NaNoWriMo 2014 ~ Sneak Peek

I am continuing my Sassy Johnson private detective series so part of my preparation is already done.  However, I do have to work on what happens in her main case as well as any minor cases she will have going simultaneously.  As usual, I also need to look in on her love life periodically to make sure she's not trying to run that sweet young Jason Quince away.

The working title for this year's novel is Motherly Love.  I decided to get kind of creative and made a book cover for it.

 Lord knows I don't know anything about cover design but doesn't this cover pique your curiosity?  You know the story has to do with a mother and her child.  You also know that the mother either is or was in prison. Who's that baby's daddy? Now you'll find that out soon enough. What is Sassy's role in all this? Snooping around duh, that's what she does best. Well, besides making a mean margarita.

Stay tuned if you want to find out more.  Later good people, I'll holler!

Cyber Family Time

When I'm not crocheting my fingers to the bone, with mountains of yarn scraps surrounding my desk chair, the kid and I have been making weekly YouTube videos. Haven't done too many natural hair videos lately because I've been wearing a lot of hats to work. You know, slick advertising and what not (and it's working, YES!).

I used to sneak and do my videos when the kid was asleep, sometimes I even did them in the car. But when I realized that having the kid's participation made for a better, more fun-filled video, I decided to include him. If he wasn't feeling to honery of course (which is hardly ever). He's been addicted to getting his picture taken since he came into the world so making videos was just a natural progression.

Of course, if he ever gets to the point where he doesn't want to be bothered, I completely understand. Hey I can be funny and entertaining all by myself. I don't need no cute little smart alek 4 year old to make my videos fantastic... Well, it wouldn't be as much fun. So I'm going to milk this for all it's worth. LOL

Hey, some people may think that I'm taking advantage of my son and using his cute face and silly antics for my own personal gain. You know what I say to that? Times is hard and the kid is going to have to get a job one day so he might as well figure out how to market his skills now.

{crickets}

It's not like he's really doing a whole lot. He's just being himself, which would be great for ratings if we were on a real tv show. But as it stands, he takes some of the pressure off of me when I'm attempting to make a not so boring show and tell type video for my crochet items.

Cyber family time is the new black.

Not sure what that means. It just sounded good in my head.

Pregnant? ~ But I Have the Mirena.

This nearly brought tears to my eyes. Can you guys please help a sister out?

I got the Mirena about 4 years ago after having my son. Since then, my periods have been pretty much non-existent. I may spot for a day or two and that’s it until the next month. The last few weeks, I’ve been experiencing a lot of fatigue and after my manager told me she had a dream that someone was pregnant, I made an appointment with the gynecologist. The last time she had a dream like that, I along with two of her nieces, were pregnant at the same time. I told the nurse and doctor that I wanted to make sure that the Mirena was still in place and that it was still working. They didn’t do a urine test and they didn’t draw blood. All they did was tell me my blood pressure was high, fondle around in my “you hoo” and do a pap smear for STDs. They told me I had a year to decide if I wanted another baby, if I wanted another Mirena or if I wanted to get my tubes tied. A week later, the spotting started and actually lasted an entire week. Like I said before, prior to going to the doctor, I’ve been feeling all kinds of crazy. I’ve been having a lot of headaches and my back hurt for about three days in a row. I’ve been getting dizzy and my right eye felt like it was going to jump out of the socket the other day. I read a couple of articles about the odds of getting pregnant with the Mirena and came across numerous sites where women have gotten pregnant after having the Mirena for 3 months to 3 years. I tried to convince myself that I was just now experiencing side effects of the Mirena but I remember how I felt the last time I was pregnant and this feels nearly the same.

Yesterday, the results from the Pap smear came in the mail saying that everything was fine but last night my lower abdomen started feeling heavy and that’s when my mental alarm went off. This morning I took a home pregnancy test and I wasn’t too surprised when “pregnant” popped up in the little window.

