My "real"

One of the funniest gals that I know, Brandi, was talking about "being real" on her blog. And that is something that really hit me deeply. There are many people that I know in real life and over the web that do not really know the "real" me. There are very very very few who really truly do.

This was the hardest post that I've ever had to write, but I think that it is also the most therapeutic thing that I have done for myself in a long time.



My real...

I thought I fell in love at age 14 and stayed with that guy for the next 9 years because I was convinced that he was "The One". I completely messed up my relationship with my parents and with my friends and other family for years because I wanted to be with him. We eloped when I was 20 and got sealed in the temple 2 years later. People at church knew he was kind of odd, but what they didn't know was that at home he was constantly trying to find ways to kill himself. He lit himself on fire, he tried to induce hypothermia. When he finally got help he tried to OD on his pills while drinking bleach. I was getting horribly depressed but tried to hide it because we had a happy eternal marriage, right?

In 2007 I had been married for 3 years and gained about 50 lbs. I was a wreck though I tried to hide it for a long time. I spent a lot of time on the computer at home trying to find something that made me happy. I blew off a lot of friends, or potential ones that I could have made, because I was afraid of what they would think of me and my problems. During the course of my marriage I was extremely emotionally and verbally abused. It reached a point that there was even some spousal rape involved.

I was too ashamed to tell anyone until 2 years later.

I felt completely unwanted by my husband who would have been content to come home, go on the computer for 5 hours, and then go to bed. The only time he ever acknowledged me was when he wanted sex, food, or the rare occasion that we were out in public.

In the middle of 2007 I fell in love with my best friend.

He was not my husband.

I told my husband that I wanted a divorce and he refused. We went to couple's counseling because there was obviously something wrong with me and it needed fixing. After only a dozen sessions with no effort on his end the counselor told me that the next time he told me to leave (To go see my best friend) that I should. And I did. And things got physical between us. My husband and I split in November 2007 and I spent the next almost 3 years with divorce proceedings. We didn't even want anything from each other at that point, but it was still hard for me.

He later told me that he never believed in the LDS church and he did it all for me and it was all a lie. I felt like the last 10 years of my life were wasted and useless. I felt like an idiot and I hated myself more than I ever had in my life. I'd lie if I'd said that I never thought about ending it. It started in the name of love and ended with me feeling unwanted and rejected.

I moved back home with my parents. They couldn't understand why I did not want to go to church anymore.

I nearly staved myself after I moved back home. There would be days all I ate was one single packet of string cheese. I hated that I let myself get so fat and while there was a guy that now wanted me, I still felt completely disgusting.

I hated that I wasn't pretty like all the other LDS girls I'd grown up with.

I hate that I can justify to myself cheating on my husband. Things like, "It was already over, you told him you wanted out, it was only a piece of paper at that point, there was no love or commitment on his end (long story)" But I was even more afraid that people would hate me if they found out why I left. Why we were getting divorced.

I'm still not out of the woods with my self loathing. Even over leaving my ex; even though I now realize that he was never going to love me back the way I loved him. I just hate myself for feeling like I failed in a marriage that was doomed from the start. I was, and am, scared that I would lose the friendships (however casual they may be) because of how they saw me in those 3 years, versus what was actually happening.

Behold Blogger, I have returned!

Well, needless to say that it's been a very long time since I've been able to have the time to sit down and write an actual blog post. At first today I was really thinking about... now what could I talk about, I mean really? There's not too much going on in my life aside from the baby and gaming. But oh wait... that was the title of my blog, right?



So, Mr Darion is doing very well. He is 6 months old now and is getting bigger and cuter every day. He can sit up on his own now, can push most of his tummy off the ground, and is getting this first tooth! There is no joy to describe how being a mother feels like. Everyday that he achieves something there is just this swell of pride that can't ever be diminished by anyone else. He is my little man and I love him.

