I was not raised christian, or with any religion in particular but I believe it was infused in some way because after reading an article this morning about female masturbation and how taboo it is to put it lightly.

A friend of mine has ‘outed’ some of her sexual escapades with her book “Single Mom Seeking
” which is a great book that I can relate to in a lot of ways reflecting back on my single mom days of dating.

Back to the point though, I was thinking about writing about masturbating because I don’t think enough people do! I once signed up to be a consultant for a well known MLM that sells adult toys and props such as swings and lingerie but when it came down to it, aside from random leads who I didn’t know, I was too shy to ask any of my friends to host a party so I could sell some of the toys.

Fortunately at about the same time I signed up for that company I also signed up for Arbonne which is much more in line with what I promote and believe in which is well summed up by their “Pure, Safe, and Beneficial” tagline. I am very much in the process of detoxing my life and this has been a big part of it. All my personal care products such as shampoo, lotion, soap, sunscreen and even premixed shakes and fizzy tabs are all Arbonne, and I love to use and share them.

I’m not writing about that though, back to masturbation. I don’t know if it is the same for everyone but I know that for me I have at times been a bit jealous about the ease that men seem to be able to reach orgasm. It took me years of being sexually active to achieve this and while the first one I had was orally induced by my partner at the time…it never happened again that way. Sure all that my various partners since then tried felt very nice, but it didn’t quite do it for me.

So when I discovered vibrators, which happened in my teens but didn’t find the ones that for me could ‘do the job’ until I was in my twenties. I do not remember the exact age I was, but I remember it was a really good thing, and that I liked it very much.

Dildos never really did it for me, I found that they did help when being used in conjunction with a vibrator but alone they didn’t do much for me, not as much as the real thing though. If anything they made me laugh, because yes, I think penises look funny, and fake ones even funnier.

So, I was kind of disheartened in the ‘toy party’ industry for this reason too, I had such conflict!! See, my favorite toy is one that is really a “All-Body Massager
“that I bought off of Amazon at some point. It’s actually kind of a funny story about how I found it too.

Prior to finding my “PIB” (plug-in boyfriend) I was using lowly battery operated ones…and they tended to die at the worst possible moment that I found extremely frustrating. So one day, when I was with someone years ago, I noticed that when he used his clippers it made SUCH a loud noise! Later I had a thought that went something like this, “If it is that loud, then it must have a really powerful vibration too…” and that led to be ‘trying’ it, and with my hand I felt the power…and beyond that, I actually wrapped it up (yes, the clippers at this point) and it was great!! So I searched online and when I saw that the same brand had a vibrator and it wasn’t just for trimming hair, I bought it immediately and have owned one (at times two) since then.

So on that note…I’m going to sign off and walk out in this lovely sunny day we’re having. I believe everyone deserves to have a regular orgasm whether they have a partner or not and whether they want their partner involved or not if they do have one, it is up to us each individually to meet our needs in this area!!

I love it and I’m glad they are still around and even better!!!

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Soon it developed into my neck down.. or I should say my neck got all ‘feverish’ and I lost feeling/strength and coordination below that. It was not cool in other words!! By Friday I was in my old neurologist’s office and being shuffled for my 3 days of steroids to begin…they did nothing and by the end of the weekend it was worse. It took me until Wednesday to get ahold of my neuro again and so I called a different doctor who saw me the following Friday.

At this point this was all almost a month ago, and fortunately after having 2 extremely difficult weeks I did start to improve. I went through insane ups and downs, the MA program I planned on applying for had a 2/1 application due date and at that point I could BARELY type at all, meaning I had to literally watch my fingers as they typed because I couldn’t ‘feel’ which keys they ere on. I think at this point my fingers are about 70% better though thankfully. Prior to the last week in January, I spent days not even able to do that, and days typing with just my pointer finger on my left hand (I’m a righty but my left hand had more control) and when it came to writing with pen and paper I was using my left hand to ‘lead’ my right. One form I had to fill out to get my transcript sent to me me which pretty much consisted of my address, social, name, and date of graduation took about TWENTY minutes to write by hand and it looked like a child or very drunk person wrote it.