Everyone has been telling me for years that my son needs a sibling and I have been turning my nose up at the thought. I can’t deal with another baby because my patience is getting shorter and shorter, I don’t have the money to pay for childcare and daddy and my dude’s mom are both in their sixties and probably too old to deal with a newborn.

Another thing for me to worry about is the fact that the Mirena will more than likely cause complications. I may either have a miscarriage or the baby may suffer some type of illness. The Mirena was made to do something to the lining of the uterus and if the baby can’t grow right, I may lose it. Even if I carry the baby as close to full term as possible, she/he may suffer developmental damage because the baby is basically trying to grow around a foreign object that was supposed to prevent its existence in the first place.

Now I’m at a point in my life that I thought about briefly with my first pregnancy. Abortion. I certainly don’t like the idea of having an abortion but I hate the idea of having a miscarriage after making up my mind to keep the child. As mentioned before, my patience is getting shorter and shorter so I know I wouldn’t be able to deal with a disabled child either.

I told my dude that if I am really pregnant that I am thinking about having an abortion. He told me to let him think about it and then we’ll sit down and talk about it together. Heck, he can’t take care of the two he has and I’m struggling with the one I already have, adding another, possibly disabled, child to the scenario would not be a good thing.

Are You A Deadbeat Mom

No matter how hard it is being a single parent, I don’t think I could ever turn the responsibility of raising my son over to someone else. Despite my feelings, I do understand how a mother can feel overwhelmed, but I do not understand a mother that does not provide for her child emotionally or financially. Even if she cannot care for the child full time, the child should have no doubt in their minds that the mother loves them.

Don’t get it twisted, deadbeat moms do exist. I’ve read the stories about the mothers wanting to go back to school or travel the world and decided to turn the kids over to their fathers. Sometimes the arrangement is until the mother gets herself together and sometimes it’s a permanent adjustment. The situations that I am more familiar with are the ones where the mothers let drinking and drugs cloud their judgment, or those that find the new man in their life more important than their children. Whatever the reason, the child loses. There’s so much talk about deadbeat dads but from my life and what I’ve witnessed, the number of deadbeat moms are rising every day.

If the mother is not the custodial parent, I think she should be paying child support just like the father would if the situation was reversed. Most custodial fathers never get support and because of pride, they usually don’t complain about it. They just do what they have to do for their kids. Some custodial mothers are at the courthouse every time she thinks the dad has gotten a raise at his job, but that’s another story for another day.

I know women that get public assistance or child support for kids that don’t even live with them. They drop the kids off at their grandma’s or auntie’s house, days sometimes weeks at a time. When the grandma or auntie asks for some money to feed the kid or buy some diapers, the supposed to be custodial mother goes off like it’s not her responsibility to make sure her kids have what they need. Chicks like this make me want to see if there’s a such thing as shaking adult syndrome but I’m sure it wouldn’t do any good.

There were a couple of scenarios that I wanted to share with you but my family and friends do read my blog. Because I don’t want to get to fighting this weekend, I’ll keep the details to myself. I will say that I totally feel for people that didn’t have their fathers growing up but in my opinion, not having your mother there is so much worse. The kids I know in these situations, mostly girls, are constantly vying for their mother’s attention, sometimes they get it sometimes they don’t. They even go so far as to act up at school or talk back to grandma just so their mom can curse them out. To them, negative attention is better than none. I feel sorry for these girls. I also fear that they will treat their future children just as bad as or worse than their mothers treated them. It could also result in the opposite; they could spoil their kids so much that the kids are so rotten no one else wants to be bothered with them.

I’ve said all of that to say this, ladies, you are supposed to nurture your children. If you come to the conclusion that you are not the nurturing type, don’t you ever, ever, ever let your child/children think that you do not love them. Whatever you are going through is your problem, not theirs. They should not be punished and neglected. We hear too much about deadbeat dads, do everything in your power NOT to be a deadbeat mom.