My big man is doing well as well. Next month it will have been 2 years since I moved here to South Dakota. And while I'm still not all that thrilled with being here I do love our little family. There are times when I wonder what like would have been like had I not moved here, but those thoughts are quickly tossed aside at the thought of my little guy. Everything has been so worth it. We're currently running a Dungeons and Dragons type campaign with a Pathfinder setting. So far it's been fun and perhaps I'll get a chance to blog more about that later. We're also playing Final Fantasy 13. I say "we" because he plays and I watch. I'd love to play but most the time I am with Darion taking care of him or something. So I just watch cause mostly I just love games' storylines.

Work has been excellent and I recently got a promotion to the assistant director of the daycare. I also am driving all of the children that are 5 and older to all their summer recreation activities. So it should prove to be a VERY busy summer. I love my job and all of the kids so it's really the perfect place for me. I do however, plan on going to school to finish my degree so that I can be a teacher. What can I say? I just love kids!

Not too much else to write though, so just a quite update on my life and now I still TRY so hard to actually update this with relevant thoughts and opinions on things now that I am in the mood (and have the time) to start posting again! :D

California Trip

So now that I got a rather long and serious blog post out of the way I thought I'd follow it up with a nice fun and (hopefully) shortish post!

On September 5th 2009 Jake, the baby (of course!), and I went out on a trip to my hometown of Manteca, CA. This was a needed trip for many reasons. Mostly because I wanted to see my folks again. Once or twice a year simply isn't enough but sadly will probably have to suffice while I am still living in the middle of nowhere. Secondly, we handed my puppy (re:6 year old 70lb Samoyed) Mochi, to my parents for a few months. She loooooves people and we're pretty sure she could lick the baby to death on a whim. Having her around also is somewhat of a hassle so it's VERY nice that they offered to take her for a little bit while we adjust to being parents. And lastly, Jake had to get the best friends' stamp of approval.

But the best part?

OMG SUSHI.

Well... not really. All I had was California Rolls cause that's about all I CAN have right now but it was still beyond delicious to taste them again. I will never take them for granted again if I live somewhere where I can get to them with relative ease.

We had a baby shower for little Schweigert baby while we were there. And by shower I mean like 15 of us went to a sushi bar, I got present stuff, and then we went back to Jess and Dev's and watched Big Bang Theory. All and all it was really wonderful. Aside from Fanime it was one of the only times that I've really seen everyone get together like that. We need to do it more often and always when I get back into town. :p Everyone really seemed to like Jake and they were actually brutally honest about how much they liked him. After the Mike fiasco I made them all swear that they HAD to tell me if something didn't feel right about all future boys. They kept their reservations about the first boything I had and I think they are more overprotective now. And even with that Jake still passed the test!

It was also nice just taking a break from everything. My work (daycare) is pretty much having me up and moving around all the time. I get tired really easily nowdays and I found, especially after I got back, that it takes a lot out of me. It was nice to sit back and relax and watch a bunch of movies, or go to the movies, even... shopping. And I HATE shopping. But I guess when Dad and Jake talked they pretty much hit the nail on the head. I hate shopping for myself, but when it's for other people, the baby in this case, I go nuts with it. I love giving things to people so that I can see the happiness on their face and know that they will think of me a little bit every time they use what I gave them.

Now that we are back home though Jake and I are on the home stretch to this baby getting here. At the moment we are looking for a new place, looking for a "new" used car :p, and just trying to both mentally and emotionally preparing ourselves for the baby. Our first prenatal class was on Thursday and we have those every week now. It should be nice and informative and the teacher is a chiropractor which is nice cause I really have been having bad back problems. We were oddly enough the youngest in the class at 25. This showed when they passed around the diagram of how dilated I will be when I need to start pushing (10cm incase no one knows) and we had to try SO HARD not to giggle. We're so mature. Hahaha.

