Reintroducing myself

 

    Hey everyone, I am still so blown away that so many of you from reddit happened to find me here. It makes me feel so appreciated. I have read all of your comments for sure and I always want to respond to everyone so I'm really sorry I haven't been able to. When this gets published we will be on our way back home from our little tour of our soon to be new home city and with the holiday, this week is going to be insanely busy but I'm hoping to really take some time next weekend and sit down and write, say hello, etc...  I noticed by the views, that my community from reddit can't be the only people seeing this so I just want to take a second to reintroduce myself and our little cast of characters that so many of you have gotten to know so well. One thing I really love about this blogger platform is that there wasn't quite the urgency there was with reddit; meaning on reddit I had to save posts right away or they would go away (of course I could have cut and pasted them from a doc but it sort of defeated the purpose). Where as on blogger, I can type, it autosaves and I can schedule it to publish later. So I'm typing this on Sunday as my daughter is working out with a local JiuJistu team and my husband and son have to be absolutely baking in this heat an Air Museum. If being six weeks pregnant means I can sit in air conditioning as opposed to listening to two aviation geeks talk about the missiles and guns on the XB-28, I'll take it. 

   I've talked a bit about where we grew up and where we still live (at least for now). Basically we are in Central Texas. If you have ever seen the movie Dazed and Confused, with the exception of the hazing at the beginning of the movie, that is a fairly accurate representation of how we grew up. Of course that movie was filmed in Austin it was actually meant to be much more reminiscent of the small towns and suburbs that make up huge swaths of Texas from the Oklahoma border to south of San Antonio. Every one knew everyone, lots of underage drinking and pot smoking, lots of cruising in cars and outdoor parties, all mixed with an absolute worship of the local high school football team. I loved growing up here and I love living here now. 

    Right now, I live less than 200 feet away from my childhood bedroom. My husband's grandparents were my neighbors growing up and when his grandma passed away about 7 years ago, we came up with an arrangement where we would buy out his aunt, uncle and sister's shares of the property.  My older sister already lived two houses away and then my younger sister and her husband were able to buy a house just down the street from the rest of us. I did move away for college and was gone for about two more years when my husband was in pilot training, but other than that I have lived within a very small radius for most of my life. I think this may be boring but it also explains a lot of who I am and potentially where I get my somewhat naive world view. 

The people: 

     My husband, otherwise known as Bubs. We met when he moved to town when he was 6 or 7, mostly because we went to the same church and the proximity of his grandparents house to mine. I thought he was a major quiet jerk until he helped me with some math in 7th grade and we have been romantically together ever since (more or less)--so 19 years. We got married on a whim when we were 22 because I had a panic attack about living together and for some unknown reason he didn't tell me to shut up and go back to sleep. We have shared most of our life experiences together and for the most part we get along really well but we have a tendency to annoy the shit out of each other from time to time. He is an insanely hard worker who works for a mid sized tech company and then co-owns a small business with my dad that exploded because of Covid and people staying home. He's also a pilot in one of the Air Force reserve/guard components (sorry I need to be more vague about this from now own) and flying is his true love. He grew up as an excellent baseball player until a very freak accident led to a knee injury (which meant he couldn't hit like he used to) and probably kept him from  college scholarship-the knee injury also basically sidelined him from the Air Force Academy  (why he is in the reserves/guard). He's fine now and he's become a fanatical runner but now he looks like a twig and I miss his muscles. However I see my friends' husbands forcing nachos into their face for entire weekends while watching football and I have to admit I'm pretty lucky. He does have one very dark secret that causes me such shame I can hardly talk about it...he's not a Texan. He was born in New Mexico and moved here when his grandpa got sick and needed help maintaining and selling off the family property. Not only is he not a Texan, he has "New Mexico pride" (if that even is such a thing) and annoys our entire neighborhood by having a New Mexico flag hanging up next to our front door. I'm in therapy for it but...I don't know...I don't like to talk about things that are so horrible. I started calling him Bubs when we were about 14 years old. His real name has a very hard "A" sound and even when I was much younger, it always sounds like I'm extremely angry at him. A friend suggested I call him "babe" which didn't really eliminate the hard a problem and he's not really a "babe" since it sounded so soft to me but that eventually evolved to Bubs and I have probably said his real name only a handful of times in the last 18 years. I think one of the things I'm going to miss about reddit the most is that it became a secondary way of us to electronically communicate with each other and I loved seeing the little love notes he would leave me there. 

