to my daughter
December 13, 2014 § 4 Comments
Lately I hover a little closer over your words, gathering sentiments like keepsakes, holding them tightly with a tenderness for the heart and mind who weaves poetry into unapologetic declarations of self.
Two recent favorites, quickly scribbled against the pages of remembering before the memories are muddled with time.
First, something from your school days. I treasure this fragment for the unapologetic honesty of your truth. During conferences your classroom teacher suggested that practice makes perfect when addressing an area of concern. As she extended examples to support the potential of progress within the exercise of practice you interrupted her well-intentioned rote message of success with contradictory evidence, assuring her that you were quite consistently horrible at the task in question. I wish you could have seen how you strengthened your posture; sitting taller in your confession of self, your eyes bright with accountability for your imperfections. May you always see struggles with humor and effort with ownership.
Second, a snapshot of home. So often the furnishings of our daily life are invisible to our experience. We move through the days without considering the presence of comfort or the distraction of inconveniences. In casually discussing the possibility of replacing our family table with another shape or finish to hide the unforgiving wear, you sprang passionately to defend its permanence, clinging to the scars as witnesses to our story with a fierceness that promised to guard our individual imperfections with the same measure of loyalty and honesty. I hope you will always see beauty in broken corners and memories in lines etched across time.
However uncertain you may feel of the world around you, the surety of self you carry in unextraordinary moments is exceptional. I hope you begin always, in each endeavor, from this place of self that claims imperfections with love.
To the Moon and Back,
Mom
blessings & burdens
December 10, 2014 § 4 Comments
The past week has been a whirlwind of ineffective busyness, exhaustive energy spent chasing dwindling minutes with endless tasks; places and people, projects and purchases. It all felt important, urgent even, until this afternoon.
Twice today a casual conversation invited an occasion to balance the frivolousness of holiday tasks with the reality of loss. A permanent goodbye shifting the value of impermanent inconveniences. Each unexceptional endeavor thereafter quickly became evidence of overlooked good fortune too easily dismissed with a debt of obligation over a wealth of privilege. Homework and mealtime, bathtime and bedtime all everyday blessings sometimes dressed as burdens; have tos and get tos too easily transposed.
The work of life is a beautiful mess, a riddle of intention I too rarely appreciate for the maddening uncertainty of a simple surety; everything and nothing in the balance of perspective.
tangled thoughts
December 8, 2014 § 2 Comments
Threads of thought tangled together like words that tumble into speech out of order. The days have crashed into one another with busy distractions and my mind wanders over parcels of prose, scattered in stolen minutes. Beginnings and endings rest like listless middles strewn recklessly in forgotten moments, begging time and stillness.
loose ends
December 2, 2014 § 10 Comments
Moments, fragments of threads undone that drift across the present, tethering us to pieces of our past with uncertain commitment to unfinished experiences. Some days these ends invite new beginnings as we gather from where we once left off, a chapter marked with a promise to return, like a photograph nestled between pages of an old story. Other times they appear in our day like letters long answered but misplaced in the mail, inviting closure. Sometimes these threads are little more than a memory that connects us to an undernourished sense of self.
For me, the holidays are often a resting place of loose ends; days past nestled in familiar songs and comforting traditions. There is a reassurance to remembering and I savor the What Ifs and Remember Whens like advent chocolates and christmas cards. It is a season of loose ends, threaded into sentiment for a season of magic.
chance & change
November 29, 2014 § 4 Comments
Every once in a while a choice comes along that chafes at our comfort and stretches our perception; inviting discomfort that fosters a fullness as we grow into something new. Most often it is a commitment, something just far enough outside the normal expectations of our day that we must realign ourselves to our sense of self as the foreign wedges itself into unexpected corners of our heart, making the familiar inadequate in comparison. We reach a little further outside our abilities, expectations, knowledge and gather the moment into our experience.
At the moment my family and I are dancing impulsively around an old wish with new fervor. Tinkering with an idea that makes us smile as we tally pros and cons with a thoughtful impulsivity that defies tidy logic. It feels a little like standing on the edge of a cliff, hands linked with borrowed bravery and shared smiles; curiosity pushing us just a little further into an intentional disregard for the fall into uncertainty.
We have only to leap and chance change.
between thanks & giving
November 28, 2014 § 2 Comments
It tickles the corners of my attention; the restless minutes of in-between, suffering the maddening density of molasses. Not ready to rush the season of thanks I am dragging my feet through snow-covered leaves, the melody of a new holiday betraying my distraction.
We no sooner clear the kitchen of a modest meal in celebration of thanks than we unpack colorful remnants of Christmas Past with ornate measures of excess. This year I am dwelling stubbornly in-between, contentment and anticipation interrupting one another with the companionable chatter of silence and song.
