Cross Post from Myspace.

 A serious day calls for a serious post.

As of today my oldest son is 18 years old.

Shocked?  I'm not surprised.  Most people are.  I don't often talk of my firstborn simply because I opted to give him up for adoption at birth.

I was seventeen and stupid and my son's father had long since bailed.   According to him, and his mother, he was sterile and couldn't conceive.

All of which I believed until that little white stick turned pink and I was puking my guts up six months in a row. 

Plus that tiny little thing of labor and delivery...

Anyway, at the time I knew I wasn't ready to have a kid.  I was a high school dropout (another story, another time) who didn't have a job or even know how to drive.  So I figured my kid deserved better than growing up with a mom who was still growing up herself - and doing a pretty piss poor job of it too.

It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do.  I don't regret it, although I have always missed him.  Especially when I had other children.  Every time they went through a milestone (first words, birthday, walking, first day of school, etc) I always thought of Scott (what I named him, I'm sure they changed it).  How was he?  Was he happy?  What did he look like?  Did he hate me and feel abandoned?  I was so plagued with the "what ifs", and that's when I finally realized that regret is lethal.  You can't change what once was.  You just have to deal with it and move forward, hoping that if nothing else you learned what you needed to learn from that mistake.

Now I just wait.  I wait to see if he ever wants to look me up, to get to know me.   I think about him a lot, but I speak about him far less.  Even though it's not really one of those big dark secret things, everyone in my immediate circle knows about him - including my own kids.  I wasn't gonna blog about it but I figure what the hell.

I'm not ashamed.  It is what it is.  I made the best decision I could make for myself and my child at the time - it was a decision based on love.  Approval from others is neither required or desired. 

And I don't say that to be rude.  I'm in the recovery stages of the terminal Disease to Please.  Hopefully one day soon I'll be in total remission.  Because I've been so worried about what people have thought of me that I've paralyzed myself and it's so futile.  You really can't please all the people all the time.  All I can aspire to do is please myself, but that's been difficult because I'm my own worst critic most of the time.

Case in point, my new profile pic [of Hal Sparks and me].  I love that photo because I have to smile when I see it - it was one of the happiest days of my life.  Right up there with getting married, having kids, and finding sugar free chocolate. 

I guarded my digital camera with my life all the way home.  Then, when I downloaded it I was completely shocked.  I immediately started ripping myself a new one that I just look so fat and yucky.  It was my social anxiety in reverse... I had all the same feelings but in retrospect. 

I wasn't even going to put it up.  I finally did, but I certainly wasn't going to use it as a profile pic.

Finally I just said, to hell with it.  I just keep reminding myself that Hal didn't look at me critically, so why should I criticize myself?  A total stranger found value in me, but here I was tearing my own self down.

It's stupid.

I've come to realize that self esteem isn't a noun... it's a verb.  I'm done hiding under a rock and waiting for someone to give me permission to come out from under it.

I'm out, baby.  I'm out.