fashion clothes

Tomorrow is my birthday, but I'm writing this now because I have something already planned for tomorrow.

Something that I need to write about here for a second, if you'll humor me.

Tomorrow, one of my closest friends is writing here for you.  Except there's a catch.  I've never met her.  Weird, right?  Not as weird as you think.

She's awesome, and I promise you all will fall in love with her tomorrow if you haven't already.  Her name is Lillian, and she writes over at It's a Dome Life.

She is one of this group of amazing people who have come into my life this past year.


They all do what they do for a reason.  We all do what we do for a reason.

They've made me laugh.  They've made me cry.  They've become my friends.

These are the gifts I have been given this year.


This past year has taught me a lot about myself.  I'm branching out. I'm taking risks.  I'm trying new things.  I'm laying it out there, in the public eye.

I'm doing it because of all of them, and I'm doing it because of you.

My fans, my readers.

Thank you.

Turns out that being prematurely pissy hasn't improved my outlook on Tuesday.  So, in an unprecedented move, I'll be pissed off twice this week.  How do you like them apples?

It's only Monday.  I'm well aware of that, but I'm in a mood, so this is happening a day early.

Maybe that means that I won't be pissed off tomorrow.  Maybe.

Let's do this thing.

Commercials and what they say about our society
I alluded to this on my Facebook page this morning, and promptly lost four fans.  I get the whole point of marketing, but I am not sure when commercials became such a ridiculous commentary on who we are as a people.  Let's see....parents lie to their kids, wives sabotage their husbands, cars can fix anything, models will make out with anyone for enough money and God made farmers so they could sell trucks.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed some of them.  The commercials that air during the Super Bowl, like most other things that day, are on steroids.  More shock value, more pilot testing, more time invested, more expensive. These companies have a lot riding on their 30 seconds, and want to be memorable.  All well and good, except that it doesn't take much to see the underlying messages behind whatever it is that they are trying to sell.

How about a commercial where parents are honest with their kids?  Where spouses work together?  Where a car is just a car and says nothing about who we are, but just helps us get from point a to point b?  Where sex isn't used to sell website domains?  Where commercials about farmers are used to actually advocate for the plight of the small farmers that built this country instead of a truck?

That would just be crazy.

The idolization of a murderer
Ray Lewis.  Just do us all a favor, and actually retire.  You sure made a scene of it all, couldn't just be like most of the other guys retiring this year and quietly call a press conference when it's all said and done.  You wanted, and got, the send-off of the century.

He's a great football player, no one will argue that point...but this man is no hero.  He killed people.  He rolled on his friends.  He paid settlements to the families of the victims. He claims he's retiring now to spend more time with his kids, six of them from four different women.  This man is no hero.  He is an athlete.

Here's your chance, Ray.  Drift into anonymity.  Do some charity work.  Actually spend that time with the kids you keep claiming you're leaving for.  Don't come out of retirement.  Learn how to be humble, really humble, not the showboating humble that seeps out of your pores now.  You managed to convince many people that you were a hero, it's time to start acting like one.

World Cancer Day
Today is World Cancer Day.

Cancer now kills more people worldwide than anything else does.  Some might say this is a sign of progress with the developing world and the fight against diseases like malaria.  I see it as a sign of progress in some ways, but a bittersweet one.   It's not just that these developing countries have better sanitation and disease prevention, it's that as they become more industrialized they are also exposed to more of the dangers and toxins we have known for decades.  Pollution, cigarettes, fast food, inactivity...all spreading to these nations, and bringing their diseases with them.

Two years ago, I was home, helping my father in his last days.  I've seen what this beast can do, up close and personal.  We need to focus on treatment, but also on the prevention of lifestyle cancers like lung cancer.  It killed him, and it shouldn't be allowed to kill anyone else.

The people who question what I do
I've just been reminded that this whole blogging endeavor doesn't make money.  Again.  Like I'm not aware of that.

Here's the thing.  My first priority is my children, who I am home for. I am a stay at home mom for a reason.  If someday I can make money from writing, that would be great, but it's not my motivation.

I write to stay sane, for therapeutic reasons, to exorcise my demons.  I write because I love it.  I write because I want to believe that I have some story to tell that someone else needs to hear.  I write because I get emails and messages from people who read what I write and they tell me that I helped them, that I encouraged them to change something, that I made them feel less alone in whatever it is they are going through.  I write because I have made genuine connections with good people.

I've been accused of a lot of things recently, I've been drug through the mud, I've been badmouthed.  I can honestly say that I don't know how or why, because I've never been less than authentic and real here or anywhere else.  I don't mislead people, I don't lie.  I don't have the energy for it.  I'm not here to make enemies, I'm not here to compete with anyone else.  I'm not here to try and take anything away from anyone else.  Yet, none of that matters to some people.