Teen Pregnancy Prevention

In my not so humble opinion, I believe that parents should introduce their teens, especially their girls, to birth control and condoms as soon as they hit puberty. We all wish that our children would remain virgins until they are 25 or married, whichever comes first, but that is unrealistic. We must explain to our children that it would be better if they waited to have sex, but we should still give them the tools needed to protect themselves from disease and pregnancy.

Susie Q (1994)

My Twitter and Facebook friend, Lakisha M. Johnson (@MySoulOnPaper) posted a link on Facebook to the story about the 90 pregnant girls at Frayser High School here in Memphis. I had heard about this on the radio last week and the first thing that came to mind was--whatever happened to the free clinic?

Here's the link to the story (http://www.bvblackspin.com/2011/01/14/90-girls-pregnant-at-memphis-middle-high-school/ )

I moved to the Frayser area when I was fifteen years old. Having lost my virginity 4 years prior, I was blessed and lucky that I didn't already have two or three crumb snatchers by the hand. When I moved in with my dad, he took me and two of my older sisters (ages 16 and 17) to the clinic to #1 get tested for STDs, #2 get birth control pills, and #3 get a bag of condoms. Daddy told us from day one that he was not condoning any sexual behavior but he wanted to make sure we were protected, just in case. "I don't need any accidents keeping me up all night and drinking up all the milk," he always said.

The reason why he did this was because he was a truck driver and was only home every other night. He didn't have time to watch us. We had to be in the house before the street lights came on but we could stay out until no later than 10 pm, when he was home. If we disobeyed these rules, we would be on punishment for two weeks to two months depending on how late we were out past curfew and what he thought we were doing while we were gone. (I was on punishment the whole summer one year, shaking my head.) My stepmother was always in a world of her own, so I and my sisters pretty much did whatever we wanted until dad asked the neighbors to start spying on us.

Even though my dad did the unthinkable in the eyes of most parents, he still taught us that we shouldn't just lay down with any old dude and that neither the birth control pills nor the condoms were 100% effective. He also schooled us on the importance of getting an education and having faith in God. As a scare tactic, he often used family members as examples of how not to be--Young mothers with three kids by three different fathers; living in the projects with a new car and big screen TV; those that had no job and weren't looking because (they said) "the man" was holding them back: high school dropouts that complained about cleaning hotel toilets.

My sister that was 16, at the time, didn't have a baby until she was around 18 or 19. She married her son's father, he joined the army and they hit the road. The sister who was 17, at the time, doesn't have any kids at all. And I waited until I was an old maid (31) to have a kid.

Even though he took us for the initial doctor visit, it was up to us to make our subsequent appointments, to take the pills and to make the guys use the condoms even if we had to put them on "the thing" ourselves (which I got pretty good at, LOL).

Parents, please help your children to enjoy their childhood and not try to grow up so fast. Set rules for them and enforce those rules. Stop trying to be friends with your kids, they have enough of those, they need guidance. Once the babies come, playtime is over. Once HIV hits, their lives may be over.

Like another one of my Twitter/Facebook buddies, Rob Grant (@Ima_Writer) says, "Condoms are cheaper than diapers, B, wrap it up."

Me and These Dreams

I had a dream about my mom last night. It was as if she were still alive and kicking. For some reason she, Donovan and I were walking to her house with bags in our hands. I'm not sure where my car was. Maybe she lived out of town and Donovan and I had caught the Greyhound there and she had met us at the station.

The house she lived in looked familiar but the path that we used to get there was different from the last time I had been there. Now, I guess I had been there before in my dreams because neither she nor I had ever lived in a house even similar to this one. Anyway, it was an addition to a main house where a big tall man lived.

Mom walked in with no problem, but I had to actually lift Donovan up so he could walk through the door. Once they were in the threshold seemed to get even higher. For some reason I wondered if that meant that where ever Donovan and my mom were going that I wasn't supposed to go. I was about to burst into tears when I noticed the tall man standing in the other doorway. He was just staring at me. I don't know what was going on with Mom's doorway, but I had to back up, take off running and jump into her side of the house. I went over that threshold like I was jumping a fence. How weird was that?

