Hurt people hurt people

When somebody said “hurt people hurt people” it took my mind awhile to comprehend and really process what that means and the depth of the statement. Basically this means that people who are mean, hurt people, etc. are in essence damaged from the hurt they received in their lifetime. Their hurt can be from many forms, physical, emotion, sexual, verbal, etc. and we may never know what causes them to hurt and to be quite frank I don’t really care. The point of this for me was because I have often found myself in life asking why people are so mean or why people hurt people with intention. I guess you could say that not all hurt people hurt other people. I guess I would consider myself a pretty damaged person and have faced a lot of adversity in my life but instead I use those feelings to try to give and help people but admittedly I am sure that I am hurt people too.

This concept has helped me because in my circumstance, I don’t speak to a lot of people… mostly the people who hurt me including people that I should be very close to including my mom. My mom despises her mother and my grandmother is not a nice woman and never has been. I remember my mom telling me that when she started her period as a teenager, her mom threw a tampon at her and called her a whore… so my mom was not shown love as a child which I think is the root of her pain. My mom would never admit this and I would never tell her to her face because I really don’t think she acknowledges this but she has become a replica of her mother. No, she did not throw a tampon at me but she did things in other ways that were just as hurtful. I know that my mother has a kind heart but I think that she never broken the cycle and became who she hated most. I also think my brothers addiction took such a huge toll on her, that she really hardened and even when we were speaking, I rarely saw those glimpses of kindness that I know were there deep down somewhere. I have chosen to break this cycle of pain by counseling and addressing the pain so that I do not share this pain or take it out on my own children. I had a rough childhood, I was never given anything and faced some forms of abuse (mostly verbal and mental) but now that I understand the concept I am so happy that I have the ability to break the cycle. As far my mother, I hope she seeks help but I don’t think this will ever happen and I cannot change people or will them to change.

My husband also had a rough childhood, he was born and raised in one of the toughest places in the world to grown up…Mexico City. He faced poverty and a father that walked out on his family and had anger issues. Now that I understand this concept I can see that when my husband shuts down (I mean like really shuts down), it is his coping mechanism of dealing with the things that he does not want to revisit from his childhood. I do hope that for our children, he also wants to break the cycle. Don’t get me wrong, my husband is a wonderful man and father but as he gets older I see more and more of his father in him and I truly believe this is because he has never faced these feelings. He is tough, very tough and does not want anybody including me to see what is underneath. Exploring these feelings is not easy but in order to be our best self we have to explore, acknowledge and change to break the cycle of hurt.

I have one person in my life that literally makes my life very stressful. Because this is a public forum, I will leave our relationship out of it but those of you who know me or have read my other blogs can probably take a wild guess on who this person is. This person goes out of her way to make my life harder, she makes racist comments about my Mexican children and does much more but we will leave it at that. So why is this person so mean? Although this is not a hall pass for her behavior, she is damaged and hurt and I really think she is a scared little girl using her position of power to bully people and have power that she must not have had in her life or childhood.

So how do we deal with this people? If you have a magical potion please let me know but I have learned that it is not OK for people to treat you poorly. We can try to understand that they are mean because they are hurt somehow and someway. I have started to express myself and feelings to certain people and will be telling one person in particular that she cannot treat me poorly anymore. I don’t know why I am afraid and I know that deep down she will probably have a deeper respect for me as these people usually pray on the weak. For the record most people would consider me the opposite of weak…I am very Type A and outspoken but certain people know how to manipulate me but it is time for that to stop.

So if somebody is nasty to you, just remember it is not you that is hurting it is them and they have to live with that…not you. Although this is not always comforting, it may help to understand that you are not the problem and that is a small start for me at least.

Thanks for listening .

XOXO- Optimistic Twin mom

“Today you are You, that is truer than true…

…There is no one alive who is Youer than You.” Dr. Seuss

I introduced you to my boys and talked a little bit about me in the “about me” section but I wanted to share a little more about who I am. I am Kalina AKA twin mom and the reason that I refer to myself as twin mom and not Kalina is kind of a joke. Nobody ever calls me by name any more except at work but in my home life, Kalina has disappeared and my new name has become twin mom. I even got to know somebody pretty well, a park friend you could say and she always said here comes the twin mom…I asked her one day, “do you even know my name?” She responded promptly that of course she did not expecting me to ask any more questions so I asked her what my name was and she was like a deer in headlights. SO she guessed, Caitlyn (maybe I should have gone with it now that it is so popular), Katrina, Carmen, Catalina?? I was not really offended because people have struggled with my name all my life. When I speak to people on the phone they think I am Hawaiian, maybe this name is from Hawaii…not sure. I just blame my mom, she was a hippie and thought it was cool is my best guess. I have grown to love my unique name but as a child really wanted to be Stacey, Nicole or Lindsey and be like everybody else.