I did manage to get my application in on time though, well, on the extended time (last Thursday) so I’m VERY grateful for all the support the admissions staff gave me. Hopefully I’ll have some more news to share soon! I have lots of other stories to share from January but I have a beautiful little teething 10mo climbing up my leg so I gotta go…plus I have some pre-requisite homework to do in Personality Psychology…

I’m not pregnant this year and am looking forward to doing the walk with BOTH of my lovely daughters this year.

I have upped my goal to $1,000.00 dollars this year as well, and hopefully can help coordinate the starting of many similar teams across the country too!! I will post information updates here and also on MomsWithMS.com

Anyway, I have gotten started and already had to stop, at least for today because I got to a part of my life that I do not have clear memory of. I have lots of random ‘scenes’ that pop up but don’t clearly fit together in my head. It is an interesting challenge to make a story out of the past with this kind of memory. At this point I am going to be digging for some of the old journals, though I know these do not tell the whole story, this part of my life I had no privacy and my journals were being read by other people daily and so were written in a way that they would be reading what I interpreted as content that would get me out of the situation. It had nothing to do with what I was really thinking and feeling in other words but I am hoping that it will still trigger some kind of memory so I can tell the story.

If the journals don’t help then I plan to write all those little excerpts and maybe that is how I will write them, it will be a kind of random set of memories that can be read as I remember them and maybe writing them like that I will find some kind of structure, I figure if I don’t then it just means they are meant to be communicated like this though.

I will also soon be writing some other ebooks with my husband for our other new site “A Niche To Scratch” as we are working together to help people to do what they are driven to do, and monetize their niche in life through the internet in ways that make sense.

Back to the life stuff though, I am thinking I might have to scan parts of the journal to put into the book as well as pictures.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving, I sure did. I was home with my girls and my husband who did ALL of the cooking in a wonderful couldn’t be better way. We did a little video of what we are grateful for and everything. Loved it as it was the best Thanksgiving ever, no pressure, no drama, all love. We spent the rest of the weekend having fun visiting family and running errands, it ended too soon.

I will absolutely be checking email and other sites @ least once every day or two still but responses might take longer.

Ironically my time will be focused on getting web design jobs probably, which I’ll pretty much be doing from starbucks.

It sucks because the way my husband has our phones set up, my phone, his phone, internet, and data plan to the phones are all linked, so that makes it expensive AND it makes it so if we can’t make the payment on time…all is lost at the same time too. Plus since we were already 30 days late, once it goes to 60 we have to make the FULL payment plus reactivate to get back in business.

I’m starting a 10 hour a week job watching another little 6mo which I’m looking forward to, that starts tuesday.

It’s crazy how hard it is to find a job these days what with the recession and all. My husband got rushed through 3 interviews for a position about a week and a half ago and then suddenly no call back at all, not a yay, not a nay. Meanwhile I’ve been applying for at least 3 jobs a week, I have to because I’m on unemployment, and nothing aside from this childcare gig has come through. It’s a trip considering I was making about 2.5 times the rate I’ll be making an hour and had benefits just about 7 months ago.

Anyway, surprisingly I’m not that upset, I’ve kind of accepted it and decided it’s time for me to write more, so I’ll be probably doing better writing too, the old fashioned way with that ‘word’ program and then bringing it to the cafe to upload. That is I will write as long as the daycare my daughter is at will let her keep coming. I might have to switch her to part time or fully pull her out of preschool because of this money stuff, I’m behind there too.

I think it would be great if we could just do everything based on a barter system, you know that whole you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours? There seems to be a lot of people who need ‘cheap’ websites, so I think I’ll pick up a couple of those low paying gigs just to build up my portfolio and then start going after the real design jobs…

In my dream world I’m finding a way to make this whole site into a non-profit so that I can help moms who are in a situation like mine. It’s the long term goal, if you want to chat about how to make that happen let me know, I’m a passionate designer wi/out a lot of non-profit experience aside from being a part of the board for a couple. I’m told to not bother even being an official 501(c)3 until I’m bringing in 6 figures but I have to get a lot more organized to make that happen. I’ll be working on that too though as that is where my passion is pulling me.

See everyone around, hopefully this won’t take long!!