Over all, just loving life. I've been doing a lot more art lately and I'm really excited for our new addition to be here. Not only cause am I going to love it to death but I am also really excited about getting back into shape and getting a gym membership after the bebe. I want to get back down to like 150-160ish cause I look SUPER HOT in that weight range.

Mostly though I just want to have this baby in my arms! I want to know if it's a boy or a girl!! ><

Never said I was good at this type of thing!

So I NEVER said that I was good at this blogging thing. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've always sucked at keeping this kind of thing updated. Much has gone to the wayside, much like my poor poor Livejournal in days of old. :( But here I am trying to redeem myself and trying to cram as much baby stuff into this update as I can!!

First off since the last posting I have now turned 25 years old. Ooooh, scary I know. Jake came home from work that day with flowers, bath salts, and a little stuffed Mochi (Samoyed). And since it's been like YEARS (minus when Thrads sent me some) since I got flowers from a significant other it was like... wow. We then went to Cattleman's (a FABULOUS local steakhouse) and then to the movies to see The Proposal. Over all the best birthday I've had in years by far. And later I got a package from my parents with my new T-Mobile phone in it that I got as a present. They were switching over to T-Mobile from Spirit anyways... but my plan still had until the end of the year on it before I could switch. Instead they just got me a new phone on their new plan and Jake has my old number now so he'll have that incase of a baby emergency. At least until that plan ends in December and then they'll put him on our family plan. :D

But the baby stuff is even more fun!

So on June 29th we went in again, hoping to find out the gender of our little one. Needless to say this baby is probably going to be as much, if not more, stubborn than both Jake and I. Not a good attribute for a child this early! It decided it needed to get all curled up and not show us if it was a boy or a girl. My bladder was pretty full, but not as full as it could have been to try and get the baby all crammed into one spot. Haha. The doctor said she THOUGHT it was a boy but it would also not hold still enough to get a good finalized look at it's gender. So Baby Schweigert is still genderless. We're pretty convinced my amniotic fluid is made up entirely of caffeine and the sperm that made it was comprised of Red Bull. It moves around SO MUCH. It has also started to let me know when I'm doing something it doesn't agree with. More on that below.

But at least we finally picked out a theme for the baby room that is gender friendly! We decided on a Winnie the Pooh theme. Mostly cause all we have here is a Walmart and the theme of Pooh they have there is really cute. A light green and creme color'd theme. Baby has also finally decided to not only move (back in June) but it also is now in full kicking mode (late July/early August). It's favorite target is Mommy's bladder. Such a kind and loving child. However it is really really fun to be able to share these movements with Jake now. When I feel the little one starting to make a fuss inside I grab his hand and put it on my tummy. He's totally being a guy about it... but I can tell that he's excited every time he gets to feel the baby move. It's scary but we're taking it one day at a time and as we get closer to the due date it is a little more scary and real every day, but we also know in the end it's going to be so totally worth it.

On the gamer side of things...

We were playing WoW religiously and then Jake mostly got burned out on the leveling and the grinding (and my not catching up :p). So we decided to take a break and play Age of Conan for a while. It was a nice break, but now we're back on WoW again and I'm STILL trying to catch back up to him. One of these days I might be as into games as he is... but not anytime soon. Not with the bebe so close!

I think that's about it updating my life wise. I've finally got my art groove back and I have been posting new art up on my deviant art account. Also on that note I've started up Blessed again with the old Studio Eternity group. It's a nice fun thing for us all to do again together and I really hope we can get it back up off the ground. =D

Seeing is believing

I'm not gonna lie... all of this pregnancy stuff was extremely surreal to me until I saw that baby move for the first time on that ultrasound on May 18th, 2009. Until I got to hear it's little heartbeat and knew that I had created a life. Even though we weren't quite ready or even wanting to make this baby just yet I can't see living without it at this point either. I am completely and totally in love with a small mass of tissue and organs growing inside of me with it's tiny little soul. As I type out this blog I am 15 weeks pregnant. We get to see the little one again on Jake's birthday (June 2nd) and MIGHT be able to tell if it's a boy or a girl by then.

