Who is that woman staring back at me?

Ever look in the mirror and feel like you don't even recognize your own face? That is what happened to me.

When I was growing up I was always outside running around playing some sort of sport. Started playing baseball as a kid, made Varsity softball as a freshman in High School and also played on my co-ed church team for years. Then I became sedentary.

I was always a huge music lover. My dad jokes that when I was a kid I used to shout out, "I love this song" after every single song that the DJ played on the radio. I began playing piano when I was five years old, and took up French horn and clarinet in High School. Now I hardly even listen to music. I don't even own an I-pod.

My children are everything to me and their world has become my world. Which is great and important but I began to realize that anytime anyone asked me what I had been up to, I immediately started telling them what my daughter was up to.

In between our daughter and son, I had a stillborn baby girl. Her name is Isabel. I will talk about her in another blog post but when she died, so did a part of me. So did a part of my husband. I was already someone who was afraid. There was always this little voice in my head saying, "don't do this or don't do that, you couldn't possibly pull it off, it's not going to work out" and then the unimaginable happened...something so terrible and unexpected and for two full years after her loss, I walked around wondering when the other shoe was going to drop.

I would look at photos taken of me after I had her and I'd notice how tired and sad my eyes were. I didn't want to look like that in my pictures so whenever anyone got ready to take a picture of me, I started opening up my eyes really really wide in hopes that the picture of me was going to be a good one. You can imagine how that worked out for me.

I am determined to get back to me. I want to feel good. I want my kids to be proud of me. I want to be the best mom that I can be. I started back at WW in February and in March started kickboxing 2-3 times a week. I've lost a significant amount of weight and am down to where I was back in High School. Kickboxing has been absolutely amazing for me both physically and mentally. I am finally active again.

I have always loved to write and was very impressed by friends who are mommy bloggers. I thought to myself, "Wow, that's so much fun, I would love to do that, but no, I couldn't possibly." And then I reminded myself that I have to stop being so afraid of everything. So, with a little encouragement and help from a friend, here I am.