“I know you
I walked with you once upon a dream
I know you the gleameoi is so…”

Here’s where I must stop, take a deep breath while I’m listening to her and focus on not laughing….she’s singing with all her heart, drawing out the sounds and being very passionate and then it comes out:

“Chamele-uglee!!!”

To which my husband at some point cracks a little joke to say that it’s a word to describe someone who is ugly no matter how they change themselves like a chameleon does.

I love listening to the way that songs get interpreted by my little princess…and I enjoy it so much that I don’t necessarily correct her or tell her the ‘right’ way to sing it. I love the way that she makes it her own. The first song she did this with was “Little Star” which I’ll never forget, however it is gone now and I miss it. She used to sing it just as passionately as she now sings the princess tunes and it went like this:

“Twinkle twinkle LITTLE star (‘little’ was said with a lot of emphasis)
How I wonder what you are..”

here it comes…

“Up a bubble in sky
Like a diamond in the sky
twinkle twinkle LITTLE star
how I wonder what you are.”

I love my little munchkin…and I can’t wait til she starts teaching songs to her little sister.

It is and isn’t hard to remember what it was like back then, I was 18 and had just moved to NYC where I was absolutely living it up and loving it. I was partying in the clubs, hanging out with guys driving Porsches and of course attending my first semester at a top design school…I was feeling GOOD!!

Anyway, back to now. I have been very distracted over the last nine days because I just moved, along with my husband and 2 girls of course, into our HOUSE. House is capitalized because for me, it is OMG..we’re living in a house!!! The house was in shambles most of the time I’ve known my husband (he owned it quite a few years before he met me) and I’m absolutely blown away by his actually getting it completed as far as he has!!!

Now of course I’m irritated because there is literally boxes surrounding me about as high as my head and I can’t get to most of the house…this is new since I left this morning with the girls to give him a break to make some progress. I’m happy my 4yo was able to climb over/around/through the disaster to the computer on the other side of the room to put on Toy Story and entertain herself…and the room next to where I’m sitting, eventually the girls room, is clear and safe for my almost 6mo to crawl happily around. In other words life is good, I hear him thumping downstairs, he’s claiming we’ll go through these 3+ dozen boxes very quickly, which I’m sure will happen though fast enough for a decent bedtime I’m doubting.

It’ll all work out though, it always does. So back to the 10 years…in those 10 years I have learned quite a bit.

I’d say the first thing I learned, was that being hospitalized for something serious is a GREAT way to figure out who your true friends are. I had friends who came regularly, bringing things like sushi (Thank you V!!) and others (one of the porshe guys) who didn’t stay long because parking was expensive…(Really? Compared to owning a Porsche in NYC?).

Once I left the hospital, using a paraplegic cane to walk around carrying my giant portfolio filled with a variety of different kinds of paper to class I think 3 times a week, I learned about what it was like to be handicapped. It’s hard, and especially being young and healthy looking, people seem to really think that you’re faking it, this is a lesson confirmed when I became pregnant about 6-7 years later and in the midst of the first trimester sickness couldn’t get a seat on the bus…I didn’t ‘look’ pregnant.

I also learned, once I felt better, that it didn’t serve me at that point to tell people about my medical nonsense, it too easily became the main topic of my life and I found that tiring. I was the one that ended up avoiding relationships with people I’d been open with just to avoid the topic at times.

Saddest lesson of all, similar topic, was that I simply couldn’t trust some people. A teacher I loved who seemed to care about me a great deal as well, went to my boss who fortunately I was open and friends with, that my boss should be careful, that I had ‘funny’ things wrong and implied I wasn’t trustworthy because of this. I never forget my boss looking me dead in the eye, telling me to come to his office, and tell me firmly, “Do not trust that man.”. It was a surprise, a heartbreaking one considering it was 3 years since I’d taken a class with him and clearly been doing just fine, and doing anything like that, talking behind my back about my weaknesses would only serve to hurt me. Ouch.

Oh, and I guess I skipped it but I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis 2 years after my stroke diagnosis. It was 2001 and I’d had heart surgery about a week after 9/11 and then lost feeling/strength in my right side (stroke had been my left) and was dx with MS sometime in November that year.

