Tag: love

Still Waters

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“God leads me to still waters that restore my spirit.” – Psalm 23

Today is my birthday. When my 6-year-old daughter realized that earlier this week, she said “Great, can you wake us up early on your birthday so we can make you a surprise?”

Wait a minute…this is a trick. So sweet of her but that morning time is my sacred time. Waking my kids up early is the opposite of a birthday present.

I’ve often thought that the transition between my quiet morning time when I do yoga, meditate, read and write to the time when I get the kids up and ready for school was a hard transition because I was selfish and wanted more quiet time. But something I read this week sparked the thought that it’s really something deeper.

In those quiet morning moments, I find my own stillness. I breathe into the space beyond myself and feel that unity with the Universe. And in that place, the feelings settle, the rush quiets down and it feels like I see beyond all of our physical boundaries if just for a moment.

And I feel that love for my kids that came the moment they became real for me. It’s bigger than a reaction to something they’ve done or the way we express ourselves. It’s that pure connection between the core of them and the core of me, not complicated by any movement. It’s that overwhelming feeling that I get when I creep in and watch them sleep. They are quiet and I’m quiet.

When I’m still, it feels like I’m standing in one of the clear lakes in Northern Idaho we used to visit in my childhood on a hot day without wind. I can see all the way to my feet and beyond.

Then it’s time to wake them up – and any movement stirs the waters. I reach for them and stir up the waters between us. It’s time to accomplish things, meet a timeline and respond to any worries. It’s like going from my peaceful standing in the lake to a full-on water fight. I have trouble traversing that threshold because I miss the quiet view of my little loves.

It’s not just these relationships either. When I’m quiet and peaceful, all my relationships seem clearer and easier to understand than when we are in front of each other talking and stirring up all the things that come with interplay. It’s harder to feel the full appreciation for the depth of each relationship in the busier moments, I just have to hold the quiet snapshot in my heart.

My friend Betsy, who is a more experienced parent than I am, suggested what to do about my birthday. Get them up just a couple of minutes early – so I get my morning quiet time and then also get to feel their love in full audio as well.

Photos of the Week: June 4

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In a week that ranged from rain to sunshine, sickness and health, nights that had restless sleep and nights we slept well, not only did I eat Dove chocolate to get through, but I also wholeheartedly adopted this wrapper advice.

My favorite picture of the week – little people casting long shadows. It reminds me of the beginning of Peter Pan where Wendy is sewing his shadow on so it can always be with him.

Backyard camping where the primary wildlife we saw was the cat trying to squeeze herself between the tent body and the rain fly.

I know what the boots are for – measuring who has collected the most water at the end of puddle jumping. But what are the umbrellas for?

Reading my tea leaves — I see love…!

How was your week?

Open Up, Buttercup

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“Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.” – Maya Angelou

The other day on the carpool home from school, my daughter teed off when her friend said something about being called on in class. “I never get called on in class!” and “I never get to say my ideas!”

Self-pity is the emotion that I have the most trouble with. I think the idea that we should never feel or express self-pity was inculcated in me from an early age. My memory is that it was communicated in statements like “You can join us again when you are feeling more positive.” Or “Can I join the pity party?” or “Toughen up, Buttercup.”

So I think I came by my intolerance of self-pity in myself or others honestly from probably generations of family habits. But a little self-reflection shows me that the complete shutdown in my ability to listen and feel when self-pity appears is neither the person or parent I want to be.

I was mulling this over when I heard a Ten Percent Happier podcast with therapist Dr. Jacob Ham that helped clarify the underlying question. In the course of the conversation the topic of whether you have to love yourself to love another came up. Dr. Ham’s answer was it depends – “It depends if your fear is so great that it inhibits connection to yourself or another.”

While my natural inclination is not to name the feeling as fear, it gets at the heart of the question of solving things in ourselves so they don’t hinder our connection to others. I still have trouble thinking of self-pity as anything useful – but I also know my resistance tells me that it’s inhibiting the Flow of life somewhere and it’s worth a look.

In the car when I was listening to my daughter’s complaints, I could relate that I often see a skewed version of events when I’m tired or not feeling well. In my daughter’s case, I think she was both tired and hungry so I asked if we could come back to it after we filled her tank.

She said it was frustrating not to feel seen at times but after acknowledging that, we made a list of things she wants to do so that she can speak up about her ideas like raising her hand more enthusiastically. We’ll see if it works but I’m just grateful that I held on long enough to participate in the conversation.

(featured photo from Pexels)

Showing Up When It Matters

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“Look at the bright spots. Look at the things that energize you.” – China Brooks

“Your son did a great job and you were amazing too” the dentist said to me as we were heading out the door. I know she meant it sincerely but it’s hard to accept a compliment for something that you never wanted to be good at. As was the case here as I had just held my 2-year-old son through getting a root canal.

It had all started with Mr. D’s dental checkup on Tuesday when they noticed a cavity. Two hours after the appointment his temperature spiked at daycare and they sent him home. I called the dentist, described the bump she saw on his gum and she dismissed it as unlikely he had an infection.

Until we showed up Friday to get it filled and she took one look and declared it was abscessed and he had to have a root canal. The tooth is important for the spacing of the next tooth to come in so they have to try to save it.

I’d spent the last two and a half days nursing him back to health after the temperature spike and so this was an unwelcome surprise on top of a dumpster fire of a week of only being able to work at night after the kids were in bed.

