FBW: Jenna from Stop, Drop & Blog is Worth More Than This (Ms. April)

FBW stands for Featured Blogger of the Week. Each week we will feature one of our calendar ladies or gentleman. Mondays will be a post written by the FBW and Wednesdays will be an interview of the FBW. If you want to know how you can be a part of the Blogger Body Calendar project, please click here.

I’m lucky to be married to an amazing man with whom I equally share household responsibilities — minus trash duty. I hope we’ll raise our boys to be equally respectful of their partners in the future, much like Alli.

But I wasn’t always this lucky.

College was difficult at best, and I found myself in a series of not-so-healthy relationships. From verbal abuse to being jacked up against a wall at a party to an evening that involved drugs in my drink that I still can’t quite recall, it wasn’t an easy time. I guess, looking back, you could say that I was lucky just to survive that tumultuous period. The worst of it all was that I didn’t believe that I deserved better than what was going on. I believed that I deserved to be called names, to be threatened, to have my property broken as I sat and watched. I didn’t even know that I could or should be strong enough to stand up and say, “I am worth more than this. I deserve more than this.” I just didn’t believe that I did.

That’s why participating in the Blogger Body Calendar this year, with proceeds going to Violence UnSilenced is so important to me. Sadly, I know that there are too many women — young and old alike — who simply don’t know that they are worth it. They’re strong — we all are — but they simply don’t believe that using the strength to stand up for themselves is worth it.

Trust me, you are. No matter your past, no matter your life choices, no matter what: You are worth it. And you deserve better.

Jenna blogs at Stop, Drop & Blog and The Chronicles of Munchkin Land. She has been blogging for ten years. She is a freelance writer and photographer living somewhere in Ohio with her firefighter be-mustached husband. She is an everyday mom to two little boys and a birth mom to an amazing Munchkin. Her photographer is Courtney Paris of Lousville Boudoir.