depression
To All The Young Moms
“What a young mom thing to do” I hear her behind me saying, while I’m explaining why I’m not leaving my baby in the daycare at church. She scoffs and continues, Read the rest of this entry »
Why I Seriously Hate Being A Woman Sometimes…
I know, I know. International women’s day was JUST here and maybe it makes me less of a feminist or a traitor to my kind but seriously I just hate being a woman sometimes.
When you’re a single woman, you’re defined by such things as: career-driven success, sexual awareness, college degrees, if you model, where you live, if you have a boyfriend —
When you get engaged, you hear: how did he propose, how big is your ring, are you having a summer wedding, did you cry, how will you announce, who will your bridesmaids be and how will you ask them —
After you get married the silent questions of strangers are: how often do you have sex, does he post romantic, effortless, and natural sounding random things on Facebook about you, is he also a feminist, does he want kids right away, has the “honeymoon” phase worn off, do you guys fight now —
And of course after you have a baby: how did you give birth, was it natural, how long did you labor, what did you register for, how big is your baby, is she sitting up, is she smiling, is she rolling over, if so was it before mine, how much does she weigh now, can she talk yet, is she running because my 9 year old is running, does she speak 4 languages yet, oh you’re NOT getting vaccinated, does she sleep through the night, have her eyes changed color yet, and THE question – have you lost the baby weight —
Most people don’t come right out and say these but they are plastered all over our lives. I could throw up at how many times I’ve had women ask me if I want one of those wraps. Because I guess I look like the kind of person who is trying to “bounce back” in a hurry. Newsflash: babies. need. squish. They want boobs, real boobs to lay on. A soft tummy and nice floppy arms. They want to fall asleep on something they can sink into. But we are so obsessed with comparing ourselves to some other version of ourselves or other women that it feels like we’re doing something wrong if we don’t look like the “hot mom”.
I’m not condoning making unwise or unhealthy choices. Because we deserve to live well, and our bodies are worth taking care of. But real life mamas, they probably don’t have rock hard abs all the time. They just don’t. ********* Hey if you’re doing a workout program right now, or if you coach one, I’m not trying to be ugly. Because the world needs people like you. And there are a lot of mama’s who want and need some help getting things together again. You’re good people and keep it up.
I stepped on the scale the other day and I’m back in the 120’s, and I feel pretty great about that. And when I look at my belly, it’s still soft as a nice bowl of pudding, and I also feel pretty okay about that too. You know what I hate? I hate feeling like as soon as my personal growth is thrown out into the social media world, it’s combatted or surpassed by someone else’s bigger and better growth.
I don’t want people to know sometimes. I honestly don’t. Elena is such a good baby. She’s slept through the night since about 5 weeks. She was tongue tied and still figured out nursing like a champ. She has slept in her own room multiple times and doesn’t ever cry (unless that doggone pacifier falls out…), she naps on a schedule for usually over an hour and a half each time, I can bring her with me to any room I’m in and complete whatever housework I need to, she doesn’t hate being left alone, she loves people holding her but also is okay when they don’t, she likes sleeping on her own, she loves baths and showers and doesn’t even cry if water gets on her face, she loves our animals and she loves us so much – and I can feel she knows she is loved. But. Our lives are not perfect.
But the second that you tell the world all of your good news, you feel guilty. Or you get comments like, “just wait until the second gets here”. Or your friends don’t comment or like your statuses because it makes them feel bad if their baby doesn’t do that. Why do our lives revolve around the success or demise of other people to the extent that we can’t be happy for our sisters when good things happen to them.
Because yeah I stepped on that scale and saw a number that I liked. But 6 months ago when I was in the throes of late pregnancy, with the Alabama sun giving me real bad under boob sweat, I wasn’t liking the number I saw. But guess what. Literally every woman in the world feels like that about something. Big freaking deal.
Why can’t we laugh at the struggles in our own lives and push them aside when someone needs our support more. This is when I hate the Instagram world so much. These beautiful women who post beautifully posed and edited pictures of their lives, with or without kids – the message is the same. It has created this bubble of lies that we all fall into. This need to be a perfectly edited picture. Not real. Not with acne, not with bed head hair that doesn’t look cute, not with clothes that don’t fit us yet.
This need for women to be a certain way and look a certain way and present themselves in a certain way, we want to say it’s because of men but it’s not. We do this to ourselves and each other.
Enough. Just enough of it, already. Honestly I could care less about how far you got in college. Why? Because it’s your business not mine. I think it’s awesome that your baby was born with a full set of adult teeth and speaking complex sentences. Whatever. It literally means nothing about my baby or my life. I don’t care if you go out and model on the weekends and I don’t. Why? Because why should I care.
I think we are so far away from loving each other. We present this “feminism” idea of supporting and empowering one another but I have never in my life encountered so many women on a regular basis that struggle with depression and/or anxiety.
Would it be so impossible to just be a blank slate. Be friendly to each other, love on each other, support one another’s success and don’t try to make it about yourself. Can we try to not be so insecure in our own strengths that we have to tear apart other women’s fears in order to make our own not seem so scary.
Feeling Rusty
I know I haven’t posted anything in a long time. A LONG time. I’ve been dedicating most of my blog writing to WaB, and I just haven’t found a lot of personal things to say.
Honestly these past 10 months have been hard. Phil and I are stationed in South Korea (although we’re back in the States right now for an Army class -his class, not mine-) and it has been one of the most isolating seasons of my life.
