sock it to me

I was so incredibly excited to receive my socks from the lovely Anna Marie.  She did an amazing job picking out not one, not two, but THREE pairs of socks for me!The instructions:

Here is the topic of your post: It has been roughly a year and a half since the last SITM Exchange. Reflect on the past 18 or so months – how has support from others, either in the blogosphere or otherwise, helped you?

18 months ago I was pretty fresh off the final divorce decree and was about to start my divorce recovery class.  I was scared to death to let anyone in; I just wanted to stay home and hide.  I’m glad I did start to let people in, but the truth is that I wouldn’t have gotten to even that point without the love of my bloggy peeps.  In the 18 months or so since that time, I have slowly moved closer to opening up in the real world.  I’ve been blogging less, but I always feel that this is a place that I can let it all hang out, that I can be who I am, and there are true friends out there who care, even when I haven’t wanted to let  anyone get too close physically.  I feel like I’m moving forward, slowly, but definitely and surely, and it’s in large part thanks to all of you.  So again, and again, and again—thank you my lovelies.

And thank you again to Anna Marie.  To sign off, Miss Famous is posing here with the pair of socks that she chose in La Famosa’s honor.  They look pretty good together, don’t you think?

For more soxy fun, head over to The Smartness, where Roxy Saucebox (you may know her as Kymberli) hangs out.

hope is a terrible thing

I heard this piece yesterday on NPR and the following lines hit me in a very deep way:

“Living in hope is a really terrible thing.  People speak about hope most of the time as a very positive thing, and I understand why…But if you stop and think about the state of living in hope,  it’s a very dispossessing thing, it’s a very difficult thing to live with. When you’ve been living in hope for a long time as I have, suddenly you realize that certainty is far more desirable than hope.”

Of course, I thought about my people in the ALI community.  And I thought about myself back when the ex and I were actively trying for a baby, back when that felt so possible I could think of little else, when my arms felt so empty, partly because it felt possible, yet just out of reach.

Hope gives us reason to get up in the morning, but it is also that Terrible Gray, that not-black-not-white space that won’t allow you to let go of the dream.  You’re left in the hospital waiting room indefinitely, never knowing, just hoping.