Dear Mom, Today is your birthday. It’s always been such a special and important day for me, because you have always been so special and important to me. I’ve been thinking about this day all week. It’s not easy to know you’re not here to celebrate it, and to accept that I can’t call you or Skype with you. I can’t hear your voice outside my head...
You, dear soul, are doing fine. You have been finding your way through the struggle, and the muck and mire. You’ve had a lot to contend with over this past year. But you’ve done it every single day. Every night you’ve gone to bed, and every morning you’ve gotten up and faced the day. That’s… Continue reading A Letter from My Inner Wise Self
Almost exactly three weeks after we lost my mother, my father and I were grabbing lunch one day, just the two of us. We'd decided to eat at a lovely little cafe not too far from where we'd been staying every night for these past few weeks; my grandmother's house, overlooking the beach and the… Continue reading The Lunch
When my son was a child, we said some variation of this to each other every day and every night, "I love you a hundred, million worlds." I'm not exactly sure of the origins of our saying it, but I know that my heart had never before felt the way that it did about him,… Continue reading A Hundred, Million Worlds
If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life. – Abraham Maslow I find this quote to be potentially quite deceptive, depending on how it’s perceived. It spoke to me in such a positive light when I first read it,… Continue reading Someone Told Me Not to Cry
Someone asked me how it feels having become the mother of a twenty-three year old today. How does it feel? Let’s see…it feels weird. I remember being twenty-three myself and it doesn’t feel like it was that long ago. So it also reminds me about my own aging, of course. That does, and my knees… Continue reading May Good Luck Go With You, And Happiness Too
Let me start off by saying definitively…this is neither an attack, nor a defensive. It is merely an attempt to describe something that I truly believe is done with good intentions. Recently I've read a couple of perspective pieces by you young, harried, stressed-out and overtired mommies, that specifically spoke about having older mothers, whose… Continue reading Good Intentions …or… In Defense of Mothers with Grown Children Who Make “Those Comments”
My third & last post in May for "Stroke Awareness Month" A therapist walked around a room while teaching stress management to an audience. As she raised a glass of water, everyone expected they’d be asked the “half empty or half full” question. Instead, with a smile on her face she inquired: ”How heavy is this… Continue reading Lighten Your Load
A mother's love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity. It dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path. ― Agatha Christie On Mother’s Day two weekends ago we discovered that robins had built a nest containing three beautiful wee eggs… Continue reading And the Course of a Lifetime Runs, Over and Over Again
A Stroke of Good Fortune 