It also drove me to live my life a certain way, because I was so hooked into the idea that one day in the not-s0-distant future, I would not be able to remember anyone – even those I love the most.

It was the year my oldest son was born, twelve years ago, that I first was diagnosed with White Matter Disease. That was after being misdiagnosed with MS, Lupus and a slew of other maladies. I went to Dr. Maynur Maniar for a second opinion and my world got brighter again. He did his tests and found two lesions on my brain. At that point, I wasn’t presenting any other symptoms, so we watched them. He ordered another MRI after 3 months, then 6 months and eventually up to a year. I was at the point when we were going to go three years in between when I became pregnant with the twins. After they were born, I just never went back.

I had some postpartum depression on top of my regular cycles and it was all I could do to focus on the children. I wasn’t able to think about myself for a long time.

Now, almost a decade later, I am having some new physical issues. I have minimum movement in my right arm and numbness on a couple of my left fingers. My headaches have changed and my relatively new glasses aren’t working correctly. I can’t do my gaming because somehow the movement on the screen is suddenly making me sick to my stomach. I cannot even start on my memory issues.

So, at 8:30 this morning I found myself alone in my car with tears just streaming down my cheeks.

Even though I knew I wasn’t going to get any answers today.

Even though I knew that the fear of the unknown is always worse than whatever the reality will be.

By noon, I am scheduled for several tests: brain EEG, brain MRI with contrast, visual optic nerve and a nerve test for the hand experiencing numbness. He is also pretty sure that we are dealing with Frozen Shoulder in the other arm which means neither are a symptom of MS. In fact, I have no indicators for that to be in my future. What I do have is a referral to an Ortho and urging to begin physical therapy as soon as possible.

I also learned that yes, while people with lesions like mine are at higher risk for stroke and dementia, it is not fated to turn out like that.

I won’t know about the future of my brain for a few more weeks and even then, I will probably have to go back to being monitored.

It would be nice if I let up on myself a bit now though. I don’t have to be so intense or lay everything out on the table all the time because of my fears of a lack of a future. Whatever life holds can come at its own pace without me pushing it forward with force. I can let go of the idea that I have any control of what will be. I can’t make certain things happen because I’m scared of  a possible future path. None of it is in my control.

And that’s okay.

xoxo ~ Melissa

The post The Future of My Brain appeared first on little bits and pieces.

I might shy away from full-length photos, but I’ve tried to be open here about my struggles with my weight. But here’s the deal… after posting what I did in May of 2012, I panicked. Within 2 months, I gained over 10 pounds and we went on our summer vacation with me weighing in at 236 and pushing the limits of my size 20 pants. Damn, I didn’t even weigh that much when I was pregnant with the twins. See?

My handsome husband, Brendan and I in the mountains. Summer 2012

When we got home, the first thing I did was stop the soda again. I swear if you do nothing else for yourself, please stop drinking it. Even the diet kind which I know can cause issues when you have auto-immune disorders. By December, I was back down to 222 just by giving up the Coke and stayed there until after the holidays. Then yes, I put back on five pounds by New Year’s Day. I fluctuated within those five pounds until mid-March when I bought the Mega-T pills on impulse and things started to change.

I began to get my food cravings under control. To be honest, before that — I was eating ALL DAY LONG. I was a complete emotional eater and shoving food in my mouth comforted me when nothing else worked. The Mega-T has Chromium and Hoodia which I credit with giving me the strength to say no to the wild binge eating. A couple of weeks ago, I started boosting that with a supplement called L-Tyrosine and I feel like that has allowed me to think rationally when it comes to snacking and my portions.

My typical breakfast routine works like this:

Before Food (8am):

1. 1 Mega-Tea
2. 1 L-Tyrosine
3. Full glass of water

I wait 20 minutes before making breakfast. Then I have stuck with one basic meal. I don’t have to think too much and I still get to be creative.

That is Activia yogurt with fresh strawberries, fresh blueberries and a small handful of Love Crunch Chocolate Granola. Sometimes I switch up the fruit or add Cheerios if I’m out of the granola, but basically I eat this every single morning. It is yummy!

After Food (on a good day):

1. Whole Food’s 365 Adult Multi for Women
2. Costo’s Kirkland Signature D3 2000 IU
3. Nature Made Fish Oil 1000 mg (200 mg OMEGA-3 EPA & DHA)
4. Whole Food’s Think Smart with Ginkgo Biloba (which has really made a difference with my ADHD lack of focus)
5. Sundown Naturals Cinnamon 500 mg (I have hypoglycemia and this has helped lessen the *shakes* I get)
6. Solaray’s Hup A with 225 mg Eleuthero (Hup A is Chinese Moss. I have White Matter Disease – a brain thing – and I hope this helps a little)
7. Rainbow Light’s Probiolicious Gummies

And I say on good days, because I don’t always remember to take them. On a bad day, I hope to take at least the Think Smart. I usually won’t eat again until around 12:30 or so.

