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Please allow me the joy of dragons and princesses, wizards and pixie dust, allow my flighty childish fantasies

Attach to me no expectations that I do not attach to myself or to you

Think me kind hearted and well intended, even if my actions seem mixed

Involve me in life, in the world, in myself, in you, in all

Entice me to risk myself, to risk my trust, my mind, maybe my heart

Need from me, need me to give, to try, to care to want, need from me as I need from the world

Choose to be cautious, I choose the same

Expose yourself, I will expose me; exercise the limits of your fear.

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If you do not spend quality time with me, if you do not engage in routine and personal conversation with me, if you have not spent a day in my life, and if you choose to avoid seeing anything from any one side, but your own; then I employ you to not make judgements of me. YOU DON’T KNOW ME.

Maybe you did, maybe you used to, and, if this is news, I hate to be the bearer of it, but we all change, we all grow, hopefully we all learn and hopefully we have friends, family and significant others that can grow with us, and we can grow with them. The idea is that we grow together, even though sometimes we grow apart.

There are many paths that we choose, and often they do not go in the same direction as those that we love and want to be with. This is to be expected. The trick is how you all learn to handle them, to communicate your needs for emotional support, financial stability, trust and partnership. Nothing in life that involves two people is ever just perfect. There are compromises and challenges. Amongst those are the challenge of growing together. However, should you grow apart, it is again up to you both to determine how the course of your lives go from there. And the choices do not meant that a friendship will be mended or a relationship repaired; but the way we choose to progress will provide the foundation for us to improve a relationship with ourselves by understanding the lost relationship between us and another. Through this process we can see how we to have changed by reflecting upon our means of handling the relationships we lost.

People can choose to keep there head down and follow their own path. In this style they will not notice if their friend has changed, struggled, succeeded. They will only recognize you as you were. They will be blocked, perhaps consciously, perhaps not, but blocked from seeing the change in you. They will only understand you as you were  - people after all are incapable of change, right? Wrong. We change. And there are those around us who will refuse to see it regardless of if our changes could be understood as good, bad or indifferent to our person. The people who refuse to see or accept my change will wonder. Wonder if its true, if I really could, if there is good to it or if it is all for show. But to you, to all of you who like to think that you know me. . . generally speaking you don’t.

If you do not spend true time with me – no cell phone, no laptop or computer; if you do not have real conversations about who I am and who you are and what are lives mean; If you do not have routine conversation about hobbies, habits, colors, work, weather; and if you do not spend at least a day in my life from the alarm at 5am to bed at midnight, late night calls for mommy, rushing from work to football to dinner to book to bed, chauffeuring kids all over town, doing the laundry and cooking the dinner; if you do not, then you don’t know – so please stop telling me how it could be, should be and how you think I am, how you think I think, and how you know me.

Please, if you refuse, if you choose to not know me as me now, then that is your choice.

I chose, I choose, to see, to know, to believe in who I was, who I am and who I want to be. I choose to see the changes you allow or that I witness. And I have moments where you are friends and enemies.

But none of you aside from my son, none of you have shared in enough moments of my life recently to think that you know me. If you think you do, think you did, and you base how you talk to me, treat me, respond to me and evaluate me and my choices off of who you used to know then I am sorry for you.

Get to know me, or get away from me. I can not be who you think I was. I am who I am now. Know me now, not me three months ago, not me three years ago, not me seven years ago. There are some fundamentals that will not change – I want to teach. I love being outside. I love the feeling of accomplishment after a hard days work. I love to cook. I love family. I love tradition. I love my son. I love books. I love music. I love art. I love information. I love people. I love the idea of love. These, and more, will not change. But how I live, how I choose to reach my goals, how I choose to eat, how I choose to exercise, how I choose the books I read and the music I hear, how I choose to react, these have changed, and will change more with time. Change is inevitable. And how I choose to be me very different from who I am.

Know me or leave me. I can not be kept as I was.

I indicated in a recent blog that I have been in need of the skills of loving, and being loved.

I thought then, and think more so now, that in order for this realization to come to pass I had to be put in a situation of desperation. A situation that felt so bleak, so lonely, so isolating, that I very quickly had to process choices I made, and choices I did not make. Through doing so I have come to learn a great deal about myself.

First and foremost, I have had to take ownership of my ill actions. I have had to face the reality that I stand where I do now as a result of my recent actions, or lack there of. My actions were perpetuated by those of  another, however, no situation is the fault of one individual. For a long time I have been scared, afraid that no matter which choice I made it would be the wrong one. I always knew what I wanted to do; and yet I was always afraid that what I chose would haunt me. I never wanted to feel so bad again in my life, and then, i felt worse.

Owning up to my portion of the situation has been hard, embarrassing, and frustrating. There is a part you that then tries to justify your actions so as to soften the blow to your own ego. Yet, no matter how I try, if I justify away my responsibility then I can not hope to grow from the situation.

