I should have known, despite the tale I tell about why I wasn’t wearing my ring, that my reluctance to put it on had more to do with the situation than the size of my fat, sausage fingers. Well, the problem was that my fingers had gone down in size. My pinky was no longer as thick as my ring finger, which is where I’d been keeping my ring for a few months. The ring fell off twice and I almost didn’t find it the second time. There would be no reasonable explanation to how I lost my ring. But my ring finger really wasn’t small enough to comfortably hold the ring. While I true statement, it is not the whole tale.

Ah, the promises of marriage that a ring holds. I saw his ring in the bathroom on the ledge – a block in the corner of our bathroom where we usually put a vase of flowers – and I wanted to put it on my thumb. I want him to understand that it’s not for lack of love that I’m doing this, but because of love. I’m holding him back. I’m causing him pain, and how I am right now, what I am, is not something I want to change. I’m being selfish, which is something that we’ve both done for our entire marriage. The problem isn’t that we enjoy being selfish, but that we nurtured the other person’s selfishness for so long. And now, when our selfishness is getting in the way of things, we don’t know how to handle it.

But I didn’t do it just for him. I did it for me to. I want to be happy, not angry or conflicted. And if the time apart can clear up the confliction, then that will have helped us both. But what if I want to go back and he wants no part of me? That’s a risk I have to take. He won’t be my friend, and sadly I have to say that is one thing that television has gotten my hopes up for. I want to be How I Met Your Mother kind of friends with my husband, even if we are separated. But I’m sure we can’t because in the end, I’ve hurt him more than any one has ever hurt him and will ever hurt him again. For that I’m sorry.

I just hope the resolve to be better doesn’t fade under the pressure of being alone.

When days are bad, it makes me contemplate the things that are going wrong in my life. Then I try to figure out practical steps to bring my life back on track. It might not be a right track, but it would be a track, rather than nothing.

What do I do instead?

Talking about television on a podcast… lamenting the eventual loss of redheads… having an amarula and remembering how much I wish I was as far away from my life as I’d been on my trip to Africa.

There’s so much I want to do and I don’t think I’ve figured out how to arrange my time so that I can do them all. All of my extra-curricular activities outside of working and all of my working outside of my extra-curricular. But I’m going to try I guess.

First things first? Kids in the Hall on Netflix Instant.

I like kids. I taught for nearly ten years. I was an drug and alcohol prevention specialist and an abstinence educator. We were abstinence until marriage, which meant we discussed the benefits of marriage for our students, for their kids, for society, for their future wealth, etc. That also meant we mentioned condoms and other forms of birth control. I spent ten years following the research on birth control and STDs and came to the conclusion that I also did not want to have sex until I was married, which I followed through on.

Before I got married, I wanted kids. Heaps of them. Despite rearing my brothers and sisters, I still thought having kids would be fun. I was hard, but fair and most kids liked me. I’ve always been able to wrangle great bunches of unknown kids and get them in line, a trait I thought would be very desirable as a future parent.

Then I got married. And had sex. And I realized that the things that I enjoyed about being married would be greatly ruined by having kids. I liked the freedom to go out with my husband whenever the whim struck us. I liked only having to cook dinner for two. I liked being able to walk around the house completely naked because it was only us two.

I think it was going to Wild Adventure that made us think about the cost of having kids, especially as we extrapolated that value to other amusement parks, movies, dining, and all the other things we love to do. It was already almost $40 each for us to get into the venue, but add children and the cost went up by almost $60 or more. I couldn’t imagine the people who had two or more kids having to pay nearly $200 to enjoy an amusement park. And the cost of food and drink – being at food events with kids showed me that kids wanted to eat what they see; it also showed me kids were very wasteful – went up astronomically as you added both food and drink to the 2 or more kids you are carting around.

We enjoyed our time at Wild Adventure, especially flowing down the lazy river in our inner tubes. We enjoy our lives together. We enjoy the relative simplicity and the great ease in which we get to be together. And if things go awry, we enjoy that the only thing that we will split is up. It’s not easy being married in this time of changing values. We want forever marriages but we don’t teach the value of meeting/waiting for the right person. We want to place the right value on sex, but we end up going too far in either direction. We place a premium on communication, but we all shy away from opening up to others and we haven’t been taught the value of keeping things shared privately private.