Since starting all this in mid-March, I am proud to share that the scale is reading 212.6 with my 18 pants hanging a bit loose. Most of all, I’m feeling really good. Here is the shot I shared on FB:

That’s it for now. Next time, I will share about what I eat for lunch.

xoxo ~ Melissa

The post Losing It Slowly – Breakfast Routine appeared first on little bits and pieces.

It reminded me of a session I had with a psych doc about six or so years ago. I had become very agoraphobic again after a trip to the grocery store. My oldest was walking along side of me while I had the twins in the cart and I was asking them to not stand up and the other one to stop touching everything. A man came up and started addressing my kids. He said something like “You need to listen to your mother. Very bad things happen to kids when they don’t listen. Especially little girls.”. Then he looked me in the eye and said, “I know your mother knows what I mean. Don’t you? You know that bad things the can happen to little girls?”

Well, I didn’t take that in the way it was probably intended. He was probably harmless and bad with words. I couldn’t see that in the moment though. Instead it acted like a trigger. Stupidly those words brought to life every nightmare I had about my children and all the things that had been done to me. And I felt it all — every scrap of it — all in the space of a few moments. I pushed my son behind me, stood in front of the cart and then just froze. He wandered off, but it probably took me a good five minutes to move. I scared my kids because I couldn’t hear them asking me why we weren’t moving along. I stayed silent with tears streaming down my face feeling like an idiotic frightened little girl.  Once I got enough of a hold on myself, we checked out immediately and sat in the car for a bit until I could drive.

I was so angry at myself. If I couldn’t just blow the guy off, why couldn’t I get angry instead? Why couldn’t I be the type of girl who could just say “Fuck Off!” and not give the incident another thought? I was also angry because one of my thoughts was “I am fat now so these things shouldn’t happen to me anymore”. Instead, I went home and stayed home for quite some time.

So, back to the psychiatrist visit… enough time had passed since that event but the agoraphobia wasn’t lifting. I wanted to know why and the frustration over it was greater than the fear of going to see him. The best he had to offer was…

“If every time you went outside you found it was raining, then you would eventually learn to not leave the house without an umbrella. If you feel that every time you leave the house something bad will happen, then you will eventually stop leaving.”

And he left it there.

What I had to figure out on my own is what’s said in the above graphic …

Be Afraid But Live Anyway.

It took years and a lot of work, but I learned to do just that.

I got even heavier — in part as a shield, but I have tried to Live Anyway. At least here online. I push past the fears to be open and vulnerable and to constantly take risks. A lot of it is paying homage to the saying… fake the smile until you feel it. I talk a lot online about loving yourself and being brave and finding self-confidence. Some days it’s real and I’m sharing and other days, I am posting to convince myself. All with the goal in mind to be okay with the fear and live my life anyway.

xoxo ~ Melissa

The post Be Afraid But Live Anyway appeared first on little bits and pieces.

I have done reviews before, but this is the first I’ve done one here for an erotic romance novel. This works features elements of BDSM and is not suitable for all readers.

Shayla Black’s Wicked Ties

• TITLE: Wicked Ties
• AUTHOR: Shayla Black
• GENRE: Erotic Romance
• PUBLISHER: Penguin Group
• DATE: 2nd Edition April 2013
• PAGES: 341
• LIST PRICE: $16.00 U.S.
• GRADE: B

The first in Shayla Black’s Wicked Lovers Series, Wicked Ties introduces us to Morgan O’Malley and Jack Cole. From the back of the book:

She didn’t know what she wanted…

Morgan O’Malley has seen a lot of kinky things as the hostess of a cable sex talk show. But she’s never met a man like Jack Cole before. A self-proclaimed dominant, he’s as alpha as a male can get — and good for Morgan to have around when an obsessed stalker ratchets up his attempts to get to her.

until he made her beg for it.

