NaBloPoMoOhShit

I just realized that tomorrow is the first day of November.

The first day of NaBloPoMo.

What was I thinking?

For other participants, look here.

Hopefully my first NaBloPoMo post will be, well, better than this one.

Decisions, Decisions

Part of me hasn’t written in a few days because there are things I want to talk about, but I’m not sure I want to write them here. Things I want to say, but I don’t know if I want to say them to the public at large. There are things going on, but they have less to do with weight loss and general nonsense and more to do with… me, my life, my family.

Which brings me to two questions. Why blog and what to share?

I know they’re important questions. I started the blog as a way to talk about my weight loss journey. It was and still is a central part of my life. It’s a huge part of me, whether I like it or not, and is immensely helpful to have a place to put the emotions of weight loss. This way I don’t burn anyone out by whining about it.

I also like the community. I may not have made tons of friends through my blog, but I’ve made some, joined a community, and enjoy that piece. I enjoy finding other people’s blogs, reading blogs, and being a part of the community.

What about the rest? The rest of my blog is… a little of this and that. What I did, what else is going on.

What’s taboo. I don’t talk about my marriage, except to say how wonderful it is. Clearly, it is always wonderful all the time, obviously. But even on the slim chance it wasn’t wonderful all the time, I wouldn’t write about it here. I rarely talk about it- that’s between my husband and I.

What about things like trying for babies? Or things that go on in my family? Things that are upsetting/ bothering/ annoying me? I don’t typically write about that stuff, but I’m not sure why. I have a post in drafts, and I can’t decide if I want to share it. I just don’t know.
So, my *ahem* loyal readers, here’s my question(s) to you.

~If you blog, why?

~How do you decide what to blog about and what is sacred?

~What do you like reading about in other people’s blogs?

~What makes you cringe in a kind of “oohh… that’s too much information” kind of way?

Share!!

Love Thursday

After what may be the most pathetic post ever, I decided to celebrate the friends I have.

They are my gold. I’m certainly obtaining silver, but these girls. They have been with me through thick and thin. They have listened to me whine incessantly about my past. They have been with me through several boys, and stuck with Khalil and I through our ups and downs. They celebrated with me when we got married. They always have time to listen. They know me. They love me despite my many faults, which they know. We have had fights and arguments, called each other out on things, and yet they are the ones that stick by me. They are all my friends for different reasons. We connected on different levels, in different ways.

But we will always be connected.

These are my girls from California. Jenn, Naomi (me) and Jessica.

Amy. (and I).

 I love my friends. I miss them.

Love Thursday brought to you by chookooloonks

One is Silver But the Other’s Gold

When I was in high school I had a very close-knit circle of girlfriends. There were six of us, and we called each other “the brat pack”. I had known some of them for two years, and some of them for fifteen by the time we graduated. Since high school, they’ve all faded away, the last two to go this past year.

In my first two years of college, I didn’t have many girlfriends. One of my brat pack members was at school with me, and we stayed friends. I made a few other friends here and there, but overall was busy creating very unhealthy relationships with boys. I left that college and none of the friends, save the one from high school, really stuck. However, I did stay friends with a girl I met while working at a camp while I was in college.

Then I went to my second college. There I made the truest friends of my life. There weren’t many, only three. But for some reason I clicked with them. They are my lifelong friends, that I have no question about. So I added them to my cache of my high school friends and my camp friend.

Here’s the problem: All of these friends lived in the states I attended college. One year after graduating, I moved to my home state. I had one friend here, for a while, that ended this year.

I miss my friends. I miss them with an ache that is almost physical sometimes. I miss seeing them for coffee, for dinner, for movies and TV. I miss talking to them. I miss going shopping with them, doing things with them, doing nothing with them.

I am making new friends, slowly but surely. But they aren’t the same. They don’t have the history of my old friends. I don’t have the same comfort level. The intimacy isn’t there, at a time when I need it desperately. I feel so far away from my closest friends that it’s hard to tell them my deepest stuff over the phone. And I don’t feel comfortable enough with my new friends to tell them.

Thank God for my sister. Without her I would be lost.

But I still miss my friends. I try to explain this to my husband, but he happens to be a boy. And his best friend lives five minutes away. Also, he doesn’t totally understand the need a girl has for girlfriends- close, dear friends you can pour your heart out to whenever you need to. Who will support you through thick and thin. Who know you.

It’s hard to know what to do. When you’re in college, intimacy happens quickly. Because you are at a level of high intensity in your life, of finding out who you are and growing up. You share your history with them, and have lots of time to get to know them. Once you are married, with a job and people start having children, it is harder to make friends like that. While you may make friends at work, or online, they’re not made at the same intensity and intimacy as your high school and college friends were.

I miss my friends. I miss the comfort and ease, protection and safety I feel with them. They are just a phone call or plane ride away, but it is too long.

We Carry Them With Us

I’m a foster care social worker. What this means is that I work in conjuction with our state child protective agency in foster homes- as a support to the family and advocate/ therapist/ case manager for the children. Our homes are what are called “therapeutic foster homes” meaning that the children require a little more than the “average” foster child- i.e., their behaviors are worse.

It’s a hard job. It’s emotional- as hard as you try, it is very hard not to get attached to the little people you work with who have been through so much- hell and back. I was talking with a relative of my husband’s, and he said something along the line of, “Wow. So you’re responsible for these kids lives.” I reframed it for him- in some senses I am, and in others, well, not so much. But yeah, every day I carry around the lives of little people who have to trust the adults in their lives to keep them safe.

