptance and if you love someone you need to tell them that without being afraid that they don’t love you as much, or at all. That’s not love. That’s greed. That’s neediness. That’s the desire for affirmation and attention. Love, in it’s purest, untapped form, does not hinge on the requirement that they’ll love you in return.

4. Let loving someone or not loving someone be enough in deciding whether or not you want to be with them. The rest are augmentable details. But that core is unchanging.

5. Have a verifiably effective plan for coping with emotional pain. Sometimes wicked anxiety crops up out of nowhere. Some days we’ll be just going along our way and then all of a sudden all of the issues of our childhood come sweeping back through us like we never grew out of them and we panic and hold onto them because we don’t know how to let go because it seems like doing so will give them the power to sneak up on us again. In these moments, you need a friend to call and a shoulder to lean on and a playlist to blast and a journal to write in. And somewhere in that journal, you need to have written: “this too shall pass.”

6. Stop trying to convince people to love you. With what you wear, in sullied comments that dig for their appreciation, in how your interests have forcefully evolved to complement or mirror those of whom you are so desperately trying to win over. Stop doing things so you’ll be regarded highly in other people’s opinions. That won’t make them love you more. It will only drive you farther away from yourself.

7. Learn to say sorry and mean it. Realize that what most wisdom stems from is forgiveness: for ourselves, for others, for what happened and for what’s missing, for what’s unstable and what’s gone unacknowledged. Realize that you won’t always receive an apology and you still may have to find forgiveness anyway. Realize that’s the only way to understand just how powerful a genuine apology can be.

8. Write lists and make goals and always keep yourself moving toward something. Joy is in the moment, but hope is in tomorrow. It’s a fine balance that takes lifetimes to perfect. Don’t feel bad if you err toward one mindset or another. Just don’t forget that when you do fall too deeply into focusing on today or tomorrow, that you always have the other option.

9. Accept that while most things end up okay, not everything does. Some things may dig themselves into you and you’ll carry them through your whole life. Sometimes things go mysteriously unresolved. Sometimes you’ll fight hard and lose. Sometimes you’ll be so far in denial that acceptance isn’t something you start to approach for years. It’s important to be okay with not being okay. It’s part of the human condition. It’s very beautiful if you let it show you a deeper route into yourself.

10. Stand up for what’s just. Stand up for love and stand up for equality and respect. Don’t be a bystander in someone else’s life but more importantly, don’t be a bystander in your own.

11. Let yourself be useless sometimes. You can’t spend your entire life reveling in achievement. In fact, you’ll spend most of your days on your knees grappling with what you’re most passionate about. You’ll turn up on the other side eventually, but not without days upon days of climbing.

12. Say thank you even when you don’t feel gratitude. It’s not that you shouldn’t feel it, but sometimes you just might not. But saying “thank you” is one of those rare things in which you do entirely for the other person. Saying thank you doesn’t help you. It helps the other person want to give again. You won’t understand what “thank you” means until it’s given to you after you’ve truly given to someone else. Foster that for other people and keep the cycle going. It will come back to you eventually.

13. Never go into anything thinking you are entitled to it because you are talented, because you have suffered for it or because it’s time for the universe to cater to your needs just this once. This will never be the truth.

14. Buy a notebook. Write down what you want. Write down what hurts you. Show it to someone you love. Save it for your children. Burn it in your backyard. Either way, go to bed knowing that in some way, those things are out of you.

15. Know the difference between the limits that withhold you and the limits that are crucial for you to obey. Draw your lines accordingly. Live your life around them.

16. Learn to comfort someone. Head nods and “I understands” won’t mean jack shit when someone is really in the depths of something. If you love someone, know when it’s time to order their favorite food and hold their hand the way they like and respond in the way they are looking to be responded to. Sometimes it’s with empathy and understanding, sometimes it’s with problem-solving mechanisms and jokes to lighten things. You won’t know unless you know someone thoroughly. There are reasons people don’t just look to anybody when they’re really in need. These are them.

17. Learn to enjoy talking about something that doesn’t come at the expense of someone else.

18. Realize how important it is to mourn properly. This means letting yourself be a whole big ball of effing mess now and again. Things and people will phase in and out as scheduled. You can’t keep holding on for their return because most often, they won’t come. But that withholding will shape you, and it will shape you through your own self-induced pain and suffering. If you don’t want that to be your story, write it a different way. It starts with saying goodbye to what’s not meant for us and what’s left inexplicably. Your quality of life will completely depend on how well you embrace this. Choose wisely. TC Mark

Okay so Im afraid.....

....of my clothes LOL

I was talking to one of my girls the other day and a light bulb went off: I'm a fat girl in a slim body. I've never been a FAT girl by most standards but I had gotten kinda chunky a few years ago and as yall know, I dropped [most of] the weight I wanted to lose over the past year. What I didn't know is that "fat" can be a condition - one where you still ACT as such even when you no longer are. Like muhfucken Learned Helplessness or some shit LOL.

I can fit all my old clothes again but its like I refuse to wear them. I'll set out a banging outfit for work the night before but get up in the morning, decide "I don't really feel like that today" and put on something a lot more conservative.... or black LOL. (I never noticed before but yo, I got a LOTTA black and gray in this bitch LOL) And I really believed "I just don't feel like that today" but the more I thought about what I was saying to my girlfriend, the more I realized it wasn't entirely the case.

I feel like these clothes ended up so far in the back of my closet that I had almost completely disassociated myself from them. I was trained to not fit them so even when I could, in my mind, I still couldn't. I'd go so far as to pull them out, iron them, and ready them for wear, but its like some invisible fence just never lets me go through with it. I almost feel like Im not supposed to wear them for some reason. Its crazy. And its the same with my shoes. I got mad shoes, son, and there's pairs I have had for like 2 years and never worn once. Ever. Where they do that at?

So Im off for a couple days this week and my mission is to somehow get over this madness of being afraid of my clothes. Im pairing up stuff - multiple options this time, so I am not cornered into just one that I can "not feel like" my way out of. But we'll see how it goes - yall know I'm the queen of loopholes LOL...