Everything is hatching! Springtime!

So, about 8 people I know, (really about 5), have had babies in the past two months.

I know, I've blogged about it before, all these 30-somethings having babies, and my uterus is just sitting here empty.

I am so not complaining about that.

In fact, I may put it on Ebay. Why the hell not? I have no use for it. If a surrogate can get $20k to carry one baby, I could probably fetch a cool $50k for mine.

The ad would read:

"One sexy bitch of a uterus for sale. Accessory tubing optional, as well as pain in the ass monthly period. Slightly used, but still highly effective. "

What else is hatching, you ask?

Bugs.

I had to have a pest control service come, since we live next to a field on one side. They have these mini-cockroaches outside here. I say mini because if you ever live down south, you would laugh at these pint-sized things. I told the Orkin man that they are a joke. But there is also earwigs here, which freak me the fuck out. I don't like the idea of any bug that implies they will crawl in your ear, lay eggs, and hatch 8000 babies in your skull.

I'm gagging at the thought.

Literally.

I also have this little dog...Berkeley, my Choodle or Poohuahua. She is a mulch-magnet. It clings to her and then I have to go through the house picking it up. Other annoying habits include her having to sit on my head when I sleep, her nasty puppy breath, and being afraid to go outside alone.

I am hoping that she migrates to sleeping with Andy or the boys, as they like animals that cuddle all night. I however, do not like to cuddle with ANYTHING all night, except my body pillow. I can tolerate an animal laying on me for about 5 minutes, and then off it goes. I am also hoping that my two other dogs encourage her to go outside without me present. Maybe she will feel security in a pack. I am also thinking that we are going to have to declaw the crazy ass sadist cat we have, because she will beat the pulp out of this harmless little creature. And my curtains.

I've been house-ridden for the past two weeks. Mostly because I have to be on a tight budget til my family arrives. They leave NY next Friday. And then it's time to go do fun stuff.

I can hardly wait.

Turns out, I am pretty F-in amazing.

So, remember how I told you I had bought a plain white ottoman, and was going to decorate it with an India dot motif?

Well, I did it. Freehand. In one day.

My mad skills never cease to amaze me.

First I dyed it with fabric dye that I got from Michaels. And then I got a few little jewel stickers from the scrapbooking section, and bought a value pack of puffy paints, circa 1987 decorating t-shirts. But for this project, it worked!!

And here is my final result.

Eat your heart out, Pier One and HGTV.

On the floor...again.

When you have two separate mornings that you wake up on a half-inflated air mattress, chances are that you need to lay off the bacon.

Or, in my case, dried mangos.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I woke up with an aching back, and realized that a second air mattress had bitten the dust.

Luckily, it was timed well, since I just recieved and assembled my guest bed yesterday, so I groggily moved myself, the new dog, my body pillow and my sound machine to the guest room, where I slept in an actual bed for the first time since April 3rd.

But the damage was done and I wasn't acclimated with the location of the toilet on that side of the house, nor did it contain any toilet paper, since my kids aren't here yet, so I still had to trek to the master bathroom for my 8 night time pee sessions. So I didn't sleep very well.

So, going backwards, yes, I got a new dog. I am a sucker for animals, specifically dogs. I really have wanted a small pygmy goat for years now, but Andy has squelched that notion after seeing on "Tori and Dean" how much they leave little pebble shits all over the place. I was slightly bored this weekend, so against my better judgement, I went in to Petsmart, knowing full-well I would walk out with an animal if I found one I liked.

It's too hard to live with no pets when you've had them since you were 10. It's harder than living without children or a husband. I always miss my dogs more than my human family.

So, there was this little Chihuahua-Poodle mix, which, I don't even know how they mated, as I thought Poodles were pretty big, but anyway, it created this little, wiry-haired creature that is smaller than a cat. I guess she is either a "Poohuahua or a Choodle". But she is adorable, because she looks old with her grayish hair, even though she is 7 months old. They'd had her in the shelter for 3 months. So I agreed to foster her and adopt next month, when it is free.

And I promptly bought her an outfit.