That's fine.  I'll walk the high road.  I've been doing it for a while now. I'm wearing the boots and my Wonder Woman costume, just trying to do a little bit of good at a time.  Superheroes don't do what they do for the fame or the fortune, they do it because it's the right thing to do.

Batgirl is pretty cute, huh?

So, do me a favor everyone...don't question my motives.

Question my logic and reasoning. Question my beliefs and my research.  Argue with me, disagree with me.  Challenge the points I make.  Debate with me.  Just don't question my motives.

I promise you I'm doing this for the right reasons.

So, it's Sunday and I have a lot to catch up on.  I got tagged in this random 20 questions post by A Mother Life, and tried to stomp my feet and walk away.

Then she was all like, but I want to know more about you....and I was like, fiiiiiiiine.  Gosh.


I want to think I'm not, but I know that's not true.  And, really, the only way that was ever tested was for it to be really tested. 



Happy Super Bowl Sunday!  Let's all eat enough that we roll around later tonight!

In this house, we take our sports seriously.  Tomorrow, one of the most sacred of all days in the sporting calendar, the Super Bowl.

I'm rooting for the 49ers for a few reasons, not the least of which is that I tend to not want Ray Lewis to go out in a blaze of glory.  I just have a hard time cheering for the guy.  Besides, I'm not sure I want to know what he'd do if he won again...last time didn't end so well.

(For those who don't know, Lewis and his buddies killed two men after the 2001 Super Bowl.  They were all charged with first degree murder, but Lewis rolled and pled to obstruction charges in exchange for testifying against his friends.  The friends were acquitted.  Lewis was fined by the league as his punishment, and later paid out settlements when civil cases were filed against him by the families of the victims.  He is retiring after this season, to much fanfare about his career, though there are some of us who haven't forgotten what he did.)

I'll be the first to admit that I have never been a fan of the 49ers before.  Up until the past few weeks, they were just another team in the NFL that occasionally played one of the teams I was rooting for.

My loyalty usually resides with the Chargers and the Broncos.

Or Ryan Leaf.  Seriously.

Since neither of those teams made it, I've had to choose.

This helped.


Colin Kaepernick.

The back-up quarterback who only got a shot because Alex Smith, the starter was hurt.  The kid who was nominated to all-state in baseball, basketball and football.  The kid who was drafted to pitch for the Cubs because he was thought to be a far better baseball player than football player.  The kid they all said had accuracy issues, but a strong arm.  The kid who got only one scholarship offer to play football in college.

The first game he started in college for Nevada, he almost beat Boise State.  Three years later, he'd snap their 28 game winning streak in his last game at home as a senior.  His stats are ridiculous, yet he never got the nationwide attention that players from other schools got.


He went into the draft after graduation, and the Niners traded up to grab him.  For a year and  a half, he played second fiddle to Alex Smith, being used only occasionally. This season, Smith suffered a concussion and had to sit out.  A few weeks later, he was cleared to play, but Kaepernick had taken the position.  Harbaugh named him starter.

All of a sudden, he was starting games for a team that had a shot to make it all the way to the big dance, and he stepped up to the plate.  My jaw hit to floor when I saw how fast he can throw, not realizing he was a pitcher and his fastball was in the 95mph range.  He can run too, and his yards on the ground made the difference in a few games toward the end of the season.


That all makes him interesting to me as a football fan, but what makes him interesting as a person is who he is.

He's mild mannered, with a quiet and unimposing ego.  He doesn't say much.  He answers interview questions with one or two word answers.

He certainly isn't hard on the eyes.

It's said that when he was a child, he predicted he would be 6'4" and play for either the 49ers or Packers someday.

He scored a 37 on the Wonderlic test, a test given to NFL players and people in many other professions to gauge their cognitive abilities.  Systems analysts average a 32.  Football quarterbacks average 24.  He's basically a genius.

Still, that's not what is making news this week.

Kaepernick is biracial, and was adopted by a white family.  Born to a teenage mother with no job, and a father who walked away, he was given up for adoption at 5 weeks old to the Kaepernicks.  They had two living children and had lost two children to heart defects.  In recent weeks, this has become a news story all it's own.

Rick Reilly, an ESPN sports analyst and father of an adopted child himself, has publicly written about his belief that Kaepernick should try to contact his birth parents.

Kaepernick's mother, Teresa, sent pictures and updates to his birth mother for many years, until she asked her to stop.  It became too painful.  His birth mother sent his adoptive parents one last letter for him to read at 18.  After reading it, Colin had no interest in seeking out his birth parents.  Still doesn't.