And so goes the ills of society and life. I’m not deciding against kids because my husband “doesn’t want kids” or because “society is so bad”. I’m not going to “change my mind” one day. I’m not going to be “sorry I haven’t built up child insurance for my old age” or any other of the various reasons women older than me give for the wrongness of my choice. But I do remember, every day at 2:30, that it’s time to take my no baby pills. Since I once taught abstinence, I know that birth control pills effectiveness, while high (in the 90th percentile) is not 100%, but I know it gives me a chance at realizing my dream. Not bringing a child into the world.

I do not send Christmas Cards.

I’m sure part of it is laziness. Too many friends, too many cards, too few handwritten ways to say, “You mean the world to me at Christmas.” Another part is how uncreative the whole idea of Christmas cards are. I hate writing generic greetings and trying to be creative for more than 50 people is just one more pressure I don’t want to endure at the end of the year.

Of course, the least of your worries is the above. What you have to worry about is forgetting someone or thinking that someone wouldn’t want a card. It can make or break relationships, at least in that person’s head. “Why didn’t she give me a card? Did I do something? Does she think she’s too good for me? Fuck that bitch!” You see how quickly that conversations degrades, don’t you?

Of course, I could just send out a holiday email, but everyone knows you blind cc’d it and it becomes the same problem as the simulgreeting – it’s just not written. Maybe I’ll never be a grownup. Whatever the case, Merry Christmas!

I’m not a cute redhead. I wish that I were. I just happen to have a strange fascination with redheads. People will talk about gingers as if they are the less desirable of the redheads, but they’re wrong. I love them all. I love their freckles. I love that most of them have extremely curly hair. I love their colouring. I just think redheads are beautiful.

So I was very sad to find out that genetics are trying to eliminate the redhead. It won’t happen in my lifetime, thank God. I’m glad that genetics works in a slow time frame. But it is still sad. So, as a future reminder that there existed such a thing as a redhead when the year 5950 gets here and they don’t exist, here are a few of my favourite redheads:

Carrot Top

Yes, I love Carrot Top. I may be the only one who does. I think he’s funny, but then again, I love silly puns as well. I’m not sure what he’s done with his eyebrows, but I do find his interesting still. He’s also the person that got me into Wendy’s.

Zach Ward

Scut Farkus (not sure of the actual spelling and don’t care) was one of my favourite characters in A Christmas Story. The pivotal scene where he gets the snot beat out of him for his nastiness is also one of my favourite scenes.

Damien Lewis

I loved the television show Life. I died a little inside when they canceled the show. Of course, it was this redhead that got me started. Actually, I loved the way the character was written, very hard with moments of lightness and a philosophical bent that aided in him finding peace outside of jail – or aided in tracking down the people that put him in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. A great show. I miss it very much.

Kevin McKidd

This is a sexy mutha…shut your mouth. I’ve loved watching him on Grey’s Anatomy, although I don’t l don’t really like how they’re writing his character. I first ran into him in Journeyman, although I’m sure I barely remember him from Trainspotting. I missed him in Rome and he is enough to make me want to go back and watch.

Lynn Kegan

Most people don’t know him because he’s not an actor, but he’s a celebrity in my book. I’m sure I drooled the first time I saw him on HGTV’s Designed To Sell. Ever since then, I watch specifically to see if he shows up. Yes, the other guys are good, but I just like looking at this one.

Seth Green

I’ve loved him since he woke up naked in a forest and said, “Huh.” Of course, that’s when he found out he was turning into a werewolf. Doctor Evil’s son, Robot Chicken, movies, and television shows… I think Seth Green is hilarious as hell.

Molly Quinn

She is so adorable, I don’t know what to do. Isn’t she? Isn’t she?

Of course the number one Redhead is a tie between these two awesome women

Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett

I love these very funny women. I spent the bulk of my teen life laughing at them. They were my comedy icons. I fail them miserably daily trying to be funny, but they are the ultimate on my comedy and redhead pyramid.

One day, redheads will be the death of me. As is only fitting.

Anyway, new crazy feelings coursing through my mind, new thoughts, and things I didn’t want to feel were all sitting in my psyche, taunting me. But I was also getting more and more sad and I thought it was the thoughts and realizations that were doing it.

I was wrong and what a relief, although the realization of what was truly eating at my emotions makes me even sadder.

