Some Things Never Change

“Sometimes I lie awake at night and I ask, ‘where have I gone wrong?’  Then a voice says to me, ‘This is going to take more than one night.”
~Charles M. Schultz

*this was supposed to be automatically published yesterday for NanoPoblano, but the new publisher doesn’t seem to like pre-scheduling my posts. Please accept my late post*

Yet another accurate post from Last year on The Old Blog:

Image Source: http://www.pinterest.com

I know what you mean, Charlie. I go through this on most nights. Despite realizing that it will take more than one night to recount all my mistakes, I just stay awake for most of the night thinking about everything. I must eventually get bored because I finally do fall asleep.
The worst nights are those when I’m on call; I get woken up multiple times and then have to try to fall asleep again multiple times. Each time it’s time to fall asleep again, I pick right back up where I left off when I fell asleep the last time. It’s usually quite a torturous night…
It’s always hard to know what are “mistakes” in life and what are just “the natural progression” of life events. Sometimes I can’t. Decide what’s worse between the two. If it’s just the way things were supposed to go, then it’s disheartening to know that there is no control and there is nothing you can do to change things. If something was a mistake, however, you feel bad about making a mistake but at least there is the possibility that you can make up for it…. Maybe.
Oh Charlie Brown, I wish I had the answers. If I did, I would be getting much more sleep at night. I would also feel like I was learning something about my life. Everything would be worth it, because I would become a better person, eventually. Hopefully it would also mean is make less mistakes in life.

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Oh, Eleanor

“Do what you feel in your heart to be right –
for you will be criticized anyway.
You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.”

~Eleanor Roosevelt

Image Credit: http://www.pinterest.com

From The Old Blog, November 12, 2014:

Eleanor Roosevelt has got to be my most favorite woman in history.  I don’t know much about her, but anything that I ever find written by her or about her always makes a solid and lasting impression on me.  This quotation, while I have come across it before, has probably never meant as much to me as it does now.  If I look back at all the events and interactions that took place in my life leading up to this present moment, it occurs to me that I often did what I felt to be the the right thing.  I truly believe that.  Unfortunately, I have been criticized in some of the harshest ways (in my opinion).  And, what if along the way I did the opposite?  Well, I would have likely been criticized too.

More than ever I feel this quotation to be true and accurate.  I have had my fair share (and I’m sure there is more to come) on being damned for doing something I should have or haven’t done – The old “Damned if you Do and Damned if you Don’t” paradigm.  I’ve realized what it all comes down to in the end, is doing exactly what you feel to be the right thing to do in that situation.  What is going to make you feel the best about yourself?  What is going to make you happiest in the end? What values and believes do you want to stand for and represent?

Too often our fears of criticism and prosecution get in our way of making the right choice.  I have to admit: after everything that I’ve been through in the past year and a half, including the discovery, criticism, and backlash of my old blog (and now my decision to start over), I have sometimes made a decision to do something that didn’t feel right just to avoid causing problems for myself.  Maybe in the end it is the right decision for me because I am saving myself from trouble… Who knows?

I have sometimes overcome the fear of criticism  by simply convincing myself that the excuse for not doing what I feel to be right is just not justified.  It is hard to not pull back out of fear, but sometimes it is harder to push forward through the fear, especially when you’ve experienced the ultimate criticism.  As always, Eleanor Roosevelt has the best and most simple solution: just do it anyway, because it will be wrong (and possibly right) no matter what it is you choose to do.

And just for fun, here are a few of Eleanor Roosevelt’s other quotations that I love:

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams”
“We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.”
“We gain strength and courage and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face… we must do that which we think we cannot.”

Eight Months

Even though I’ve been through this twice before, I find it impossible to believe that there will likely be a full grown baby ready to pop right out of my belly.  I thought about this in a more cerebral manner than I ever have as I held the perineum of a woman delivering her very own baby this morning.  How is it, that in 8 months, everything so quickly transforms from a little pink line on a pregnancy test to a complete human being coming into the world?

The more important question is, “how will I (can anybody) be ready for this to happen!?”

Eight months is not a long time, yet it is the only time we get to prepare ourselves for the most life changing event ever.  I know it will be enough time, but I can’t believe it: Even though the last two times, it was certainly enough.

What does seem like too much time though, is the time it takes to wait for a better confirmation of this pregnancy.  Just this weekend we have had 3 ladies with ruptured ectopic pregnancies and it has been impossible for me to not think about that possibility for myself.  Or the possibility that I could be one of the 30% of women who have a miscarriage, or something else that would make this pregnancy non-viable.  It feel like forever.

Time is surreal and it makes no sense.  Regardless, we are bound by time, whether we’re ready for it or not.