Gifts and Garters Welcomes Toys for Tots!

There was a very exciting announcement today over at Bewitching Burlesque.

From the blog:

Bewitching Burlesque and Through The Looking Glass have been very fortunate this year and we decided we wanted to share out fortune with others. In order to accomplish one of our goals, we have teamed up with Toys For Tots to collect toys for kids in need.

There will be a collection station at the door, complete with Marines (in uniform!!) to collect your generous donations.

You can read the rest of the entry here with details of prizes and other fun stuff.

So come on out. Bring a toy, and I'll show you my bubbles ;). Ok. So I'll show you my bubbles no matter what, but wouldn't it be nice to indulge your voyeurism in the name of charity?

Remember, girls and boys, Christmas can be a very sad time when you don't feel a part of it. Let's do what we can to help prevent that.

xoxo BvBB

ANNOUNCEMENTS!

Ok...if you're looking for anything of substance on my blog today...see below. Meanwhile, I have two very happy things to share with you!

First off, I am very excited to announce my next show.

From the Bewitching Burlesque blog:

Here it is, the BIG announcement you've all been waiting for, the full line up for Gifts & Garters!!

Special Guest : Perle Noir - Queen of Burlesque

Featured Performers : The Jigglewatts, Ruby Joule & CoCo Lectric

Also performing will be :
Miss Malicious Erin Go Braughless Angi B. Lovely Rose Darling Vivienne Vermuth Honey CoCo Bordeauxx Glam'Amour Pixie O'Kneel Scarlett Switches Vinny Velour Bubbles Von BonBon Jai'L Bait

We are so excited to bring you fabulous entertainers not only from the DFW area but, Austin and New Orleans. Pre-Sale tickets available for $15 at www.giftsandgarters.eventbrite.com. Get yours today!

That's right, lovelies. Just in time for caroling and dreidling and apple cider libations, a little holiday treat. I am so excited to have the opportunity to see Perle Noir perform, and you won't want to miss her either.


Second, in non-tassle news, I am officially available in print. You can check out my story, "My Dead Isn't Dead" in An Honest Lie: Volume I, available here. You'll notice that my page at the site says some hoopla about voting. Well, kittens, buy the book through my page and it counts toward a contest being held for a writing contract. Or if you aren't ready to commit, leave a comment letting me know what you think of the excerpt. (But I can promise you the story is much better in full. ;))


There are a ton of great stories in here besides my own. So go give things a gander!

That's all for now. But so far...what a wonderful week. Hope yours will be as well.

xoxo,

BvBB

And The Rest is Silence.

My marriage made its ending remarks yesterday.

It was a long time coming. We haven't lived together in over a year. A while back now, when I told him I wasn't ready to coexist under the same roof again yet, he said he couldn't wait. So we moved out of each others' lives, and it's been for our best. All of us. Although Princess Duckie may not get her parents together all that often, I think she gets the best of both of us when we have her.

We tried. We really did. That's what I find so unfortunate in people's cynicism regarding the term of a marriage. The tendency to act as if you didn't try. Maybe we didn't try our best, and maybe we could have tried differently, but we did try.

He always had a funny way of putting things simply that really made sense. So for once yesterday, I let him talk. I told him I would listen. I cried silently, but not with regret. Just a kind of release. A goodbye to the trying.

Here's what he told me. He told me that as much as he loved and missed me, there comes a point when you realize that waking up lonely is better than waking up next to the person you love angry.

I remember that anger we had. The way it would sometimes swell in our throats in the morning. Suffocating the love we might have made or the sleepy small talk we might have cuddled over. I remember feeling something close to hatred when our fights would reach their fever pitch. I remember holding each other in love that was tinged with sadness that we couldn't stop the fights.

He's right. Waking up lonely is much preferable to sadness that just paralyzes you in an awful cycle of finding ways to be disappointed with each other.

He told me when he saw people—people we both knew, people who ask about our baby and how things are—he always said the nice things about me. When it came time to answer how our relationship was faring, he said that we just aren't doing as well as we hoped we would.

There was a lot of hope with that trying. When we wed, I was just out of college and happy to fall in love for a real, live good guy who wanted to make my secret little dream about being a wife and mother come true. He was older and happily surprised to find a girl so carefreely loving. I made him silly presents and called him sweet nicknames. We really hoped this was going to work. But something just couldn't quite connect between time and space to bring us to some space of common ground, like we hoped for.

