Shedding My Hide...




Shedding My Hide...




07 August 2016

When Life Has Other Plans

I was planning for a productive weekend this weekend. I was excited that my cousin got to come over for dinner Friday night so we could spend some quality time together. He was supposed to work yesterday but got called off work so we got to hang out more, which was nice but he would have rather been able to work so he can get back home to his family. 
However, I am grateful he got called off because that means he was there when my body decided not to cooperate. Around 1pm, my stomach started hurting. Within 15 minutes the pain had increased and moved to my lower right adbomen. It just got increasingly worse, until I was nauseous from the pain. I finally told him I was convinced I had appendicitis but I'm not a nurse so, we started calling our nurse family and friends and there was a general consensus... Go to the hospital and get it checked out. 
So I called my husband who was working and asked him to come home because I needed to go to the ER. My cousin was kind enough to stay with my kids, and my in-laws brought some reinforcements.... We didn't wait very long at the ER to get back, and they did some blood work and ordered a CAT scan. Sitting still made the pain less intense so I asked the doctor if we could skip thenCAT scan, but the bloodwork had come back and my White Blood Cell count was high, which told him there was likely an infection and he needed the CAT scan. It was a good thing, because I was right a few hours earlier... It was definitely appendicitis and they scheduled an emergency surgery right then. 
Surgery went well, and aside from a post-surgery panic attack and some pain, I'm doing ok. 
I've been able to pump milk and send it home with Cedric every couple of hours. I'm finally eating something. Hopefully they'll send me home soon because I miss my babies!!!!!!

03 August 2016

Momming is HARD

Today was one of those hard Mom days... Our hard is different on different days... And my hard is different from your hard, but it's hard work nonetheless... Today was a hard "working mom" day. I scurried around the house getting two girls and myself ready, starting with my early morning pump session to keep up my supply and trying to get us out the door on time with lunches and bottles and extra diapers and clothes for the little, my three giant water cups and pink drinks for the day, pink drinks and vitamins set out for my husband... And big sister wanted me to hold her while she ate breakfast, and her hair was a mess, and little sister was sleeping until it was time to go, so I grabbed her to change her diaper before we ran out the door... And she woke up happy and giggling and wanting to play...and my mama heart broke. Because I wanted to stay and play and enjoy those giggles... I wanted to get to make her giggle and just be... Just be with her... But we were already late and I had to scoop her up and put her in her car seat and off we went. 
So we got to school and dropped off big sister and of course she was happy to be with her friends. I took little sister to her room, got her bottles in the fridge and sat down to nurse her before I left (like I always do). When she was done, she needed a diaper change. I wanted to change her diaper, but I'd spent too much time talking to another mommy in between dropping the two girls off, and now another mommy was using the changing table, and I was soooo late for work... I had to hand her off to her teacher and kiss her goodbye and it just broke me. What kind of Mom am I that I don't have enough time to giggle with my  baby first thing in the morning? What kind of Mom am I that I don't have enough time to change her diaper so I can enjoy one last moment of giggles? (She loves having her diaper changed.)
What kind of mom am I that my baby spends more time with strangers than she does with her family? It was especially painful after arriving to pick her up yesterday to find her crying huge crocodile tears on the floor by herself, while one of her teachers was just watching the older babies play across the room. What kind of Mom am I that I can't find a way to be with her instead of leaving her all day with people who can't love her like I can?
So I spent the day on the verge of tears all day, and they came a few times for sure. 
It's hard being a mommy. It's hard knowing what the right thing is and figuring out how to make the next best thing work when the best thing isn't an option. It's hard to be away from your baby more than you're with her, and trust that she is in good hands. 
I'm working hard every day to make a better life for our family... To make it so that I can be home with them and give them my attention... The attention they deserve. But until then, it's hard!
So when I get home, this is the only thing I know to do...
  Hold her and pray!

31 July 2016

Starting Over For THE LAST TIME


I can't believe I'm here agin but I ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT BE HERE AGAIN! 
Not only do I want it, but I've found the tools I need to be successful that are sustainable. No more fads, no more ketosis, no more deprivation, cheats, magic solutions... 
Just healthy choices! Healthy guts! Daily activity! Drinking enough water (which you may be surprised is actually HALF YOIR BODY WEIGHT in ounces... So yeah, you're probably not drinking enough either). 
My beautiful girls deserve a healthy Mama and a good role model of how to take care of yourself and love yourself. 
So yeah... I'm doing the damn thing... 29 pounds down since I delivered Berkleigh in May... 
I'm committed to healthy choices. I take my Plexus supplements religiously... Slim helps me regulate blood sugars so I don't have cravings and don't have crashes. Probio5 and BioCleanse clean out my gut so my whole body works the way it's supposed to. My XFactor has 833% DV of B12, 500% of B6, 250% of Vit D, 333% of Vit C and 100% of everything else I need. My MegaX has Omega 3,5,6,7 and 9. 
I lost 3 pounds last week!!! 
Wanna join me? It's easier together!!!!

