Category: Antidotetomeanness

Biscuit is concerned about the news of bullying and the spread of fear. I asked him if he had an antidote to all of this. Kinda ironic coming from a dog that is going deaf – he must mean with the heart!

Biscuit is very willing to help — and a bit of a baby whisperer!

75 posts in 75 days. I started this project to find something funny, kind or beautiful every day. Not too surprisingly, that intention created more joy in my life just by sharing and all that others shared with me. I thought I would find the antidote to meanness when out and about. Instead I discovered how much hilarity and tenderness I have within my home and the posts became a daily comic strip. Repetition has a way of numbing my senses but now when I am cleaning up a cupboard emptied by curious hands for the 10^th time in a day, I am alert and finding the humor in it. And when I start to capture that, it multiplies. Our mess is our message, to borrow a phrase from Robin Roberts.

On a larger scale my mess became my message when I chose to become a single mom in my mid-40s after the dark days of a painful divorce and collapse of my business. Circumstances that I found so wrenching at the time turned to be just the upheaval necessary to retill the soil of my life for Miss O to grow. But this fierce and passionate feeling that comes with those I love carries so much responsibility. In the moments when the nerve that allowed me to become a single mom has left and I succumb to the worries that I will fail – to be a good mom or adequate provider — I look at the moment that I captured and I know that for that day we did okay.

Biscuit and Simon are doing a great job raising Miss O. They are amazingly patient, curious and gentle. These three beings that can’t speak in the conventional sense communicate so much and it is almost always funny, kind and open. What have I learned from a baby girl, an old golden and an ornery cat? We can all get along and laugh together. We have the antidote to meanness within us – to the fractures of this election or the indignities of life and an instinct to take care of each other and if we’ve forgotten that, we need to get back down on the floor and watch the less guarded beings until we remember.

Due to recent developments, I’m going to continue my posts. Someone please tell me if this gets stale!