I didn't get to see what mom's house looked like on the inside because I woke up (figures). I do remember looking at her and pointing next door and mouthing that dude was crazy. Mom seemed to get scared when I said that and told me not to say it again.

Now, my head is hurting more than it was yesterday. I remember Donovan crying out in his sleep but when I looked over at him he seemed to be okay. (Shaking my head) I hate to think that something would happen to my son, now or in the future. He's just a baby, only three years old. I mean I had my mom for more than 20 years. She was living kind of foul so I knew when I was about 13 years old that she wouldn't live long, but my baby. I don't want to think about him dying. He's perfectly healthy and has more energy than any child I've ever encountered. He's a lot smarter than I was at 3 years old. I just don't know what I would do, how I would be able to function.

I guess I'm having all of these thoughts because next month, February 7th is the 14th anniversary of the day we buried my mother. She was 35 years old when she died, her birthday was August 11th. February 25, 2011 is my 35th birthday. This right here...

Life is too short, especially if we make wrong decisions that could cause us not to live a long life. Her thing was using drugs and fighting with men. My thing is stressing over my job and not taking care of my body. If the Lord says the same, I will make it to 36 years old and beyond. And I'm praying that my son lives to be 103, but in good health, lifting weights and running marathons.

2011 Life Plan

I've been working on this list since Christmas which means a lot of thought has gone into it. This is not just a list of resolutions for 2011, but things that I will continue to do indefinitely.

I know many people make resolutions and by February or March have totally forgotten about them. I've been guilty of that numerous times. All of these things are realistic and doable. These are things that I have been doing but not consistently, which has been a major problem for me. Sometimes I allow work and the act of trying to relieve stress keep me from doing what I need to do for myself and my son. Balance is the key, and I am determined to get balance in my life.

1. Actively seek higher position at work.
2. Spend at least one hour a day on house work.
3. Start and stick to an exercise routine.
4. Eat and drink healthier.
5. Create and stick to a budget.
6. Finish at least one of my novels in progress.
7. Write at least one blog post a week.
8. Keep car maintenance current.
9. Prepare for Donovan's education.
10. Use leisure time more wisely.

I complain a lot about my job but I'm not really doing everything I can to make a change. This year I will start taking advange of the free online training that my job offers. I will also check the job postings every week and apply for every position that I'm interested in, not worrying about how many people that I feel may be more qualified. I might get lucky.

I've always hated house work, ever since I was a teenager. I mean I love the smell of a clean house and I love being able to get a plate of food without having to wash the plate first. The thing is, I just wish I had someone else to do it, or at least help a sister out. But since it's only me and the kid I have to make time every day to get things done.

"An elephant is stout," my dad used to say. And sometimes I feel like I'm on my way to being a baby elephant. I've gained more than a hundred pounds in the last 13 and it's driving me nuts. On occasion, I go through exercise phases but once I've lost 20 to 30 pounds, I end up dropping the ball. Of course I end up finding the lost pounds and few of their friends. SMH

Exercise won't help much if I keep making McDonald's and Burger King richer, so I'm going to have to start eating better. I'll never be able to totally leave fast food alone, but I can always make better food choices. I can treat myself to some utterly useless food as a treat for a job well done every once in awhile but should get right back on track. Sodas are also a big issue that I need to cut back on. I don't drink nearly as much water as I should and I'm sure those empty soda calories have contributed to my weight gain.

I've had budgets before and pretty much stuck to them over the years but the last three or so years, I've been slinging money all willie nillie and my bank account is suffering. "A fool and his money are soon parted." is another saying that my dad uses a lot concerning my siblings and other relatives. I'm afraid to tell him that I fall in that category as well.

My home office and dresser drawers are filled with three novels in progress and several short story ideas and first drafts of poems. I am determined to finish at least one of the novels by October before I begin to prepare for another NaNoWriMo, which will add yet another unfinished piece of work to the list.

