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This Post is For You

This post is a change of course from my original message, but needs to be addressed. So - this post is for you. Yes, you. The beautiful human being reading right now. I see you. I see your beautiful eyes dancing from left to right as you make sense of the combinations of letters on the screen. And I want you to know that you matter. Over the past 6 months, I have watched many people I love affected by suicide and depression. I have watched wives bury their husbands. Little babies wondering where their father has gone and what they did to deserve to be abandoned. I have watched friends and family mourn and hurt and get angry. Each time I hear of another affected, I feel intense sadness for my loved one who is hurting - Yet no one wants to address the elephant in the room. I will. Depression is not a highly discussed sickness, yet it takes more lives each year than many common illnesses. If you are reading this right now, I want you to know that no matter what you are feeling right
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The Bold & the Brazus

I know, I know. It’s been like 3 months since I wrote last. Raising a tiny human is hard work! I’m going to pick back up where we left off: Rough patches.  SO - we were going to have a beautiful baby girl. Lord help us - a mini version of me running around in the world. I thought there was only room for one of us but apparently the universe thought differently! Really though, we were ecstatic. Bows, tutus, oh my. Things were going great until week 26, just a short 6 weeks after finding out we were expecting a baby girl.  I was sleeping like a baby when all of a sudden I woke up to the most intense pain I had ever experienced in my lower back. The pain was so unimaginable I woke Cj up with my screaming. I’m usually pretty great with pain but this was just something I cannot even describe. We decided to go to the ER because we were worried it was something to do with the baby. Upon getting there, the first nurse took a urine sample - told me to relax. We waited 5 hours with me
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POPPING the question - boy or girl?

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18 weeks and 2 days. I remember this day like it was yesterday. There are only a few big things you anticipate in your life and finding out the gender of your first born child is definitely at the top of that list. Up until this day I was forced to buy green, yellow, and gray items until I was blue in the face (no pun intended).  My money was on a boy, 100%. Call it “mother’s intuition” or whatever. I had already secretly started buying little boy things and was stashing them in our spare bedroom closet. Cj’s money was also on a little boy, obviously. He has always dreamed of having a little boy he could coach in baseball and do all of the “big manly stuff” with. And for those of you who know me probably already know that he heard the “anything a boy can do a girl can do better” speech. Girl power and all that.  My best friend Ally planned a gender reveal party for the day we had our gender appointment. We planned it all out - the tech would put the gender in an envelope and we
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Ch-ch-ch changes

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“Turn and face the strange”. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say a pregnant woman’s developing body was not how Mr. Bowie intended these lyrics to be used, but honestly, it’s the most accurate comparison.  There I was, just staring in the mirror at a 16 week baby bump. Too small to be noticed as a pregnant belly by anyone who didn’t know, yet, big enough for me to feel anxious and scared about the changes I was going through. I should have loved the way my body was morphing in preparation for my beautiful little baby’s growth. I should have found myself even more beautiful with each passing day. I should have...but I didn’t.  I cried as one by one my pants became nick nacks on a crowded closet shelf. The body I had worked so hard to create withered away with each pound of beautiful baby fat I put on. And while I was over the moon in love with the creature growing inside of me, I hated myself and the changes I saw in the mirror. No matter how hard it was to look at myself, I l
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Dr. Google: Friend or Foe

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Week 12 hit. We were finally out of the first trimester and I could not have been more excited. For the past ~8 weeks my anxiety had been running so high I’d need a ladder to bring it back down. Let’s find out why. ——- Around week 10 I was in my office when I started to get severe abdominal cramps. When I got to the bathroom there was significant bleeding, so, naturally, I panicked. I immediately did the wrong thing and consulted the experts at Google.com on “week 10 bleeding”. Let’s just say the results did not help with the anxious feelings. - miscarriage - ruptured placenta - uterine tearing - cancer - (like what?!??) So many things could be going wrong. I had been terrified of miscarriage from day one because of the surgery I had just 2 months before we found out we were pregnant, I was always worried it was too good to be true and maybe God did not intend for us to have a child. Regardless, I took Dr. Google’s advice and called my OB’s office (but not before calling
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A Fork in the Road

Sometimes the perfect pretty picture you envision for your life strays the path a little bit. Or maybe even a lot a bit. There are casualties caused by paths no longer heading in the same direction, or jealousy, or even for no reason at all. Some friends are mere stepping stones in this journey through life and others are more of a solid foundation on which you can build and change and they will grow with you. I’m a firm believer that both kinds of friends are necessary.  People change and that’s okay. It would be easy to get angry at the friend who chooses to no longer speak to you because you are having a baby. It would be easy to be sad about the family member who doesn’t show up to visit your son/daughter or even call to check to see how you are doing. It would be easy to continue wasting your time and energy focusing on all of the wrong things instead of using that energy to focus on 1. The people who always make sure you are whole. And 2. That beautiful human you are growing i
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Know-It-All Nancy

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There is nothing I hate more than a human who feels the need to: 1. Piss on your joy & 2. Tell you the rules of parenting I’m sorry - did I miss the “parenting 101” book we are required to study and follow through this journey? Because Nancy over here seems to have studied this thing twice over and got an A+ for sure. NO. No one wants to hear your opinion on the “right” way to do things. We are all out here just trying to figure it out one day at a time. So when Know-It-All-Nancy and her band of followers tells me I’m supposed to wait until 12 weeks to announce our pregnancy... We tell everyone at 6 weeks in and don’t even think twice. The first ultrasound we had was a turning point for me in my “delayed joy” journey. At first, nothing really changed because it just looked like a little odd shaped peanut and I was not impressed. But from the moment they turned up the volume and I heard that little heartbeat for the first time - so tiny and vulnerable - my heart was tor
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