I have to say ever since I was little when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up it was a typical little kid response always followed by, "...but I want to be a Mommy most!". 2006 was a very hard time in my life when my ex husband and I were trying to conceive. Nothing we were doing was working. I finally started to talk to a friend of mine (who was also trying with her husband at the time) and she said that it sounded like I had what she had. She has PCOS (Poly-Cystic Ovary Syndrome). I have a lot of darker hair on my body, I have skin tags, I got overweight really fast and it was very hard to lose some if any of it, and I was always having really painful cramps randomly, not just during my period. So I went to my Gyno in 2007 about it but she said they couldn't start a test for it until we had been trying for a year. Anyone that knows me knows that 2007 is when my marriage unraveled itself (and not because we couldn't conceive). In May 2008 I had my gallbladder removed and while they were doing all the testing for that they said that they found a lot of liquid that wasn't supposed to be there in my ovaries. They said it was from cysts popping inside them and that I in fact did have PCOS. It was something that was devastating because like my friend I thought that I was going to have to wait until I was with someone that I wanted to be a parent with and that we would have to go through fertility treatments. And have my heart break a little more every month that we couldn't get pregnant.

Jake, bless his soul, was always joking about his 'super sperm'. But since I was on the pill (more to control the ovulation and cramp pains than actually preventing pregnancy) and I had my condition I just thought that such a thing really wasn't possible. I have never been so glad to have been so wrong. I thank God every day for my little miracle. And I've made a promise to myself and my unborn baby that I will love it no matter what it does. I will love this little baby and will give it everything that I can (within reason, haha) to make sure that it has a happy and comfortable life. While Jake isn't so poetic about what he wants for the baby I'm extremely happy to be with someone I really feel that I can trust with this little life. Someone that I love and that in turn loves me for the way that I am and loves this child already (maybe!) as much as I do. Going through this together is going to be one of the hardest but most rewarding things that we will ever do. And while we don't plan on having another one until after we're married and a little more prepared in life for more we're going to love this one to pieces in the meantime.

And honestly, I don't think life could get much better than this right now.

I want to be judged for just being myself

So... I dunno how exactly I wanted to start this post but it's something that I think I just wanted/needed to get off my chest. Just really how I feel about something that I can't just scream at the top of my lungs about. And probably something I will only be posting here and on my livejournal.

For those of you that have known me either for a few years or a good chunk of my life you will know that I, for the most part, consider myself a decent human being. This doesn't mean that I am not prone to bad choices, horrible choices, or outright stupid ones. It doesn't mean I think that I am better than anyone else. It doesn't mean I think I'm more awful than anyone else either. Basically... for most of my life I feel like I've been judged or looked at as -what- I am. Not -who- I am. Not for my individual choices, but from the preconceived notion of what I should or should not be doing.

To illustrate I think the biggest example was my growing up Mormon. Now, I'm not saying that I completely disbelieve that everything that was taught to me in the church is true. Some of it I don't think I could ever deny as I feel that it is accurate to the very depths of my soul, but at the same time I no longer really go to church and haven't for almost 2 years now. I think my biggest pet peeve about having grown up Mormon and continuing that faith into some of my adulthood is the people that were not a part of the religion. I know that sounds bad but hear me out. I ALWAYS was being told what I could or couldn't do. "Hey Jenny, do you really think that you should be doing that? I mean you're Mormon after all." Yes, thank you I do know what I am supposed to be doing and what I am not. I always felt that no matter where I went, no matter what I did, I was always being tied down to the definitive factor of what my religion would and wouldn't allow. I was always being judged by it. Even if people didn't have the same moral upbringing as me I was a 'Bad Mormon' or a worse person if I decided to do something contradicting to my religion. And you know... I know that all religions have their own set of rules and it's pretty much stupid to say you're a member of an organization and now follow the rules but at the same time I don't think it should dictate who you are. I don't think that anyone should be any less individual even if they do belong to a bigger group. It's what makes us all unique.