Soon enough cheer and sentiment will drape the door frame as we circle the lingering days of another year in a raucous festivity that chases the New Year with a fullness of possibility.
soul food
November 26, 2014 § 4 Comments
I am not a cook, I am barely a baker. At my best, I am attentive to directions and curious. The never ending task of coordinating healthy meals that are a pleasant balance of familiar and unanticipated has made me an exhausted, under-inspired family cook. Excuses and invitations interrupt the tediousness of my children’s predictably plain palates with an opportunity to peruse the pages of my oft-overlooked recipes for an idea. Slowly the search becomes an extension of a backyard treasure hunt, the entire process an enthusiastic quest for a new experience.
This is the playful path that lead me to shuffle the expectations for our Thanksgiving meal. Without the company of family our meal is a collection of unexceptional staples, a menu dictated by memories that is more reassuring than creative. Not wanting to challenge the harmony of the day with disruptive substitutions, I instead conceded my place at the helm of preparations. This year my children gathered the groceries and their hands will soon craft the meal. We will play with our food before we eat and maybe, perhaps, we will carve new traditions.
While my children stand taller in their tasks, I am counting my good fortune as their mother. The menu matters so much less than the company of my children. Our time together, food for my soul.
home & holidays
November 23, 2014 § 9 Comments
Curled beneath the blanket my mother knit, the sounds of my family sorting through individual distractions interrupting the silence, I am content. Old toys and new projects, quiet interests and easy company are hallmarks of our weekends. Holidays are similar in their simplicity; well-loved decorations will nestle corners of our home in nostalgia and familiar meals will draw us around our child-weathered table in good company.
Our traditions are informal, inviting opportunity and chance to interrupt the stillness while holding our place at home with a promise to return.
This morning we ventured outside our routines, gathering new memories along familiar streets. Shuffling between store windows and street performers, we settled into the magic of a musical. Both children, too grown to be so easily lost under the spell of make-believe, leaned into the performance allowing themselves to be tricked into a story. Returning home to the comforts of less grand endeavors, I thought of days past and marveled at the inequality of time.
Traditions slow the minute hand least I move too quickly through my days. Just as the trees have emptied their leaves beneath the burden of shortened days, I too have drawn myself further into the season; giving thanks for time shared and conjuring magic with a celebratory spirit. Stretching the days across fleeting years.
one
November 22, 2014 § 2 Comments
We began our son’s high school experience with a clumsy, unapologetically honest introduction. As a student on the autism spectrum he is a contradiction of expectations and assumptions; his needs are misread as predictably as his ability to perform consistently. I walk a delicate balance, informing teachers and support staff of the invisible needs that shadow my son’s experiences and permitting him greater autonomy to speak for himself.
Somewhere in the language of advocating for my child as a student with special needs, emotion becomes muddled with words weighted in clinical knowledge that sometimes consumes my vocabulary. Years of navigating a second language of need has created a sterile dialogue that suffocates the lightness of my love with terms that cannot contain the colors of my child’s personality.
Each year I hope for someone who speaks the same language of care, but celebrates the complicated prism of my child’s spectrum of light.
Yesterday the person I had been looking for stepped more clearly into our path, speaking the language of our need with a smile. More importantly, he volunteered to partner with the spectrum of teachers whose worries are as diverse as their personalities to help inform my son’s assumptions with practical exercises in deconstructing the social language of his days as they create a new path toward greater independence.
Within this singular exchange I was able to reshape my words from an armor of advocacy to a partnership of possibility; infusing the language of need with a joyful celebration of my child’s spirit. One person has changed the entire landscape of our experience, bridging fear with hope.
On this, the eve of our Thanksgiving holiday, I am counting my many blessings and celebrating the power of one.
yesterday’s tomorrow
November 21, 2014 § 6 Comments
The past has tumbled too quickly into the present. I stacked my hope into milestones, one toppling into the next until the momentum of my experience misplaced the art of intention.
I have been thinking on this all week, standing stubbornly outside the normal pattern of my days. Lately optimism seemed an effort too cumbersome to contort around my worries. The heaviness of helplessness chaffed against the memory of another self, one who smiled more recklessly and leaned forcefully into the unknown.
Lost in the shape of my days, I began to map a path to self in the company of others. I interrupted my routine with invitations to old friends and new; planning for joy in such a way as to still myself in anticipation and dislodge the dread that had been chasing after my footsteps.
The pieces of self I could no longer avoid clattered against my consciousness and I became, once more, the architect of my intentions. Crafting yesterday’s tomorrow, today.
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