My hair was meant to expand Not be straight It was meant to raise up To seek moisture in air To be playful Forcing me to chase it with my fingers, brush, and gel And still defy all three It was meant to have curls, strands racing around in a wave or coil that often changes And demand that I accept all of them My hair now reminds me of Joy Of teasing Of resistance Of demanding to be free And I get to wear this growing expansive crown It is Black, and it is Me. 

                   (My proposal to a local school board near my town) I am a woman who is a descendant of the Saginaw, Swan Creek, and Black River tribes of Ojibwe. I am a mother of five children, I have a college education, including a graduate degree. I work professionally in the community in a role that adds diversity to the institutions I occupy. I am a self-professed lover of urban culture, coffee, popular music, dancing, and an information and book-collecting nerd. One thing I am not, however, is a mascot. I am also not a redskin. I belong to a racial and ethnic group who was admittedly, by the US government, an experiment for forced assimilation, which enabled Hitler to gain inspiration from America for the disgusting self-declared supremacy that resulted in the annihilation of innumerable Jewish people. I am a member of a group of racial and ethnic people who were forcibly remov...

I created this space as a space to detach from the scrutiny of social media and to dissolve a little bit into the vast anonymity that is the Internet. Here, everyone writes, even things that aren't true, and everyone reads and discards continuously what they don't want to take in. This space was for me to have a journal of honest growth in the areas of my life, but I haven't been very honest for the past year of my life. For that I am sorry. Why haven't I been honest? In part, of fear. Okay, cut the crap, 99.9% out of fear. Fear of losing the respect of others, fear of what others would think about my put-together outward appearance. If others knew there were times I had doubts about my life, my personality, my marriage relationship, my family size, certainly they would see me as unstable and questionable and maybe two-faced. And that would be terrible, since I want nothing more than to be taken seriously. But part of those fear-driven secrets are just that...create...

I feel like I keep writing the same thing over and over again, possibly because I'm thinking the same things over and over again. The same thoughts and questions about existence, God, spirituality, raising children, being a good partner, what to expect from my partner, how to resist being unhealthy in mind and body...these thoughts pervade my mind constantly, and I never know if I find acceptable answers to them, or find peace about them. Take the first three for example: If everyone has a thought about What Is, about Who Is, and about inevitable death and the afterlife, the question remains as to who is right? But my question has been, does it really matter who is right? We all end up at Death's door in the end, and we will all have to pass from this life to another, where we don't really know what will happen from experience. After our spirit passes, we will all find out one way or another, but we won't be able to share that with those who are still on this side of ...

I will be completely honest. So many people are attacked for their transparency, or as others may less sensitively call it, "telling all their business." I laugh at this because privacy is considered a virtue nowadays. Privacy about sexual relationships, about breastfeeding, about fights in marriage, about disagreements between family members. What does privacy really help if we are being honest? What creates more discomfort and more awkwardness and more fuel for change but to be confronted in a not-so-private way? At the same time, what causes more vulnerability, more lowering of our shields that yield us powerless where we most need safety and security, in our hearts? So as I said, I will be completely honest because I am at peace with where I am in my life. I don't find shame in the normal shaming society finds to be necessary, but I do find a yearning to confront and call out why we feel it is ok to provoke shameful feelings in others undeservedly because they are d...

Many of you have noticed I took up the moniker "Moni" a couple years ago. To be honest I was going through a change in life of learning who I was after being reconnected with my birth family, and that was a nickname my natural parents called me. In my eagerness to be connected to who I was before my adoption I decided to try basking in that name for a while. Then when I felt "full-grown" and was ready to step back into life as "Monica", damned Facebook decided to limit name changes. So I am stuck being "Moni" when I really want to be Monica. Everyone has adapted that name and it has definitely stuck, so I'll let it lie. To be honest, it's kind of sweet that everyone has accepted my different changes of growth and is just going along with my flow. So I don't really mind. Just know that Monica is the fierce outer shell protecting the inner child "Moni." As I've been getting to know "Moni," I've been very ...

