What to Do?

days ago I posted something about me hating Christmas, and you know that was a really rash post.

It is not the holiday that I hate it is all the expectations that come with it.

I have a huge family. HUGE. Just my brother and sisters kids alone spending no more than like ten bucks a piece on them break the bank, then we have all the cousins that live around here, aunts uncles, dad, moms, our own kids...

After I got my mothers card, and read it many times over something in me changed. That night I started on our Christmas tree, and not like in years past. Before, I would just put it up, not even care that the limbs were not straight...this time, I did it right. Two hours plus putting just the tree up...making it all symmetrical and everything. Then the next day we spent hours and hours doing all the lights and beads and decorations. Ryan and I had so much fun, and it looks sooooo pretty. And then I realized something....

I have more to be grateful for this year, than I have in the last three. I am not sick this year...although I did fall ass first down my back stairs today, my son is happy, and he is in our lives.

This year has been so full, so wondrous, and yes we have had our ups and downs, but you know...I would not trade them for anything, because when the day is done, I go to bed with love in my heart and know that there is someone out there who loves me too.

I know I have been super bitchy lately, and there has just been so much going on that is not right...but...I also know that through everything, he is there. As I am for him.

This year, I have been given so much. I have great friends, a wonderful, loving, if not over energetic little boy, my family is healing slowly, my godson was born, and I met him. I have so much to be thankful for, but sometimes it takes looking at what we think is the worst, to realize what it is that we have. This week has done that for me.

Oh yeah...I even went to church...and...kinda liked it.

*smooch*

As some of you know, my real mother gave my to my father when I was three months old. I never spoke to her, as when I was old enough to finally get up the courage to ask about her, she had already died.

For the majority of my life, I lived with this resentment in me, almost hatred towards her. I could never understand why someone would give up their child if they loved them. After I became a mother, that resentment became loathing.

Today I received a Christmas card. My sister found it when she was looking through some of our moms things. My mother wrote it to me when I was two years old. The envelope was addressed, and even had a stamp on it. However she never mailed it.

In that card was her words, her handwriting, her feelings. I opened it at the post office, and had to sit there while I cried, pouring over it, trying to grasp at every little clue as to why she walked out. There are no answers in it, but it did heal my heart a little today.

I went to my dads, I had to show him, and ask again what happened that day that she left. He read it, and as tears came down his cheeks, he said, Tara I did not know. I would have taken you to see her, if I had known she wanted to see you.

See as far as I know, she never called, she never wrote, she never did anything, other than kiss my forehead goodbye as she told my dad that he could have me and she would keep the other two. Then she left. That is pretty much the same story I have heard my whole life.

I cried, I balled, I got all snotty, and I suspect I will again later today when I take it out once more before putting it away for good. I needed this. I needed to know that my real mother loved me. As much as I needed it now, I needed it 27 years ago more.

*sigh*

I posted a comment on someones blog, about how I backed into someone on purpose once. I did not say who that someone was, so I thought I would explain it here. Seeing as it was my dad, and his brand spanking new Subaru Legacy.

Long story short, me and my dad had some really really rough years. I am not going into details, but we both did things to each other that parents and children should never do.

I was working in Charleston at the post office at the time, and he was once again mad at me. I was 18, had just moved back in from the last time he kicked me out, was paying rent, buying all of my own food, and I had came home later than what he set my curfew at the night before. I had told him I would be late, but he blocks my truck with his car, so I can not leave. I asked twice for him to move, because he knows and I know that I am a hot head. He refused and just stood there yelling at me. SO I grabbed my keys and said if you do not move, I will get out anyway.

I went out side, got in my little truck, and hit the side of his car. I hit it three different times, until there was enough room for me to squeeze out of. Then I went back inside and told him what I had did. You know what....he laughed. He laughed because it was the same thing he would have done. He told my step mom he had no idea who did it, and turned it into insurance. He kicked me out again a week later...for being late on curfew.

Two things...

One, a picture of Ryan before playing in the snow yesterday. I swear all the padding added about 10 lbs to the kid... Can you tell he only weights around 50 lbs and is 4'4"?