People around me have been wondering about me because I’ve been drinking more. I made a promise to my husband that I wouldn’t get hammered every night, but I did not promise to stop drinking. I do things to limit myself. Instead of bringing my entire bottle of gin to a party, I just brought a flask worth. Three drinks later, I’m done for the night. Poverty helps with the rest, although every now and then my efforts are foiled by people who want to keep me drinking because they are. Because I’ve only been a heavier drinker in the past couple of years, I hadn’t figured out the triggering factor. Until now, that is.

In January, my father will have been dead for 2 years. My uncle will have been dead for 4.

My uncle was like a dad to me. When I was younger, I would visit him and he would do all the things that a dad should do. Despite the fact that he might not have been a good dad to his own children, though he did try, he was a great dad to me. He encouraged me to keep my grades up, gave my fragile ego the boost it needed when my grades were excellent, gave me advice on how to handle the bitchy preteens and teens at school, encouraged my competitive spirit and made me laugh.

My dad, on the other hand, was a sullen alcoholic that would rather sit in his room and watch westerns on television than interact with us. In my mind, I saw him as the person that stopped all of my attempts at being a normal kid growing up because I had to be responsible in his stead. He was abusive to my mom, and his drunkenness, like clockwork began on Friday night and didn’t end until early Sunday morning. When I was 10 years old, I gained a grown up understanding of what was going on and the thing that I’d been feeling since I was 6 blossomed into something harsh and destructive, something that now had a name. I hated him until I was 22 years old, even after finding out at 19 that he wasn’t my biological father and that he’d taken me as his own with no hint ever that I wasn’t his flesh and blood.

While I wouldn’t claim to be a traditional Christian, I do have a ton of God moments in my life. Losing my hatred of my father was one of them. It was weird. I’d begun trying to talk to him and be there for him because I realized that he wasn’t a monster, just a sad man with issues that began after his tour of duty in Vietnam. Every time we spoke, a knot would form in the place where my heart beat and I would get off the phone filled with anger – rage actually. It wasn’t anything he did necessarily, just the remnants of 12 years of interacting with him in hatred. One day, while sitting at my desk eating lunch, I felt as if a load had been lifted off of my shoulders. It was weird. I actually felt lighter. I didn’t know what happened, but I felt as if I could finally go on with the rest of my life. I just didn’t know why or why now.

The next conversation I had with my dad, I didn’t feel that burning rage in my heart. I never felt it again.

It was 2005, Thanksgiving. My uncle was the skinniest I’d ever seen him. I wondered if something were wrong, but I knew that I would be told if it was. He was in good humour, which was normal, but he didn’t look like his normal self. I still remember the feeling when he told me he had lung cancer. I still remember space collapsing around me. I still remember hearing his words from within a tunnel. Everyone else had known almost the entire year. I was the last one to know. What made it worse was that when he died, not even two months later and shortly after my birthday, I wasn’t told. I wasn’t able to be with him and the last time I saw him, the words, “I love you” went to his lifeless body, not to him. He didn’t know how much he’d meant to me outside of being my uncle. I resent my family for doing that to me. I’m not over it yet.

I found out the next Thanksgiving that my dad had throat cancer. I knew something was wrong because he sounded like a train had crushed his larynx earlier in the year, but he refused to go to the doctor. By the time he went, he was stage 4 and even though it hadn’t metastasized, it was still dire enough. VA benefits took so fucking long to come through that I thought he would die before my first trip to Europe. The problem would have been that his death wouldn’t have stopped me from going and I knew my family would hate me for it, even though my dad already understood. As he lay dying, we came to an understanding. It is weird. He couldn’t talk because he had a hole in his throat, but we communicated more than ever in our life. The day before I left for Europe, I went to visit him and his benefits had finally come through. He was now on chemo and he looked better. Much better. A part of me thought, “He could beat this!” That was in March.

In January of the following year, he fell out of his bed and my grandmother couldn’t lift him back in. They made arrangements to send him to a care facility. That night, in the care facility, he died. We all think that he clung to life because he didn’t want his mother to find him dead in the other room. Once he was free from being a burden to her, he stopped holding on. I’d saved my time to visit until Saturday after I taught my class of teenagers. Halfway through class, I got a call from my mother. I ignored it because usually she was calling to gripe about something I’d done. This time, however, it was to tell me that my father had died. I cried the 35 miles it took me to get from class to my grandmother’s house.

