Time Warp Tuesday: Post Publishing Fear

Let’s do the Time Warp again!

This is my first Time Warp Tuesday! I’ve enjoyed reading some of the posts for it now and then, but this week’s topic just called my name when I saw jjiraffe’s post in my inbox, and come to find out, she even suggested this topic!

To sum up, Kathy at Four of a Kind had the idea to revisit old posts each week, writing a new introduction, maybe about why you chose it for that week’s topic. Here’s what I have for you.

When I first returned to blogging, like many of you, of course I kept a lot of personal things to myself. The thing is, I cannot abide secrets anymore. Due to events in my life, I have a desperate need for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I am the person I am today because there were too many secrets, and I abhor them now.

The more I wrote, the more I read, the more connections I felt with other bloggers. It ate me up inside that I wasn’t being myself. I had begun forming these relationships with other people that weren’t wholly based on the truth. I felt so guilty because I was lying to my friends, to my infertility family, and I didn’t know how to live with myself, knowing about this huge intentional omission, this elephant in the room that no one else could see.

So I wrote this.

For those of you who are just joining me, no, I’m not pregnant.

And while I didn’t tell much of the story at all, the short-and-sweet AA version consisting of ‘hi, I’m April, my husband had an affair and now I’m a mom sometimes’ was enough to get the monkey off my back, for the most part.

But it was so hard to write. And even harder to publish.

I agonized for so long before talking to my husband about writing something like that. I never want to say anything here that would upset him after all we’ve been through, but he told me then, and has reassured me since, that he’s completely okay with me writing about anything at all that I need to write about, that I can say anything that needs to be said to help me feel better.

Of course, I still hold back. I can’t help that. The interwebs do not need every single intimate detail of our life together. But I do say a lot, because that’s who I am now.

Secrets don’t make friends. I believe that with all my heart. If any of you were to be my friend, I had to get this off my chest. Now that I have, it’s so much easier to be me.

But that’s not the only reason I had to write it. And as immensely important as that reason is to me, it’s not the most important.

I don’t ever want our little girl to ever think that we’re ashamed of her. She isn’t on our Facebook pages (boo to fb anyway!), we tweet about her rarely, and she isn’t mentioned on our Google+ profiles. The only place you can find our pictures of her are here, and even those are a rarity.

We would never, ever be ashamed of her. We are so proud and happy to be her parents. So if you ever stumble upon this in the future, my darling baby girl, know that Mom has always cherished you. Even when you were hitting and biting and screaming bloody murder at bedtime. You are always in my heart, and I love you very, very much.