My oldest son is getting married so I wanted to put together some kind of slide show and dusted off the old VHS tapes of his 1st birthday, things like that. My first idea was just to pay a camera store to do it, then I decided maybe I could do it myself? I found an adapter, I just couldn’t find a VCR ANYWHERE!! Then I remembered I had put our first video camera in a box in my closet, the big whopper camera with the VHS tapes directly in it. The camera was gone, my old journals were in there.
Transferring videos was on hold, I started reading. It starts when my husband and I met and goes through until we finally had our 2nd boy. Kind of documents our relationship at the very beginning and the struggles adjusting to being a family.
The thing it points out the most is how frigg’in lonely it is being a new mom when you don’t live by family. I grew up a beach girl, it was completely out of my element and I was trying to conform to a standard that just was never me. The things people said to me were awful!! There was a spot where I wrote I asked my husband if I could play volleyball in Santa Cruz a few weekends and he said “no.” Talk about trapped in suburbia.
What would I tell my 30 year old self? Go to Santa Cruz and play volleyball! I didn’t start doing the things I really loved to do again until I was 50 when the boys were gone (I don’t play volleyball anymore, I just can’t move in the sand). I tried so hard to be a traditional stay home mom, living for everyone else.
I don’t regret raising my boys one bit, they’re great men now. If I had to do it over again, I would have lived in a place where women were more like me and I had a lot more support. I was a fish out of water here and now it’s just out of control expensive to live in Manhattan Beach.
I still don’t know where home is? I’ve now lived half my life in NorCal and half in SoCal. I’m used to it here, it’s really close to everything. I miss having friends I grew up with. I see them having a blast on FB, I see the women here all together on FB too and I wonder when I got completely out of the loop?
Not to say I don’t have a great time sailing, it’s just that it would have been nice to enjoy that all along with friends that I really never seemed to make in life. One thing that I did have though was a phone. I could call people and chat, laugh and cry, I can’t remember the last time I had a good girlfriend chat on the phone. I could die and people would just put a sad face on my FB page.
I do have my boys as my buddies though, last week bringing the boat back and sailing with him was amazing for me. I adore his fiance too, I can’t believe I’m going to be a MIL. She’s not a sailor, that’s OK though. Sometimes it’s OK to be a girl and not be it all. I was trapped in a woman’s body (I’m straight BTW). Inappropriate to hang out with men, yet not one of the girls either. That’s been my biggest problem in life.
