Okay, so I have been thinking about doing this for awhile, starting a blog, but who has the time right. I’m 27 years old, I am engaged to my daughter’s father, he’s 24, and my daughter is almost 17 months old. The pregnancy was very surprising and very unplanned but we’ll get to that later. Right now I am just going to tell you about why I am starting a blog.
My pregnancy was hard for many reasons, extreme morning sickness until about 18 weeks being one of them, but the hardest was keeping, or rather, finding myself throughout those 9 months. Of course, I had all the “normal” new parent anxieties and questions which I calmed by reading/Googling/watching everything about pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and the first year. With knowledge comes calm for me, the more I knew the more I felt in control. So I knew everything about the little peanut growing inside of me but I somehow lost myself, I didn’t know myself. Then I started thinking whether I really even did before my pregnancy.
Who was I before? I had quite smoking on New Year’s, so a few months prior to my pregnancy and I had eased up on partying and was actually working out 5-6 days a week, so I was in good shape…huh, maybe that’s why my body decided that was the time. Anyway, I had kept myself busy those months prior, being healthy but that was very unlike the me of the prior decade.
I grew up in the South Florida party scene. I had an older boyfriend and older friends. I was impulsive and ended up blowing off a full scholarship to university in order to go model in Milan, Italy, which I did. I then came back, waited tables at various restaurants, and then took off to teach English in Phuket, Thailand for a few months. That was followed by a short stay in Brussels, Belgium modeling and then back home.
Having the desire to travel but never having the funds to do so really opened my eyes to the other options that are out there, so I became a flight attendant for a charter airline and was incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to travel the world for a year and a half, before I changed my mind again.
This goes on for, like I said, a whole decade. Let’s see…I was also a bank teller, a gym manager, a Starbucks Barista, a telemarketer, a cocktail waitress at a gentleman’s club, a summer secretary at a high school, I did emergency room registration and insurance verification in a trauma center, hourly house cleaning, hmmm a bartender, a hostess, oh and modeled in Europe and Miami and I think that about covers everything. The point is I really didn’t have any idea what I wanted to do and pretty much just partied around the world…most of those jobs were really just funded partying.
So back to the year of growing my peanut. I had decided to straighten out and go back to school, yep that’s how I ended up with a 24 year old fiancé 😉 I figured while I was there I might as well get the full college experience which included dating a douche bag and playing beer pong, a lot. Don’t worry he knows I call him a douche bag, back then he really was! Remind me to tell you about the ridiculously awesome man and father that douche bag has turned into, it’s really something!
Fast forward through the college drama to our unexpected pregnancy and weeks of bedrest…I was a mess. I was questioning our relationship of course, I’m sure that happens with a lot of unplanned pregnancies. I was alone in bed, missing classes, losing weight, freaking out about what I was going to do next, then I realized I had no idea what I was going to do next. I mean I guess I really had no idea even before the pregnancy, I was just doing what I thought I needed to do to “straighten out” but I had put no thought into what that really meant. Then I realized that if I was going to raise this litte munchkin, whether it be with him or by myself, I needed to get my shit together, actually together.
So getting my shit together, that’s what this blog is about. It’s how I went from party girl to baby girl and found myself somewhere along the way and the continued struggle with the balance between being a mom and finding time for being me. Typing it out and sharing helps me figure it out and helps keep me sane 😉
The "Mom" Me 