This past Friday, I was prepared to shut down the blog. The internet was full of sadness over the passing of The Queen of Mommy Blogging, The OG Mom Blogger, Dooce. I pored over the tributes and read some of her best posts. I loved her take and will miss her beautiful words. As I took in the commentary from around the planet, I thought “It sounds like blogging is mostly dead. I think there are other platforms like Tik Tok and Instagram and a whole host of others that I know nothing about that must be the platforms of today. I missed the boat and have nothing new to add to these new-fangled ways of communicating. People don’t want to read blogs. They want visual content and it needs to be in 1-2 minute increments.”

So I decided I would bury Beautiful Olive. Why pay for the website hosting, the Constant Contact subscription, and the domain name rights when it was just sitting out in the internet world languishing with no new content? When blogging was old-school and a thing of yesterday?

Have you ever tried to cancel an auto-renew subscription? Well, the business-savvy peeps of the world are business-savvy for a reason. And they have figured out that if they make it really hard to cancel an auto-renew subscription, 92% of people won’t cancel it. You can buy almost anything online, without talking to a single person, with a single mouse click. But if you want to cancel something, you have to CALL someone and TALK to someone first. No amount of mouse clicks will get you there. This is why, two days later, I have not yet canceled Beautiful Olive or any of the internet extras that accompany her. I would have to make phone calls and talk to people and I am an introvert. We don’t play that way. We do not like to talk to strangers whose goals are exactly opposite ours.

So, the blog is still here because it was too much of a pain to cancel it. And, then I woke up today and I decided to write. So, there you go.

“Do you know what a loser is? A real loser is somebody who is so afraid of not winning they don’t even try.”

Grandpa, “Little Miss Sunshine”

It’s Mother’s Day and my typical MO celebration has been to do whatever I want with wild abandon. Mimosas and blueberry muffins for breakfast. Naps. Reading. A dinner fit for a queen, complete with dessert. And wine. Plenty of wine. Sometime after becoming a mom, I declared it the day of indulgence and I always indulged.

But, some things happened to me over this past week (which I will tell you about in a minute) and all week when my husband or sons would ask what I wanted to do for Mother’s Day this year, I would answer “I don’t know. Not much. I know what I don’t want. I don’t want to have mimosas or blueberry muffins or a bottle of wine or naps. I know that’s what I don’t want. I’ll get back to you…”

I’ve been on a collision course for the past year with my bad choices and habits. I weigh more than I should or ever have, I drink entirely too much alcohol, I don’t get the exercise I need and my ability to deal with life’s stressors is out of whack. The real struggle is in the knowledge of these things on the one hand and doing nothing about them on the other hand. The cognitive dissonance takes our anxiety to an even higher level and then we are even more unhappy with ourselves. It’s a vicious cycle. Because we are thoughtful, intelligent beings, we really should be able to figure this out. But, we can’t. So, we are losers.

I’ve had the “Why do I KNOW what I need to do, but do the opposite?” conversation with myself so many times over the past year I’ve lost count. And every time I have had that conversation, I would follow up with “And, are you ready to do something about it?” And every time, the answer was a resounding “Nope. Tomorrow. Come back tomorrow and ask again. Maybe the answer will be different.” And I would stroll off with my glass of wine.

About a week ago, I had the same conversation, but the answer was different. You can tell when it’s different. It feels like it rises up from your core and is straight-up bellicose. Everything starts to align and suddenly you’re just ready. You holler back at the old self who answered “Nope” every time. “Hey. Old Self. New Me is taking over. We don’t need your help anymore. We got this. Bye-bye.”

I don’t know what flipped the switch. All I know is that I’ve been praying for it to flip for the past year and I knew I would know when it did. I was glad it flipped on Sunday because I had an appointment for a routine physical on Tuesday. “Whew!” I thought. “This is great! I dodged that bullet! Thanks, Me!” But, apparently, two days of changed habits is not enough lead time for your lab values to be whipped into shape and my doctor called me on Wednesday to tell me that I might need to go on some medication to combat some concerning findings. 😲

Truth be told, my inactivity, my diet, my relationship with alcohol (that is a really dumb term) was really getting wildly out of control. I think it was pretty dark at times. And when it’s dark, we peer out of the hole and look around at everybody else to see how they’re doing. And when everybody else seems to be doing just fine, we clamp the shell down even tighter, don’t we? But the inner turmoil is still there beneath the surface. Somehow, we can’t figure out how to just do what we know we need to do. We are losers.

Well, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. The switch will flip. The inner turmoil will work its way to the surface and demand a decision about who wins. I woke up this Mother’s Day and I RODE A BIKE for 30 minutes. I drank water and fasted until 2 p.m. I’m writing, not napping. At dinner, I’m going with CAULIFLOWER MASH instead of POTATO MASH. I e-mailed my physician and asked for a 6-month reprieve, medication-free, to get my sh*t in order. And I’ll gladly pay out of pocket to get new labs drawn in 6 months so I can prove that my switch has indeed flipped.

Will I feel as sure tomorrow or the next day or the next as I do today? I don’t know. This isn’t my first rodeo. We are all a work in progress, all of the time. Today, I woke up and I felt like writing. I felt like riding a bike instead of drinking a mimosa. I felt like eating an orange instead of a blueberry muffin. And I felt like being a better mom to my boys, which means some of my dark, crap habits have to take a back seat. So many of us are fighting crazy fierce battles. We get really good at hiding them from the world. Keep the conversation going with yourself. Let her answer “Nope” as long as she needs to. When the timing is right, she will suddenly answer “Yes” and you will know. And you will always be a winner in my book.

Happy Mother’s Day, my beautiful friends. You are nothing short of fabulous today and every day.