Same goes for being a woman. Because I am a woman there are things I should and shouldn't do. Things that I "can't" do. Or because of how I look things that I should be limited to doing or things I should be doing. Because I am a woman I am supposed to be emotional. The weaker sex. I am supposed to make sure that my man (boyfriend, husband, whatever) is taken care of. And you know what? I'm sorry but that theory can go to hell. That's what got me in trouble the first time around. For almost 9 years I completely and totally devoted myself to one person. I gave up friends, family, and everything I knew to be with that person. I tried to always take his side even if it wasn't rational at all. I tried to be there for him and do everything that he wanted me to do. I wasn't there for MYSELF. I rarely gave care or notice about what I wanted or needed until it was too late in the relationship to really do anything about it. We had become so concrete in our ways that even with extreme effort on both our parts nothing was budging. And while how I ended that will forever be one of the worst decisions of my life I have to say that I am a better person for getting past that. I don't know that I would make too many decisions differently given the chance. Because right now they are making who I am today.

One of the other things that 'defines' me is my weight. For people who knew me in high school I was this twiggy little short thing with boobs. After high school and through the course of college and 3 years of marriage I managed to gain about 50 pounds (at my heaviest) since then. Really really not healthy. But because I am chubby that means I NEED to exercise, yes? That means I NEED to diet, right? Because in society's books I am fat and I need to be like "everyone else" and be more healthy. I won't deny that I know I need to loose the weight. Mainly because diabetes runs on my mother's side of the family and being overweight means I will be at greater risk for it. But no one else really knows that. All they know is that I look vastly different than I did in my youth. Because I am fat this means I MUST be lazy. It means I MUST not be trying hard enough to get it off. Because if I really wanted to I could get it all off whenever I wanted to, right? I work 40 hours a week. I raid (yeah yeah I know...) 13 hours a week in EQ2. I work at a daycare so I run around with kids all day. I walk my dog. I cook and clean up the house for the boyfriend and myself. I do a lot. I'm making much healthier food choices than I have in the past and I've even been to a gym and you know what? IT DOESN'T COME OFF. Part of it is a medical condition I have that makes it harder for me to actually loose the weight. Part of it very well may be that I'm not trying hard enough. I know I can do it, and I AM trying. But the point is when does it become an obsession? When does it become so important in my life that I ignore everything else and become fixated on it? I feel more energized that I have in a long time. I feel healthier and I have dropped a chunk of that weight. But still in society's books I am 'fat' or 'overweight'. But you know what? I'm happy, dammit.

And now if you've managed to wade through all my emoness and my rantings you will come to the heart of the matter about why I am feeling so strongly about all these things. Despite not even trying and despite being sure it was pretty impossible to happen to me right away (or I have to admit, at all) I have found something out. At first it was just a shock. It's something that I've wanted for so long but thought that I was going to have to wait a good while later for. It's something that will completely change my life. And it is something that I couldn't be more excited about.

Last month Jake and I found out that we're going to have a baby.

It wasn't planned. I have PCOS (poly-cystic ovary syndrome) and I was also on birth control. But by some act of... I don't even know who... we're pregnant. It makes me so happy but it makes me feel so scared. Being a good parent, bringing this child into the world... I don't ever want it to feel about the things I've described above. I want my child so much to have all doors and options available to it. I want it to know that we will love it unconditionally. I want it to be able to be proud of it's choices in life. I don't want it to be or feel limited to what it can or can't achieve. I want it to know that it can follow a path I may not agree with, but I won't condemn it for those choices either.

I want my child to be loved.

I want my child to be judged for who he or she will be. What they DO in life rather than what they "are" or what they are "supposed to be".