The second, Netscpape always has cool sites of the day. I was sitting here drinking my tea, looking back on all the ones I missed and came across this one. It is sweet and romantic, but glad it is not me...

http://www.daveloveselizabeth.com/

Smooch

Hornbeam Tree (the Good Taste) -- of cool beauty, cares for its looks and condition, good taste, is not egoistic, makes life as comfortable as possible, leads a reasonable and disciplined life, looks for kindness and acknowledgment in an emotional partner, dreams of unusual lovers, is seldom happy with its feelings, mistrusts most people, is never sure of its decisions, very conscientious.

Find your tree...click the title.

Many of you know who Stanley Tookie Williams is, I am sure. Being a Criminal Justice Major, this is a case that my ethics class has been looking at this semester.

First my opinion. Do I think he deserved full clemency...That would be a no. Based on the amount of victims there have been in the years since the Crips was founded, he should not be given clemency. Even though he did not kill them, rape them, violate them, take their childhoods from them, take family members away, rob them, burglarize them or terrorize them personally...what he started has and that makes him indirectly responsible for the actions that have occurred.

I do think however that his sentence needs to be re-looked at. He is the model of what the Criminal Justice System is supposed to do. The system is not so much in place for retribution as it is for rehabilitation. Punishment is only a small part. The biggest is rehabilitation. He has shown that he has been rehabilitated. Does that mean he is safe enough to walk the streets? Who knows, all I know is I do not feel he deserves to be free. Nor do I feel he deserves to die.

He has done everything that has been asked. He has became a model prisoner, and has spoke out and reached out to the kids who may be looking at a life within a gang. To me that is a lot. I feel that there is so much more that he can do, that he would be able to do, if he were not scheduled to die in the wee hours of the 13th. He has been nominated for the Nobel peace prize. He continues to fight against gangs, with his website, and his book...

But that still does not change that indirectly he has been involved in so much crime. So much pain. So much anger, torment, loss, and sadness. There are so many victims out there and many who do not even realize that they are victims, because of something he helped to start.

Reading the Gov. words about why he denied clemency, I simply shake my head. He doesn't get it. This man has done everything that he has been able to to show remorse. To make things right. His life should be spared. But instead of doing what is right, there is a decision made to uphold the courts decision. The same courts who refused to reopen the case to allow DNA evidence to be presented. The same courts who have denied his motions time and time again.

Tonight, I will say a silent prayer, that his death will be quick. That he will feel no pain. But I know he will. I know about death sentences. I know how inhumane they really are. But still, I will pray that his GOD takes him quickly, and sees the good that has came from so much bad. Sees the man he became instead of the tormentor he once was.

Today, I am sitting here in his house working on school work, listening as Ryan plays quietly in the background, as Dora is on the TV. I hear the washer kick off, and watch the cars move up the street from the back door window, and realize that this is exactly where I want to be. This is exactly what I want to be doing. This is what fits. What is right.

Today, I am happy.

Amazed
Amazed.mp3

Today, after Ryan gets out of school, I head to Atlanta once again. I have to be back to school Friday by noon to take an exam, but he is coming with me. My drunk mom will be here Friday afternoon, and she has to meet him. This meeting is one I am not worried about at all. She is more like a friend than a mom.

Somethings up...my dad is actually being nice this morning. After days of arguing, he is being nice. I think he is having problems letting someone else do the things that he has done for me for so long. After I looked at it that way, thanks baby, I had to laugh at the way my dad has been acting. Kinda like a spoiled kid.

*smooch*

My niece sent me an email while I was gone, and it had this little ditty in it. I think she said she got it from about.com, but for now, I will credit Kristie's email...

Mike's 10 Commandments of Marriage:

When my youngest son was married a year ago, he asked me to be his best man. Therefore, I had to propose the first toast to the new couple. I wanted it to be as much a gift as an acknowledgement so I wrote the following and used it. These are what I apply to my current marriage, as does my wife. They may have saved my former marriage but I hadn't thought it through then.
Marriage is the sum of all its many parts. If any of those parts is missing, the marriage is missing something essential. Here are those necessary parts.

1. Friendship: Ideally, before you marry you become friends.
You really take the time and make the effort to get to know one another. In time that friendship begins to take on an innocent intimacy because you feel free to discuss personal issues you would only talk about to a true friend.

2. Relationship: Over time the friendship develops into a relationship. You begin to know one another more closely and, in time, there is an exclusivity about the two of you and others know that you are together and becoming one.

3. Love: As the relationship grows, love replaces like and there is sentimentality about the relationship that goes beyond acquaintance and becomes longing and need. You want to spend all your time together.