I try to keep the idea in my head that hope cannot be destroyed...only converted. I'm hoping now that the friendship we once shared within our relationship will be enough to get us through these proceedings with some grace and dignity and even love still intact. We do have fun together still at times, and I'm hoping that can be more of the case as Duckie gets bigger and wants us together more often for various rites of family. I hope we can both find the long-term situation we thought we had found within one another and be happy about it. Because we do still have a long-term relationship. Just not quite the way we planned.

One of my girls took me out for drinks last night for the bereavement and celebration of the passage of one life for the enhancement of the next. As luck ordained, I ran into someone that knew me as part of a couple that had shared many mutual friends. He asked how we were, and I said we were friends. And I meant it.

Marriage is sorta like jumping off a cliff and trying to hold someone's hand. You don't want to let go, but sometimes the winds just prove too much. Before you know it, when you land on the ground, you don't even recognize the person you leaped with. You lost touch with the turbulence, and there's just this distance left that is finally too far to cross.

We had a moment, and it couldn't last. But I've got some real faith that our friendship can make it longer, and if there's any sort of method to the mayhem, this whole thing just might make each of us stronger.

Conversion can be a tedious process, but I'm hopeful about what's on the other side.

Mean Girl.

I'm a much nicer girl when I'm single. I become friends with most girls instantly, and most the time, I'm the first one to make the move toward said friendship. I grew up with all girls—my mom and my sister—and I relate to women really easily. Even when we don't seem identical from the onset, there is always some underlying current of sweetness that I find easy to grasp within other feminine souls. Unless you are just a huge mega-bitch, bad person, chances are if you're a chick, we can get along and make the best of friends.

Unless I know you within any context wherein you knew my boyfriend before you knew me. In that case, you must be an awful, horrible girl who I will absolutely never like because I'm afraid my boyfriend likes you better, you slut-ass, dull, boring bitch!

Oops. I really like being that other girl better. I mean...have you seen my glitter pumpkin? That's the sort of girly shit I adore doing with my friends, accompanied by a bottle of wine and giggling. I love having my work BFF to half a scone with. I love texting one of my chicas about the awful weekend I'm having and hearing her first response be: I'm buying you a shot! I love discussing costumes and tatas with my burl-y girls in ways that I never could with the general public or anyone in possession of a dick (any potential boylesque friends excluded). I fucking love being the girliest girl on the block and having girl friends around me who get a kick out of being sexy, hot, smart chicadees as much as I do.

So what changes? What is it that clicks in my brain and causes this tragic chain of events where I'm consumed with jealousy and dislike for anyone who may or may not have liked the guy that I currently like before he even knew me? I don't know really. I know it sucks. I know I hate the way I conjure up the most absurd notions that don't hurt anyone but myself (and occasionally...and very unfortunately...these misled thought missiles land on whomever I might be seeing at the time which is incredibly, all-together unfair of me). It's terrible. It contributed in so many massively awful ways to my unhappiness during my pregnancy (and marriage). This all consuming, raging jealousy I feel about other women when I'm seeing someone. My crazy straw thoughts range everywhere from the typical (Does he think she's hotter than me?) to the absurdly convoluted (I bet he would prefer to fuck a girl who knows the name of more than one current president.) to the categorically insane, mundane (He'd probably rather a woman like her who wears flats in rainstorms.). It's fucking exhausting.

I don't know why I do this. I don't know why I assume that when I meet someone he is secretly in love with every other girl he knew before me. That I'm somehow not good enough or pretty enough or smart enough or interesting enough to hold the attention of a boy who clearly didn't have his attentions engaged elsewhere too much—else I could not have swept him off his feet. I don't know why I can absolutely adore almost every woman I meet to some degree, so long as the boy I call my own isn't around to possibly like her better than me.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, why can't I see anything clearly at all?

But I think I'm tired of asking why I do this. I think I'm just going to stop. Rumor has it, I'm a lovely girl but you're only as pretty as what you give to the world and the positive space you create around you. So instead of wondering why I do this—why I miss out on having new people to share my adoration of all things girl talk with and why I make otherwise beautifully, happy relationships into battlegrounds—I think I'm just going to stop. I'm hoping it proves to be one of the most freeing resolutions of my life. I'm praying to anything that can help that I'll be able to maintain it.

Because life is too short to not sit in bars talking about corsets and cupcakes, and Snow White didn't get her Prince by acting like an Evil Queen.

Loverly Things.

I danced around my kitchen in an apron this morning, cleaning and almost in tears. I was listening to a song about love ending and I was searching to discover who my first love was. What time that I fell was it so real and so complete that I would consider it to be my first? The time that had topped all others and would from thereafter be regarded as the standard to which all future loves would be measured.