The past two months of our lives have looked completely different. I'm laughing inside at the idea of "perfection" we all have of others...perfect marriages, perfect families, perfect pregnancies, perfect hair, perfect bodies, perfect schedules, perfect perfect perfect...Can I call it? It's all BS! We all have to do the best with what we're given, and we're all given some of the same things: brains. mouths. butts (ok that was pointless). opportunities (although not identical). Here's what has changed for us, and WHY I'm happy with it. In March we became completely debt-free. Nothing owed to any collectors, creditors, parents, NADA. We worked our butts off for this to happen, had some arguments, the whole 9. When we made it I was so relieved and could barely believe it. I felt free. We were really happy. We felt to RICH not owing others. Then we worked on building up our emergency fund. Dave Ramsey suggests a 3-6 month fund, Suze Orman suggests...

Oh sh**. It's really time to get up again? Why do I feel like crap? Oh yeah, I got up with my daughter who awakened me with her terrible squeals in the middle of the night because she had to go to the bathroom but seemed to forget how to get up and walk in there. Then proceeded to whine and cry for God knows why even after I led her by the nose pretty much to the toilet and cleaned her up. Then I couldn't go back to sleep. Oh shoot, husband has to work today? Nope, didn't make a lunch. Too tired to make one at night and can't drag myself out of bed to do it in the morning. Good luck fending for yourself, dear! You could take the leftovers from last night, but oh wait! You don't like leftovers. Tough luck.  Oh why dost my body betray me? Too much stress makes my chest tight and it travels up my throat. Dear God, please help me get this under control before I get throat cancer from always carrying my stress there. Researching as many stress-relieving breathing ex...

Since I came out today, I figured it is only fitting to organize what I do believe since detaching my tentacles from the organized religion of Christianity. Here is what I do believe, with no evidence, just feeling what my spirit feels: I feel there is a Creator. Actually I choose to believe this because I cannot wrap my head around any kind of notion that the beauty we find in nature, children, love, and the connections of spirit with others  is just by happenstance or evolving biologically. There is no way this just "is". I can't tolerate that concept. There is something bigger than this universe that has taken time to deliberately paint flowers, design body systems, and provide emotions. That I feel in my spirit for SURE.  I feel the closest spiritually to my creator when I am in nature. When the sounds and music of nature are playing I can almost tear up for the sheer beauty of it all. I feel healing happen naturally in nature.  I believe that when someone is ha...

To my lovely readers, I want you to know that I'm still here. I have been avoiding writing because my life is a little imperfect right now, and to share it with you would be very risky for me because it would mean being honest. As you know, I am very insistent on honesty. So since being honest would be hard, I decided to wait until I was confident enough to share this honesty with you. My life is such a grand mural, and a new paint or pattern may become splatted on it at the drop of a hat, with no warning and certainly no opportunity to wipe it off or rearrange. Once it's there, it's there. Displaying right on my heart. There's no way around it. I want to be responsible in how I share the new art that's been done, so that my words will paint an accurate and, again, confident portrait of what is now.  I find such an escape through writing, painting, playing my instruments. But I have to remember not everyone understands and unites with my soul. And I'm okay...

I am musing today about my evolvement. At 10, I thought I could befriend everyone. I knew nothing about petty nonsense except that certain girls in my fifth-grade class would sometimes tease me. My mom thickened my skin by telling me they were jealous. In fact, anything that happened in which I was teased was always resolved by "they're just jealous." Thanks Mom. No, seriously. At 11, I went to music camp (Blue Lake) and made friends with a girl named Tiffany Yang. She was a better pianist than me, quiet, and kind of weird. We became friends. I wonder if I can find her on Facebook now? At 12, shaving legs was a GIGANTIC deal. I wasn't allowed to. I felt like the Yeti. At 13, I returned to music camp. I fell in love for the second-ish time. The first time I had no clue what was going on. This time, I never got to say good-bye to my new flame. I was depressed over that for a little while. At 14, I went to CMU's music camp and met an awesome girl who was be...

Good morning! It's 9:00 am, the morning of my 26th birthday, and so much has happened. Opening my eyes this morning, I didn't think as I have so often in the past with giddy excitement "Oh my gosh, Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, birthday, birthday, birthday! Me! Me! Me!" or something to that effect. I woke up, thinking how annoyed I was that my daughter was screaming in contempt of something her older brother was doing in the room next door. My newborn son (well, 11 weeks old) was next to me kicking me in my chest (bare chest) since he snuck into the bed during the night to nurse. He was, of course, kicking in his sleep so he got a free pass-this time. Then my husband comes in, leans over to kiss my forehead before heading off to work, and says "Happy Birthday." What??? Wow. I forgot. Again. He had told me "Happy Birthday" at midnight just before bed last night, and again I exclaimed, "Oh wow. I forgot again!." I don't have a great memor...