Though Jack is a bodyguard, Morgan feels anything but safe in his presence because, slowly and seductively, Jack is bringing her deepest fantasies to the surface. And when he bends her to his will, what’s more shocking than her surrender is how much she enjoys it — and starts to crave his masterful touch. A willing player in Jack’s games, Morgan knows that his motives aren’t pure, but she has no idea how personal they are…

MY TAKE: I thoroughly enjoyed the romance of Jack and Morgan, though I felt that the plot of Jack protecting her from the stalker took a definite second place to the BDSM theme. The sex scenes were a thrilling and intense ride through their level of the D/s lifestyle. It was a great example of how being dominant and submissive were part of who they were as people and not just some experimental play. The lovers meet under ugly circumstances: revenge. Due to this driving need, Jack betrays Morgan’s trust immediately after their first time together by sending a video of their love-making to who he thinks is her fianceé. I struggled with this along with his strategy of convincing her that she needed to let go and allow him to fulfill her fantasies. Overall though, Ms. Black’s writing was brilliant in that I could feel all of the emotions of the hero and heroine as I read.

Jack is a great Alpha male character with a sense of humor. Interesting enough, it was a secondary character that I truly fell in love with: Deke. Almost towards the end of the book, Jack gives Morgan the gift of her darkest craving. A threesome. I found myself wishing that more time had been spent with Deke, but the next book in the series – Decadent – will be his love story and I’m looking forward to getting to know his character better.

You can find out more about the author here: SHAYLA BLACK.

Enjoy!

xoxo ~ Melissa

The post Erotic Romance Book Review: Wicked Ties by Shayla Black appeared first on little bits and pieces.

As a parent to a daughter, I have been more aware of keeping my words positive about my body and my looks. I have looked in the mirror with her face smushed up to mine and said out loud, “We are beautiful.” And then I wonder if she knows that I only think that of her. I don’t want to lie to her and I am working hard to change that. It is not easy after almost 45 years on this earth to convince yourself that just maybe you aren’t unattractive.

I don’t think I was born with that innate confidence gene that some people possess. Couple that with early peer sexualization and by the time I was 12, if a boy was interested in me it was never because of who I was inside or how I looked from the neck up. I was just a body. It got to a point where if a guy did show actual interest, I would waver between thinking he was stupid or thinking that I wasn’t good enough because the other boys had touched me. If there were kind words spoken about the way I looked, you couldn’t have paid me to believe them.

I did believe the boy in 7th grade who told me I looked like Barbra Streisand (who I had hated at the time). I did believe the kids who made fun of my nose (there is a bump on the bridge), my overly large top front teeth or called me Casper in high school. During my teenage years, I had an abusive boyfriend. One of the first times he was violent with me was a night we had gone to a party. I was happy with what I was wearing and the way my hair turned out. When he first picked me up, he looked angry and eventually cut our evening short. I wasn’t wearing a seat belt and he drove the car really fast. It came as a shock when he suddenly stopped short in the middle of the road and I was thrown like a rag doll into the dashboard and my head bounced off the windshield. He yelled at me, but he didn’t make sense. He told me that I had looked too good and I wasn’t to wear that outfit again. By the way, I think it was a loose jumper type thing… really just fancy overalls.

As a teenager, I had wonderful girlfriends that tried to convince me otherwise over the years, but I didn’t trust their judgment. That’s what friends did for one another and besides, I had some really truly gorgeous friends who were confident in knowing their beauty. They had no clue what it was like being me but I appreciated their kindness. Finally out of high school, a guy told me “You aren’t conventionally pretty. There’s just something about you.” and that actually made me feel better about myself. That was a statement that made sense to me. I wasn’t beautiful. I wasn’t pretty. But there was something about me.

I am writing this now because I need to get better at finding the beauty in me. This knowledge will not come from some outside source and has to be something I teach myself. I’ve come a long way over the last few years. I now see my entire face when I look into a mirror instead of the super focused look I would use when brushing my teeth or applying mascara. I have grown comfortable with what I see reflected and can find things that I like about me from the neck up.

I am also writing this now because a great looking male friend was brave enough to post on Facebook how it has taken him over 30 years to see himself as something other than ugly. As his words broke my heart, it reminded me that I not only needed to work harder and faster on my own self-love but also to get my boys in front of a mirror with me, smush our faces together and say out loud that we are beautiful. Boys, girls, men and women — YOU –  all of us need to know that we are beautiful and worthy of love – especially from ourselves.

The post Finding the Beauty appeared first on little bits and pieces.

I do not know what my heart believes it’s missing.

I yearn for something I cannot describe.

There’s that feeling that it is finally in my grasp only to slip away again.

I yearn for something that’s on the inside of me.

If only I had a map.

xoxo ~ Melissa

The post I Yearn appeared first on little bits and pieces.