Well…when I put it that way—all of them.

For the purposes of the song bringing me to tears, some cases came to mind more accurately than others. I do tend to be the one to break things off, and here was a girl singing in pleading tones for forgiveness for her need to move on. (If you don’t know Adele, you really should.) But even the times when my lover left first, those were first loves, too.

Each time I’ve fallen in love, I’ve sworn it’s better than the last. And it has been. Not always because of the new love entirely though. With every relationship I’ve had, I’ve learned something new. Every time I’ve fallen in love, it’s been for the first time because I’ve never loved like that before. It’s a new person that I’m loving, and it’s a new me—freshly healed wounds from my last lover’s battle, etching teachings on my being.

I got to thinking about what I had learned from each of them. Each of these men who had shared some part of their lives with me before one or both of us realized it couldn’t continue past a certain point. The men that I’ve missed, sometimes never seeing their lessons until I was far, far away from the occurrence. The men that I can look back on and remember that I loved, with no recollection of how it felt when I did. No memory of the desires and the longing every dawn. Just vague shadows of what they came into my life to teach me. The affinity there once was.

I think I’ve been missing the point of relationships and their place in our lives. I’ve dismissed anyone I used to love as not being genuine because it came to an end. Feeling concern when my current lover once loved another because if that was real, then perhaps he can’t really love me. I’ve felt this need to reject that I have ever been in love because if it was real love I wouldn’t have stopped. It was real. But being real doesn’t mean it was meant last. I think instead of assuming it’s real love I’m still looking for, I should accept that all love can be real. It’s just a matter of sustainability.

I have a tendency to run ahead in love. I rush, rush, rush things, anxious to see the ending in sight—often causing my own crashing because I become so concerned with whether things are meant to last or I’m wasting my time. But maybe if I accept that love doesn’t have to have a happy ending to mean something, it will be much easier to slow down. To not miss all the pretty pictures along the way because I was too busy trying to zoom my focus in on what lay ahead.

I guess only time will tell.

Life Munchies.

I've been really hungry lately.

Hungry for writing. Starving for time to work on things. Cursing the way my mind tires after hours of mundane editing. Desperate to remember that otherworldly elation that comes from laying an entire story down on a page without hesitation and knowing it is good. I've been aching to remember what it was like to have the time and energy to feed my writing fairies. Have them buzz about me like hummingbirds, feeding from my free-flowing soul. I spend my days searching for ways to clear my head by the time I arrive home. But it's never quite enough and I leave every blog and every story that I do manage to sputter out with a hungry feeling that if I could have just had a little more to give...that last sentence would have been golden.

Hungry for learning. Craving the pleasant swell of your brain when it gets to know something it didn't before. The pleasant tingle that can occur when the something you find out is very, very interesting. I miss reading others' words. Will I ever get to go farther in those Hemingway stories began elsewhere? A dear boy bought me a book that I love yet have barely started. I'm still reading a book borrowed this time last year. But it's not for lack of want that I haven't been reading or learning. The want rumbles through my insides making me imagine food hunger pangs. Until I eat a cracker and listen to a podcast while I edit.

Hungry for sex. Always thinking of sex. On desks. In chairs. Outside hotels. In a dressing room. While driving. While eating. During the rain. Early in the morning. After a bath. Before bedtime. Quiet and safe. Restrained and frustrating. Sweet and soft. Hard and frantic. I want to rise with sex every day and sleep in it every evening. I want to taste it on my lips and feel it in my thighs. I want to baptize myself in the holy, forgetful bliss it brings, and look at every day of my life as if I was just reborn again in sexual salvation.

Hungry for dancing. More and more, I want to look back on the dance I loved before I even knew what burlesque was. I want to explore the ways that a human body can feel when it gives itself over entirely to the experience of physical movement—outside of sex. I want to stretch for hours and have each day to discover another way I can move that opens this part of my spirit or heals that emotional wound. I want to dance through pain and revel in it through pleasure. I want to return to burlesque every evening, even more capable of twirling like a muse and taunting like a siren because I can feel all the way down to my pointed toes just how much I can control. I want to own my body and set free my spirit with the crescendo of a song.

But don't you worry now—curious cats never go starving. And this little kitten gets what she wants.

Burlesque and Babies and Bubble Floating Dreams

Motherhood has not come easy for me. Most the time, it has felt like some exclusive ass club I somehow didn't get my pass into. Were they handing those out at conception or first introduction? In both cases, I may have been too fucked up to catch the angel or spirit or doctor who was supposed to be giving me my glittered and waterproofed pass into being one of those moms that all the other kids wish theirs would be like. (Drinking in May or epidural-ed in January--pick your poison.)