Because I've never had a dog small enough to wear clothing, nor one that would allow me to do it.

She's a needy little thing. She insists I bring her food where I am sitting, because she doesn't want to wander around on her own much yet. And I have to go sit outside so she can pee.

Anyway, she will make a fine addition to our household of vagabonds.

And it turns out I am a professional Ikea assembler. I got everything put together on the first go, not having to walk away from it before I broke something. It became a game, and, (dare I say it), I actually enjoyed doing it!

I have this pure white ottoman that I got. It has a slipcover on it, but it's bigger than I thought. So after ingesting way too much HGTV again this weekend, I am going to try my hand at decorating it. I don't know what with. Do they still make t-shirt puffy paint? Maybe dyeing the fabric, and then creating an "India" inspired look using colors in my living room? You can tell I am bored when I start creating things, since I get really frustrated when they don't turn out the way I intended to.

We shall see how this endeavor plays out. And if it looks cool, I will post pics. If it doesn't, I will probably still post pics.

California Love

As I write this, I sit in my backyard. Just one line of the ever-growing list of reasons why I love my life today.

How much has changed in a year.

Every day, a delivery comes with some new addition to my forever home.
It looks amazing. I want people to come visit so that they can tell me that I am a design genius. My desire to make new friends is fueled by this one purpose.

The only bane of my existence is the fact I have more furniture to assemble. But at least I know, when I swear, sweat, and throw screws and boxes everywhere in frustration, that on e it's done, it will all be worth it.

Everyone has a list of items they would love to add to their home. Mine has been steadily growing since I was 18 and newly engaged. My first set of furniture was a mixed bag of hand-me-downs from my mother in law and my parents. Our walls were so stark and bare that I bought posters to hang on them. I've only owned one house, and while I loved certain aspects of it, namely the kitchen and the pool, it was far from my dream house.

This is my dream house. Its not huge...only 2100 sq feet. But it's laid out beautifully, and we are leasing it, which means that in two to four years, it will be my name on the deed.

It's been an interesting journey, the past 15 years since I graduated high school.

An unexpected first child, and his battle with Aspergers.

Two long deployments to Iraq, as I managed to deal with two young boys, not knowing how to teach them to become men on my own.

Three moves in Georgia, three years in Alaska, and four years in New York. It was those last four that made me lose any hope for my dreams.

And then I lost everything that my life was. In a split second, one text message ripped my life apart and sliced clean through my heart. It drowned me in the continuous ocean of sorrow, despair, grief and confusion.

But it presented me with the opportunity to get rid of all the chains that were wrapped around me. All the things I couldn't say or acknowledge. All the lies. All that suffocated me.

And, on June 8th, my husband will be out of the army, and all three of my boys will join me in this wonderful life that I've created on the other side of the country.

I support us now.

It means so much to me to be able to know that I was the one who did everything the wrong way...and got the looks of disappointment from my family for getting knocked up and married, with two sons before I was legally allowed to take my first drink.

I, who lived on $14k a year with a family, having to donate plasma to have the luxury of going out to eat.

I, who in my first year of adulthood, managed to fuck it all up before I even had a chance to spread my wings and try to fly.

And now, I make more than my sisters, who, in my shadow, tried to do everything right. I don't think it was a conscious choice for them to try to stick it to me, but that's the way I made myself feel.

I watched as my best friends, one by one, moved west, leaving me behind. And I wondered what I had done.

And so I've lived my life wondering how to get back to that time, so I didn't have to watch my life pass me by.

But I caught up to it.

And I grabbed at my chance when it came, so fiercely determined that I will not let those 15 years be in vain.

I hung curtains this weekend, by myself. I enjoy my nightly happy hour, smiling at nothing and no one as I sit and look at what I've accomplished. I was scared, when I left. Scared of what I was leaving and if this would turn out to be another misstep.

Would it be what I dreamed, or like everything else, was it going to be a disappointment?

I'm so happy.

I know that I won't always be.

The most we can hope for in life is contentment.

There will always be a battle to fight. Always be good and bad, happiness and sadness.

