In the mornings, the holiday decorations around the house are light and crisp with sunshine. But still, as daylight starts to fade away and dark settles over our house, I love nothing more than the romantic glow of twinkle lights, candles, and sparkle.
In January, when everything comes down, I am missing that warm glow every night.
Happy Holidays, friends.
Today is the start of my 5 day weekend, and the beginning of winning my husband back from 14 hours of school and 5 days of work a week this last semester. It will be quiet around here until the new year, and I'll be back then to say hello.
I hope you can all spend some time with the ones you love, think about the year you lived, and be inspired towards the changes you will make into the new year. See you soonish.
Now that I am entering my 6th month of pregnancy, there have been changes happening over the last few days that are sending my emotions into a whirlwind.
Now I can feel her kicking, and the little fluttering movements I once felt are stronger, and feel like fingers drumming inside my belly. This week I can no longer bend over to put on my socks or boots while standing, and my body has taken on a completely different appearance.
As each change has happened to me physically, they bring on a set of feelings that leave me exhausted with the surrender of one more lesson that this adventure has left me with. Other than marriage, I have not yet traveled on one journey that has made me question who I am, more.
Inside every woman's conscience lies her ability to criticize herself more harshly, and often, than anyone else around her. We begin our battles with insecurity young, often struggling to fit in with the other little girls we are playing dolls with. Our shame and self-awareness comes in the form of our looks, and eventually, our downfalls and insecurities with where our lives are heading.
With each chapter of my life beginning and ending, I have moved in and out of these motions fluidly. They come like an old friend, but not really a friend at all. Rather, a familiar pain or inconvenience that we just grit our teeth and learn to bare through. As the years have gone by and I have found my place of peace in life, these moments fall farther and farther away - until I am almost shocked to find myself in the middle of them again.
And here I find myself on a Friday night, standing in my favorite bikini and staring at a body I don't recognize. In it I find pieces of the old me, my toes and ankle bones (maybe not for long) and a few inches around my upper waist that still feel like the body I call home. I have no idea what possessed me to put it back on for the first time in months. It is in the 30's outside and the beach and Summertime seem like only a figment of my imagination in these dark, cold days.
But I did, anyway. And on my belly, I found little spidery pink lines that I can only imagine are the beginning of what most Mothers like to call their badge of honor. Marks left from 9 months of growing and nurturing and building a human being inside our bodies.
They're here. And no matter how strong and confident we are, something inside us wants to cry out like the little girl playing dolls with her friends that feels left out. Something is so vulnerable, and familiar, and painful.
I needed that moment to feel sorry for myself, but quickly realize that life is changing and happening, whether I want to dig my heels in the ground and stay put, or not. This is my next chapter of surrendering to Motherhood, and the body that will come with it.
When it is all said and done, I am still me. Whether my future beach days will only hold visions of one-piece Mom swimsuits, or not. This acceptance came quickly, and almost painlessly. Like one quick moment of panic that immediately melts into a sinking realization that everything will be okay. Because stretch marks are not the end of the world, and in the incredible adventure and journey that I am taking, and will continue down for the rest of my life, something so small and insignificant almost feels like an afterthought.
It's nights like these that I barely recognize myself. Not because my body is growing and changing and I can't find me, anymore. But because my mind has grown, and changed, and in these thoughts, the old me....insecure, vain, a shameful little girl with her dolls....that is the only me I am starting to not recognize.
In the Fall of 2006, a couple weeks after we got married, Michael and I flew to Jalisco, Mexico. We had gone back and forth for quite some time on where we would be spending the week of our honeymoon. In the end we decided we wanted more adventure than a few lazy days laying on the beach, and I got busy researching.
What I found was the city of Puerto Vallarta - it's culture still rich and preserved, a town center with cobble stone streets and beautiful Catholic churches. All surrounded by the lush Sierra Madre mountains.
We booked an 8 day, 7 night trip to an all inclusive resort in the hotel district. That was our first, and only mistake of the trip. Looking back, we spent next to no time in our hotel, and barely even ate there. Every day we set out in search of new adventures, and this is the story we came back to tell.
For $5, we could take a taxi from the hotel district to the center of town, where we spent most of our free time. It was my first taxi ride ever, and our seatbelt-less cab proved to be less than comforting as we raced in and out of traffic, dodging pedestrians and mopeds along the way.
On the boardwalk we found beautiful art and sculptures displayed, with the Pacific Ocean as a backdrop.
