I’m Floored

I’m deathly afraid of sharks. My parents took me to see Jaws 3 in 3D when I was a very little girl (like too little, WTF were they thinking?!) and I am still in therapy thirty years later. Seriously, I cover my eyes while watching Shark Week on the Discovery Channel.

I have an unhealthy addiction to bad reality TV. The Bachelor, Teen Mom, 16 and Pregnant. I watch it and text my girlfriends trash talk about the shows and the people in them. It’s a sickness.

I grew up in Florida, but hightailed it out of there as soon as I graduated from high school. People think that I’m crazy moving to Syracuse from Florida. But crazy is what I would have been if I stayed home. My family is nucking futs and the best thing I ever did was leave. However, I miss the beach fiercly. And if I had a choice I’d move our family south of Boston in a heartbeat. It’s kind of perfection there — beaches, good shopping, four seasons, good schools. Maybe someday.

I ended up in Syracuse, but always thought I’d actually go to school in Texas. My hair was definitely big enough for Texas back then…

I wore a fake nose ring in high school because I wasn’t allowed to get my nose pierced.

I have a Bachelors and a Masters, but I only use my Mrs. degree. Which doesn’t bother me, most days, but makes me feel really dumb when I’m out with my friends who have super awesome careers and the most eventful thing that has happened to me is I was shit on earlier that day (literally and, most days, metaphorically).

When I last wrote about my diastasis, I said I was planning a post on it someday but “my head is just not focused on that part of my life right now”. That was a lie. The post is sitting in my drafts folder. Completed. I have a consult with a plastic surgeon next week. The truth is that a bunch of stupid bitches some people pinned the pics of my stomach with captions like “why I’ll never have kids” and it made me cry and am not sure I can subject myself to that again.

I make jokes all the time about drinking alone in my closet, but the truth is I rarely drink at home. I am a social drinker. Give me a glass of wine with dinner and it will just sit there. Give me a glass of wine and a girlfriend and I’ll throw it back like there’s no tomorrow.

I get really lippy when I drink, become too honest and swear about 10x more than normal. I normally swear a lot. So that’s saying something.

I tended bar for over ten years. One night the DJ at the club I worked at played a song that was a Roxette remake. I was singing it while we were working and one of the other girls asked me how I knew all the words already. She had no idea who Roxette was. Or that the song was a remake. I knew then that I was too old to still be bartending.

The kids’ middle names were taken from my favorite authors. If you ask me why, I’ll tell you that I love to read and I taught English so it just made sense. But the truth is that I don’t like anyone in my family enough to make them a namesake and I didn’t want to hear the bullshit that came along with naming them after Joe’s family and not mine. So authors were a nice middle ground.

I have a reoccuring nightmare that I’m being force fed rancid sticks of butter. It’s horrific. The weird thing is my dad had the same nightmare when he was a kid, except his butter was in tubs. Must be a generational thing?

Motherhood is a million times different than I thought it would be. I love it. I love the kiddos. I’d stick a thousand more needles in my own body for them. But it’s hard. And some days I feel like I am the suck. Lots of days, actually. One of my favorite books, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, has an awesome quote. It’s kind of how I’ve felt every day for the last three years.