But today I am enjoying my happiness, knowing I haven't felt this good in my entire life.

Millionaire bachelors, all waiting for you.

I keep getting the most ridiculous emails for dating sites. Today it was Millionaires. I took a look, as I wanted to see how attractive said bachelors were.

Turns out, not very, providing them with a justification to advertise themselves based on their income.
And it looked like most were scouring for sex.

Blech.

In other news, I've just about eaten a whole bucket of cheese balls. I saw them and thought, "Hmmm. I haven't seen them in a while."

It was not a good idea.

I thought I could resist them. Who knew that it would be my go-to snack of choice, right after dried mangos. I have cleaned out about 30 bags in a week from Target. When you wear sweatpants 4 days a week, you don't have a realistic grasp on your weight loss/gain. Then you put on real grownup clothes, and accessorize with a cute, upper waisted belt, only to whip it off on the drive to the office because you think you may pass out from the restricted oxygen/blood flow.

Damn.

Since I am not doing too well with this whole dieting thing right now, I have to seriously consider putting some of my funds in to a gym membership. But I know I won't use it, so I don't. I just have to wait until my motivation is strong enough to commit to losing weight.

Anyway...

I've been waiting all week for this damn wicker outdoor set to be delivered. So they finally come today, and not only is it NOT assembled, but when I tried to start putting it together, the screws don't match up with the openings!!!! Thus confirming that the two reasons we really need men are sex and furniture assembly. I would gladly put out FOR the furniture assembly. "So, IKEA delivery man, how about I slip you an extra $100 bucks and a BJ, and you throw this stuff together?"

That would generally be frowned upon.

However, if you are married, you can say, "If you put together all this stuff today, I'll give you a BJ." And they do it, and then you develop a sudden headache, and never have to follow through.

Somehow, the hope must be so great for married men, that they fall for this scheme over and over and over again. You would think they would catch on after the first year of it never happening. It's kind of like playing hide and go seek with a baby. The baby is surprised every time you uncover your face.

It's the best perk of being married.

I've bartered sexual favors for all kinds of things with my husband. A dinner at Applebee's. New shoes. This is why prostitution is the oldest profession. We are worse after we commit. That's when the real whoring begins. And its with no shame because we have a ring. It's our license.

A year of Wonderland

I don't think anyone is as happy as they think they are.

Or they imagine themselves to be.

I love my husband. We have a good friendship. We can laugh. Even in the midst of madness, cracking highly inappropriate jokes can't be silenced between us.

But I never was as honest with him as I am my closest friends. He was never TRULY my best friend, because of this. I didn't give him that courtesy to know every part of me. But until now, I had fear, I guess, to hurt his feelings, damage his image of me.

The golden wife.

The good wife.

Steadfastly supportive, even when I wanted to cry out, shriek, throw myself on the floor and refuse to get up...go on a hunger strike.

Okay, maybe not ever that last one. More like insolently over indulging.

It's funny that we paint this picture of how we must appear to others. We go on job interviews and play the role. We act like we know what we're doing with our children, so fucked up by examples we've seen growing up, books and experts that tell you what is bad today, only to have it rejected a few years later.

As I grew older, I found that I cared less about what people expected.

I tell people on job interviews that I will take off all the time I earn. Unapologetically for expecting that if I work when I commit to, I am entitled to have a break. But I will work my ass off for you.

I swear like a sailor in front of my sons. I never heard the word "fuck" until I was about 14. My kids have known it from birth. But yet, they know it's inappropriate to use those "bad words". I snicker when they think I don't hear them swear with their friends, and I think of how I used to as well when I was their age. What's a "bad word", I used to say. Who has the power to deem words bad, and if they are, why were they created? It's logic I had as a 12 year old, and I hold steadfast to those questions at 32.

People used to put my marriage on a pedestal.

Maybe because I've been married the longest. Maybe because we appeared happy.

Now, of course, I see what a charade it was.

I love my husband, and he loves me. That was never false.