According to his parents, he was never curious.  His family was just his family.  His siblings were his siblings, his parents were his parents.  It didn't matter to him.

When pressed on the issue, he has maintained that his adoptive parents are his parents, period.  It's not an issue of curiosity, or of not wanting to hurt his adoptive parents, of resentment or any of that, he says.  He's just not interested.

Why isn't that the end of the conversation?

Adopted children have the right in some cases to seek their birth families, this is true.  Shouldn't they also have the absolute right not to?  Shouldn't we respect that, not question their motives, and shouldn't we leave them alone?

This is none of Reilly's business, nor is it anyone's.  It's not appropriate for anyone to tell him what he should or should not be doing in this regard, certainly not now just because he entered the spotlight.  Why should he be subject to questioning about his personal choice simply because people know who he is now?

Obviously, I am arguing that he shouldn't be.

Who his birth parents are, who his adoptive parents are, whether he wants to find them or not, has nothing to do with football.

Get back to sports analysis, Reilly.

There's a game tomorrow.

Shit.

Dani stared down at the stick in disbelief.  Two lines, bright as day.

She shook her head.

How the hell did this happen?

She had taken her pill every single day that month.  She hadn't been sick.  She hadn't forgotten.  She hadn't done that thing that some of the women she knew did, where they claimed to be taking them religiously, but weren't. She had taken them, and dammit they were supposed to work.

Yet, there it was.

She closed the lid of the toilet, sat down, put her head in her hands and sobbed.

The truth was, she didn't need the test to tell her.  She already knew what was happening.  Her breasts were sore all the time, and she had developed an uncanny ability to smell anything and everything in a five mile radius.  She had been more crampy than usual and was falling asleep standing up at the hospital by early afternoon.

By the time she was late by a week, she knew it was time to face the music.  She'd willed her body to cooperate for all those days and it hadn't listened.

She had gone to the drugstore that morning to pick up the test.  Grabbed some shampoo and lotion in an attempt to mask the reason she was there.  The cashier looked to be about 17 years old, and he seemed more embarrassed than she was.  She quickly grabbed the bag and left, having never felt such humiliation in her life.

And for what? Women buy pregnancy tests all the time.  Women go to doctors all the time for pregnancy.  She'd just completed her rotation on the Labor and Delivery floor, and clearly all those patients had seen the set of lines she was looking at now.  This wasn't something she was supposed to be upset about.  She wasn't the first woman in the history of the world who found themselves pregnant on accident, but she just couldn't do it now.  She couldn't.

She spent the rest of the day composing herself.  She threw the test away, then took the trash bag out to the dumpster just in time for Bryan to pull into the lot.

She brushed the hair out of her eyes and mustered a smile.  She couldn't tell him.  Not yet.  Not now.  Maybe not ever.

They had only been living together for a few months, and she wasn't sure if he was really the guy she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. He was handsome and kind and had a good job.  She just wasn't completely sold on the idea of it all, no matter how great he made it sound.

She wasn't sure if she would ever want the husband and the house and the kids and the dog.

He had a normal childhood, his parents were still together.  She, well, hadn't.

She didn't believe that there were people in this world who actually chose to love and support one another no matter what, because she'd never witnessed it.  In her life, people left.

They always left.

She was immediately skeptical of it all, love, marriage, happy endings.  Maybe there were people like that, but she'd never known them.  She just couldn't accept the possibility that he actually meant all those things he said.

Bryan had even mentioned marriage a few times.  Already.  She wasn't ready for that.  She knew that much for sure.  Marriage made it harder to leave, and she wasn't sure she wanted to stay.  She still had another year left before she would have full certification.  She wanted to finish all that, pay off some student loans, travel.  She loved the idea of becoming a traveling nurse for a few years, moving all over the country like a needle wielding nomad.

She hadn't ever been far from where she was right now, and she wanted to see what the rest of the world was like.  Craved something, somewhere else.

Having a baby would ruin all that, just like she'd ruined everything for her own mother.

The next day, while she was between patients, she snuck outside and called a small clinic in the next town over.  She told them that she was pregnant, that she was seeking a termination.  They told her that she'd have to make two visits, one for information, then the second for the procedure.  She asked how much it cost, told them she would pay in cash.  Made the first appointment for the following Monday.  She would be about 7 weeks, early enough that they could just do it with medication.

She didn't want a surgical abortion.

She just wanted it over.

The next week was hell.  Dani fantasized about the world where Bryan was right, where she felt like she loved him enough to trust him with this.  Where he loved her enough for both of them and they would get married and she would figure everything out with school and it would all be okay.  That part of her that wanted this fantasy grew and grew with each day, and she found herself becoming more open to the idea that it could work.

