FBW: To Just Breathe by Nicole from In These Small Moments {Ms. March}

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.

In my previous relationship, I was afraid. At first, of glares, words, slamming doors, squealing tires.

Later, of being shoved, grabbed.

It has been more than seven years since I’ve been out of that relationship.

In the years since, I have built a life based upon joy, trust, and happiness.

I have found in my husband unconditional love and endless respect. I now know what it’s like to feel treasured and protected.

We have brought two beautiful children into this world and we are teaching them what it means to truly love.

What it means to feel safe.

What it means to be able to just breathe.

I planned to use this space to write words of encouragement, of speaking up, being brave. Leaving.

And a while ago, as I sat down to write, I briefly checked my blog traffic and my blood ran cold.

He found me. He found my words.

He found the post I had wrote about my life with him…the post that brought me such tremendous catharsis.

And I panicked. He spent four hours on my blog. Four hours.

I went into full fight-or-flight mode and reacted out of fear.

I immediately pulled the post down and my husband blocked his IP address.

Pure panic.  I was swept up into the past.

My blog has been my space. A place for me to share my happiness, my family, my joy.

Having him there as an uninvited guest made me feel violated and afraid.

I barely slept that night, as I tried to make sense of it all.

How did he find me? What does he want? Is he angry? Does he wish me harm?

In the weeks that followed, I kept my eye on my traffic, just waiting for him to return.

I spent days worrying.

Those words that I planned to write here now feel hollow.

But slowly, the panic is moving through me.

And that panic is being replaced by anger, anger at myself for allowing him into my mind. For allowing him to make me feel afraid. For allowing him to rob me of even one moment of my happiness.

I don’t want to live my life in fear.

I am not that woman anymore.

I want him to stay far from me…from my blog. My words. My story. My family.

I have unblocked his IP address because I cannot and will not live in fear of him.

But, the post I wrote will stay down. For now, at least.

The panic I felt when I knew he read it made me realize that I still have some work to do.

Honestly, I am shocked by my own fear. Shocked that he elicited such a visceral reaction in me.  After all these years.

A setback.

I’m reminded that healing is a process.

That process, I have learned, may mean many steps forward and a few back.

And I’ve also realized that that’s okay. It’s okay for things not to be black and white. Afraid. Or not.

It’s okay to be somewhere in between.

What matters most is the forward movement.

I will continue to surround myself with my family… my amazing husband and our children who envelope us in their love.

I will breathe them in and find strength in them.

I will continue on my path of healing.

Because this life is mine.

Nicole, Ms. March, authors in these small moments, her blog about finding meaning and beauty in the ordinary moments of parenting, of life.

FBW: Jules from Michon Michon (Ms. December)

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 feel very honored to be Ms. December for the Blogger Body Calendar. Last year, I wrote a guest post for BBC. I wrote about the difficulties and triumphs in accepting my grown up body. Having been many different sizes, and doing crazy diets to keep a certain weight, I loved finding a site where women came together to battle the stigmas and mental conflicts surrounding our bodies.

This year, when I heard that the proceeds of the calendar are going to Violence Un-Silenced, I was thrilled. I know that only by sheer luck, I’ve avoided being the target of violence. I think back to college when I stayed the night with a guy I had just met at a bar. When we walked into his apartment, there were five other guys sitting around the TV. Six guys plus me. That should have cried out to me, “DANGER!” but I was at a time in my life when I was invincible. The guy and I barely even made out that night. He, along with any one of those other guys, could have done anything they wanted to me. Sheer luck.

Many of my friends haven’t been so lucky. They’ve told me their stories of rape, date rape, being stalked, being pushed, being hit. Even in my own family, my sister has dealt with being stalked by an ex-boyfriend. And more recently, being pushed by a newer one. The betrayal of being hurt by someone you love isn’t easy to get over. Yet, they’ve all done it. They’ve grown. They’ve taken their experiences and done tremendous things with them.

My sophomore year in college, I did an internship at a women’s shelter. Part of my job when I was there, was to work with the kids. I remember one time when I was playing in a doll house with a four year old. Down the hall, one of the women slammed her door. The little girl jumped and looked at me with fear in her eyes. I could tell in her very short life, that she had seen more than I had. A week later, her mom took her and went back to her abuser. My heart ached. I realized later that the need to feel loved, even if it was by a man that hurts you, is sometimes the only thing that a person can see. At least until you can love yourself.

Women shouldn’t feel ashamed about their experiences. That’s why Violence Un-Silenced is such a wonderful cause. It takes the feeling of being alone out of the situation. I’m extremely proud to be a part of this year’s Blogger Body Calendar.

Jules can be found blogging at Michon Michon, as well as spending a huge chunk of time on Twitter and on FB.

FBW: Andy from Crazy with a Side of Awesomesauce (Ms. July)

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 can’t explain why I wanted to be apart of the Blogger Body Calendar without explaining my deepest secrets and pains. If you’ve read my blog, you know many of them.