06 December 2014

Wounded

When I was a kid we lived in the country in Oklahoma… the driveway to our house was a long gravel road from the interstate and that is where I learned to ride my bicycle… I still have sweet dreams of that house and the mulberry tree we used to climb up in and eat the mulberries straight off the tree… bugs and all... I can remember when I was riding my bike up and down that gravel road one day and I lost my balance and veered to the side of the road and crashed… I banged up my knee pretty good and had gravel up under the skin… it was pretty gross and it really hurt… my parents used “monkey blood” to clean it out and disinfect it (that red stuff that hurt like the dickens, but it worked)…. As carefully as they tended to my wound, I still have a scar on my knee where the gravel was…  That is the nature of wounds… even the small ones leave scars. Reminders of where we’ve been, lessons we’ve learned, reminders of how to protect ourselves from hurting our self in that way again. But before they are scars, they are wounds… open, exposed, painful, messy wounds.
Wounds can take on a life of their own… if not properly cared for, they can become infected and take over your body… and if they get bad enough, a special wound care doctor has to come in to oversee their care. It involves carefully inspecting it and debriding it… removing the dead, damaged or infected tissue to improve the healing potential. It requires proper calorie and nutrition intake to give the body the energy it needs to heal. It requires constant oversight and attention to make sure that infection doesn’t set in and take over. In their early stages, wound are uncomfortable… a nagging feeling to remind you they are there… but not so uncomfortable that you feel the need to do stop what you’re doing to address it… and sometimes the care necessary to heal is uncomfortable, even painful and leaves the wound even more exposed and sensitive to the outside elements. To an untrained eye, one may see necrotic tissue of a wound and think it’s scabbing over… it’s hard and black or gray… one may think that maybe it will just heal itself… But, under the surface the infection is taking over and if the wound doesn’t get the care it needs it can eat away at the tissue, and the tissue cells begin to die as it spreads and goes deeper into the body… eventually seeping into the bloodstream… an then we have a whole new problem as sepsis surges through the body and it’s too late. By that time, the discomfort has become painful and debilitating… stopping you in your tracks… What a tragedy to be poisoned to death when proper attention and care, while painful, could have provided the healing necessary to recover and thrive…
I probably don’t need to say this… because if you know me at all, you know where I’m going with this…. But just to make things plain… Racism is our wound, America… any reasonable person, regardless of your worldview cannot deny that our nation is hurting and broken where race is concerned… the people in the streets of our cities all across the nation are proof that racial tensions have hit a breaking point.  Our scab has been knocked off and exposed a septic wound that has eaten away at the very fibers of our being and poisoned our institutions and systems in ways that we cannot even see… WE ARE SEPTIC and if we don’t comply with some serious life-saving measures and apply the necessary treatment to clean out our systems and start healing, we are going to self-destruct… that’s not me being dramatic… that is real life… even if you don’t see it.
As a Chaplain, I have learned many things from the patients and families I have served, but even if I had learned nothing else, I know this much to be true…. Presence, compassion and empathy are powerful and vital tools for standing with those who are hurting, grieving and struggling with the deepest of sorrows, anger and fear… Compassion and empathy are the only ways to sit with them and offer your self… your presence… your acknowledgement of their personhood and their pain, when there are no words for the tragedy they are facing… When cards and hot meals and flowers and texts and Facebook messages of sympathy are lost in the winds of well-meaning attempts to fill the awkward silence when people don’t know what to say. Presence, compassion and empathy are the tools that can create sacred space that invites someone to be authentic in their pain and struggle, and sometimes…. sometimes… you are privileged enough to be invited into their journey, to walk with them as an ally, to be their partner in the struggle to create meaning and find the Divine in the aftermath of destruction and chaos. Only, to do that means being vulnerable yourself… you can’t truly journey with someone in their struggles without hearing with your heart… and sometimes that means hearing things that convict you and make you uncomfortable… I’ve heard Moms who have experienced neo-natal loss share other people’s reactions to them sharing their “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” photos of their infant… that it made others too sad to see pictures of their now precious child… “I’m sorry the photos of my dead child make you sad, but this is my child, and I want to acknowledge and honor this member of our family.” My pediatric hospice patients’ parents who share how their support system dwindles when they make the decision to go on hospice because their friends and church communities can’t handle the thought of children dying. It’s selfish… human, but selfish. 
            Presence, compassion and empathy are vital tools for creating sacred space that invites people to begin to heal… but at the end of the day… No amount of presence or compassion or empathy is going to put you in another person’s shoes… We are limited in our understanding… in our worldview… by our own experiences… and until we can acknowledge that and acknowledge that limitedness equates to blind spots in seeing the whole picture when it comes to tragedies that affect other people’s lives… we cannot engage in meaningful conversation about things that really matter  like race and our nation’s eternal struggle with how to acknowledge the intricacies of how our history informs present day race relations and racial tensions in this country. 