But it's not my little Duckie that poses the problem. I love that little girl and I will defend to the day I die that she is the best baby born in all of time ever. She's so mighty damn pretty we were told of her beauty while at the ER with her 104 fever this weekend. She's so fucking charming she can melt your soul to liquid candy with one glance. She's so freaking smart, I'm pretty fucking certain she's going to be all kinds of trouble in traditional class settings. (Have I told you the story of how I got kicked out of an English class? My last year of high school was done in my third year. I couldn't be in both gifted/AP/honors-whatchacallit English 3 and 4 at the same time. So I was placed in my very first ever regular English class. I was sent to a different teacher when the first accused me of being racist because I did not feel his assignment of coloring our pictorial interpretation of Beowulf on gridded paper was an appropriate assignment for high school seniors. The class I transferred to was an improvement in quality at least. But it was also led by a pompous, Mark Twain disciple. Thus my hatred for the author today. That and thinking Samuel Clemens at least was sort of a misogynistic bitch. I didn't end up reading much of his work, though, so don't quote me on Mark Twain and misogyny. Sorry. My blog should come with a warning: Prone to digress.)

So back to my point. I love my baby, but pulling this mom shit has not been easy. My BFF can tell you I never wanted children. Everyone was freaking shocked when I told the news. That I was pregnant and I had tried to get that way. Despite what I thought to be a very conspicuous Mother's Day floral arrangement and card I sent stating my desire to be a mom "as wonderful as mine" that year, nobody suspected a thing. We weren't even living together yet. I was working in a bar just graduated from college, and I didn't even have a rough estimate of how hard it would be to find a desk job...or even how much my baby's daddy made a year. We were trying to get pregnant though. People were shocked when I told my news to friends and loved ones. To say the very least.

I'm not sure how to tell this story at the moment because my writing fairies are evidently having pie slinging contests in my mind, splattering their different shoots of creativity all at a time. So bare with me. (Is that supposed to be bear? I just think bare is a cuter spelling. Wonder why ;).)

I never wanted children. That is what I told people.

I say a lot of things I don't mean out of fear of people seeing who I really am and not liking it. I think that's why burlesque has been so good for me. Because for once I'm actually showing who I really am. My playful thoughts and daydreams that I dance through throughout the day. Costumes I put so much care into. Even as a character, it's really me up there, and at times, it can be very scary that people who are important to me won't like it. But I keep trying at it because being myself feels like a cold rush of waterfall falling freedom down through my spine.

So if I did sort of want children and I actually had had names picked out for a good portion of my life, why did I say there was no way I would have children in a bazillion yonder years? I was afraid of what might happen if I committed myself to another person that much. What would happen if the person I made children with did not stay with me and I ended up alone? You can see where your father issues kinda blend with your mother issues at this juncture. I was afraid of never being as pretty as I once was and being too strapped for cash and time to achieve the sort of appearance and creative enterprise that I really desired to have in life if I thought about it. This is where eating disorders and parent issues collide and you create a big, ugly beast that stomps through your brain and appears at nearly every corner you turn in your life. I was afraid to ever be pregnant because I did not want to left bedraggled and sad to die without a mate. Pregnancy seemed like such a binding thing to me. Something that would make me want to stay with someone forever and hoping they didn't leave me because I wasn't pretty enough any more.

So on that hand, you have my bizarre insecurities that I am trying to stamp out like grease fires popping up in my kitchen. Let me tell you what the dream was though.

I was torn between wanting one child or two because it seemed with one you might be able to travel more and give her (hopefully) more of the things that make girls happy. But a boy could be fun to temper the hurt feelings that so often arise during a girl's teenage "I'm going to be a bitch because I just learned how to and got female hormone rages" stage. But really I love just having a girl and it would be hard to litter that with increased boy presence. I like men, not boys, and I can't stand the thought of dirty, nasty gym clothes being left about. But I really wanted to be a mom with creative little outlets that could become more full time once she was old enough to attend a school. When Duckie gets older, I would love to have the ability to have tea parties for her where I bake awesome vegan cupcakes from coconut milk and put lovely pastel frosting on top. I wanted to be pretty when my husband got home and be able to tell him I had gotten writing or costuming or whatever done that day. I wanted aprons and cardigans and pearls and cute dresses and kitchen-cooking heels. I wanted to be a Stepford wife channeling the spirit of a sweet little sex kitten. That's right, my loves, I wanted to be somebody's wonderful housewife with a twist. I wanted the time to do things that made me happy and in return I would give the people I loved a very happy home. I wanted to be a charming, well-read, very loved wife to a man that I could adore and trust.

