CHEERS

Guess what time it is? Time for reflection, anticipation, regrets and promises. We are just days away from a new year, and for the first time, I am so ready to say good-bye to this current shit storm, and am looking forward to the next.

I have always given a big fat eye roll to all that were bidding adieu to the passing year. As if the calendar actually matters. As if the ticking of the clock and the dropping of the ball could wash away all the sins and injustices of our lives. We kiss our loved ones, breathe a sigh of relief because we survived the last 365 days, and we believe that when we wake up in the morning everything will be just fine!

And it totally will! We will wake up, rested, refreshed, reset, and move on with our day. And it totally won’t! Our problems don’t come and go at the stroke of midnight, we aren’t Cinderella, sigh.

This has been my most trying year. My life has been rocky, my marriage has been rocky, and my children have been rocky AF! People that I love have died. People that I love have almost died. My animals have died (not the ones that I could do without either, those chickens are indestructible.)  Money sucks (I know, join the freaking club) and everything, literally everything is breaking. And even with all of that, I am still waiting for the OTHER shoe to drop.

It’s just been one of those years where everything that could go wrong, has.

In fact, if I could describe the feeling of this year with one word it would be…

Drowning.

I feel like the last 364 days have been me holding my breath, treading water, sinking, and kicking as hard as I can while gasping for air. And I really need a break. I need dry land. I need to kiss the ground of the beach after the battle for shore. I need sanctuary, a haven.

However, I know that no clock will bring me peace. I won’t breathe a sigh of relief at midnight. There is no magic number of days that I will have to endure this stage of my life before the pendulum finally starts to swing back up. I know that every day is just a continuous climb to the top of this mountain, and every day faces new challenges, and tomorrow may be even more difficult than today.

I had fully anticipated this last year to be spectacular. We were moving, we were going to grow and get closer as a family. We were going to have new adventures and new animals and all of our dreams were going to come true. That didn’t really happen, like, at all. The bad definitely out weighed the good.

But there was still good. There were moments this year that I wouldn’t trade for anything. There are people in my life this year that weren’t there before, people I didn’t even know that I missed that showed back up completely unannounced, people who I am just so thankful for. I am doing things that I never thought that I would, I am growing as a person and finding the things that ignite my heart and soul. So I am not going to write off the entire year and wish it never happened. I am going to be thankful that I had another year at all.

I am going to be thankful that I am still breathing. And at the end of the day, isn’t that all that matters? If we can just survive, isn’t that what counts?  We aren’t promised a privileged life or even just a life without suffering. We aren’t even promised tomorrow. What we are promised is that we can handle our life. Even if that means that God must think we are a complete bad ass because the shit keeps on piling up.

WE. CAN. HANDLE. IT.

We have to believe that we are given the children that we have, because we can handle them. We have to believe that we have been given the marriage that we have, because we can work through the challenges. And we have to believe that when everything falls apart and we just can’t handle one more moment, that we have been given the people in our lives to help carry the weight for us.

There are people who have been placed in my life, that I didn’t want or choose, that would drop everything at a moments notice to help me if I needed them. And there are people that I would crawl over broken glass for if they so much as breathed that they needed my help.

I fully anticipate this next year to be amazing. Even though nothing is actually going to change overnight.  I am going to wake up on January 1st with the same set of problems I went to bed with the night before, I am still going to have an amazing year.

I am going to climb an insane amount of mountains, and read a stupid amount of books. I am going to continue to work on my body and learn to love it at the same time. I am going to continue to do the amazing things that I am doing because I started them months ago. I didn’t wait until after the holidays were over, or for New Years Day, I made my choices and I started them THAT day, because that was the moment I had control of.

I won’t be making promises I can’t keep. I am not going to give up coffee, or start sleeping normal human hours. I am not going to try to do anything that makes me less me. I don’t need any “New Year, New Me” goals to make life harder than it actually is. I need to love and accept myself for the crazy, psychotic, amazing, complicated, disaster of a person that I am.

If I want to change something about myself or give up something or learn something new, I am not going to pull out my calendar and see when the right time will be that I can fit it into my messy life. I am going to just do it, then. In the moment I am in. And if I fail, I won’t wait until Monday or February or Summertime or after the holidays or next New Years to start again, I will just start again, then.

So lets grab our booze and toast to a New Year and know that it means nothing more than that we are still alive. Lets stop pretending that it will fix everything. Lets stop pretending, we will be better, our lives will be better, our bodies will be better. Lets stop pretending the clock has any power at all. Whatever power is out there belongs  to us to take control of whenever and wherever we want.

