Waiting...

..for ninjas, superheroes and princesses to come visit our house and eat our candy! So excited. :)  Happy Halloween, ya'll!!

Honesty...

I've always tried to be extremely honest on my blog. It's important to me that it is a true reflection of my thoughts and life because this blog is more for me than for anyone else.

Writing about ones life and posting it on the world wide web can make a person pretty vulnerable. I know a lot of people read but don't comment regularly and that is okay. I'm kind of a blog voyeur too. I don't judge.

Many times, instead of commenting, I'll get an email that I respond to privately, which is good too. For the record, I'd love to meet you, so drop me a line! :)

Anyways, back to honesty. I believe in being honest, not only on the internet, but also in my daily life. I strive to live a life with no secrets because I lived for a very long time in a life that was full of them. Growing up and having to pretend everything was good when everything wasn't made me abhor the double life. It's not something I wish on anyone.

Now, I'm going to this new phase in my life where I'm going to have to make a lot of decisions. I plan to blog about it when I can, but I've been thinking a lot about what that is going to look like and what consequences will come of it.

Will it attract a lot of people that will encourage me and my right to make decisions? Will it attract people that will bash me and bring me down? Will it change anything at all?

It probably won't. Most of the people that read my little corner of the world are my immediate family and some friends, so it should be fine.

The bottom line is that I plan to be honest. I plan to write what is really going on in my pregnancy and how I'm really feeling about it. It would be naive of me to think that there aren't people trolling the internet just to comment on how someone chooses to raise their family or wear certain clothes or whatever. I see horrible comments on blogs all the time and I hurt for the authors of them.

Now that I am pregnant I feel initiated to a club that seems to be pretty brutal at times. I already get weird looks from people about wanting to have a home birth and kick it old school. So imagine what people will say when they can sit behind their computers with complete anonymity. Yikes.

It can't help but be on my mind...

Girls, Girls, Girls

**I was having some minor formatting issues - sorry about that! All should be fixed now. If you are still seeing wacky things let me know. Thanks!**


Today, I’m thankful for women.

I haven’t always “understood” girls. Especially the ones that tear each other apart and bully other girls. I never had too many friends that were girls because inevitably, there would be backstabbing, boyfriend stealing and gossip. I never wanted anything to do with it.

Usually, I would have one or two best friends that were girls, and two or three friends that were boys. It worked for me, since I lived with three girls at home. I always said I could only take so much estrogen.

Since my seventh and eighth grade years, I’ve had probably 7 or 8 total girl friends. Right now, not counting my sisters, I've had two and a half. Then, all the stuff I’ve been writing about lately meant that I had one and a half.

I ended up talking to the friend that I was having issues with and without ever talking to me or hearing my side of the story, the half friend sided with my friend. “She was really good at being mad at you when I was.”

Before I move on, I want to clarify: I say she was a half friend not to be mean. She moved a little over a year ago and I’m really bad at long distance relationships. We’ve talked on the phone a few times, Skyped a few times, texted a bit. But it’s mainly my fault and both of our busy lives that is to blame. I suck at life.

So that half was gone… which meant I had one.

ONE.

At a time that I’m about to go through one of the biggest life changes and events that a woman’s body can go through, having just one female friend is just not cutting it.

Now, more than ever before, I am yearning for female friendship. Girls to band together to support each other through whatever is going on in their lives. To hold each other up and encourage each other and understand all the things that only girls understand.

I’ve never been one to reach out, because I am extremely fearful of rejection. It’s one of the precious gifts I got from being an alcoholic's daughter. I was scared to reach out and be met with crickets.

I did it anyways.

I set my fear aside and so far have contacted two girls that are moms. One of them well, we didn't even get along in high school and the other reads this blog (HIII!!!) who I enjoyed immensely in high school but never got close too and BOTH of them have welcomed me with open arms and made themselves available to me in whatever way they can help. They both had different experiences with the delivery process so I am getting lots of great feedback – with a whole lot of honestly.

It truly is refreshing. My heart is so incredibly thankful right now.

Us women truly need to stick together, and when we do, it’s a beautiful thing.

Worth It

I went and got the new Taylor Swift album today. I went after work to Target with my sister, Kari, to get the CD with bonus tracks. I came home with the intention of making spaghetti, but I got really frustrated that my pasta pot wouldn't fit under my stupid-doesn't-work microwave and I just couldn't even face the whole cooking meat thing. I turned off the burners and told Bryan to have cereal and that I hated food.

Bryan then said that he liked me better when I was in a good mood.

I said me too and walked to the living room. I popped in the CD, laid down and listened. He made dinner because he? Is a saint.

I only have a few songs left before I'm sure he'll pull the "I listened to Taylor Swift for over an hour so I want to watch something that is loud, has guns and bad people blowing things up" card and that's what we'll watch. He deserves it.

He started his new job today and tomorrow he figures out the treatment stuff for his non-active not contagious tuberculosis. Yaaaay.

He can watch whatever the heck he wants, I say.

This post was not even remotely going to be about my evening.

When I was....12? 13?  I went to a Christian play, Acquire the Fire. I ended up befriending a girl and we became best friends. Every weekend, every summer break, every church service, we hung out. We were closer than close. I was one year younger in school than her, so when she graduated and went into the service, naturally, our relationship changed.

Then she met a guy... and it really changed. I fought as much as I could for the relationship. I called, texted, myspaced. I tried to be a part of her new life, even though we were states and worlds away from each other.

