Pregnancy does not define you as a woman

You know something about me that people who take time to get to know is that I try and focus everyday on becoming a better person..to change something about myself, to seek answers to this crazy life....and an answer I have found in the past week is learning that becoming pregnant has turned me from a lady into a woman. A woman who has to learn compassion, patience, kindness, but I believe the biggest thing I found that I learned was the way you let the experiences, trials, the feelings that transform you into who we are suppose to be...the people we talked about in heaven and planned to become. 

Pregnancy will always bring the heartburn, the random outbursts of crying, SUPER weird cravings and having weird dreams...but my favorite is going baby shopping!!! :)

I wanna tell you a little secret about this baby that will be joining me, she was something that I never planned to come into my life at this time...I never knew that her daddy would have nothing to do with her life...cause in my mind, I was going to have the "fairytale" ending...you know I would be married, I would have a home to go to everyday and be the girl who was able to stay home, cook dinner, clean the house and wait for my hubby to come home after a long day of work and we put the kids to bed and enjoy our alone time...but my life hasnt been that way..and it has been one of the biggest transitions I have had to learn to accept...my life went from this independent life...to now, where I am losing everything, my car, my place, not having a job for whatever reason that might be...(that in and of itself takes a lot of lost pride) and not having the finances to buy all the things I have always wanted...My dream was to have a nursery for my baby, to have a rocking chair, to have a stroller, and a highchair....but you know the dream that I had always in visioned has brought me a new dream. A dream where I spend moments crying with my BBFF (my mom) we get to go find $1 outfits, I get to experience the blessing of people being so kind to reach out and want help me. I get to experience the feeling of a single woman, I get to experience what I have always believed I would be and watch it come to past. But the biggest thing that I have come to grips with is letting go..Letting go of what does NOT matter, what should not come between me and the baby, what wont define me as woman.

Sunday was a life changing day in my life, I dont know if there are any other girls

 out there going thru something as similiar as I am...but I highly doubt I am the only one going thru it and that is being pregnant out of marriage and I am LDS. People could talk about this subject for hours...Trust me, I know this..but my point of it to bring it up isnt to bash on how judgmental people can be and how the church has a huge part in family. My point to bring up the emotions that people dont talk about. It is so hard to sit in a room in relief society when you can look around and you find that these women have a man who provides for them, that their finances SEEM to be taken care of...and that is when reality hits you and you begin to feel like a failure. You feel like you are the only one in the world who is going thru such an experience, you think of all the could of, should of and would of's...but a lesson I have come to learn is LET people think what they want..but that is NOT what defines you as a woman, that doesn't define your character, it does not define your potential and it doesnt take away God's love that he has for you. If anything it helps you learn what his love is ALL about and it inspires you even more to become the parent that you wanna be. A parent who looks past your faults, who looks past your mistakes, who loves you for your shortcomings, for what is to make/shape you into ALL you are to come.

Something about Pregnancy teaches you that life will begin to line up, things will change for you, and not for any other reason but to prepare you for bigger and better things.

Pregnancy is all about Progression!

There are women all around me, getting pregnant...creating life and bringing it into this world...and what more comfort that can bring to a heart that feels so uncontrolled of her emotions and the world around her. Yet thru the lack of control, comes experience, knowledge and trials that often words cant even be put on them and that is what often sets each of us apart from one another. Because just cause the process of creating life is the same...life outside the belly isn't.

As this journey began for me, when a baby changed everything..I was going to begin it with the baby's dad, Jared Astel. We had everything that seemed to be "perfect" exactly how anyone would want there life to be. In love, a baby on its way, and fiances that would take care of everything that was the in between. The things that seem to be put together and less talked about. This baby wasnt planned, but if it were to happen I felt like we were ready for the challenges, the excitement and all the changes that would come into play...its amazing when serious things in life happen, does it truly bring out a side of someone that not everyone around us gets to see...

As that side of him became more evident to me...you know that side where I saw how irresponsible he was. How that trickled into everything in his life and who he was...and what kind of life is that where you feel more lonely next to that person, then you do when they are away.

 I knew I had a decision that would change everything going on around me, it would change the dream job I had been working at, Independence that I only found at the end of everyday, simply because every decision I ever made was set on, whether I wanted to do it or not. By those decisions it either effected my fiances, where I was living, what I was driving and what I was eating..I had nobody else was going to pick up that slack or the other end of this decision would be that...I had to begin to live a life where family would be around, I would go through moments I could no longer share with a man that I would spend late night talks with of what our baby would be like, what our future of raising this child could be like. That I would struggle everyday with the demons, emotions, feelings that I never had dealt with, I would have family around that I would be listening to their struggles and concerns while I still held myself up....and at the end of the day I would be no longer living a life for myself anymore, but I would be stript of all the independence that I had grown to know and have it be replaced with dependence on others. 

Well some of you may look at this as, that is easy why wouldn't you want to be around people who would support you, love you unconditionally and would help you hold that end of the responsibilities you were to yet encounter. 

I had finally made a decision to leave my selfishness in another state and pick up everything I knew and put my faith into a new future I had no clue what was going to happen. It has taken me nearly 3 months to realize who I use to be...wasnt who I am becoming.  In these months, I have gone through moments of feeling like this could be a miscarriage, feelings of a failure, lack of income hurts the soul, cause not even the comfort to stay positive doesnt make us realize what weighs on our hearts, feelings of frustration of never feeling weight be put on that puts us into a reality that I cant fit into anything. Other feelings of any worth or even feeling that beauty exists somewhere inside of me...cause isnt it obvious why I would feel such a way.. 

Most women that I know of are excited to bring life to this world, they have support of a spouse, family and most of them have jobs to be prepared when this baby comes into this world. Most get excited at every step of the way from the moment we realize we are pregnant, to the times we hear the heartbeat, to growing out of clothes and our bellies stretch to fit such a small yet big thing, to feeling the baby, to finding out the gender....well you get the point. Excitement is more of the common feeling then constant feelings of being scared.  

Well the point of this post is to tell you that my pregnancy has been no where near a fairytale...but a great realization that this has all become a great analogy of progression. Whether you take that as being physical, emotional, or just all around. I am not the same woman I was when I first found out to this very moment.