But we were both far from happy and fulfilled. He, in the darkness of his secret depression and anxiety. Me, in the role I never wanted to play as dutiful war wife, always waiting. Waiting for life, which wouldn't be okay to live without him home. Trying over and over again, unsuccessfully, to accept that this was what I chose. For him.

And I resented him for it, oh yes. And reminded him of my sacrifices when I could. But I resented myself more.

So when the proverbial shit hit the fan, I was finally "allowed" to spill my guts about my true feelings. My lies, my hidden thoughts. The fact I always felt gyped out of the life I dreamed of.

Because I was meant to do something in this life.

It's really an egotistical thought. I was born to do something amazing. I will be known. I will make a difference in someone's life.

But the reality of it, is that I was meant to write. I spent a decade frustrated about it...not knowing what medium I was meant for. A novel? Fiction? A journalist?

After several false starts, uninspired enough to continue blogging about things that didn't interest me enough, I started this blog.

I will always be an army wife. I wear that battle-worn badge proudly. The few that stick it out, the strong. I will always be here to help any military wife that reaches their wits end and needs someone to reach out to for help.

But my real area of expertise is my own life, my own foibles and follies.

See my picture up there, in the right-hand corner of my blog? That's really me. And my name is really Keri Tietjen Smith.

I hide from no one in shame for my failures, because I have had successes too. As everyone has. Maybe if we were all a little more honest about them all, we would stop putting so much pressure on ourselves and enjoy life a little before we die. We make enemies of each other, always having to prove you can handle everything and balance it all. Maybe we should support each other, instead of condemn.

I don't have the perfect children. They weren't always the perfect babies, toddlers...they didn't try to walk at 3 months, weren't proclaimed geniuses at 5, didn't know how to talk at birth. I roll my eyes when new mothers talk about their amazing wonderkin. These are the same bitches who never seem to have anything go wrong, EVER. Never worry. Are never vulnerable. Never outwardly or publicly question themselves.

But I have pretty resilient and independant children. They are witty, loving and accepting. They embrace other's handicaps. They don't see race. They are smarter than half the adults I know.

Life is drama. And every drama has it's comedic moments. And I have plenty of both.

And so, I will share more of my stories with you.

Stay thirsty, my friends.

I make no excuses, nor explanations. I am...me.

Today I had, quite possibly, the most honest discussion with my husband in months.

It's been three weeks of distance that I have embraced, a 3 day drive, 2700 miles of land between the reality that I left behind, the proof in my children of the time and acknowledgement I have devoted/spent/wasted and the shininess of all the opportunity that is possible.

That is probable.

That will be.

We talk every day, but it's so easy to talk without saying anything after 14 years of long-distance love. The "I love yous", "I miss yous"....met with a generic, "you too." Talking about the daily activities, any changes in routine. Filling the prerequisite amount of time with the expected, cordial chatter that you would have with a stranger on a bus, and no more intimate.

Today it must have been the gin.

That was a joke. But I really am drinking gin. ;) And listening to 90s music. The music where I was still me. The music of the era in which I still had all the mysteries of my life before me. Where I had no one to answer to, explain myself, or pretend to be. I had no idea who I was then. I still had to figure it out.

I watched a show on Lifetime last night, where a woman interviews celebrities and asks them very poignant questions about their lives. Of course, some of them are still posturing. But in some of them, you see the real person inside. And they say things that touch something in your core. Like talking about how you learn to mask your true self over years of marriage, parenthood and life. How it sucks everything you loved about yourself, and your partner loved about you, and changes you in to a stereotypical, nagging image of your mother.

It's amazing how one event sets off a chain reaction of change. Like a path of dominoes that can't be stopped from falling.

My event was a year and five days ago. I resisted the urge on the anniversary date to blog...not wanting to give it anymore of myself. It's taken enough out of me.

But I realize, it's given me more than I've lost....something I wasn't capable of seeing until recently.

Maybe it took the worst parts out of me. It left a shell that was free to be filled with what I choose. I realize now that I am free...the way I was free the first time I could ride my bike without training wheels....the way I was free the first time a boy told me he loved me....the way I was the day of my high school graduation, rebelliously smoking a stogie while running down the halls.