Stop pretending!

Pretending is for children.

And children can’t drink.

CHEERS!!!!!!

 

 

 

 

 

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Bah-hum-blog

Merry Effing Christmas!

It’s that time of year again for credit card debt, over eating, and family feuds. Wait, is that just us? I doubt it.

Right when you have successfully completed your last holiday of getting fatter and fighting with whomever is in your nearest proximity, Christmas just keeps creeping up, reminding us we have to do it even bigger and better this time around.  Foods have to be richer and more delicious, drinks have to be festively themed, the house has to be glittery and jam-packed full of Christmas joy, and the presents, oh the presents…

I know everyone does Christmas a little differently from one another, some family’s have a few small gifts, some have hundreds. Some celebrate on Christmas Eve with a big party, others keep it very close and personal on Christmas morning. Most familys have traditions that stretch back many years, and some familys avoid all the fuss and go on vacation.

If it were up to me, I would be on a cruise ship somewhere maybe alone, maybe I would invite my husband, but I can say confidently I would be avoiding Christmas like the freaking plague.

Instead, I have a house full of people and everything is falling apart.  While trying to keep up with family traditions and cooking all the things and making all the memories, I have a leaking refrigerator, no water pressure in my kitchen sink, and still no dishwasher.

Our truck is stuck in the ditch of our driveway and can’t be pulled out until at least Tuesday. Oh, and we have no internet, so just writing this Bahhumblog will require me to drive over to my mothers to hit publish.

My cat went missing a few days ago and hasn’t returned. He’s the third this year to be taken by the demigorgan on the mountain.

Christmas, sigh.

I know I could blame my lack of Christmas luster on the circumstances, but the truth is, I just outgrew Christmas a long time ago. I remember as a child how truly magical Christmas was. We spent Christmas Eve at my fathers parents house. All of the Aunts and Uncles and cousins would come from far away, we would eat things that were specific to that side of the family, swedish meatballs, corn casserole, blueberry salad and some weird hot fruit soup that I only have the faintest memories of. We would all gather in the living room and go around in a circle and one by one open each gif,t taking literally hours to finish. Then the kids would all run off in different directions, my cousin and I would have to change our clothes and put on our matching outfits that we got every, single, year, and the adults would play Euchre. My grandfather would sneak all of the kids Cream de Menth to pour over our vanilla ice cream for dessert, and it was just everything that a holiday should be, happy.

Christmas morning would be just our family. My brother and I would wake up early in the morning, and wake up our parents. We would open our stockings, cook breakfast, S.O.S. (a tribute to my father in the military) and open the rest of our gifts. Later in the day we would head over to my mothers parents for our third and final Christmas.

My Grandparents house was always amazing but Christmas was spectacular. I don’t remember the food (except there were always bowls full of red pistachios), but it was never all about the food. It was all about the experience. We would fish off of the dock or swim in the pool, because Florida, and write poetry. We would take picnics up their spiral staircase to the roof of their house and watch the sun set over the bayou. We left sometime after dinner either to drive by car or boat, because we could, to look at Christmas lights, and while we were gone, Santa would magically come so that when we returned, the tree was covered in gifts. It was everything Christmas should be, magical.

It turned out that my Grandmother was Santa Clause, of course. Once we were all loaded up and ready to go look at Christmas lights, she would conveniently forget something inside every year and quickly put all the presents under the tree. But she had us idiots fooled for years.

When you grow up with what seemed like the perfect holidays (until it all fell to shit at least,) you just know that there is no way to compete with that, and I don’t really want to. I transitioned from believing in Santa, to finding out he wasn’t real, to becoming Santa, to having to tell my kids that it was all a lie, and along the way it just became a big pain in the ass. I try to make our own little traditions, but every year it gets harder and harder.

What world did we actually create that we give our kids permission to hand us a list of demands every year? We spend hundreds, just kidding, thousands of dollars on crap we don’t actually need and then we literally give or throw away last years loot to make room for the new treasures.

I am sick of the waste, tired of the pressure to make everything special, and so over the performance. But I do it for Jesus. Just kidding, we all know Jesus lost the battle to Santa Clause a long time ago. But no matter what, Christmas is here.

So pass the booze, and let’s do this shit.

.

35

If you are reading this, it’s official. I’m 36, and I never thought I would be. I am writing this three days before my birthday, tempting fate, dangling a pork chop in front of the wolf. But still, it’s just three days.

If your reading this, it means I may be a little crazy, but then again, aren’t we all.