And we found Our Lady of Guadalupe, the stunning Catholic church I had seen in so many photos, and couldn't wait to see in person.
In the center of town, we felt like flies on a wall. Here there were no sunburned tourists, waitstaff, and beach vendors. It was just us, lost in the middle of a city that was bustling with so much life and energy that it felt like it could just swallow us whole. The locals spoke to me in Spanish, and asked us if we were newlyweds. "You look too happy to have been married for very long."
And in the middle of this city I did nothing but watch, learn, and memorize every smell and sound and the way it all just worked together fluidly.
95 degrees, in a dress, on my hands and knees in pigeon poop was the best place in the world at that very moment. I wanted to remember each and every character in this story, like the old man that walked up slowly with a bag of bread, who turned and walked away just as quietly as he had come.
We wandered farther into the streets until we were the only ones that didn't walk those streets every single day. We ate from food vendors on the street, drank $1 margaritas at a bar, and questioned the quality of the open market butcher shops with no doors or windows at almost 100 degrees outside.
It was my first time out of the country, and I was in love with everything I was feeling. We don't have very many opportunities in life as adults to experience something so new and raw for the first time - consumed by equal parts fear, curiosity, and sheer determination to dig deeper and farther into what we are feeling.
When the sun would start to go down, we would take a taxi back to our hotel every night.
The beach was the most quiet at those times, and we would make our plans for the next day. It was in those sweet nights that we spent on the beach that we experienced something so breath-taking that I could never find the words to describe it again.
One night while we were walking on the beach, I started to notice that every footstep I was taking was glowing. Thinking I was going crazy, I had to stop and make sure that what I was seeing was really true. We'd later learn that on that night, we were surrounded by plankton called dinoflagellates.
Algae that glows bright blue along the shore. We spent so long that night, digging them up in the sand, watching them float out in the ocean, and catching little bits of glowing light on our fingertips. It felt like home, and our sleepy Summertime fireflies.
Restless with our 8 nights stuck at the hotel, we began to notice loud bass, fireworks, and buzzing life miles away, in the town center.
So one night we set out looking for something new and exciting, having previously been timid to venture into the locals area at night.
The town center was alive at night, and there was no other word for it. While we had spent 3 nights stuck at our hotel with the other tourists, dining in their cheesy restaurants and listening to paid entertainment, life was happening just a $5 taxi ride away.
The streets were full of food vendors, entertainers, musicians, artists, and performers. It was loud and people were laughing, shouting, and dancing late into the night. We ate at a restaurant by an open window that served queso made from goat cheese, and realized why we weren't enjoying the American/Mexican food served at the hotel.
For the next couple days, we wanted to explore even farther from our hotel, and decided to board a catamaran that would take us along the coast.
The city was beautiful from the outside looking in, and we kept sailing forward for another hour until it all disappeared into the thick vegetation of the surrounding mountain range.
We came to a small cove where we would be snorkeling for the next couple hours. I had never been, and was scared to find myself suddenly in the middle of such deep water. The fish were amazing. Every color of the rainbow and every shape and size imaginable. The salt burned my skin and every minute spent in the water felt like tiny little ant stings that I learned to completely ignore in my efforts to preserve every memory we experienced that day.
On another day, we traveled to Nuevo Vallarta. The ride was long and hot, with 8 of us in the back of a large military truck. It took an hour on the highway before we started to reach the small towns and again found ourselves surrounded by the culture that we were looking for.
The people and children here were so shy, and reserved. I felt intrusive and out of place.
We were back in the truck in no time and traveled to the countryside. Our next big stop was a trail in the Sierra Madres, where we would spend a couple hours hiking. First we stopped at the home of a woman with a small, outdoor kitchen.
She made us fresh tortillas by hand and I wandered around her land, imagining what her life must be like. One tin roof, no plumbing or electricity, and a huge tequila plant. I guess for her, life is just simple.
We were refreshed and ready for our hike. Along the way I saw some of the most ridiculously terrifying spiders I had ever seen....and I'm not even that scared of spiders. We met a young boy and his horse, and I pretended like I was in the Ferngully Forest. It was sticky, hot, and incredibly humid that day.