I’d been with a guy from late 1999 until I was pregnant as well, through him I learned the valuable lesson that someone sticking by me through the terrible medical probing and such that lead to an MS diagnosis is a wonderful thing, but not wonderful enough to stay once the relationship became abusive. In 2005 through my pregnancy with my first daughter I learned what it was like to be one of those girls written about in Cosmo when he started threatening me. He started threatening to get someone to hit me, then this progressed to threatening he’d hit me, at one point he grabbed my neck, it transitioned to him threatening to kill me, and when my daughter was about 6mo I hit the point where I’d had enough. I wouldn’t allow my daughter to witness this kind of treatment, and I left him. So the lesson from this story was that no matter how good someone is, they aren’t worth staying with just for that reason. Especially if they become abusive.

Fortunately, I am very stubborn. I’m a very by the books Taurus in this respect and once I make a decision, I consider it made and it is done, I did not look back after spending 6 months near NYC and no progress being made I moved across the country to Seattle which is the best decision that I ever made. Speaking of that decision, it was made in Oregon. I had flown across the country with my daughter in the midst of all of this madness for a froofy family reunion in the middle of Oregon which consisted of me flying across the country to Portland with her on my lap, renting a car in Portland and making the beautiful drive from Portland, up to the mountains, across the plains, and I think it was at one of those first rest stops after crossing the mountains that I realized that I had to come back to the west coast, which is where I was raised. Who was I to keep these kinds of experiences from my daughter? Seeing the beautiful mountains, vast plains, animals, trees, snow, and laid back culture of the west coast? I wasn’t a big enough person to keep her from all that, and we flew to Seattle just a few short months later. Once coming west, I learned that I had a hell of a lot of valuable assets to offer!

Professionally, I was seamlessly streaming through the ranks at the company I was initially hired on as a $10/hr temp. Soon I was a first level technical support person, then a top level escalation support person, and then chosen as the employee of the quarter in 2008!

While all of that was going on at work, I learned that having MS or not, I was not ‘damaged goods’ because I had MS, nor because I was a mom, nor because of my daughter being mixed race. I was power dating like crazy, I laugh as I remember one co-worker, a conservative guy I worked with, being furious at me one day! Why was he mad? Because I had 3 dates that day…I had a coffee break date, a lunch date, and a happy hour date. Talk to any dating single mom and I like to think she’d give me props, that was tough to coordinate but so productive! I didn’t really like any of them, but it helped get the dating but out of my system, and get over the guy I’d been seeing before that who had taught me that my standards had been too low, and I could get a great guy if that is what I wanted. From there on out I didn’t put up with anyone who ‘didn’t quite cut it’ and I soon met my husband.

Speaking of my husband wow…yeah, we were absolutely destined to be together. I remember the night we met, lol. My good friend was watching my daughter, if I’m remembering right I’d been scheduling days ahead of time and scheduling in dates to fit that schedule and for once, I think one of the first times, I did not have a date! So I decided to take myself for a date, I went and I got my favorite sushi with sake, then I think I walked about 2-3 miles from there (it was July so very nice out) to the neighborhood I’d just recently moved to. I was almost home when I got a call from her saying she’d be late, I was actually 2 blocks from my apartment and standing outside of 2 bars, instantly I thought it would be great to meet some of the locals! There were some younger guys hanging outside the bars smoking or something and I asked them which bar they recommended for ‘someone like me’ younger/urban type crowd. They made the call and I went on in…my husband came in pretty soon after me eating a gyro with his dog happily sitting under his bar stool. I remember I’d tried talking to a girl there at the bar and she was much more interested in her book, and when he came, I started a conversation based on not being able to read the chalk beer menu, I definitely don’t know my beers at all so I was probably trying to figure out which one I would like. I remember one called the “Howling Pig” or “Pig Whistle” or something to do with a pig being a topic of conversation. A drink or two later and we were already ‘joking’ about how we might as well get married now rather than waste time on the details. A year and…13 days after meeting we were officially married, a year and 14 years after meeting we were in Belize!

So I learned a lot, and things are turning out really well. Now I’m living in my home. I have a home. I am one of those displaced folk who don’t have any parental homes that feel like ‘home’ at all, my parents have all moved multiple times since my living with them and their place is their place for shizzle, so this is very special to me. My favorite part is I have a husband and two beautiful little girls to share it with. Cheers to that!