Then, the other part of her, the realist, she shoved it all away.  She wasn't going to do what her mother had done. She wasn't going to get married because she was pregnant.  She didn't want him to feel trapped or stuck, and she didn't want that either.  She wasn't going to go down that road without knowing for sure that Bryan was the one, and she sure as hell wasn't bringing a child into it.

Monday came, and she called in a favor to a friend to cover her shift, knowing that she would have to do it again the following day.  She made the drive alone, in silence.  Her mind wouldn't shut off, there were so many things running through it all at once.  Could she do this?  Should she do this? 

The waiting room was empty, and for that she was grateful.  She didn't want to look at anyone right now.  She filled out the paperwork, inventing a new name and false address for this form.  No one needed to know who she was.  No one needed to know, period.

She was called back to the room.  The nurse was kind, though to Dani she may as well have been faceless.  Dani refused to make eye contact, but sensed that was fairly common here.  Women didn't come to these places for happy reasons.  She took the cup and went to the bathroom, returned it to the nurse without saying a word.

She sat on the table in an itchy paper gown and waited for what seemed like an eternity.

The doctor came in, he was older with kind eyes.  She had no choice but to answer his questions.

Yes, I would like to terminate.

He explained the risks, calculated how far along she was, and gave her the choice of methods.  She would have to come back the next day.

I understand, she whispered quietly.

The drive home was tortured, but different.  She wasn't as sure as she thought she was, but she knew what she had to do.  When she got home, Bryan had already started making gumbo for dinner.  She walked in, cold and detached.  He poured her a glass of wine and asked if it had been a hard day with her patients.

She gulped it down, then refilled the glass.

She sighed heavily and sat down, just said, I don't really want to talk about it. Maybe later, okay?  How was your day?

They ate as he asked about how her program was going.  She answered, but she wasn't really there.  She was fully inside her own head, and found herself completely distracted.  After she was done eating, she feigned a headache and said she needed to lie down.

Bryan came in to check on her four times before he finally went to bed, each time she pretended to be asleep.  She couldn't sleep, it wouldn't come, but she wanted nothing to do with him right now.  He climbed in beside her, still thinking she was asleep.  Put his arm snugly around her waist and whispered in her ear, I love you.

A silent tear rolled down her cheek.

Within minutes, he was soundly sleeping.  And she was still staring at the ceiling.

She wrested with herself all night about whether she should tell him or not, finally falling asleep just before dawn.  Morning came and he left before she stirred, stopping to kiss her goodbye as he walked out the door.

She had missed the chance to tell him, but she knew that it was just easier this way.

She let go of the idea of the romanticized happy ending.

The entire day was a blur.  Miles of highway, signing consent forms, handing over more cash than she'd ever carried in her purse before.  She had to take this pill now, the other tomorrow. They asked if she had ibuprofen at home and she nodded.  She swallowed the tablet, knowing that she was sealing her fate, closing the door on this chapter of her life forever.

She left with the bottle in her purse and the list of warning signs. In a haze, the next 24 hours came and went and the second pill was gone.  She'd hardly spoken to Bryan at all, and he seemed so sure that something had happened with a patient and she was having a hard time processing.  That stuff happened to all new nurses, and he wanted to give her time.  He tried to talk to her, ask how she was, and she just pushed him further and further away.

In the small hours between days, Bryan woke up to noise.  He instinctively reached for her and she wasn't there.   The clock read 3:12a.m.  He squinted at the light coming from under the bathroom door.

He stood up out of bed and walked to the door, knocking gently.  He could hear her sobbing.

Is everything okay, Dani? He was suddenly wide awake.

No. She sniffled.  No it's not, Bryan.  I think I need to go to the hospital.  

He threw the door open before she even got the words out to find her sitting on the floor.  The bathroom rug beneath her was soaked with blood, the pool reaching out towards him.

She sobbed and sobbed, she couldn't find the words.  She couldn't tell him.

She didn't have to.

Now he knew.


This post is part of a fiction challenge I am participating in.  This is a continuation of a story that already has two parts.  You can find them here: part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.

Here is this week's prompt:

When was the last time you looked into someone’s gorgeous eyes? Maybe they were sea green and seemed to have all the secrets of the world behind them? What would happen if you had a chance to know this person intimately? Then you find that person has a dark secret that would bring your perfect but lonely life to its knees.

Check out the pieces from the other participants!

http://www.clearlykristal.com/
http://www.worldsworstmoms.com/
http://www.bulamamani.com/
http://www.susannenelson.wordpress.com/
http://www.itsadomelife.com/
http://www.debiehive.blogspot.com/
http://www.mollyfield.com/
http://neargenius1.blogspot.com/
http://the-suds-box.blogspot.ca/
http://quirkychrissy.wordpress.com