I am going to lay it all out there and stress the importance of self motivation and seeking out other forms of motivation. You could call this my dirty laundry. You might even think it scandulous that I even mention any part of what I am about to type. If you find yourself thinking 'how dare she' at any point of this blog, I would suggest you find yourself a back button or a little square box with an 'x' in the corner of your screen. There is a good chance that the people who will be reading this are people that love me and want the best for me or you could be a innocent stand by just secretly wishing the world for BOTH of us, either way this is important to me. This is important enough that it directly corralates to this new journey. First off, let me point out that I have daughters. I have been put in charge of raising 2 children that will eventually become women. I will have to face hard realities with them in the years to come. Boys. Puberty. Boys. Drama. Boys. High School. Boys. Religion. Boys. You get the idea. As much as we all want to believe we are in charge of our own happiness, the hard fact is that most of us turn to our husbands in time of 'happiness' needing moments. As girls, we looked to daddy. As teens, we looked for boyfriends preferrably ones like daddy. (not in my case, I, in fact, made a conscious decision to find his opposite, and succeeded!) I understand that my life cannot and will not be mimiced in my home. We cannot compare apples to oranges. We cannot make the past go away but what we can do, and this is a precious gift through agency, is that we can move forward and take the past lessons and apply them to our future. Free agency was given to us and if at any point in your life you find yourself saying 'you don't have a choice' or 'I can't help it', I want you to think again. We all have free agency to choose the life we want and to choose the people that we want to become. I recently heard someone blame their bad behavior and choices on the being their 'father's daughter'. Shame on this person! If your father was that horrible, why would you repeat his process and expect others to fall at your feet? (and forgive?) If you knowingly do something that you know is bad, are you really going to be that person that expects the world to forget? Are you really going to expect your children to be any different? Careful on the person you become. One day your children will be that person. So think long and hard about the relationships you have with your family. You are teaching our future to repeat what you know may or may not be wonderful. In my case, I am a mama's girl. I work hard on continuing my bond with my mother. My daughter's will one day see the importance and the love that can come from working on a 'generation' gap. Except, my mama is pretty dang tech savvy which makes it all that more easier to keep our lines of communication open. I mean, seriously, does your mom Facebook, Skype, and text message? Ha...okay. Off subject, I still haven't revealed my dirty secret and the driving force behind my motivation that drives me to be the 'do-gooder'. 95% of men in my life, that I have either loved, love, known, friended, liked, or hated have all at one point in their lives CHEATED. Scandulous right? You may now be naming off the people you know in my life right now and trying to figure out which is which. I ask now, STOP. You should be wondering about the men in your own life. There is this saying that 'once a cheater, always a cheater.' Well since I have some great experience with this, out of the 95% that I know of, only 50% are habitual repeaters. That should tell you that 50% of the men you know in your lives have cheated once and only 5% have never. That's probably just my statistics. As you can see, I have given this great thought. I have had 26 years of trying to make some sense of this and of trying to find someone that is in that 5%. Impossible. In all my math and in all my 'trying to make sense of it', I have only one conclusion. Women are awful. The only way that men can cheat is if the one they are with says 'yes'. Women! You are awful! If you have sat in my seat, walked in my barefeet while chasing my children, you would see just how awful you are. I am not saying this is a recent turn of events in my life. It's been a few years since I have had to experience this on a personal level. I have in fact, seen several of my closest friends and family have to deal with it and I have had to try to find the words to make it right but I cannot. There is nothing right in that single act. I have somehow started to believe years ago that maybe women are to blame. Maybe we let ourselves go too much. Maybe we reveal too much. Maybe we make ourselves unattractive or unwanted. Maybe we sabotage ourselves. Maybe we settled for someone because they were second to the best or second to the greatest love of your lives. Maybe we as women are not given enough time in our social lives to know what we want so the first thing that comes along that our parents approve on, we jump, we leap, and soon we are pregnant with baby number 3 and daddy is inviting the babysitter over when no one is home. I'm just saying that maybe the social pressures and religious pressures of becoming wives and mothers leads many women to fail in the marriages. I know that my first marriage was pretty much all of that and more. I don't recall knowing who I was until I was around 22 and Rhondalynn was 4. I had to make several mistakes before I could figure out what was right for me. The social pressures are everywhere. But the religious pressures come from a much deeper place.... the home. We all know that we seek out home for comfort and answers. If you have daughters, be careful with what you teach at home. Off topic! What I am getting at with all this cheating that goes on...particularly in my own life, is that this cheating tears a woman into pieces and proceeds to scatter the pieces until the woman is no longer her former self. She becomes her own bad memory. She blames herself for years. It's a wearing experience. It's an experience that has made me who I am or maybe just a series of memories of who I am. I still find pieces of myself everywhere I go and the great thing about those pieces is that I don't have to pick them all up! Oh, sweet free agency. I have choices. No one is in control but myself. Unfortunately, I haven't made all the right choices yet. I still choose to not trust anyone. I still choose to put up a wall anytime anyone gives mention of 'how does that make you feel?'. I even struggle finding the spirt of the Gospel. I am so guarded that I find myself with no 'real' friends. It is so hard to bring back all those pieces after someone has decided your feelings don't matter. I have to let these things go. I have to feel them out and then banish them from my life for ever. When I am working out, I picture myself turning into the person I want to be inside and out. I tell myself that I want to be so wonderful that the meaning of the word 'cheat' will escape my husband's mind and will never be found. I never want him to find a reason to cheat. I never want to let myself go. I never want to become my worst fears. I think the last 2 years has been a series of letting myself go. Not caring so much about running...even though, running has been a life long passion. Not caring so much about what I wear...even though, I used to have an infatuation with all things retro, red, and polka dotted. Not caring so much about my flower garden...even though, I used to pride myself on having the prettiest yard in the neighborhood. When I let go of all those things that I cared so much about, I let go of what was keeping me together. I gave all those things everything I had to forget all the other things going on in my life and instead, put myself on the couch so that I can sit around and remember all the things that went wrong or feel wrong in my life. I am 25 lbs heavier than my wedding day almost 4 years ago. I know that doesn't seem like a lot to you but to me that 25 lbs represents all the things I let go of because I thought if I cared less maybe someone else will care more. Feeling extremely stupid, I am facing these things head on by putting them out there. I feel more accoutable for my actions when I put them writing. I imagine people having certain expectations of me and when expectations have been set, I can't help but try to exceed them. So that's my driving force. What's yours?
