Startin' Over

I read myself to sleep every night.  Usually it's books, and yet my daughter's Hunger Games book sits in it's current untouched spot (for the last three months), waiting for me to finish it. I don't really know how I haven't finished Hunger Games yet and Shades of Gray is a whole other blog post (yet another one I cannot, not, not get into)...it's perplexing in my world, but alas, a season, I think.

Lately (just lately) I find the zzzzz's reading my app's on my phone. I don't know if it's the handiness of the phone or the fact that I don't have to reach over and turn off a light. The mad scramble to find my phone in the morning (at the bottom of the bed sheets) doesn't bother me enough, I guess. And for the curious, this is the order by which the app reading goes: Facebook feed, People, TMZ and if I'm still not in dreamland, MSNBC. I am very current.

Moving on, cuz this is actually a serious post. I've been trying to figure out how to get back over here and write.  A lot has happened since the last time I posted.  Actually, literally days after my last post,  everything changed--to put it incredibly mildly.  If you follow my blog, you know I'm open, that I "say it"...I share too much--almost to a default.  I can't do that right now.  Today.  What has happened has to come out in bits and pieces now, sprinkled into my NOW every day.  I thought about starting a completely new blog, because my old life is just a chapter of the rest of my life now. It's the end of a story. But every time I try to begin a new blog, it doesn't work.  I think because it's not real enough for me.  You have to see all of it.  What used to be and this continuation of what is. 

Back to the original thoughts that got me back to my blog today (stay with me)...

As I was saying above about reading myself to sleep, I came across and article on my People app featuring Garcelle Beauvais's blog a while back. I didn't even know who she was before I saw this, but I SO feel like I know this woman very well now. I just want to share her, her story, because her story is MINE. It's stunning to me how universal, how parallel, how same, the walk of betrayal plays out...the wave of it's consequences. Her story is very real. Trust me. It's so good to know...so good to live out the goodness, The Better, that somehow, almost supernaturally can come out of it. I'm happy for her.  I'm happy for me. I think this is a positive story, in the end. Amazingly positive. And it's encouraging to me, as I imagine it is for a lot of us.

Here's the link to her story.  

 http://celebritybabies.people.com/2012/07/24/garcelle-beauvais-blog-parenting-after-betrayal-tips/

Take good care.

The Mom Suit vs. The Bikini Observation

In my last post, I shared a recent girlfriend getaway--

http://sowhatwasisaying.blogspot.com/2011/06/girlfriend-getaway-2011.html

(in case ya missed it)

I left you with *quite* the doozie of a cliffhanger with my observation of The Mom Suit vs. The Bikini.  Let me explain, cuz I know you gotta know. 

The girlfriends and I spent some quality time in the pool over Memorial Weekend.  It was all I envisioned the week before, whilst walking through parking lot puddles in my flip flops during our all too frequent Portland downpours.  It is June, right? I will pay for sun, y'all.

Pretty soon into the pool festivities, I noticed all four my girlfriends and I were donning our "Mom Suits"...which goes a little something like this:

 (that is not me)

Super cute, right?  Totally.  So we were all wearing something like this.  Tankini's with the swim skirts, a.k.a.-- Mom Suits.  Perfectly fine.  I was peeeerfectly comfortable in my Mom Suit, hanging with my girls.  Of course, there was none of this going on in the vicinity either:

or this:

Or even this (and by "even this", I mean lame ol' Tom Cruise, cuz all I can see is Tom Cruise not Maverick nowadays.  And also, Goose frickin' rocks):

(you still with me?)

However, there was a lot of that going on at my brother's house in Tucson (minus the volleyball net and the Kenny Loggins playing in the back ground). 

After my girlfriend getaway weekend, I spent some time in Tucson with my brother and his wife.  It was at the tail end of Memorial Weekend and he may have had a "gathering"...for three days in a row. 

It was *quite* entertaining right off the bat.  Basically, Top Gun central, as my brother is in the Air Force and he and his friends were living every single bit of that Top Gun stereotype, around the pool and hot tub.  Nothing but Goose's and Maverick's and Iceman's eveeerywhere (including "resting" face down in the 3' x 3' patch-o-grass in his desert-ey backyard).  They all had the Arizona tans, the short and tight hairdids, Iceman smiles, and were "regulation fit".  Darn it. 

Here's where the bikinis come in.  Mixed in the ever-playing clip from Top Gun, there were also, OBVIOUSLY-10-years-younger than me, women girls there.  Just-a walking around, all beautiful and bikini-clad, only jiggling where 38-year-old women wearing Mom Suits want to jiggle.

All of a sudden my super cute Mom Suit was a potato sack. I found myself strategically positioning myself in certain ways to downplay my Mom body--crossing my legs this-a-way and that, facing the sun, not facing the sun, obsessively going between sitting on the side of the pool, the step and halfway submerged, as well as sitting and leaning back as far as I could without actually laying down to show that my stomach was *also* flat (darn bikini women).  Could I be any more uncomfortable?  No.  I can't even remember the last time I felt like that, no doubt due to not hanging around half naked with men in uniform (or rather, not in uniform) and not having the security of my kids to strategically cover things up distract me.

It finally occurred to me that no one could really see me through their blurry vision anyway.  I probably looked a'right. For a mom. I'm just going to say that.

And honestly, I would be totally disappointed in Maverick, Iceman and Goose if errrbody was NOT doing all of the above--cuz that's what you do when you're in your twenties, single/no kiddos and are straight out of the movie Top Gun.  Duh.  I seriously would've had to give them the stink eye, if they were all sharing a bowl of popcorn, watching the Twilight series when I got there.  

So after viewing that (beautiful) scene entirely too sober, for a couple hours, I traded in my Mom Suit/potato sack for what I now refer to as my Mom Clothes and declared I was going to leave now (Woooh, the sun makes me sleepy, does it make you sleepy? No?) and get some food, cuz apparently no one needs food when they are in their twenties (hence the bikinis).  I totally forgot. 

As always, the fun was good, Mom Suit vs. Bikini, and everything. And I didn't feel like death the next day.  38-year-old wisdom bonus!

Here's the brother looking just as he should:

And...for your viewing pleasure--The Volleyball Scene (I totally need to watch this movie right now):

http://youtu.be/6GLeMwSwFUw