With this blog and the one at http://poetryforyoursenses.wordpress.com/, I should have a much larger cyberspace presence. But since I haven't even uploaded one blog post a month, no one but my high school chums, co-workers, and a few Twitter and Facebook friends even know that I write. I plan to do something about that in the very near future.

My break light has been on for a month and since I can still stop without scaring myself to death, I haven't done anything about it. Not a good thing I'm sure. You would think a person with a white car would have sense enough to keep it clean, but unfortunately I don't. If it wasn't for the kid rubbing his little hands on the car, it would probably be gray. Plus I have a habit of eating in the car on the way to work or on the way home and don't always throw my trash away once I've gotten to my destination. So not good when it's my turn to drive everyone to lunch.

The little dude of the house will be turning 4 in May so it is definitely time for him to go to somebody's school and learn how to get along with kids his age. He's been around grandparents, pre-teens and teens since he's been in the world so he only knows how to rough house. I'm sure I'll have to stay by the phone for the first few weeks until he realizes that he can't put his hands on every kid he comes in contact with. D is a smart kid though. He can count and read a little (mostly fast food signs), he knows his colors and most of his shapes. Once I teach him how to spell his name he'll be all set, if he can sit his hyper butt down long enough.

I must admit--My name is Susie and I am addicted to Facebook games. From the time I walk into the door from picking up D, until I can barely hold my eyes open before I drag myself to bed, I am gaming. Cityville, Farmville, Frontierville.... The list goes on and on but I'm gonna have to get myself together and limit my game playing.

When I incorporate all of the other points, the last one will be a no brainer. I won't have the time or energy to spend hours playing games and getting frustrated when I run out of coins.

So here's my list. What do you hope to accomplish in the coming year and beyond?

Money On My Mind

It's been a while since I've written a blog post, I've had a lot of stuff on my mind. Yes, it all seems to boil down to MONEY.

I've been a faithful servant for the federal government for 13 years. The first 5 years, I was a seasonal employee, but after applying for hundreds of positions, I finally became permanent. Yes, it sounds ungrateful, but ever since I became permanent I wanted to quit. Of course I didn't quit because of what--MONEY!

The fact that I've been promoted a number of times has made things a little more bearable, but things are still not the way I want them to be. This is the second time (beginning Fall 2009) that I've decided to go to school in order to acquire more skills so I can advance. Since I will always be a writer whether professionally or as a hobby, I've decided to get my Bachelor's Degree in English with a concentration in Technical Writing. At some point I may return to get my Master's in Creative Writing but I'm taking it one step at a time. Yes, to many people it seems like I am a career student but when you have 20 more years to work before you are eligible for retirement, you begin to think about how far you can climb up the ladder within that time frame. I'm not the type of person that sits in one position forever and ever. I crave challenges and I love to learn new things. Although MONEY is not the most important thing to me, it makes getting things I need and want much easier.

The first time I attended college while working for my current employer was from 2004 to 2006, when I got Associates Degree in Information Technology. For a little over 5 years I tried to acquire a position in this field at my job with not much luck. It turns out that it's alot easier to get the position you want if you are willing to move out of town. Of course the only downfall to that is that if they decide they don't need you anymore, they will send you back to your previous position. Which means relocating a least twice. Before having my son I was pretty mobile but I wouldn't want to put a two year old through all of the moving back and forth, so I'm trying to sit here and be patient until someone reads my application and considers me worthy. Hey, the girl needs more MONEY.

Even though I was an honor roll student all through high school and the first couple of times I went to college, this time is a lot harder. I'm not sure if it's because I'm older or because I just have too many things on my plate (son, work, and school). It may be a little bit of everything, but I'm not the only person that has gone through this and I'm sure I won't be the last so I just have to suck it up and keep it moving. I thank God for my former babysitters (The Fletchers) and my father (my current babysitter) because without them I would be like my dad says--"Nutty as a fruitcake". One day all of the working and schooling will pay off and these will be the first people that will get taken care of when I get that big MONEY.