    We have two kids, #1, #2  with  #3 on the way. I don't really like to talk about them too much and why I plan on remaining as anonymous as possible. I don't ever want to make a choice about their public lives that they may resent me for. I was also a little freaked out about how some of the people on reddit would direct their anger at my kids and say some pretty awful things about them. For a basic rundown, oldest is a girl who is brilliant in everything she does but will never be the type that will wear matching dresses with me (or dresses at all) or watch a Gossip Girl marathon. But I love her so much because of how unique she is. She is absolutely obsessed with MMA and Jiujitsu and really wants to start Judo after watching it in the Olympics. #2 is our youngest and until about April 18th of 2025, he will be the youngest of 7 cousins so not only his my youngest, he's the baby of the entire family. I have never seen anyone more adept at navigating social dynamics and when to turn on the charm and when to change gears to match the mood. He's into everything that, as he puts it "can kill stuff," and right now is saving all of his money for a knight sword  made in Italy (dad says yes, mom says not only no but fuck no). #3 is still cooking, they are quite good at making their Mom feel very sick. We have started affectionally calling them Cado (short for avocado seed) which was meant to be temporary but with as much as the older two love the name, I think we have given she/he a nickname for life. We will be finding out their gender in about 10 weeks or so. 

    And me. My real name is Danielle. I like to think I am a little bit above average intelligence but very average looking for where I live in Texas. We have some gorgeous Hispanic women with olive skin and stunning hair while most of the white people still have some very beautiful German ancestry. For me I'm super plain, I'm very short, my boobs are way too big and I have corn silk hair which can't hold a curl to save my life--so I've been wearing the same pony tail since I was about 4 years old. The only thing I ever wanted to be is a teacher and I've been in education ever since graduating college and getting my teaching certificate. I did work as an assistant principal in a mostly agricultural area of Texas but this year am back in the classroom in anticipation of our upcoming move. I was a very competitive gymnast until my senior year in high school and I'm still super flexible and can knock out 10 straight arm pullups pretty easily. I was raised in a very traditional Christian household and still am a believer but I am having some doubts about what role organized religion should play in my family's life. Like every other college girl in America I worked as a server while in school and did everything from dive bars to national chains but my favorite by far was the orange themed restaurant with a name reminiscent of owls.  

    But as I'm coming to learn, I also have some pretty severe mental illnesses to go along with everything else--while I think its always been simmering in the background and something I knew i needed to address, the Mexico/reddit explosion put it front and center. My husband and I were on the verge of divorce and met with a marriage counselor and she has since said that she could see it on my face that I desperately needed help. For my entire life, there have been bouts of mania where I would do things like get in my car and drive and not tell anyone where I was going or decide out of the blue that I can go on solo back packing  trips in the Rocky Mountains with no experience. I also probably have 3 times the arrests of most other women in my demographic (I've been arrested/detained 3 times) because I have always been so keyed up that I've always been willing to turn a verbal disagreement into a full on physical fight and the size, age, gender of the other person has never really mattered in the moment. Mixed with the naivete I have from a fairly sheltered childhood (and adulthood for that matter), I'm a pretty volatile mix where most of my relatives and loved ones think I'm about to stumble my way into trouble. That's exactly what happened to me in Mexico where I was sexually assaulted in a hotel room that I should never have been in (this is definitely a topic I'm going to be more direct about now as well, reddit was not a good place to use that phrase because of the mostly male demographic who would get deeply offended at my use of the term).  I am so lucky that something worse didn't happen to me in that hotel room and I'm lucky that I unfroze before it went too far that the man could have really used his size advantage to really hurt me. It's never a person's fault when they are sexually assaulted but I can also never fully shift blame and I have to admit that my naive and impulsive nature got me into a situation where I truly could have been hurt and affected not only my life, but my husband and kids lives as well. 

    The good news from all of this is that I am now seeking treatment for what has always been there. I am seeing a psychiatrist who's preliminary diagnosis is Bipolar Disorder with ADHD. She is part of a growing group of practitioners who would rather try things like making sure I'm eating well and sleeping enough and handling stress through therapy, journaling and mindfulness practices instead of instantly putting me on a pharmaceutical. I've met with the therapist she recommended (and had an amazing first session talking about what happened in Mexico and my place in it and how I'm allowed to call it what it really was, sexual assault. I also met with the dietician who told me that my diet of four cups of coffee, whatever sweets the PTSO dropped off for lunch and then a rushed dinner of mac and cheese may not be the cause of Bipolar/ADHD but it isn't doing me any favors either. He sent his recommendations to the psychiatrist and I'm supposed to meet with her this coming week to see whether it's medication, lifestyle modification or a combo of both that will help me pull through to not be such a dumb blonde all the time (all three of the mental health professionals I'm seeing right now would hate that joke, but I couldn't help it). 

Like all my other posts this went on way too long but apparently my daughter is finally ready to go back to our hotel so I need to get an uber on the way. Have a great week everyone (as you read this I am probably scared to death on an plane while my husband is saying "don't worry P, that's just the table flank screw bringing the niner roll into place with the rest of the landing gear wing" and I'm resisting my every urge to wrap my hands around his neck and squeeze until he stops talking).