Here’s the deal… It’s not intrinsically bad that our nation continues to have difficulty navigating race relations (except that it is the result of centuries of slavery and segregation in our nation… which is, in and of itself, intrinsically evil). But our history (those centuries I just mentioned, followed by the fact that there are still individuals who were alive during Jim Crow) makes it impossible for our struggle to have been resolved… The consequences of centuries of slavery and segregation are not going to be erased or eradicated in less than 1/3 of the time they were the societal norm…That is not how grief  and oppression and healing works. The problem is not that we still struggle… it’s that we want so badly not to…. We want so desperately for it not to be a problem… to put it behind us, that we pretend that it’s not a problem until we can’t anymore… we take such offense at the notion that we benefit from its existence… and, by “we” I mean white people… It offends on multiple levels… on one level, we can’t accept the differentiation that you don’t have to be “a racist” to benefit from white privilege and a society whose very fabric is woven with systemic and institutionalized racism (the way its also woven with patriarchy)… it just is what it is, whether you want to accept the boost it provides or not. Which hits the other nerve… to acknowledge that we didn’t all start off on the same ground, somehow minimizes the hard work we’ve put into achieving the successes and achievements that we are so proud of…  Just because someone else has to work twice as hard to get where you’ve gotten doesn’t mean that you haven’t worked hard… it just means that they have had obstacles we know nothing about. This idea of white privilege hits our nerves in such a way that we feel we have to reject the notion of systemic and institutionalized racism in order to pardon ourselves from participation in anything racist and hold onto the pride we have in our accomplishments… we are so bound up in our own comfort with the status quo that when it implodes on itself we try to blame the “victims” and transfer the issues, deflecting to how “they need to do better” because the exposal of the Truth makes us feel guilty and like something is being taken from us… and that’s uncomfortable… It’s easier to feel good about how far we’ve come, individually and as a nation, without acknowledging that our nation, just like each of us individually, are a work in progress, we have wounds that need to be healed so we can become whole in our broken places…. 
             We can’t continue to say “I’m so tired of hearing about racism in America” when we have no idea what that reality is like for those who are living it every day… it’s like being offended at a grieving mother’s photo of her dead child… Get over it and put your big-kid pants on because we have some tough work to do…
            I will admit that for months I have struggled and wrestled with what part I play in the current struggle we are facing… it started with Trayvon Martin when I was pregnant with our first child and I was trying to articulate the extra layer of fears the mother of a “brown baby” must wrestle with on top the fears any mother experiences… because every mother worries about her baby out in the world, unable to protect them from the inevitable pains and struggles and evils they will face…  but if your child is brown or black… and God forbid, male… those pains, and struggles and evils are multiplied simply because of the color of their skin… something they cannot control and cannot hide or “overcompensate” for with “good behavior.”  And trying to articulate this to a loved one whose life-experiences simply limit their capacity for understanding this reality, was isolating… so I kept my mouth shut… And then Michael Brown was shot and killed in broad daylight and we learned there wouldn’t even be a trial… and I tried to talk to my husband about it… my black husband… I wanted to protest with my Black Church Studies Minister colleagues in Dallas and felt like I needed to DO something… to stand up for my husband… and my cousin and his wife and children… my brothers-in-law, and my sister-in-law and nephews… and my friends and colleagues…. And MY DAUGHTER and unborn children… but my husband and I have very different ways of processing this sort of thing and different outward responses and he felt like I was being to vocal and public with my frustration and was concerned that I may offend his friends, and so I learned to keep my mouth shut… because this is more about his experience than mine… so his desires trump mine where this is concerned…. And then while I was still digesting that injustice on my own and feeling paralyzed, we learned that even though Eric Garner was killed in the light of day, ON CAMERA FOR THE WORLD TO SEE, where he unarguably did NOT resist arrest, by a police officer who used a banned chokehold to execute and arrest for an infraction that normally warranted a ticket and not an arrest in the first place, where he said ELEVEN TIMES…. 11 times…. “I can’t breathe” and multiple police officers continued to bring him down in a chokehold and then sit on him to restrain him without regard for his pleas for life… where he is seen lying on the ground, not breathing and no one checks his pulse for 4 minutes… no one performs CPR at all… and he dies on camera…. We watch him die… and nobody is held responsible… NOBODY! There are so many different factors at play here… so many systemic issues that need addressing… but the one we seem to have the hardest time with is that if Eric Garner were white… this whole scenario would be different… and he most likely wouldn’t have been dead… and even if he had still been arrested and died in the process, there would have undoubtedly been an indictment… It makes me sick… It scares the shit out of me… literally terrifies me to the point that I have resorted to praying that as I will someday bring another child into this world, that it won’t be a boy… because I don’t think my heart can handle the weight of that responsibility… to protect him, teach him how to protect himself by making himself smaller when he is being disrespected by authority whose fears and ignorance are blinding and incite panicked and fatal reactions… I can’t imagine that God would trust me with the weight of that responsibility for Her child.
            I’m not sorry… My silence is suffocating me… and I can’t breathe anymore… Literally… I sit and think about my daughter and the children we want to have in the future, and I CANNOT stay silent anymore… When they learn about this in their history lessons, because make no mistake… this is a pivotal moment in history… and they ask me about it, I have to be able to show them that I fought for change so that they wouldn’t have to experience the gravity of the struggle we are facing today… And finally, I stand up not only for them, but for me… For my soul… To address the sickness in my gut… My soul is not right with this… I have been aching and sick because if this were 5 years ago… I would be standing up in a much more active way… and the fact that I have censored myself has added salt to an already aching wound in my heart… I know better… I know that there are different realities for how this world is experienced based on race, gender, class, physical ability, mental health… and I know that my salvation in the Kin-dom is wrapped up with that of my neighbors… So…. This is where I start… My Presence and Compassion and Empathy without censor… We have to start having difficult conversations… not only in times of crisis, but ongoing conversations about how we can clean up this oozing wound of ours… We have to do better…
#blacklivesmatter
~Rev. Megan Elizabeth Lilburn Turner, MDiv


