A Mom, a Blog, and the Life In-Between

Thursday, June 07, 2007

Oldies but Goodies

I was reading some of my older posts and came across some older ones that, honestly, I'd completely forgotten I'd even written. It's funny, sometimes I'll come across something I wrote a long time ago and will be thoroughly impressed with it. Which is weird only because I'm usually so critical of myself, and as I always worry that my writing is too convoluted and incoherent to be "good" or "moving" or "understandable".

So for your Thursday amusement, I give you some older posts that are among my favorites.

I have deep thoughts about Christmas.

I'm terrified of flying, but the fear of dying makes me bare my soul.

"The Housing Market Can Kiss my Ass" - the title says it all.

My swiss-cheese memory lands me a "Perfect Post Award".

A picture of my boob. Plus a rant about breastfeeding.

Rain makes me melancholic.

Sometimes, I'm a lesbian.

Labor and birth.

I don't always like Miami.

My Cuban heritage has defined a great part of who I am.

A public bathroom makes me reevaluate everything.

I love Tyler Florence; but Rachel Ray? Not so much.

UPDATES!

More faves from the latter part of 2007.

It was a bad Monday.

Ask me this question, and I'll smack you.

Metablogging, how geeky of me! (Later in the year: More thoughts on race, ethnicity and the blogosphere.)

I'm pregnant and petting an alligator.

I start out talking about WBW and end up ranting about the dire state of maternity leave in this country.

Motherhood is devastating.

There's my boob again.

MORE UPDATES! (March 2009)

In 2008, after 7 years of marriage and almost 10 together, my marriage fell apart. Everything ended. It was painful and ugly and horrible. I tried to keep the worst of it out of this public forum, but it was impossible not to write about it. Here are the highlights.

I break the news.

But prior to that, there were a couple of hints that all was not right.

Early on, I was able to articulate a whole bunch of what I was feeling.

My husband's gone, life is painful and weird, but I win a prize.

I go back to zero, and it's not such a bad thing. I also banish an awful word from my vocabulary. Both things still apply today.

An explanation for those pictures I take of myself.

My first thoughts on being single again.

Setting the stage for the only kind of man that will do for me.

On being strong and vulnerability.

Really, I just want someone to take care of me.

Despite everything I'm going through, it is beyond evident that I am way more qualified to be VP than Sarah Palin.

On loss.

Everything changes with this post. Though I said nothing publicly then, I was suffering through some crazy shit my ex was putting me through. That one thing snowballed into months of misery. But it was the misery I needed to get myself to the next level of recovery.

I have a naughty, crazy side, and she worries me.

When everything is really nothing.

Still trying to accept how obvious it was that he had stopped giving a crap about the relationship, but I couldn't put it all together.

Trying to get past the horrible nightmare that is my life and into a better place.

And as the year ends, trying to capture it all in as precise and honest a way as possible. My favorite post of this entire ordeal.

Meanwhile, I am still a mother to my wonderful boy. Becoming a single mother and navigating this new, scary life while trying to keep him protected from my pain becomes my mission, one that I worry about and agonize over a great deal.

About being mother to a boy.

About the fear I feel in all this.

He turns three, and I remember the first time I held him.

General agony about the whole situation and how it could affect my son.

He starts school and it kills me.

As 2009 gets off to a start, I begin to move past the awfulness of everything and into actually living and enjoying my new life.

But it's not always easy.

And sometimes I just ramble on and on about my self-esteem and the support everyone's given me and other things that don't really belong together in one post.

Things finally begin to feel normal, and I have the smile to prove it.

Some issues linger.

But overall, I maintain hope for better days ahead.

NEW UPDATE (May 2010):

To say it's been an eventful year since my last update is an understatement. So much has happened, more than I could have imagined, so much of it so surprising and sweet. Last March, I had moved to a better place, but it was tenuous. All I was trying to do at that point was leave the sadness and grief and intense feelings of failure and pain and anger behind. In fact, let's start there:

On what would've been my 8th wedding anniversary, I try to explain these feelings.

I take my son to The Fair, and it's a wonderful break from all this crapitude.

Acknowledging my willingness to let my old life go and accept whatever's before me.

My son is so free with his emotions that it both baffles me and tears me to pieces.

My ex and ex-good friend are suddenly buddy-buddy, and while not my business or my problem, it is such an unexpected and surprising move on his part - and so revealing of a side of him I did not know existed - that it completely floors me. I thought at the time, now I finally understand exactly the kind of person he really is, but I wondered if the feeling would last. It has. I link to this now because it was indeed the moment where everything changed for me in a very deep and important way. I've never been able to look at him the same way since this.

Bad car crash.

I'm hooked on milestone dates. A year ago from the date of this post, I broke the news of my marriage's ending; so naturally, I have to do a post about it.

The blog vs. my real life, plus lots of over-analyzing.

My boob pops out at a water park. Thanks to this post, I've discovered just how many people troll the internet looking for "boobs pop out" or "boobs water park" or "boobs pop out at water park" (answer: too many).

Sharing custody of my son, while good in many ways, is extremely hard for me. I wonder all the time about how the back-and-forth affects him, and I feel like I live two lives. Some thoughts about it here. I'll write about this a few more times, and I know as I write this that there's more to come. These two things -- the back-and-forth and how fractured I feel -- are two huge issues in my life.

I dump Dave Matthews. And his band, too.

One positive thing? I start getting back to that place where I'm totally comfortable with myself. This, this is good; and I'm happy.

On anger. There is still some truth to this post, the way I react to things now out of fear of what consequences my anger will bring. I catch myself doing it but don't know how to fix it; it's like I've been reprogrammed to feel shame at expressing anger. This, I'm not too happy about.

Like millions of Americans, I lose my job. It's both bad and good, as the situation at work had become nightmarish. At the same time, there's other stuff brewing in my life, and it's really pretty neat.

BOOM! A (figurative) bomb goes off in my life, and everything - every. single. thing. - changes. That bomb? Was the explosion between Jevo and me. One moment we were friends - good friends who really cared about each other - and the next, wow.

My boy turns four. *cry*

I'm so embarrassed to say this, but I love skinny jeans.

Say hello to my boyfriend. My god, I can't even believe I have one. And he's so wonderful.

Not having my son with me all the time kills me. It's devastating, a pain I carry with me all the time. Everything is shadowed by this reality and how much it hurts me. I don't know if I will ever find any peace with this, if the guilt will ever subside or if I'm hurting my son beyond repair. I just know that this is awful. And then, I explain a little more about it.

I try to share some thoughts about love, but I don't know, this might not make much sense.

Bad, bad night. Max was sick and my very bad financial situation was worrying me to death. This night, everything just became too much for me.

Bizarrely, and apropos of nothing, I'm hit with some feelings about having more children.

Another big theme in my life: being a mother, and seeing and raising my son, without the divorce as the central theme of it all. This continues to be a challenge, though I definitely feel some progress.

My son and I are too much alike sometimes, to both our detriment.

An ode to Jevo.

Just another typical day for me.

Till next time...

Labels: me, writing

Posted by Tere @ 6/07/2007 | Permalink |

1 Comments

Balou posted at 6/08/2007 2:26 PM
OMG, I hadn't read the post regarding Rachel Ray until you linked it here yesterday. Every time I watch "$40" I always think to myself "man, that's a shitty tip." LOL!!