I have every justification to excise my husband from my heart. I've considered over the past year all my options, in a way that my apathy towards someone who has been the center of my life for 14 years is remarkable. It takes a second to fall in love, and even less time to fall out of it.

But I am free from expectation. Free from judgement...because, really...who the fuck cares? I am free from the fear of always worrying that the other shoe will drop, because it has not only dropped, it beamed me in the head and gave me a major head wound. I don't worry anymore. You can't will life to not happen, in all of it's chaotic messiness. No one is protected. Some things you can anticipate...steel yourself for. Death of your elders. Growing children.

But nothing prepares you for a loss in your marital bed. The only person who stood in front of an audience and verbally pledged to love you and foresake all others, no matter what. Their death would be easier to take, because there would be no way that it had to do with you. There would be no choices to make. The choices are the hardest part in all this. And the forgiveness. Such a complex idea.

As I said, it's been a year. As Joan Didion called it, "A year of magical thinking." As I spent the better part of 10 months buried in bed, wearing the same pajamas for 4 days without a shower, no will to even raise my arms high enough to wash my hair, part of my soul irrationally believed that it would all go away and prove to have been a bad nightmare. Your head knows it's irreversable, but something somewhere in you refuses to believe it completely. So you are trapped between the world that was and the world that is. At first, you don't want to tell anyone...being alone with horrible news means that it's not acknowledged. But then you tell the first person, and the second. And you tell your story with remarkable detail, and almost no feeling, because in your head, it's not your story...its someone else's tragedy. And you know you are ignoring it. So you tell it, and re-tell it. Over and over and over again. People avoid you because they don't know what to say. How to comfort you. How to reassure you that you aren't in some stage of dying. They spit the venom about the offender that you wish you could expell from your body, and then you find yourself defending them, because if your loved ones hate your husband, then you have no chance of fixing it. Even if you don't know that you want to.

And then you stop trying to figure it out because you haven't eaten, you haven't slept. You believe that you are insane because you don't know any way to resolve all of these unknown and conflicting emotions. And so, in most of your time, you ignore everything and when you do talk to people, you pretend. For them, of course. It's the right thing to do. You sit and listen to cute stories and daily events, willing yourself to feel a real, tangible emotion...other than disbelief. And you lay. You lay in the soft comfort of your bed, clutching the stuffed dog you've had since you were old enough to remember. Maybe none of this happened. Maybe you are still 5 or 6. Maybe your mom will come in and turn on the light and wake you up, singing songs and saying "Rise and shine!"

Only, your mom never comes.

Morning never truly comes for months.

And then, one day you get up. You take a shower and realize you need three razors to shave all the hair that's accumulated on your legs in the months you've hibernated. And you're ravenous. You eat enough in one month to gain back the 40 pounds you've lost. And you make a decision to do something.

I decided to move across the country. No rules apply to you, because you don't give a fuck what anyone thinks anymore. No one can touch you. No one can hurt you. You ignore the criticisms and judgement. Because you don't care.

You drive across the country, listening to your Ipod, and as I call it, the soundtrack of my life. And in your mind, you are the fearless heroine in some book or movie, making your big move. This is where the change comes in the plot of your life. It's very romantic, in a literary sense. You know it's your moment.

And then you rejoin the human race. You start a new job, having something productive to feel good about. You rebuild your nest. You fill it with everything you always wished to have, because if you make it right this time, then you have a chance to have things turn out in the end. You find the time alone peaceful, instead of lonely. There is no boredom, because haven't you been alone for the past year? Haven't you been alone for half of your marriage? You are comfortable with yourself, and are able to decrease all the haze of anti-anxiety medication because there is no one to give you anxiety.

And then you make peace with it. And you decide whether or not to forgive.

So this is where I ended up today. And I decided to forgive. But the stipulations are that I will never again pretend to be something other than my true self. I will not compromise that. I will not lose this girl again. If I am wanted, than I have to be wanted for all of me. I will not lie. There is no one to hide from anymore. No expectation of youth. No one to impress.

Because you don't give a fuck. You're happy.