It's OK to Be Afraid

This blog has been the most amazing thing for me. I think that it started a bit before the transformation that has happened in the last week or so, but it has definitely served as a catalyst for some great things. I have gotten good responses to my posts and I love hearing your stories and messages. I am happy that there would be any piece of what I am writing that would be helpful to someone...anyone! I know that life can be a struggle for so many people. I also know when this all happened that my end goal was to find something positive through it all...something that I could take from my story and help someone else! And if right now my blog is the thing that will do that, then I am happy that I am finally heading in the right direction. I was apprehensive about the blog for a while. Some of you may know that I started a blog before and shared intimate details about my weight loss journey and random information. That was hard for me, but it helped me also. Weight has always been an issue for me and I figured if I went public with my struggle, it would snap me into the healthy patterns I was looking for. And when I was blogging, it totaly did! I was eating well and exercising and posting and...then I stopped. I am by nature a fairly private person, believe it or not. There are things that happened in my life that I'm fairly certain many of my readers know about, but I wouldn't dare post on this blog. Some things are better left unsaid, and some family issues are just too sacred to share with others. And that viewpoint may change as my girls get older and things happen and stories are told and the stars align just right. But, in the meantime, I'm more than happy to share the little tidbits of our lives that I have been sharing. Having a six-year-old and blogging off of her stories is a bit difficult. Amelia is wise beyond her years and I can almost always count on her to come up with something to give me for my blog, but then there are nights like tonight. There were no profound conversations. There were no Amelia-isms. There were only tears. You'll remember a few posts ago when I spoke of her infected tooth. Well, we are schedueld for an extraction in November, but while she was eating dinner tonight she heard a pop and part of the tooth broke out. Poor kid! Needless to say, there was only tears and anxiety and worry and calls to the dentist. She eventually cried herself to exhaustion and after reading our nightly fairy book, I tucked her into bed, kissed her goodnight, and listened to her one more time as she proclaimed that she was scared. I told her it was OK to be scared and that we needed to just stay calm and figure things out in the morning. She told me I was the best mommy ever and she rolled over and went to sleep. And just now as I'm typing this, I'm seeing the lesson here. I guess this will be a good blog because you'll be able to see how I come up with this stuff. This is completely off of my head and from my heart. There are no pre-written ideas or lessons, and this is a perfect example. I just finished telling you there was no blog post coming out of our one more thing mommy moment, but I just found it! So, here goes... I think I've messaged before that I go to therapy. After the events of the last few years, I think that therapy is an important part of my life. I hated it at first, but it's grown on me...and grown me! So, today I went to therapy as I do every Monday for the last year or so. I have felt so good, so euphoric for the last week or so that I didn't possibly know what I would have to talk about with her, but I went and thought we could talk about how great everything is going. I have spent the last year or so telling her how awful I feel and how sad I am and how anxious I was that maybe a positive conversation would be refreshing! Maybe I would even graduate from therapy. So, I sat in the chair and started talking about how great life is going. How we are all fine. How I feel euphoric and excited. How I feel like my heart contains so much love and joy that it just might burst. And then, I started talking about how anxious I am that it's not real. That it will all end and I will crash hard. And this brings me to my advice to Amelia. It's OK to be scared! You just can't stay scared. You have to be brave and trust that God has everything under control. Losing a tooth is a scary event, especially with the potential threat of surgery or extraction looming over your head. Losing the love you've learned to have for life is scary also. And having emotions is so important. You need to show sadness. You need to show happiness. You need to show fear! But you need to pray and have faith that God will bring you through those emotions and that you will end up right where you were meant to be. So, my Miss Amelia...even in the simple little lessons there are things to learn. It's OK to be afraid...it's what you do with that fear and where you land in the end that is the important piece. So, I'll let my heart have fear, but I will also know that the happiness that I am feeling is real and important and that all of this emotion will lead me to right where I'm supposed to be...healing, happy, whole!