Dear Daughter, I can see you watching me. On Mondays and Wednesdays, after your MMA class is done, you sit out of the way and you wait with your brothers for your dad and I to finish our Kickboxing class. When we started, I had a very romanticized version in my head of what this would look like.  Not only would we be instilling the importance of physical activity in you as a child, you would be able to see it lived out in our lives, too!  Not just do as we say but do as we do!  Parenting win! And then yesterday, as I was looking dishearteningly in the huge mirrors during class, adjusting my pants, I caught your eyes. Your eyes were on me. And you weren’t seeing me confidently rocking roundhouse kicks or sprints or push ups. You were seeing me try and adjust my clothes so that roll of fat at my belly wouldn’t show so much. After class in the change room, your question was hard for me to hear. “Mom, why are you always looking in the mirror in class?” Let me tell you the truth, my love. It’s because I need you to do as I say, not as I do. I feel like I am failing the battle of self-confidence in my head every single day.  Instead of standing in defiance of fitspiration and thinspiration, of ‘motivational’ shaming and the world where the pretty thin girl is always the one in the romance movie to get the boy, I cave. My heart, deep down, can’t shake that you-don’t-look-good-enough-to-do-this attitude. My head, it tells me I don…

The day isn’t different. I won’t wake up tomorrow magically more in love with you than I was today. You will still get up before me and I will still crawl out of bed 5 minutes before I leave for my run, yelling at the kids all the way out the door what they need to have finished before I get back. Chances are you will have left for work by the time I return, and I will finish packing lunches, shove a total of 74 Valentines into their respective child’s backpack and kick them out the door.  If it’s a good day, I won’t have to lock the door behind Monster, or drag him down the street by the arm the whole way to school. The I’ll shower and you’ll do whatever it is you do at work.  I’ll head to a meeting and you’ll, I don’t know, do some army thing. We might meet up for lunch.  Because we can. And we’ll look at each other and laugh because neither of us cares the slightest about Valentines Day, or any other ‘special’ day for that matter, but there we will be at lunch anyways. Every once and a while I love going out with you in uniform.  You look sexy in green. And then after work and school we’ll head out to the gym and the kids will go to MMA and you and I will go to kickboxing.  On the way back we’ll rent a movie and we’ll eat the pizza I made in the afternoon and watch it together. Maybe we’ll even find one…

It’s time. For those of you that know me, I hate labels, short cuts and excuses. For other people. I LOVE short cuts and excuses if they are mine. And though we’ve been struggling with Monster in many ways since he was a toddler, he was so unique, so outside the different labels that we heard suggested or considered, or mumbled over the past few years, I never pushed to have one because it seemed at the time more like an excuse than a necessity. In fact, I may have pushed against one. If my child obviously fit a mould, I would have embraced whatever label was suggested to get him help.  But most of the time, most of the time he only grazes the top.  He doesn’t fit the box, the criteria, the different expectations for a kid with the various labels that have been offered. So I just said no. Monster has an imagination that makes you wish you could see what he sees while he runs, jumps and sings his own theme music around the room. He’s been working computers and video game consoles and tablets since he was a toddler.  Usually, better than we can.  And at 4 I already knew he was a gamer.  Which is strange for us, since his dad and I aren’t.  We have considered sending him to live with my brother. He loves puzzles and wants to know each detailed bio of each obscure super hero. He makes you laugh.  He has the best grin.  He is affectionate and cuddly and will never hug on demand but will always hug on his whim. He wears costumes and capes and two different shoes and…

This past week, like many, many weeks before it, entertainment news has offered a lot of cheap and easy fuel for any writer, blogger or person with a social media account. It’s easy to point fingers, mock, insult or make hurtful memes of otherwise successful people when they are down and bleeding for the world to see. We all secretly (or not so secretly) like to in one way or another.  I mean, sometimes these people are rich and powerful for reasons we don’t understand, and then they make such epically terrible decisions that it seems almost like kicking them while they are down is the *right* thing to do. And I am no different.  Trust me, if there’s one thing I have in abundance, it’s opinions on how other people have messed up. But then yesterday, through course of conversation with a friend I was reminded of something. I’ve been broken, too. In many ways and through no fault but my own, I have been broken.  I have made very poor choices. And there have been times those choices have left me in very, very stupid places. In fact, I was reminded that 16 years ago, the *right* choice seemed at the time to rob a local liqueur store of a case of expensive whiskey.  Why?  Because we were already intoxicated in one way or another, and we wanted some. I mean, that’s a totally reasonable, right? Fast forward several hours and a shit storm of poor decisions and my boyfriend at the time is in police custody, along with a few of my friends and I have squelched my anxiety under so much of said whiskey that I am blacked out…

Question most often in my inbox? “Can my husband get in trouble for what I post online?”   It’s like OPSEC, but if the fear wasn’t security but instead, discipline. The short answer is no, not really. But life rarely works in short answers. I’ve touched on this before, but I’m going to go ahead and give the rules I use that help clear up some confusion. (These are MY rules.  So hold no weight.  Like, at all.) *Remember, I’m talking about posts that don’t violate OPSEC, PERSEC or information security rules.  That’s entirely different and never okay.* 1. What you re-post is actually important. Whether it is something you made yourself or shared from someone else, posting something tells people you agree with it (unless you explicitly state otherwise). Make sure you agree with what you post so strongly that you would be willing to defend it, and that it’s never anything that violates OPSEC, PERSEC, information security or is illegal or threatening.  2. What you say is attached to your name. Some people comment on facebook or twitter or news articles.  A lot.  On everything. Sometimes on pages, on groups, on friends statuses. We get it, you guys have OPINIONS and free time.  And you enjoy letting people know. That’s fine if that’s your thing. Some days the Internet wins and I post comments, too. I almost always regret it. But remember a couple things about your comments: You are talking to real people.  Real human beings sitting at their own computers or phones, with real lives and real feelings you know nothing about. You are also…

“There are no curses.  This is just Afghanistan.” Watching Lone Survivor with Dh, when Marcus Luttrell, as portrayed by Mark Wahlberg, gives that line, there are audible snickers from all over the theater. This is, after all, a military town. And after I watched Hollywood re-tell me a very real story of Navy Seals at war, I was compelled by the courage and bravery and strength of spirit. I have no illusions. My husband is not American.  He’s not a Navy Seal. And this movie did not portray his experiences. It would be a gross exaggeration for me to say that it did.  The truth is, I will never see my husband’s war on the big screen.  I will never see the moments of camaraderie or danger or bravery or courage or boredom or anger or fear or pain.  And that’s ok.  I think I’m best not knowing. But sitting there after it ended, watching the people file out while Dh took it all in for a moment, one thing sat heavy on my heart. It’s been a long 12 years. I know because when the movie ended it took a long time to get up.  And when I did, I picked up my jacket from the back of the chair, then dropped it and hugged Dh just long enough that the people beside me waiting to file out had to be just a little uncomfortable. I know because Dh didn’t try to get me to stop, just  tucked my head under his chin and held on. I felt like my heart was full of stories but they will never need to be told. Because we are…