I am the adopted daughter of a crazy woman who beat me down with whatever she could from shoes to words. I am a sexual assault survivor who didn’t tell anyone about the assault until too many years later. I’ve attracted people in my life whose narcissistic personalities abused my soul for entirely too many years.

But despite or because of those experiences, I believe with my whole body that survival is about self-love, nurturing your own strengths and then nurturing the strengths in others.

More than one person has commented that it’s amazing I seem so normal, with all I’ve been through. First of all, I always reply, what is normal anyway? Secondly, I’ve worked hard to heal, to be whole, to love myself. It’s been incredibly hard, but completely worth it

By my late twenties, I was ready to take myself back, to reclaim my being for myself. Not only was therapy the single-most invaluable thing I ever did, but it allowed me a forum to help myself and do the hard work with honest feedback and a cheerleader whose job it was to be on my side.

Seriously, I highly recommend it.

In that process, I figured out what I could let go of, both emotionally and literally. I let go of the guilt of being not good enough and learned what about myself made me feel better than and great at, what I loved for the pure joy of it. What had been my survival tools all those years and what I could adopt to do more than survive, to really live.

Words. Words have been my biggest savior: poetry and prose, the reading of words, the writing of words, the community of expression through words. What I couldn’t say, I could write. And the words of countless strong characters in books have bolstered me for the whole of my life, old friends I can always turn to.

Learning. Expanding my mind. The more educated we are, the more worth we give ourselves, the more we expect out of life. Education has been proven to combat abuse and domestic violence. And I am an education addict. The more I stretch my brain, the more confident I feel.

Movement. Though performance is something I dread and something my mother forced upon me, dance made the list as a constant love. When I dance, I’m wholly me. I’m in my body and my mind is given over to the movement. I feel strong and beautiful in both a primal and controlled way. My body is strong and powerful and real and I can inhabit it without any question.

People. I finally had the freedom to let go of the toxic people from my life sans any guilt. But on the flip side, I could never survive without those who love me most and who’ve always held me up no matter what or when. My father, my cousin, my dearest and best friends. People who give their love unwaveringly and who I’d do anything for (And I mean anything. Anyone have a body to bury? I’m there.). People who’ve taught me what kind of love I want to attract in my life.

Myself. I have myself to love and trust and rely on. Figuring out who I am and what I love about me has been the most powerful tool I’ve ever discovered, and one I use a million times a day. And once I figured that out, I realized that the more I push myself, to live, to learn, to grow, to be, I get better and better and I don’t accept anything or anyone that brings me down. I can accept who I am as I am, but also know that I can only get better in all the ways that matter. I mature, I grow, I pursue wisdom. I love who I am today and can’t wait to meet who I’ll be in ten, twenty, thirty years.

So THAT is why I want to be apart of this incredible project. To show that I love myself, all of myself. To show that loving oneself is the best survival tool anyone can possess.

Andrea (Andy to her friends) blogs at Crazy with a Side of Awesomesauce, and Sprocket Ink. She can also be found sharing a little bit of her crazy on Twitter @andygirl and on Facebook.

FBW: Lerner from Stay at Home Babe (Ms. November)

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 didn’t know the profits of the calendar were being donated to Violence UnSilenced until after I’d agreed to do it–so I can’t say that’s why I’m doing it–but it is why I’m really glad that I’m doing it. For almost ten years of my childhood, I was sexually abused. I grew up identifying my body as a sex object and my self-worth was wrapped up in how much sexual attention I got with it. I wasn’t violently raped, I was slowly and methodically molested. I was groomed into a girl who thought that sex was the most valid form of affection, not that my body was a temple.

Through pregnancy and motherhood I developed a whole new respect for my body, a whole new perspective on beauty and a completely different standard of what’s sexy. Motherhood healed me. Watching my children reach the age that my molestation began, watching them grow past that age and still have their innocence, watching them be so little and still need so much protection—those are the times that have helped to pull me past the guilt and shame of feeling like I was the one who did something wrong.

Becoming a mother was a turning point in my life, when I stopped living my life as a victim and started living my life as a survivor. I survived what had happened to me and I survived the way I lived my life after. I started loving and allowing myself to be loved.

I think it’s important, as a woman—especially as a mother—to have those moments when I can think of myself as beautiful; to take that time to nourish myself and not just my family; to be myself outside of the roles I have in my day-to-day life and independent of who I was in the past. I usually find those moments while soaking in the tub. Because let’s face it, there’s hardly a better way to end the day than soaking in a tub with aromatherapy salts and candles.

November 2012, you will find a picture of me soaking in the tub washing away the stress and worries of surviving another day of motherhood. It’s a tradition that started when I was nine months pregnant with my son. I soaked in the tub every night with my big ol’ pregnant belly breaking through the water like a big, bare island. Now it’s a time for me to be quiet, alone and naked in my own skin.

Lerner is an American living in the UK since 2008 when she married her English husband. She chases two kids, two cats, two guinea pigs and four chickens around all day, cooks anything that sits still long enough and writes whenever she can steal away a moment at the keyboard. You can read these stolen moments at her blog (with moxy) Stay At Home Babe on Twitter and Facebook.