Our last stop was Monterrey Beach. It was a small, private cove owned by a Mexican family. Standing on the beach, you could run across the entire length of it in 30 seconds and that was it. Tiny, secluded, and surrounded by lush, tropical foliage. The sand was dotted with gold flecks, and as the tide crashed down on the shore it looked like a flash of light and sunshine so bright it was almost blinding. We were the only two people in the water, and waist deep when Michael spotted the first sting ray. He was out of the water in 5 seconds flat but I stayed, searching for shells, until I got a cut across my butt cheek from a string ray swimming by.
We spent a lot of time in the ocean, on this trip. My heart is by the sea, and the weightless feeling of knowing that something consuming you is so out of your control that you could be gone at any minute.
We swam, boogie-boarded, and kayaked into the waves.
My favorite day of our honeymoon came when we traveled by boat to a small fishing village called Yelapa. It is only accessible by water, and no roads will take you to or from there. I imagine a portion of it's small population has never even left.
It took us about an hour to get there from our hotel, and when we arrived the locals flooded the beach to help us.
It only took about 30 minutes to walk through the entire town. We passed small businesses, homes, beautiful gardens, and more stray cats than I had ever seen. I guess if you're going to be a stray cat, a small fishing village in paradise is the best place to be.
The end of our trip took us to the waterfall at the back of the town. We stopped for a drink and I thought about the people we saw in Yelapa. I felt a nagging sense of sadness, but I didn't know why. For some reason they seemed lonely, quiet, and lost. I was 23 years old and at the time I didn't know a lot about life other than going to college, getting a career, and buying a home with a white picket fence. Years later, I can look back on this trip and understand how my memory of it has shaped who I am today, and what I consider to be a good life.
The people of Yelapa were untouched, intact, and naive to just how hectic and full of static life really is on the outside.
One of Michael and I's favorite stories is one that reminds me of this day, every time I hear it. And when we do, we remember the line-dried clothing, bare feet, and stray cats.
The best part of traveling to a place where everything is unfamiliar is coming back, knowing that it has shaped a small piece of who you are. This was the trip we needed to take. The 8 days we spent, two weeks into our marriage, teaching us lessons about what our priorities in life really are.
A few weeks ago I was going through some old things and I found a list I had made Michael when we were dating:
"One hundred things I love about you."
I read through 2 pages, smiling, because not a lot has changed in the 5 years that I've written that letter. Here we are, no longer babies, but having one of our own.
Ten thousand fights, make ups, movie nights, adventures, tears, and laughs later, it has been 4 years since we said I do.
No one in this world stirs the same kind of emotion inside of me that he does. When we found each other, I didn't even know if I could ever love somebody again. He chased me for a long time, and a lot of "no's" and "I will not be your girlfriend's" later, I finally jumped in.
I would later discover that by saying I do, I was marrying adventure.
First in the form of traveling to places inside myself that I had never been. Meeting your complete opposite and realizing you can't live without them forces you to look down into the roots of who you think you are - and should be.
My entire life I had watched my parents and the kind of love they had. She can't stand him, he's infatuated with her. She gets annoyed and he calls her baby, pulls her close, and everything else melts away. They hold hands, fight like cats and dogs, only to come home again. Disappearing into the wilderness for weeks on end just to spend time with each other and escape anything and everything else that stands in the way. She curses at him under her breath and he laughs and she laughs and somehow, I have never seen two people so incredibly different - her, stubborn, fiery, quick-tempered. Him, calm in his heart, patient, and kind. It's a match that only can be understood when you meet that one person that hushes the fire inside of you, and balances any wrongs that need to feel right.
When I was a little girl I told my sister that when I grew up, I would marry my Dad.
And I met Michael there. In my own fiery battles, lord, I have thrown every inanimate object in this house at his head. And like cats & dogs we hiss and bark and come home again. Through the adventure of finding out these things about myself and learning that I am not always right, and him wrong, or him black, and myself white, we just are. The yin yang that somehow works even though it goes against everything that seems rational and right.
In the last 4 years of marriage we have learned so much about each other that it feels like we lived a lifetime together in some other world, far away from here. Content, safe, and completely comfortable here with my best friend, sometimes looking at him feels like I am looking through at myself.
In 4 months, it will be 7 years since our first kiss and the beginning of our story...where it all began. And in 4 months we will meet our little baby girl, and begin this new adventure with her.
We are so excited to share something real with her, and show her that true love can be ugly, hard, scary, and victorious at the same time.
And in the heart of the battles we are fighting, there is beauty and solace in the hard roads we take to reach happiness, and true love.