After that cry, I was tearless. In the light of day, I was the strong one. My family had lost two brothers or two sons, in a short period of time. Their faces were swollen and sad. My face was determined. My tears only came in the dead of night, after we buried him, when I couldn’t hide from them anymore.

If love could be used, I would say I didn’t love my dad. I think we’d come to a sort of mutual respect and understanding. Maybe I would say I didn’t love my dad because I’d lived the majority of my life not loving him. I don’t know. But I do know that the things that made the holidays with my family good no longer exists  and that my drinking increases. I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know how to handle it. I don’t know how to talk about it and I want to stop effing crying about it. I like the holidays with my friends, my new family in a way, because there isn’t the constant reminders and the requisite awkwardness of what is missing from our family gathering. Maybe all it takes is time to heal and I will be able to sit with my family without resentment. Here’s hoping all it takes is time.

I’m making new friends now and these new friends are sort of a complicated relationship. More complicated than any of my current friendships, but not in a bad way. It’s one of those things where if it works out, I could gain new best friends. I know people can’t have multiple best friends. Best implies the top, but my best friends run the gamut. My oldest friend is the guy that knows me best. My closest friend, who has only known me for about 5 years, knows me a bit, but she is someone I can confide in and who knows she can confide in me. My husband knows me really well. It’s one of those things where living with someone who gets to see your habits every day amps up the familiarity factor. 12 years with my oldest friend (OF) vs. 6 years with my husband (TH) gives them the same kind of information. It’s a little weird. OF may know things more quickly than TH, but they usually can read my expressions and body language and know what is going on in my head.

I’m one of those people who are usually so candid that I also end up not being able to hide my true feelings. Anyone who knows me knows that everything I feel is on my face. I don’t know if I’ve necessarily gotten better at hiding my emotions, but I do know that others have gotten better at pretending they don’t know what I’m thinking. It’s something I appreciate in my friends. 

It’s interesting that people want to protect me. Last night, I was sitting at my favourite watering hole on the back patio, the cool breezes blowing through my hair, over my face. I could feel anxiety within me. I identified that anxiety and told myself to let it go. I was waiting for my best friend to show up. I was waiting for a new friend, who came out with me and bought me a drink. I was being texted by other new friends who wanted me to hang out. I decided that I would let the anxiety go, at least for the moment, and accept the love of my friends, of my husband, or anyone who was willing to give it, and feel I truly deserved that love.

There are so many things about my life that is in turmoil. My emotions are jacked right now. I want to be more mature, but sometimes I feel like my maturity ran out about 8 years ago. I’d been responsible for my family since I was 6. I didn’t practically raise my siblings, I did raise them. My dad was basically the babysitter while I was in school, but when I came home, it was all me. Cooking dinner, cleaning, discipline, everything – it was all on me. For 20 years, I was the most responsible child and young adult I could be. I didn’t know how to have fun. Sometimes, I still don’t know. I’m too intense. I’m too conflicted. I’m too something I don’t want to be. And my feelings…

I’m glad that my friends are willing to take me at face value. I’m glad that they are willing to not push when I’m not ready to talk. I appreciate that they are there when I am ready to talk. Sometimes, I’m just glad for the hug that people are ready and willing to offer. For that, I’m very grateful.

Now, going home is like finding an unpaid parking ticket in last year’s jacket pocket. You know you have to take care of it, but it’s been so long, you’re not sure what the repercussions are going to be.

This year, if I hear my grandmother say something about my weight, I’m going to scream. This year, if my brother shows up drunk and disorderly, I’ll probably disown him. I will get to see my sister, which is good, but we won’t spend the quality time I would like to spend with her. Holidays with family has quickly become a hot mess.

For the past few years, I’ve been avoiding family, not because I don’t love them, but because I have nothing in common with them. A couple of years ago, I started leaving my family gatherings to go hang with a group of friends I’d gotten to know. I brought a dish, macaroni and cheese, which everyone liked. We sat around this big table trying everything and then we sat around the house in pods – and outside – drinking and smoking and conversing about nothing and everything. It reminded me of what holidays once were to me – a time to get together with people you like and just enjoy yourself.