4. Commitment: Becoming engaged signals a commitment, one to the other, which, at the proper time, is solemnized with a ceremony meaningful to both parties and you have now become husband and wife with every intention of making the bond inseparable and permanent.

5. Fidelity: This is what you pledge when you marry -- forsaking all others and having an exclusive relationship wherein there is trust, constancy, shared vision and unquestionable loyalty to your mate.

6. Individuality: Each of you bring your own, individual and unique strengths and weaknesses into the marriage. While the act of marrying implies a melding of these, you each fell in love with the individual you are now married to and while a marriage is full of compromise, each must retain the individuality that made you fall in love in the first place.

7. Independence: Each of you must be available for the other to lean on occasionally but not to smother. Ideally, when times are difficult you lean together to combine your strengths. Neither should be wholly dependent upon the other but each should be able to depend on the other. Maintain the delightful independence which brought you together while working together for the common good.

8. Equality: Each of you must give 100% to the marriage and to each other, and more. No one of you is more important in or to the marriage than the other. Neither of you is subservient to the other. Both of you have equal responsibilities and equal rights within the marriage and your lives together.

9. Mutuality: In all things you must present a combined front to the world. There will be many things that may wear on or tear at your relationship but if you face them, strong and united, they can never prevail against you.

10. Spirituality: Whatever your independent and individual beliefs, marriage is a uniting of the spirit as much as it is of the flesh. If you have no spiritual belief in and bond to your marriage, you will be lacking that which sets us aside from the beasts of the field.

In the bible there is a passage about the first and great commandment and a second that is like unto it. In marriage, the first and great commandment is "Put your marriage first." The second is, indeed, like unto it. "Put everyone and everything else second to your marriage." Children come, grow and go. Parents pass on. Siblings and other relatives scatter. Friends relocate or you may grow beyond them, or them beyond you. Jobs and the people in them change. In the end, all you have to totally rely on is yourselves, and all that within the framework of your marriage. -- Mike

This coming from her is something big. She is younger than me, but we have had a lot of the same trials in our lives. She also wished me and my sweetie many years of happiness in our lives together, and I hope that one day he will be able to meet her and her wonderful little boys. Maybe after Christmas.

Okay, so I am home now, and have the ability to post pics of my new godson without having to curse out the computer.

The proud parents of baby Dylan.

Dylan, the man of the hour.

Momma

Papa.

A precious moment.

I simply do not know who is sweeter.

Sweet Slumber.

Just so no one gets confused, the baby is not mine, it is my godson. I. Only have one kid, and he is 7, and likely my only.

That is my new little man. I have some other pics of him, but on dial up and not alot of time to post.

He came home today, and weighes 5'9" now. Ryan weighed 5'4" when he was born, so it is a lot like having him all little again. Mom is not so good, she is 30 and the pregnancy put to much strain on already strained hips, and she has to have one side replaced within 5 months. The other has maybe two years. They want another baby, but it looks like this may be it for them.

*smooches*

My GodSon was born on Nov. 29, and weighed 6.5 lbs and was 19 3/4 inches long. He is just perfect.

One thing though, is my friend Amy had to have a C-section because of a childhood disease that affected her hips and legs. It is something that she does not like to talk about, and apparently she has been having pains that she has not told anyone but her husband about since the begining of her third trimester. I told her either she tells the Dr. or I would. She knows that if she had not told, I would have totally let it all out. Today she told them about the disease, and they sent hr for x-rays and an Orthpedic Dr. will be visiing her. You know, when your leg locks in place and refuses to rotate in the joint, something is wrong. Hopefully after the scolding she got today she will take better care of it.

Back to my little man. His Name is Dylan Thomas. Not after poets, but after her dad. He is simply beautiful, and I cannot wait to be Auntie Tara.

My sweetie came to NC to meet me and little Dylan. Every minute that I spend with him makes up for all the ones I have spent in this life without him.

I will post baby pics when I am home and not in the sticks of NC and have my DSL and not dial-up. How do people do this?

Friday, December 23, 2005

Happy Holidays

Monday, December 19, 2005

A few

Friday, December 16, 2005

27 years late

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Elaboration

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Quickes

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Taken from Minnie...

Monday, December 12, 2005

More Seriousness

Thursday, December 08, 2005

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

On the road again...

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

10 Commandments

Monday, December 05, 2005

More pics

Clarification

Saturday, December 03, 2005

Friday, December 02, 2005

Baby update