To say the kids I work with have been through hell and back is an understatement. I do therapy with some of my kids, and usually leave sad and angry. Sad for what they have been through, angry at what we put them through. Not only do they have “issues” of abuse and neglect, but foster care is not a pretty picture. These children move around far too often, and often for not very good reasons. The families we have are wonderful, and try their best, but after years of abuse and then transition, well, these little people can be hard to live with.

I have always been very good at keeping my job separate from my life. In the field I’m in, burnout is rampant and when you burn out you are no longer an effective worker. You lose your perspective and your energy, two things which are crucial to the job. Crucial to these children’s lives. One way to prevent burnout is to “leave work at work”. Usually I do ok with that, but sometimes… sometimes it’s harder.

The hardest time I have is when my children are disrupting from the homes that they are in. Homes that I have worked hard to help save, homes I have put time, effort and energy into to make sure they can stay. And it’s not about me- moving for these kids adds another notch on their belt of “I’m not worth it”, “It’s all my fault”, “No one loves me” and “No one really cares”. Our goal is to give children homes that can unteach all of those lessons.

From the thirteen year old boy who has moved four times in three years, and still has temper tantrums, to the seven year old who is being adopted, to the 10 year old who just went to an inpatient psychiatric unit, to the 21 month old who headbangs… I carry them with me. Their hurt sometimes becomes my heartache. Their pain invades my dreams. I worry about them and worry that they might be going through things I don’t know. Because they don’t trust the grown-ups in their lives, it can be difficult for them to trust us. Even though their lives depend on it.

When you see me, or when you are interacting with a social worker, know that they are carrying their children with them. For their own sake they are working hard to keep appropriate boundaries, take care of themselves, separate themselves from their clients, but know that somewhere in them at that moment lies the lives of children who are unable to care for themselves. Know that they worry about those children. Know that they celebrate the joys with those children. Know that they love them even though “clinically” they should be more separate. They love them in a way that is not the love of a parent or family member, but in a way that means they want the very best for children who have experienced the very worst.
Know that they care.

Per Request

The recipe for Pumpkin Chocolate-Chip Cookies, AKA the recipe for The Most Dangerous Cookies Ever. If you come here for weight loss support, just skip right over this post.

1/2 c margarine
1 1/2 c sugar
1 egg
1 can pumpkin puree
1 tsp vanilla
2 1/2 c flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp cinnamon
1 c choc chips
1 c nuts (I omitted these)

Cream margarine and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in egg, pumpkin, vanilla. Mix and sift flour, baking powder and soda, salt, nutmeg and cinnamon in seperate bowl. Add to cream mixture, mix well. Add chips, mix well.
bake at 350 for 10-12 mins until lightly brown. (I actually cooked for 13-14)
remove to cool, makes 3 1/2 to 4 dozen.
recipe can be doubled.

Also, just an FYI, they come out VERY moist. They are more like a small cupcake, they don’t really get like Tollhouse cookies do- hard or anything.

 Enjoy!

NaBloPoMo

National Blog Posting Month!!

Fussy and Kerflop (formerly Very Mom) are hosting NaBloPoMo. It’s a challenge to blog EVERY DAY in the month of November. I’m pretty excited for the challenge.
Best yet? There are prizes!!!

So. Um. Anyone want to walk me, step by step, through how to get that little picture in my sidebar? Anyone?

Love Thursday

Love Is…

 

Grandmas.

Holding hands.

These are my grandmas. They live many states away from each other, and their children (my parents) have been divorced for 10 years. They are still friends and on the rare occasion that they see each other, they held hands.

Brought to you by Love Thursday

I’m MOVING!!

Come see me over at:

http://lessofpaige.wordpress.com

I want to thank my first Blogging home, Blogger, but I have found a site that actually keeps up with me as I type. How refreshing!

Grief

Last night we found out that an in-law of an in-law died. (My mother-in-law’s sister-in-law’s father, in case you needed to know.) The funeral is today at noon, and there’s no way my husband can go, so we went over to the wife’s house (who’s husband died, can this get more confusing?) to see the family and pay our regrets last night.

I’ve watched my sister handle grieving people. She is a nurse, who used to work in hospice and now works on an oncology nurse. She knows how to say the right thing at the right time. She’s comfortable dealing with this stuff head on.

Me, not so much. I’m usually the person who says the wrong thing, “How are you?”. How are you? how do you think they are? Their husband/father/grandfather just DIED! Shut UP, Paige! SHUT UP! Yeah. I just don’t know what to say. I do the “I’m so sorry” but always feel like… how many times do these people have to hear that. Sheesh.

I haven’t had to manage alot of personal grief in my own life. Some, yes. But not alot. But- and I do not mean this to be trite- I’ve read something about grieving people that has stuck with me. How they feel like people are nervous around them.

Nervous that their grief, their pain, their suffering, might be contagious. Grief makes us sad, and it makes us scared. It makes us- me- sad for the people who have lost someone they loved. And it makes me scared- if that could happen to someone else, it could happen to me. I was watching Miami Ink the other day, and they had a young wife who’s husband had died. I. Lost. It. Royally. Just cried and cried. If husbands actually do die, that means mine could too. I just couldn’t go there.

It’s kind of ironic. I do therapy, and I can be around grief when I am working with clients. But I pull on a different skin when I’m working, in a big way. And how to manage grief is different when I’m working and when it’s in my personal life. It’s easier when I’m working, because I can depersonalize it and focus on something else- helping my client walk through the grief. I have something to do.

Because isn’t helplessness the most frustrating part about watching people who are grieving? There’s just nothing you can do but be there. Just- be there.

The man who passed away last night was not someone I was close to. But it still made me sad, and made me very sad for the people who I am more close to who had a significant loss this week.