stand by me
January 25, 2016 § 7 Comments
It began at the end of school last Friday. My daughter was faced with a decision to muddle through a commitment to others while feeling ill or honor her commitment to self and disappoint others. She chose the latter. Not feeling well, she skipped play practice and headed home.
We each navigate a million different versions of this decision everyday; self or others. I was raised to be a people pleaser and move through the motions of responsibility to others even when resentful of the personal cost. It is easy to understand then that I almost missed the importance of my daughter’s choice.
I was quick to consider her irresponsible before weighing the maturity of her self-awareness. Ever one to get run down and sick, she recognized the early signs of exhaustion and chose self-care.
I’m sad to say it took me too long to appreciate my daughter’s awareness of her body’s needs and acknowledge the world would keep spinning on course despite the trajectory of her departure from expectations. Thankfully my emotions played out in the privacy of my living room with only my husband as witness while our daughter made the trip home by bus.
By the time I saw my daughter I could appreciate that this was not the decision of an irresponsible, insensitive child, but an act of self-care by a sensitive child who worried about disappointing a teacher she respects and a friend she cares for. In missing practice and letting down a friend who needed a ride, she was highly attuned to the consequences of her choice.
Still, she made the best choice she felt she could and then let go of guilt for confidence.
My daughter chose to risk being excluded from her school play for her absence and was validated by a thoughtful message from her teacher acknowledging the integrity of her decision with respect for health and well-being. I still don’t know how my daughter’s friend felt or if they will be ok today.
Last night, Friday’s actions were close in my daughter’s worries. She feared out loud that her friend might still be angry and that it would be uncomfortable sitting beside someone you care about knowing they might be mad. She dreaded the class where she could not escape the uncertainty of her friend’s feelings.
Growing up is hard, it isn’t easy finding balance between our needs and others. I’m thankful my daughter could make a difficult decision efficiently and wade through the complicated consequences mindfully. I love that she understands her self-worth with the same awareness she values others.
In fact, I’m pretty sure I could learn from her practice of self-compassion and trust in others. Mostly, I’m glad she let me sit with her through it all; however it all turns out.
to my daughter
January 24, 2016 § 2 Comments
Earlier this week Dad and I stumbled across a video – you and your brother, years ago, hamming it up for the camera. It was one of those spontaneous living-room productions, siblings collaborating in boredom.
The first part of the video was painful, you were directing your brother’s performance; an overly articulated, forced execution of a joke the audience could not decipher. I was set to delete the clip until the very end when your face popped into the frame. Speaking directly to the camera, your image consuming the screen, your voice boomed with the comedic timing and grit of a weathered entertainer proclaiming affection.
Love you, people. Love ya!
It was almost physical the way you threw your words. Fearless and playful.
You have long since layered yourself in more cautious performances of self. The world around you has etched away at the tough exterior, but your spirit is no smaller.
I’m saving the clip for the days you hide behind your doubts or hesitate too long in joy. For the time when you are old enough you cannot remember being little, or when you feel too small in your imagination. When the world feels too serious and you lose perspective, I hope your own words echo my love back to you.
I want you to celebrate yourself at five, dressed in your big brother’s hand-me-down astronaut costume, directing play and relishing in the spotlight; commanding sight and tossing love noisily into the moment.
Love, Mom
off days
January 22, 2016 § 6 Comments
It was a long week. Even with the grace of a three day weekend, Tuesday felt like Monday and yesterday felt like a betrayal by Friday.
Each day I stumbled out of bed on the wrong foot, tired. My son made a messy mistake at the start of a new experience. My daughter rebelled against every morning routine. New pants fell apart and winter hats were lost at school.
The further we fell out of rhythm the more I fought the imbalance, overcompensating until I surrendered to a simpler effort.
I endeavored to start the day well, to offer care and respect; homemade breakfast and kind words at the door sealed with a hug. Cold walks with our dog, hands free and mind centered on the ground beneath my feet as I picked a path around ice and through snow to find stillness in motion.
It was an excruciatingly unexceptional week. There was no poetry in the madness, but there was beauty in the smallest detail so long as I remembered to look.
We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out. -Ray Bradbury
a year ago, today
January 21, 2016 § 11 Comments
A close friend called at an unexpected hour with an unfamiliar sadness in her voice.
Can you come over?
It should be said this friend was new to my life, old to my soul; one of those rare individuals placed in my path by a purpose greater than our excuses to spend time together.
On this day, she was facing the early hours of a new loss and I was offered, generously, the opportunity to be present in her grief.
I remember admiring her raw vulnerability, the beauty in the honesty of her emotions. Tears like a blessing.
Reaching out and letting go.
It is the only memory I have to offer, the only way I know to mark this day.
So, I remember my friend’s grief and her love; they are inseparable. Joy is not the exclusion of loss.
I carry this lesson in my bones to live more consciously.
My friend did not pretend away her pain, she gave me permission to stand witness to her emotions.
Acting brave and feigning strength is an exhausting act; one that depletes the very marrow of our integrity with illusions of honesty. It is a facade that hides our fragility, something too often presumed a weakness.
Our relationships, family and friendship, are stronger for the tender faults that crack our hearts open further with love.
stargazing
January 19, 2016 § 9 Comments
I am a great thinker of dreams, a poor planner of deeds. My thoughts are consistently conjuring magic, while my actions are often lost in daydreams. It was this Achilles heel that inspired seasons of good intentions and misplaced effort; glow-in-the-dark stars bundled into forgetfulness.
From the time our first child was born, my husband and I made grand plans to gather the stars for our son. Holidays and birthdays brought books, a telescope, and tiny plastic stars to be stored for another time.
The telescope was a poor quality, a compromise of cost. The books were read and disregarded. The stars, a task postponed until forgotten.