“If you have come here to help me then you are wasting your time… But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” ~Lila Watson

Taking a New Direction….

So, not because weight isn't still a battle in my life… or because I have given up on weight… but because life happens and I miss writing, I have acknowledged that I have more to write about than just a weight loss journey, when it comes to healing my soul and uncovering the me I was created to be… so, I am going to attempt to resurrect this blog… and my first post is going to be much different than anything I have posted before… But it comes from the deepest places of my soul… because I just couldn't breathe anymore…

Since my last post, over two years ago, a great deal has changed in my life.  In November of 2012 I married my love after 5 years of dating…




and in September of 2013 we welcomed our beautiful daughter Sophia Grace into the world… and our lives were changed forever…



Life has been a crazy, beautiful mess ever since and I can't imagine it any other way.


18 September 2012

Healthy Body, Mind and Soul

So I haven't been as faithful a blogger this time around as I was last... not because I haven't been successful or because I am less committed, but because I am so rarely sitting in front of a computer where I can... and my personal computer is now out of commission, at least temporarily.
So... to catch you up on this journey... I weighed in for my week four appointment today and I have lost a total of 16.5 lbs and lost 3 inches in my waist so far... which is good and exciting.  In addition to doing Medi, I have also been on another journey... I started a 60 day challenge with Bikram Yoga, which has been really perfect for me. I have to do 60 classes in 60 days, and who wants to exercise in a 105 degree room for 90 min at a time more than once in a day... which makes me even more motivated to go every day. I can feel a change in my body... and in my spirit... My practice (overall) has improved (even though, of course, I still have bad days)... so today will be 18 days in a row... and I really LOVE it. My biggest challenge is staying hydrated though... because you sweat like nobody's business and I can't drink the coconut water or normal sports drinks because of the carbs (because of Medi) so, it has been a challenge... one that has resulted in 2 migraines during the 18 days... But the reality is, I need to stay hydrated anyway... so I just have to keep working at it.
Anyway... in addition to Medi, and Yoga, I have also been doing Spiritual Direction which was exactly what I needed to jumpstart my whole balancing act... helping me to balance my emotional and spiritual life and practice spiritual discipline. During my first session... before I started back to Medi or Bikram... she invited me to remember what it felt like to be the authentic Megan i have known in the past... and I remembered that there were times when I was Brave, Bold, Balanced, and Healthy and so that became my mantra... and my drive to be those things again...
Life long practices to keep balanced and healthy...

28 August 2012

8.9

So today was my week 1 weigh-in and I lost 8.9.
I'll admit, it was a bad week to start because, months ago, we made reservations for restaurant week at Del Frisco's with Sarah and Adrian... And I've never been to Del Frisco's so we weren't about to cancel and you can't not have the full experience. I didn't overdo it, but I didn't eat only protein either, so I fell out of ketosis. And Saturday I walked 3+ miles with Dory and didn't increase my caloric intake so (apparently) my body went into starvation mode... And they saw that in my numbers before i even told her about the walk... but 8.9 is good. And I'll do week 1 again this week and get off to a better start. I feel good about my week and the 8.9 lb loss! This week will be even better!