I own it, I accept it, and though I know should the stakes get any higher I will suffer a blow, I also know that I have no choice but to accept that life must go on in a highly altered way. And if it is meant to be any other way, then with luck, my personal beliefs in myself others, and God, and instinct will benefit me. Yet, I am not naive enough to think that those odds are in my favor.

For weeks I have cried. Though not been self piteous, I do not believe in it. Being self-piteous is almost as selfish as suicide. I will face each day and do so to the best of my ability. I will be strong. I will learn to live my life, as me in this altered state.

In recent readings and self explorations I have increasingly realized I am comfortable with myself. My body, my skin, my style, my likes and dislikes, my imperfections. I have begun to see where I faulted, where I was weak and where I fell short – both for myself and for others. Through this process though I have had to make a choice : feel sorry for myself, or change myself.

I am changing, growing, and evolving. I am doing so quite naturally with no drastic movements or alterations of who or what I am. Rather I am embracing me. I am accepting my femenimity, my personality, my intelligence, my self. I am certain in who I am without that person be contingent upon my son or any other man or friend or group. I am me. I am certain of who that is.

The task now is understanding what I mean in the context of others and how best to communicate to them what they mean to me. I need to learn skills of communication and expressions of love. It is important to express how I feel, but it is equally important to understand how the persons I care for understand love and the means by which it is expressed. Some value gifts, some words, some touch. Though we all likely know what each form of communication means, we are each more receptive to one or some then others. I need to improve upon understanding the needs of those around me, and the needs of myself….

I love my stretch marks and my hernia scars. These are my memories. Edan knows that my scares are his scares, and my life is told in many ways through those scars. They show the trauma of love lost and love gained, of hope and joy, and pain and sorrow.

People always talk of beauty, here is a beauty. I may not have the ripped abs of an athlete, or the perfect waist of a child free twenty something or even the forty something cougar. But I have a love of life, a love of people and a devotion to those that were a part, product and support of my journey to stretch marks. In the way we cherish natural blondes and bright green eyes and all the other glamourous images of beauty, why not the underside of beauty. Often I think that those who are responsible for determining what is beautiful to the general public are working from a lack of experience or understanding.

Birth and love are painful and amazing. Both come with their own trials and tribulations, both are socially accepted as beautiful. Why not my stretch marks, why not my imperfections? Is not my confidence in them what makes them beautiful. I embrace them, they are a part of me.

And though they remind me of better times, they give me strength and courage to go through the pain, and to keep trying, to keep pushing, and to keep loving.

The exploration of my self from the middle up will likely unfold at more length and depth then did my legs. I have always been confident, stable, solid and sure of myself as my legs, as a runner, as a worker, and a doer.

The middle of me has caused greater grief. In high school I was diagnosed with anorexia, though largely due to a brief depression that resulted from a drastic change in life and life style when my family moved from our childhood home to a far off land of grey skys and flowing pastures.

Those who know me, up until recently would likely have argued that I still was rigid about my running and my eating. Well, rest assured, those that know me well now, can assert the change. I am significantly more inclined to eat when I am hungry, don’t when I am not, to enjoy a meal and conversation and the joy of cooking a meal. And while I still run, it is more cathartic than anything. The tears that my pores weep are tears of joy, frustration, sadness and so forth. But my run now is relaxing, is draining, is inspiring. It is not about calories. I have also found a new love in pilates, and though I am not avid in my practice, I am routine. Here to I find a certain relief in the stretches, a reduction of tension. I have learned to cherish the changing  of the leaves and the light shadows in the morning, perhaps even more than my run It is no longer essential on a daily basis. Though I like to if I can, its not going to kill me to go to the movies, eat pop corn, and go to dinner in the same day I miss my run. In fact the energy I wasted living that way is nuts.

I am skinny. I am almost boney, but to a large degree, there is little I can do about that. I am tiny. A mere 5’1 (on a good day) and about 105 lbs. If I quit running, Id actually be tinnier. Its not always as great as everyone thinks. My rib cage is my most pronounced feature.

I have learned to love my middle just as it is – stretch marks, hernia scar, odd belly button, rib cage and all.

Dissection to come later, here are the past, and present, Im not to concerned about the future, it will work out. 

There is something to be said for foods such as chicken soup, specifically when home made. There is a comfort, though notable a mental connection to the idea that soup could ‘fix’ you when your ill. For myself, I find that the cure is in the love that is used to make it. It does not much matter what the food is, or if you are really even sick, but the thought of someone making, especially for you, some dish – cookies, soup, mashed herb potatoes and chicken, beans and corn, coconut cake – all are more than acceptable gifts from the heart and a product of another’s thought and labor.

In fact, I believe that all handmade gifts are infinitely more effective at curing, or aiding in the comfort of one when they are down or sick.

Food is essential, we all know that, but putting love into the preparation of it is not. That is an added component that is found in how, when, where and why the delectable comforts are made.

And so, while this soup in front of me is not the soup of love I wish it was, it does create a longing for those tasty tokens of affection.