This fall, before the night air became cool, you could find our son lying on the ground outside as our dog ran playful circles around his shape. My teenager was once again the elementary student of the stars, marveling at a sky unpolluted by development.
I would wonder at his thoughts, but leave him to our pup’s companionship. Just a boy and his dog without a care in the world, smaller for the scale of the sky.
There is something comforting beneath the familiarity of the stars; markers of space in memorized shapes.
After our move, watching our son stargaze and our daughter daydream about decorating empty walls, my husband and I revisited an old love with new attentiveness.
This Christmas we shared with our children a new telescope and linked together evenings under the stars. Already this winter we have begun mapping the sky and searching the texture of the moon. We also, finally, hung those pesky plastic stars above our daughter’s bed.
It was only after the last constellation was contrived that our son mentioned his lost stars, remorsefully considering the years his own ceiling waited on our good intentions. It was our daughter who counted her leftover stars and lead the way to making right an old promise.
Now both children sleep beneath the stars and we are all falling in love with old lessons in an ancient sky.
to dance
January 16, 2016 § 5 Comments
I used to watch a popular, reality based, television program called Dancing with the Stars. Each season novice dancers who are celebrities of various accomplishment, in seemingly unrelated professions, compete in dance competitions broadcast live.
Weekly I watched edited pieces from practice, the emotional highlights of conflict and struggle that documented both the relationship between partners and the evolution of individual dance routines that culminated in a live performance.
More than the elegant costumes and choreographed movements beneath theatrical lights, I admired the novice dancers for their willingness to be seen imperfectly to an audience of strangers, the honesty of their effort, and the uncertainty of success.
There is something to dance that we cannot pretend, a letting go that transcends the performance for something intimately uncertain.
We are all called upon to dance in our own way, to take risks and invest in ourselves wholeheartedly that our life is more than empty movements.
This morning I’m thinking of the ways I let go in faith and the places I hold on in fear.
For all the topics I dance around, the ways I struggle to be visible in my fears; it hadn’t occurred to me I was begging to be seen. Me, too, comes from first placing self in a position of sight.
There’s magic in stretching our arms high and looking out into the world tenderly.
artistic
January 15, 2016 § 2 Comments
In fleeting minutes of busy days, I have taken to indulging in borrowed time among old photographs; giving thanks for those images preserved in a cardboard box of jumbled memories.
Among these paper gems was a particular photograph that has captured my heart, a forgotten play day from long before our son’s Autism Spectrum diagnosis. There is joy in this discovery for a later memory, one not captured in print; a discussion with our elementary aged son and a cautious question of his understanding of Autism as so many adults introduced a new language to his vocabulary.
I wasn’t sure, then, what he understood and it was important to me that our son’s identity expand to encompass this new knowledge in a way that honored a heart, mind, and spirit greater than clinical terms and educational assessments. So, I asked our son if he understood what his diagnosis meant.
I know I’m artistic.
And so he is as he always was, a mystery of ability with not so unusual needs.
In ten years we have learned much, but it is the magic of the inexplainable that still best speaks to our son’s truth.
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” ―Albert Einstein
day planning
January 14, 2016 § 9 Comments
It was just after I drew January’s calendar of days that I came across a brightly colored, inexpensive day planner. The cheerful hue drew me from my task. I hesitated, weighing the frivolousness of my find, but there was just enough joy in the discovery that I indulged my impulsivity and invested in whimsy.
Appreciative of the convenience of technology but nostalgic in my love of paper, I decided I would use the large blocks of space to map my thoughts on multiple classes, preserve fleeting inspiration from borrowed quotes, chart the work of unexceptional errands and note efforts toward personal care.
Curiosities and quotes, doodles and debts of time now sketched in a place near to where I rest. Gone are the torn fragments of hurried scribbles and misplaced thoughts in want of paper. It is a diary of days and a place of self, an active commitment to an investment of time.
“Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today!” ―Mark Twain
living brave
January 13, 2016 § 4 Comments
As I approach exercises in Living Brave, I am reflecting on my core values and those individuals who guard my heart and honor my tenderness with safe havens of trust; beginning with home.
If living wholeheartedly means being vulnerable and present in genuine connectivity, then home is the place where we are invited each morning to show up in love and honor what is important to those most important to us. It is the place we first learn we are worthy regardless of our imperfection because we are loved unconditionally.
It is the place we are first brave.
In considering how I live bravely among my values and relationships in the context of home and family, it was quite simple to identify my intentions. Accountability, Compassion, Gratitude, Integrity, Joy, Learning, Love, Perseverance, Reliability, Respect, Sincerity, Trust.
Words like poetry that promise a sacred appreciation for and responsibility to my blessings. It is much harder to look to the places where my actions have not always aligned with my beliefs; where beautiful words spoke to broken promises.
Over the past few years, I struggled to mother against external expectations. I gauged myself against other’s examples of importance and fell into the danger of comparison. In these moments my children were held to an unfair example and I was bound to an impersonal standard that did not reflect my values.
On these occasions I discounted independence and curiosity for submissive conformity. Thankfully, my children remembered my early lessons and knew they were safe to challenge the contradiction in my expectations.
We do this for one another, offer save havens to fail so that we may try again.
This summer life contrived to offer me a second chance. In the chaos of living between houses, we carried the space of home in one another’s company. Our attention was intentional, like those early newborn days. Love and trust in moments of sleepy, disorientation. The entire world condensed in small moments.
More often now I find myself breathing into the difficult moments; softening against frustration to more purposefully cultivate days guided by a kinder attention.
I am more the mother I first chose to be; tender to those I have been entrusted great dreams and simple needs. I want to know that my children are armed for the world with confidence and kindness, that they move through the unknown certain of their worth and brave in uncertain adventures. That work begins with me.
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