So past the dirty secret and on to me being a human yo-yo. A few days ago, it was 2010 and I was ringing in the New Year 4 lbs lighter with the strength of a small newborn ox or maybe a full grown ...cat. Either way, I was feeling stronger than the mouse I had become, eating crumbs out of my couch. I got so excited over the 4 lbs lost that I started obsessing with jumping on the scale. Seriously. I would weigh myself every time I would go to the bathroom. Nothing changed. Nothing changed. I sweat harder. I ride bike longer. I push a little harder. I drink more water. I sweat some more. Nothing changed and then 4 days ago, I woke up and wobbled down the stairs wincing in pain, found myself that bottle of water I swore I put by my bed the night before and drank and drank and drank. I remember thinking, SWEET! I am totally conquering this water thing. Immediately after, I go to the bathroom and what do I do when I am done? Obsessively, I jump on the scale and WAM! there is those 4 lbs...plus 5 more. I get off. I reset the batteries. I step back on and WAM! there they are again. I may have pictured myself throwing the glass scale against the wall and seeing it shatter but then thought my luck the thing will come bouncing back like those 4 lbs I lost that decided to bring 5 more friends along for the ride. Before rage set in, I remembered something I learned a long while ago. When you drastically change your activity, the body can respond by gaining tons of muscle before shedding the weight. I also remember that when you stress your muscles they can fill up with fluid as they start to repair themselves. I slowly felt my blood pressure creep back down when I again remembered that I am in the process of Gladys weaning herself and I can easily put on a good 5 lbs in just 'milk' after a night of no nursing. I finally felt myself calm enough to recall that I took down the inches of certain body parts that I want to see diminish. So, after all those recollections, I still waited a few days (and several hundred weigh ins) until this morning when I marched my pain filled body up the stairs to do some measuring. I only measured my arms and my waist at the belly button. I optimistically recall when I took my measurements that there were some parts of me I had nothing to complain about and decided they weren't worth measuring. Anyway, I took out the tape measure and took one last breath before what I may have thought would be the last time I would do any of this again and WAM! 2 1/2 inches....gone...in 12 days? I flipped the tape measure around checking for some sort of glitch in my measuring and there again, I seen 2 1/2 inches... gone...off the waist. I took off running, ignoring the severe ache in my thighs and back, down the stairs, on the scale and WAM! all 9 of those pounds that I found were gone plus 1. I guess I didn't realize that my body was able to so quickly find its inner strength. I didn't realize that it would only take 12 days to begin unwinding 2 years of damage. Yes, in that 2 years I had a baby, but that is never an excuse for me. The process of becoming my own 'leading lady' is off on a grand start and each day I find myself feeling stronger. I will admit that the energy is depleting as I am not sleeping well. My baby G is teething again...I really truly believe that teething should be an extreme sport for both mom and baby. Last night was one of those nights I would like to forget immediately. The screaming and thrashing and no matter what I gave her, she was not giving in. I thought to myself at 2am this morning, that if she can have the stamina to whine for this long, than I will somehow find the stamina to continue to work out.... even though, I would love to use my lack of sleep as an excuse to not be able to workout but that is me, sabotaging myself. Do yourself a favor, don't find an excuse EVER. Quite simply, there is no excuse good enough. If you haven't followed me on Facebook, I have added my exercise bike in with my workout. I only do 10 minutes but I do a very fast 10 minutes that involves a lot of screaming. You may laugh, but I find Ace of Base wonderful music to bike to. Try it! A little bit of laughter while you are sweating it out doesn't hurt... in fact, I've read laughter to be one of those great hidden work outs that make a lot of good things happen. If you are lacking the funny in your life, you are welcome to join me for a day and watch all the antics my 11 month old tries. She will keep you laughing for hours. She keeps me going and going and going, making it hard to find the time and inspiration to blog. I may need to ask my family for a few more minutes of 'me-time' to be a more avid blogger. Holidays have been fantastic around here...but so has the stress! As the New Year goes on, I hope to feel the stress diminish (and the pounds too) and the exercises increase. This year should prove to be interesting as I try to find fertility, laughter, beauty, gardening, canning, self control and self esteem. Do you have a list? I'd like to hear it.
Do yourself a favor, lose the scale. Feel empowered by your strength and will power. After all, losing weight technically just makes us less of a person. Ha. Get it?
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