People that meet me always tell me that they have never met anybody like me, I will take that as a compliment! I can be very serious but for the most part I am always the quirky one in the group. At work, I am always the one cracking jokes, being silly and trying to make people laugh. It is comedic to me because I work in the HR department which can be kind of an oxy moron for my personality. You could say that not everybody appreciates my humor as my boss did confiscate my yoga ball one day and stab it with a knife and I never saw it again…that was not very nice of her by the way…maybe I need to stretch at work. There is now a joke at work that whenever it is a holiday I ask somebody to buy me a yoga ball loud enough so that she can hear me, hey…at least it makes me laugh.

I wasn’t supposed to work in HR, I went to school and studied pre med/microbiology and wanted to be a doctor and cure cancer. Well, I never made it to medical school I fell in love and moved to California to be with my now husband. I actually went to a temporary staffing firm to work for a top employer there and they hired me to file paper and moved my way up and it was history from there. If I won the lottery tomorrow I would go back to school but that does not seem to be happening anytime soon.

Enough about my work, things that are more fun! Things I love:

Traveling! I love to see different places and different cultures. My boys have been on 3 international trips and I want them to see the world too! My husband is from Mexico City and that is one of my very favorite places. I lot of people will not travel there because of the danger but I love it and have always been safe plus I speak Spanish so that is always helpful!

coffee, coffee and more coffee. I have tried to quit this so many times but I cant… I guess that it is better than other addictions but I am also obsessed with whiting my teeth so I have a constant battle of white teeth or coffee, FYI coffee is winning the battle currently. I love to read, I am more like a teenage girl and I do love the Hunger Games, Divergent, etc…I don’t really like grown up books I would rather read something completely fictional. I love sweets although I know that sugar is SO bad for you. If you have never seen the documentary FED UP…check it out, it will really change the way you look at processed foods. I am eating clean now and feel great but the boys have been potty training and I am rewarding them with M&Ms and lets just say I have eaten quite a few of them and am craving more which leads me back to my original thought of how addictive sugar is. I love to exercise and have always battled with my weight so the fact that I am a bit addicted to exercising right now is a good thing. I typically hike 5 miles in the morning and I also do Zumba class every Monday. I am addicted to my fitbit because I am very competitive and I love the fact that it tracks me and tells me if I am not meeting my goal. The fitbit also tells you when you are doing a good job and if you read my last post you know that I am always seeking approval and reward so this little bit is working for me for the time being. I do not watch much TV but I do love certain shows like Orange is the New black, YAY I love Netflix and I am SO excited for their new season. Some of my go to shows are Greys Anatomy, Chicago Fire, Parenthood (they are no longer on air but it was the BEST show ever), some reality TV but I really enjoy a good movie however I have not been to the movie theatre in a long time and miss it a lot. I cant wait until the boys are older, one of the theatres here has a daycare but they have to be potty trained and the 3 day method is turning into the 5 day method that is still not working. I am ready just to put diapers on them until they are 10 years old. I would rather change a dirty diaper than have to clean dirty sheets, carpet and car seats!

I am super organized, my husband is also a very clean person but it drives him crazy how I want everything in place all the time. For example, when it is nap time all toys go back in their place even though they are going to wake up and take them all back out again. I also keep track of the finances and investments and if you asked me to get you a W2 from 5 years ago I could produce it in two minutes. I find that remaining organized helps me maintain a certain level of normalcy in a life that is nothing even close to normal. I used to do financial planning for friends in high school and college and always like helping people get their things in order and I am hoping to use this platform to help people with that.

Anything else? I live in Arizona, it is super cheap to live here but the education system is not good so we are kind of looking at companies that would pay for us to relocate somewhere that has better education but we cannot really deal with the cold. When it is under 60 degrees we are freezing so not sure how we would do. My current employer offered me a position in Delaware and that was not really ideal for us. I love interior decorating, DIY, cake decorating and other craft stuff and if I was rich (after I went to medical school) I would do some party planning. I love the rain, music, dancing and just having fun. I hate folding laundry, parents that ignore their kids and are constantly on their cell phone. I despise people that go to dinner and every child has a tablet and the parents are both on their phones. Everybody can raise their kids the way they want but I want my kids to be kids…they don’t have tablets or watch much TV…they play in the dirt and build things, we go to the zoo and the airplane museum, etc. Being an adult sucks and they will be their soon enough so my philosophy is why not let them be kids while they still can be. I guess now in schools, they use computers and tablets and do not use a paper and pencil like we used to so while they are with me…they are going to be kids. Kids color and get dirty and play in the sand…that is just how I roll. If you do something different, good for you but they are my kids and I do what I think is best for them.

I am off to drink more coffee and start another day of naked toddler madness .