I tend to always cry on my birthdays, and I am SO not a crier. But for whatever reason, it makes me sad. I don’t know if it’s the whole getting older thing, or if it’s how each year seems to go by faster and faster, or if it’s remembering all of the things that I wanted to do but never did. I try to prepare myself, but every year at least at some point during the day, I end up locked in my room, in bed, hiding from the world. Boo freaking hoo.

Last year was particularly dark. 35 was my magic number. It had been a long time coming, and as much as I tried to ignore it, not talk about it, pretend it never happened, it was here. I was 35, and I was going to die.

This is the part where you can judge me, or call me crazy, trust me it’s fine, I judge me too.  You see, several years ago, I was lying in bed next to my husband, he was gaming, I was reading. I heard an audible voice. Yes, it was in my head, my husband didn’t hear him, but I heard him.

“You are going to die when you are 35.”

What. The. F*ck.

Only moments after he announced my fate, and I tried to dismiss him did I recognize him. He didn’t lie before, so why would he lie now.

I was sitting in church, almost 13 years ago, not paying attention to whatever was going on around me, and he spoke, in my head. I heard him.

“You are pregnant. It’s a boy.”

What. The. F*ck.

I had no reason to think I was pregnant, I had a nine month old baby I was still solely nursing. We were up to our eyeballs with children it seemed, so we definitely were not taking any risks that would end up with me knocked up again. Why would something like that pop into my head, why would I imagine it?

I didn’t imagine it? I heard him, 13 years ago. And 13 years ago, he was right.

So all those years later when I heard him again, what was I supposed to think?

My first instinct was to talk about it, so I took the risk of sounding a little nuts and told my husband. His response was, “Oh, great.” And then we never spoke of it again. To be clear, I don’t blame him for his response, it was a ridiculous thing to say out loud anyway, and I don’t blame him for not remembering it either. If the shoe were on the other foot, I probably would never have given that conversation another thought either.

After that though, I never dared to breathe those words again. I almost told my very good friend a few times because I knew if anyone would be able to talk me off the ledge, she would. But I just couldn’t. I believe our words have power and if you are just going to throw words out into the universe, you better mean them, and be willing to watch as things unfold because of them.

So for years, I waited. Sometimes I wouldn’t think about it for months at a time, I didn’t have to, I wasn’t 35, yet. But then there were times where I wrote my children letters, so that they could know how much I loved them even after I was gone. And time passed, and the end of my life approached.

Last December, we were in mid-move. I turned 35 knowing I was about to move to the top of a mountain, in the nature, with all the monsters that live deep in the forest. The stage was being set for my finale. I thought of everything that could possibly go wrong, how painful everything could possibly be, and I decided that for the better part of the year I would just stay inside. I would conveniently develop agoraphobia and then once I turned 36, come clean as to why I was suddenly cured. It seemed like a fair plan.

But, it wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t realistic, and life had to just continue on. Then something happened that I wasn’t expecting.

Acceptance. If this was the year I was going to die, so be it. I had no control of it anyway. I decided to not tempt fate and jump out of airplanes or anything, but I did just live. I even joked with myself whenever I was doing the things that scared me, “So this is how I die. It’s a little anticlimactic, haha.”

This year didn’t kill me, but it changed me. It broke me little by little and I let it.

This year put me in a place so far out of my comfort zone, it was like we were planets away. It made me realize that I am capable of change and discomfort and I can adjust and thrive along the way.

This year took my Grandfather, someone who wanted nothing to do with me. It forced me to deal with deep-rooted family hurt and provided healing in the most unexpected ways.

This year killed my cats. It brought tragedy in doses small enough to recover from, and prepared us for a life we weren’t used to. It gave me thicker skin, when it comes to the world we live in.

This year brought brain cancer to someone I was a kid with and it made me feel things I had completely built walls against. Compassion, grief, sadness, empathy. Basically the things that make you nice. His cancer made me nice, so there’s that.

It also made me realize that life is just not fair, and that tomorrow is never a guarantee. I watched him thrive after being beaten down, after a voice told him he wouldn’t survive the year. He chose to not roll over and die, he chose to live.

It reminded me that I could do the same. I didn’t have to listen to a voice that told me I was going to die. Whether it be a doctor or demon or just some crazy part of my sub-conscience, I didn’t have to listen to a voice that said die.

I had to listen to the voice that told me to live.

So, I will not be sitting in my room, crying on my birthday this year. I will be dressed like an elf, hiking with my friends, celebrating me and being thankful for my life.

I won’t worry about tomorrow or when I will actually die. I could die when I am 36 or 106. I won’t be sitting around waiting, because…

The years don’t actually matter if the days don’t actually count.