It all kind of came to a head when I went to visit her and I met the guy. I hated him.

Truly, there is nothing worse than hating your friends boyfriend. Ugh.

He was in the service and had seen some pretty bad stuff at war. He was angry and messed up; He did not want help.

We went to their friends' house and I remember that I felt really uncomfortable because there were kids up, it was late and the parents were drinking and cussing. So, I went into the kitchen with them to color and the boyfriend came in a little while later.

He was drinking whiskey. I was stone cold sober because that's kind of my thing, but you wouldn't have caught me drinking in a place I didn't feel comfortable in. It was just me and him and we were talking. I had asked some lame question because I felt awkward, and he looked up from his glass and he said, "You know... sometimes when we [him and my friend] are play wrestling, I want to really hurt her."

I stared at him a long time, trying to keep my face calm. I was seething. I've seen domestic violence, I've been hurt by someone that lived in my home. WHY would he tell me this? Why would he tell his girlfriends BEST FRIEND this?

So calmly, I said... "Katie has told you my history, right?"

"A little." he said.

"You know her Dad was in Vietnam?"

"Yeah."

"....If you ever, ever hurt her, we will kill you. And there won't be a body to find. Is that clear?"

Mind you, I was 19, all of 5'3 and 128lbs and this was a near 6'0, tall, lanky infantry dude. My voice was steely serious. He got a surprised look on his face and said, "Yeah. I won't."

I nodded and before I walked out of the kitchen, I said, "Get some help."

When we got in my friends car, I was shaking. I begged her to break it off. She made excuses. Reasons. Validations. I told her to just break it off until he gets help. That it wouldn't be a healthy relationship.

She ended up dropping me off at her barracks and going back out with him. I slept on the bottom bunk, watched movies on her laptop and cried. I was sad because we never saw each other and she left me in her room, in an unfamiliar place to be with a douche-bag. I was sad because I could see the warning signs and couldn't help my friend. I was sad because I knew our relationship had shifted and there wasn't anything I could do about it.

The next day, she bought me an iPod. I had never had one before and I told her no. She had said, okay, she wouldn't. She insisted that she buy me a Danielle Steele book for my flight home. I kept looking at stuff while she bought it and she came back with both the book and the iPod.

Every time I see that iPod I think of that trip. I flew home listening to music she put on it, praying that she would leave him. When I got home, we were further apart than ever before. She wouldn't talk to me about her boyfriend and soon I stopped trying.

A few months later she called me to tell me she was pregnant and I started crying.

A few months after that her new best friend emailed all of her family (by pressing reply-all to one of her status updates) asking her when she was going to change her name. They had gotten married and no one knew.

At least I didn't.

I sat there stunned. I was so sad. After all those years, she didn't even tell me she got married.

I still tried. As much as I could. I would try to Skype with her. See her new baby. See them when the visited.

They were married for a few years and her birthday came along. I called her all day. Over and over and over again. I was devastated that she wasn't picking up my calls and I was worried.

She called me very late that night saying she had just gotten out of jail. That her husband had been cheating on her and they had gotten in a big fight and it got violent. He and his mistress lied to the authorities and blamed it on my friend so she went to jail.

I couldn't believe how it had all turned out. She's still dealing with the drama of that relationship and we talk only occasionally. Our relationship is all that it can be at this point.

Every once in a while I'll get so sad that our relationship turned out the way it did. That her kids won't know me as Aunt Megan, and my kids won't know her as an Aunt either. I doubt very much that if her son saw me he would know who I was. I wasn't there for his birthdays or Christmases. It breaks my heart.

Now I have another relationship that is falling apart. We haven't spoken to each other for a few weeks now, not about anything important. Our friendship is in this huge limbo and I can't help but wonder...

Will my kids know her as an Aunt? Will she be around for the delivery, birthdays and Christmases?

The circumstances of each relationship failing are absolutely different. I fought for the first one and I guess that's made me not want to fight for another. Why didn't/haven't either of them fought for my friendship?

I've been thinking about that question a lot. All I can come up with is, maybe I'm not worth it.

Life is a Process...

There have been multiple times over the past few weeks that I've opened up Blogger, hit the New Post button and just stared.

I suppose I would freeze because there are so many things I could write about. So many different words to type.

I could write about a friendship that was damaged and now just hangs in a weird limbo. With neither one of us doing anything about it and it seems like we don't want too. Words were said and there was a lack of reaction on a huge event in my life and I'm just not sure where to go from here. So, I'm going no where.

I could write about losing my dog, the dog I loved and cared for since I was 19. I could write about the terrible night he was hit by a car. The night I saw my husband cry harder than I've ever seen him cry before. The night that I watched my husband dig a hole, where he placed my dog, and then covered it. I suppose I could write about that.

Or, I could write about how just a week or two before all this happened, I found out I was pregnant. Even though I had been told that it would be 'very difficult' for me to have a child, that doing so without medical intervention would be "entirely unlikely", after almost three years of not preventing it, God blessed me with this tiny, little miracle. I could write that I'm stunned, honored and scared. I'm equal parts excited and terrified.

I could write that just a week before I found out I was pregnant, my husband lost his job. In one fell swoop, I became the main bread-winner and a mom, lost my dog, and mourned a damaged - maybe beyond repair -  friendship.

Yes... I suppose I could write about any one of those things. But considering that each event is heavy on its own, I guess I can't blame myself for not wanting to rehash it all in writing. I guess I'm just still processing it all.