Hey. I've missed my blog! I just want to say that there are so many beautiful people in the world. My hormones are going crazy. I've just had a baby 8 weeks ago, so you'll have to forgive the emotional gushing. But seriously. I'm seriously super inspired by endurance, emotion, simplicity of spirit, character and integrity, and sincerity and humbleness. My birth mom, Teresa, is someone who is humble. I can tell her something I struggle with and she snaps back with "Me too, Monica! I really need to work on that." We share and bond over our weaknesses. It makes me feel relieved that I'm not a perfect woman. Those are overrated. I am not in the slightest athletic in a sports-sense. I'm a pretty decent musical athlete. But in the sports world, trying to catch up with the Olympics to me is almost like going to school again. I'm impressed by how smart, fit, and talented those athletes are and feel like I am super ignorant about their world and their...

My dears, It's been a while since I've posted. I've taken a hiatus to surround myself with work, learning to fully love and care for my husband and kids, and to protect and nurture my third pregnancy. Life is so amazing. And I know there's a God because of what I've learned for sure. It is SO much easier to judge, pass blame, put your pain on others, and seek justice when you believe (perhaps rightfully) that others have hurt you . "Vengeance is mine," saith the Lord. This is a hard concept to accept and let lie. We feel vindicated, that if others have hurt us we finally have the right to expose them and let hell loose around them and leave them to lie in it. And maybe we do. But the Christian principle is to "turn the other cheek", one of the most ridiculous, hardest, and craziest-sounding things to do when you want to fight. The words that carry a sting to them, like "abuse", "mistreated", "unstable", etc....

Everyone handles grief differently. I would say I hold it at a distance, tolerating it in small spurts. My Great-Grandmother Donna Langdon died recently. Although I only knew her for a short time (being reunited 6-7 years ago after being adopted), I find myself missing her. I handle death in a very meticulous way. First, I being to tell myself that it will soon happen, sometimes preparing many, many years in advance. I have done this with my grandparents, and I did this with my great-grandmother. Some people say they "don't think about it," but I'm the opposite...I understand it as a normal part of life, I forewarn myself of it's pending coming, and gently remind myself every so often so I can figure out the best way for me to handle the situation. This may seem morbid to you, or insensitive even. Truth is, if I don't think about it, plan on it, I'm not sure how my grief process would end up. For me, death is the ultimate separation in this life. I...

Tonight, I had a rather long conversation with a good friend of mine. She is quite a bit older than me, but one of the sweetest and most caring women that I know. We stayed after a meeting at church to chat a bit, and after two hours I realized I had been sort of rambling in reminiscing about my life. I jumped from the topics of weariness in caring for kids while my husband is at work to marriage to "life happens" to "I'm grateful things happened how they did" and all over the place. The amazing part is that my friend stayed-and listened-to my ramblings and let me just talk.  After sharing personal information, I always feel like I want to hide under a rock. Like I've just made the social blunder of sharing how unintelligent I am in front of people who are extremely smart. Like people probably think "so that's why she's so weird!" or "wow...that girl needs some help." But I don't mind. And I doubt my friend was thinking any ...

Turning 25 freaked me out, mostly because I felt as if I was approaching a huge deadline...the "I'm now old" deadline. I felt old, unaccomplished, broke, and without direction. I felt that if I didn't get ahold of my visions and shake them until they scattered out pieces of my dreams I was going to turn grey the next day, and possibly die the day after that. I felt panicked, as if life was suddenly moving too fast for my comfort. But what I've learned during this year has been so worthwhile I felt compelled to share with you just what this year has brought me so far(granted, I've only been 25 for 3 months, barely!). I've learned: 1. How to keep loving myself      After having two kids, a softer belly, more stretch marks than I cared for, and acne that suddenly wouldn't go away, I felt more at peace with my body than ever before. I started being more aware of how the way I dressed sent a message across about how I felt about myself. Reading "W...