XOXO- trying to think positive about potty training twin mom

The invisible illness

So I have not gone for my daily walk today which means my mind has not had a chance to write and rewrite this article and I have chosen a very deep topic that I will talk about more throughout my experience but would like to break the ice as I don’t think we as a society talk about it enough, depression. The actual dictionary definition is

feelings of severe despondency and dejection.

Anybody who has struggled with depression probably finds this definition a little weak. Just so you know, I was on the other side of this before I had the twins I truly believed that those people that said they were depressed just wanted attention and felt sorry for themselves, I just want to keep myself honest. I mean I had bad days at work or would get mad because the scale did not say the number I wanted but I never suffered from depression. So where did it start? Well my children were born at 32 weeks so they were premature and had severe health complications which we will talk about another time but for the thirty days that they lived in the hospital there were literally days that we did not know if they were going to make it then WAM! they are healthy, awesome but what is a new mom to do with tiny little 4 pound babies, I just went through the most difficult time in my life and now you hand me two little babies to take home and take care of and OH it is hard! I remember thinking that I could handle it because I am Kalina the overachiever and I can handle anything, wrong! New babies don’t sleep through the night, they wake up every 2-3 hours to eat and if you are breastfeeding that means you have to be there for them to eat. On top of breastfeeding, the hospital told me to pump every 2-3 hours to make my supply increase so that meant for me that I would feed the babies when they woke up which took about 45 minutes then pump for another 30 minutes,  clean the supplies and guess what… they were awake again for another round. To say the least, I did not sleep for a long time and thank God I had a husband that helped a lot. After weeks of not sleeping your mind starts to go a little haywire and I started feeling very down which is normal…we call this baby blues or post partum depression. The problem is that my baby blues never went away and got worse. I remember the moment I knew something was serious, I told my husband “do you ever wish that you would not wake up the next day?” He was freaked out and got me every pamphlet from our baby supplies with hotline numbers. I did not call for a few days and when I decided to call they did not answer the phone or were not open…great resources for a depressed person which I will get more into another time. So, I went to my OBGYN and told them how I was feeling and what did they have for me, DRUGS! My choices were limited because I was breastfeeding so they put my on something called Paxil…ok sounds good, wrong! Maybe this drug has worked for other people but it did not work for me. Depression medications do things to your brain functions so they should not be taken lightly (obviously I am not a doctor) but I am speaking from my experience. Well after about a week on this medication I had never felt more un-normal. I literally did not sleep for that week even when I had the opportunity and felt like I was going crazy and felt very very down. I quit this drug cold turkey, not recommended by my doctor but I knew it was not good for me. I continued to breast feed and made a choice at 6 months to stop because I needed to explore other medications that could help me and I knew then that I really needed help. I talked again to my OBGYN and they gave me Prozac which seemed to work better for me, it did not make me feel crazy anyway. So to make a long story short I went back to work but still struggled from this beast that I call depression, I just was not myself. People who have not gone through this do not understand and that makes it harder. I have a very close friend that I worked with who I showed the attached picture to because I saw it on social media and thought it was a good representation of depression. My friend, who I adore, laughed and said “so you want me to build you a tent” and made a joke of it. She never knew this but I was crushed, I went into the bathroom and cried because I just wanted the person I was closest to and interacted the most with in the day to try to understand me instead of telling me which is very common “its fine, it will be better tomorrow.” which brings me to the point I want to reiterate, to a depressed person things are not fine, they may not even be able to see tomorrow so don’t say that it will be better tomorrow. Being that I have been on the other side of this, I understand how it is hard to understand and deal with at times but google “how to help a depressed person” there are actually a lot of resources. So what do I want to come of this, I hope that sharing this deeply personal story helps people that may not recognize the signs. I also want change to happen to have more resources for people who are depressed. I have a very close relationship with the March of Dimes Director in Tucson and have considered trying to talk to her about starting a program for moms that stayed in the NICU and had traumatic experiences, maybe a follow up from a nurse that really understands depression because the hotlines that did not answer the phone scare me. I was not at the point of considering harming myself but there are people that are and what if they don’t answer the phone when they call??? So, today where am I? I stopped taking depression medication about 6 months ago and I see somebody to talk to every couple of weeks. You could say I am better but unfortunately I feel like there is always this gray cloud just waiting to move in. I don’t want to battle this, I want to be the best person that I can for my children so I am doing things that help me like exercise, clean eating, venting in this forum which is a way of self expression for me and I hope to one day say that I never battle with depression and until that day I will do everything in my power to be my best self for myself and the people I love. Slowly but surely I am getting there.

PS- If you saw me on the street you would never know that I have this struggle, I am very put together, have a beautiful family and a nice home, great job, etc… it is not a stereotype and can effect anybody, please remember that.

XOXO- Trying to be better twin mom