So my fears were battling my dreams. Why then...did I decide to have a baby?

One time I made a very hard decision that not many people will admit to others. I'm not sure there's a wrong or right to the decision which is why I think putting laws in place regarding it must be done very carefully. It's hard to make a law regarding something that most rationally minded people would say might defy the boundaries of where right and wrong belong. For me, if I were to answer the question, I would say that it was right for the timing, but wrong for my soul.

I went through a very hard time my last year of college following that decision. I went through periods of basic substance abuse and experienced months of overwhelming sadness. I didn't eat until I was sick from not eating and I drank more alcohol than should ever be consumed. I was a drunken, emotional, sad mess. I was in graduate level classes seeking stimulus that was lost by that point for most my undergrad work. I watched my stupid 4.0 that was fucking hard to achieve because of the grade point rules in place at my school slip to a 3.7 and I felt disgusted with my inability to control my life. (Sigh. An A- does not count for a full 4.0 credit. It's hard to always stay above a 93.) I was a mess and if it were not for my ability to take both acting and yoga and aerobics those semesters due to my abundance of electives left to pursue, I might have not graduated. But I did.

And I grabbed onto steady ground as fast as I could. Steady ground that would allow me to carry out something I felt in my body I shouldn't have stopped initially. Think whatever you like, but when Duckie was born she emerged like a dove of baptism. She's just special and is meant to be here in the world with me.

So back to where you manifest your fears because you have to walk through them. In the throes of pregnancy, I asked a man to marry me sooner than we had planned on and it was done in a way I would always secretly be sad about no matter what I was saying. Because I was afraid of him leaving me and my baby.

Pregnancy was rough. I've had an eating disorder, and I knew it would be. Accepting weight gain. I had different potentially complicated risks that caused me to attend more doctor's appointments than usual while working a full-time, but hourly-paid job and take shots twice a day. (A word of warning for any of my lymphoma-survivor ladies--dependent on how long it's been since your treatment times I would suggest checking in with your oncologist just in case. Trust me...I know more than anyone that there is no need to rush a baby when her soul needs to come into your life. If she's meant for you, the timing will arrive.) I found my marriage wasn't what my heart really wanted in very many ways that I don't want to discuss here yet. I was miserable and depressed.

Well, of course things couldn't last in that state. My marriage came to a standstill of sorts last year, and in my head at times, even though I pushed for the separation and he just complied with it, I felt all my worse fears had come true. And no man would again ever want to make love to me for the rest of our lives because I already had a baby with me. It was around this time I turned to paying attention to burlesque, and I'm thankful I did. It has been the most sensually-sweet, sugar-covered surprise of a distraction, and I'm thankful for that. I know I wouldn't be feeling nearly as okay as I do if not for its debut in my life.

I'm certain that I have been battling postpartum sadness in slight degrees since the end of my pregnancy. When I felt strapped for time and love and was missing both in my life. Times are changing though which makes me wonder if standing my ground might just be the best plan to see how things go. I've been so scared of not having one thing in my life that I've neglected to realize I have a chance to have a different kind of just as wonderful experience with what I do have. Yes. I'm tired. Yes. I feel like I can never work long enough and hard enough to balance my editing position and my fiction and writing and my dancing and costuming and my beautiful baby girl and her time with me. Yes. I get really overwhelmed. But the more she looks at me and we see eye to eye on things, the prettier the view gets.

Someone who really likes to see me happy got me a session this week to see an amazing spirit helper who can help with energy. She was the first one who could see what I had been afraid to say aloud to anyone but the writer journal that got stolen: that my baby is a strong beautiful spirit that flits into lives like a fairy and leaves love dust for all the world to feel after she leaves. I'm hoping I might figure out some more insight into what kind of mommy I can happily be if my dreams don't turn out the exact color I thought they might be. How to learn to trust people when they are talking to you close enough to let you know everything will be okay if I just give a little faith in what I want my fate to be. When the energy-spirit you can't define but just know to be brings a sign into your life, you can't hesitate with the question of what everything means.

And there's still a chance yet, I'll find myself settled with with a holy trinity in my life living my girlhood secret wishes to be a Sweet Ass Housewifey. Some sexy Messiah to fall asleep next to me and bless the daydreams in my head into being. You just never know where things might go when you let your bubble-cased dreams float up and out to the sea.