I’ve gone over several ideas for a community outreach project. Something that involves me giving back a little of my time. Something small, you know. Like buying a stranger coffee, and listening to them talk for an hour. Something like Humans of New York. But the farther into the idea I get, I feel like the more discouraged I get. And I don’t think I struggle with depression as a whole, but I’ve seriously doubted that a few times in the past year.
Complacency, apathy, and just a lot of self-pity too.
I’ve applied for a job, and although the hiring process is taking an extremely long time. I think it’s really going to help with everything. I think it’ll help me feel more involved and like I’m still an independent person.
Anyway, this post isn’t really anything other than something to help me get back on my writers’ feet. Make those words easier to find. You know?
Caution, Bumpy Roads Ahead.
Phil and I are going through a marriage conference this week and I have to say that quite possibly it has taken all of the last six months and this week for it to actually sink into my heart that I am married. Not only that I am married, but just what marriage means, requires, asks, needs, desires and pulls from me. And let me tell you, it is one of those very comforting things that makes you want to run into a panic-stricken state for maybe I don’t know, ten thousand years or so.
I don’t know if anybody out there has ever felt like this before, but I’m sure if you’ve ever been hurt or lied to, you know that when someone safe comes along it isn’t too easy to just say “here’s my heart, do with it as you please.”
Oh no, after years and years of abuse, disorder in the home, an ungodly view of Love and marriage, being abandoned and mistreated by men AND women, I can safely say that this was no piece of cake. And quite frankly I am in the middle of it right now.
We talked about sexuality today, about the woman’s heart and the role a man should have with it. And it was all wonderful things. It was a beautiful picture that God created, designed for a woman to be safe and a man to be her covering. I mean, how awesome would a covering be, right? Someone to watch out for you, someone who always has your back, someone who can help you when your emotions go haywire, someone to bring you back down to earth, someone to dream with you, to love with you, to be your best friend, and walk through the world with you.
Well I guess I always thought that it was men who had the problem. It was men who were passive and incapable of showing any sort of emotional support, men who needed to change their way of thinking to be more like God. However I didn’t think for a second that if men actually did change, if they did become the kind of men we needed them to be, that would mean we would have to let go of all of our mistrust, pain, anger, manipulation, jealousy, and we would have to be vulnerable.
So the Pastor starts to talk about sexual molestation and what it does to your heart as a woman (and a man, if that has happened to you) and I can feel every single muscle in my body clench up and tighten. I feel my eyes kind of glaze over and my arms cross, my legs cross, and I have this pit in my stomach telling me to crawl under a blanket and hide. Phil puts his hand on my leg and I feel like if I don’t get it away from me in a hurry, I might have a panic attack.
I’ve definitely had ministry for all of this too. I’ve gone over all the junk from my childhood and growing up years, talked to God about it, renounced all the assignments on my life and my sexuality, gone through all the painful memories of my dad not being at home, of him abandoning my mom and our family, of all of the uprooting, all of the inconsistency. I mean, I really hated feeling like I was dirty, like I was bad, like I was constantly doing something wrong or like God was mad at me because I have had no clue about my sexual identity. That is such a crappy feeling. So I have really made an effort in my life to remove all that, to start new and especially when I got married, I really thought it would be different. That having Phil in my life would make things… make sense.
Well obviously, it didn’t. And I still felt broken and I still felt this barrier between him and I. And as we’re talking about it in the class, I really feel God start to unravel some things in my heart. Some deep things, some things that have hurt, some painful things, some things that were never supposed to happen. And I start to realize that I will never get freedom from being a victim, and having a victimized, warped, and distorted view unless I actually communicate with Phil and trust him.
I always thought it was so wrong to tell people when you were having trouble. Why would you put all your burdens on them. Phil asks me if I’m okay and I feel so guilty saying no. I feel like such an awful person sitting here, struggling over this huge lie inside of me that I am a bad girl who is a disappointment.
So I’m writing this because I don’t know if there is anyone out there who has related to any of this, but I had a revelation and I thought I would share it because it really helped me.
It’s literally like you’re standing in front of your spouse, looking into their eyes, and saying,
“Hi. Welcome to my mess of a heart. Would you like a look around? Here we have my trauma’s, the days when I thought I wasn’t going to live to see tomorrow. Here we have some abuse and some hatred of men – that just came with it. Oh, over there in the corner is some insecurity. And all of it is in a sea of Fear. Telling me that no matter what, I won’t ever know if you’ll wake up tomorrow and leave me….So. Do you still want all of me?”
Because even though it looks ugly, its not. The parts that hurt are ugly, the way you were mistreated is ugly, but you and your heart are in no way, shape or form ugly. And being vulnerable CANNOT become a lost art. Being vulnerable is how we get our hearts back, we regain faith in our beauty, we trust our husbands to do their job.
Life cannot become one big mess of Fear. Fear doesn’t deserve that much, he’s such a crapperbasket. Always telling you that no matter what you do in your life to make it better, it could always go to hell in a handbag and there would be nothing you can do but sit back and realize you’re more of a failure than when you started. But that, isn’t so.
I’ll tell you right now, if I was God, and I created people, I wouldn’t create people who were failures, who were dirty, who were disappointing, who were ugly and worth nothing more than to be mistreated. So why would we think such things of ourselves. Do we think that just because those things have happened, that it eliminates God’s view of us. That it changes our DNA from the image of the Godhead into the image of the Satanhead? That’s ridiculous! Satan doesn’t even have a Satanhead for crying out loud!
I just want you to know, if anyone out there reads this who has been though anything of this sort… you’re not alone, you’re not doomed in your memories or your hurts, you’re not forsaken, you can be vulnerable again.
Chew On The Write Words 