This year, a lot of people I know went to their home out of town to visit family. You don’t think about how much you miss people until they are no longer at the table. This Thanksgiving would mark the 4th anniversary of my uncle telling me he had lung cancer and the last year I saw him at Thanksgiving. It also marks the 3rd anniversary of my dad finding out he had throat cancer. I would only see him for one more Thanksgiving before he died. No one blames me for not wanting to be there, but everyone wishes I would.

I don’t blame death for making family gatherings hard. That happened the moment I got married. But that’s another story altogether. As for now, I’m waiting for friends to return so that life will get back to the way I want it, surrounded by the family I’ve created.

I’m drinking PBR from a can – cheaper than going to the bar.

I’m watching the Doctor Who Christmas Special trailer and I can not WAIT until we get to see  it!!! (<— Doctor Who loving nerd)

I’m debating whether I should spend time with people I want to spend time with or if I should just go home.

I’m hoping that my heart can take what I’m about to make it endure.

I’m wondering what you’re going to do when the mayor of Hollywood wants someone to put their name on your big ass earrings (ha!)

I’m slowing feeling more like myself.

I could use another beer.

I wonder why rappers keep getting arrested. Is it really worth the street cred or does the three squares, free time and regulated schedule something that people who rap strive to achieve?

I wish I could eat a whole pizza, even though I know I’m not going to. I can almost taste it with my tongue.

I wish I had a higher tolerance for bullshit.

I wish that I didn’t feel the way I do.

It’s an esteem thing, of course, and that thing girls perpetually do. We never think we are good enough. I wonder, sometimes, if my weight is the cause of some of my problems. Then I think, that’s not fair, he gained weight too. But in the end, it’s just me staring at myself in the mirror wondering when this other skin started covering the real me up.

I tell myself that I don’t want to go to my weight when I was 25, but really, deep down, I do. I tell myself that weight will be too skinny for me now. I’ve seen too many girls who have gained a lot of weight feel like if they get back to the weight they once were, they will be beautiful again. The thing is, I didn’t feel beautiful at 25. I didn’t like anything about myself except my feet and my lips. Those are weird things to like, but once upon a time, I had oddly beautiful feet. People would comment on them. I painted the nails and wore sandals often. I treated my feet better than my hands. My hands are utilitarian, after all. Typing, fighting, popping my knuckles, more typing. The finger nails are brittle, not like my toes. My toe nails were even beautiful. But beautiful feet do not a beautiful person make. I liked my lips because they were, to some people, the only symbol of my blackness. Okay, so my ass was also a symbol. No matter how much weight I lose, I will always have a huge ass. The thing I hated about my behind is that, because it was so prominent, it made me a sexual target. Not a beautiful person.

My lips are luscious and full. They take up a good bit of my face. When I was younger and trying makeup for the first time, my mother chided me for covering the whole of my lips in a colour only a kind person would call fuchsia. It was a hot purple pink mess of colour in the middle of my face. I watched as my mom demonstrated lipstick application and found myself growing sad when she left out one third of her lips with two third coming into peachy view. I wanted to cry for my mom because she grew up in a time when her black features were so ugly, black girls did everything they could to be more like white girls. Under-lined their lips, straightened their hair, all in an attempt to fit into a stereotype for beauty that they could never reach. In my youth, white beauty was reaching into black features, plumping their lips with collagen, getting the tan that gave their skin that rosy mulatto that I came by naturally. They wanted to be me and I didn’t even feel beautiful.

Every now and then, even with the extra weight, I feel beautiful. He worked so very hard to make sure I knew I was beautiful, but what little I learned was destroyed as well. I am self conscious. Semi self conscious I guess is a better term. In rejection, those little glimmers of beauty I tried to hold on to found themselves flitting away. Once again, I am shy at a compliment. I think the only reason my friends compliment me is because they love me. I accept that love. Need that love. It buoys my soul, but my common sense about myself is eclipsed by my enormous lack of esteem. I think, perhaps, a part of me knows my friends are true and that part of me that sees through my bullshit will say something to a little part of my soul. Maybe I will get those flittering pieces of beauty back. Maybe I will be able to look anyone square in the eye, say I’m beautiful and believe it with every fiber of my being. Until then, I will continue to love my lips and my feet and hopefully that love will meet in the middle and spread throughout my body, like a river, healing my soul.