The only routine that made it through the week intact for me was my self-care routine in the morning – yoga, meditation and writing.

As I sat in that hot room, stinky with the smell of teeth and hissing with the noise of the drill I wondered if the reading, writing, and meditating made any difference. Then I paged through the thoughts that arose:

Therapist and author Deb Dana declares having a well-regulated central nervous system a gift to those around you. Whether or not we intellectualize why, the “neurosception” of our body as it senses another nervous system often reacts to what it finds. Our brain then gets a sense of whether or not we feel safe simply cued by the nervous system.

I thought of the comment that apeacefultree made in this post asking Can we be selfish and selfless at the same time?  “Healthy selfishness can include self-care and putting our own oxygen masks on.”

Then I landed on the research of Daniel Kahneman, psychologist, behavorial economist and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow who found the way that we remember both painful and pleasureful experiences as defined by the peak moment and the end moment. It helped prompt me to try to make the end moments of this procedure as good as possible in order to help Mr. D’s memories of it less painful.

Cycling through those thoughts, I came to the conclusion that the time reading, writing and meditating made a big difference. Because this was life – this was showing up when it mattered. Of course it’s also in the dance parties and the snuggling up to read at night but you can’t have one without the other. Or at least not the depth of one without the depth of the other.

It was because I’d taken the time to meditate and get myself in order before this appointment that I got through. The credit goes to Mr. D for being an easy-to-calm kid but I can at least say that I didn’t make it worse as I’m sure I would have if I’d gotten in a few more billable hours but had come in hot.

It’s so hard to stay present for someone else’s suffering. But it also is an honor to be able to do that for the people we love.  And I think why we call people like Mother Theresa saints for witnessing the suffering of people they don’t even know.

At the heart of this is that I wouldn’t have chosen to be anywhere else. The experience taught me that I need to keep doing my self-care if I’m to have any chance to help Mr. D work through this a traumatic experience. Especially because we have to go back for the second part of the root canal in 8 days.

(featured photo is of Mr. D playing at the dentist before the procedure)

The Deep Story

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“Our days are happier when we give people a bit of our heart, rather than a piece of our mind.” – unknown

I have a perception problem that caused a disagreement. I adore my brother. I see him as smart, likeable, responsible, resilient and industrious. I also know he has faults and avoids conflicts, will disengage instead of work things out or stand up for himself and has trouble being vulnerable.

We have another family member that sees him as manipulative, irresponsible, underhanded and arrogant.

Generally, we know the same history of my brother with the ups and downs of his life and interpret the story with our own lenses. I see him as the older brother I can always call and she seems him as the schmuck that dated her best friend in junior high.

In this On Being podcast, sociologist and Professor Emeritus Arlie Hochschild talks about the idea of a deep story which she defines as what you feel about a highly salient situation that’s very important to you. A story that explains how we can look at the same set of facts but come up with different conclusions because of the emotions that underlie the story. Her work has been primarily about our political divide – the deep stories of the red states and blue states.

But I see it at work in the stories of my family. It explains why we see things differently and have this perception problem that no amount of facts can solve. It points to the amount and type of work my brother and our family member would have to do in order to rewrite the deep story.

It also predicts that my brother and I will probably always be in accord through the rest of our lives. For me it makes some sense out of the unconditional love and adoration I have always felt and acted on through our many different phases of life.

Finally, it reminds me that the work of empathy for and listening to others is not only necessary for our relationships but also possibly the most transformative. Because even when we don’t agree on the facts, understanding someone else’s deep story at least brings the a-ha moment of understanding.

Are their deep stories in your family? Are there places where facts don’t seem to matter?

(featured photo from Pexels)

Looking for Evidence

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“Remember it is who you are that heals not what you know.” – Carl Jung

Yesterday I came across some notes I jotted on my phone of books that my brother recommended the last time we were together.

I adore my brother. He’s 6-years-older than I am and has been the sibling that I’ve looked up to since I learned how to look up. I’ve lived near him my entire adult life, I was very close with his daughters when they were growing up and now he’s very close with my kids. There was even a time 20 years ago when I worked for my brother at his company.

So I think it’s safe to say we have a natural affinity for one-another – we have lovely conversations, enjoy our time together and have stuck together through the ups-and-downs of life.

But I can’t name a single book that I recommended to my brother that he has read. And he reads all the time so it isn’t because he doesn’t like to read. Same goes for podcasts, tv shows (back when I watched tv) and spiritual practices like meditation.

It’s taken me a lot of growing up to be able to say with certainty that it isn’t because I’m his younger sister. I know he thinks I’m smart and he respects me.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who has looked for evidence that they matter in the lives of the people close to them. I’m thinking of a comment I once heard a husband tell me that his wife had to vote exactly the same way on a ballot which surprised me for an independent couple.

When my brother eulogized my dad he described my dad’s ability to “meet you where you were at without leaving where he was at.” Coming back to that helps me remember that hearts are the center of friendships, not heads. The work of love is to meet each other so we all know we aren’t walking alone. Instead of looking for the ways I’ve influenced my brother, perhaps I should just count all the miles we’ve walked together.

 I ended up not checking out any of the books on the list from my brother. Not because he doesn’t read mine, but because I like it when he tells me the stories of what he’s read and where’s he been. It gives us something to talk about when our hearts meet.

Do the people in your lives read the books or content that you recommend? Does it matter?

The Long Good-Bye

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“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.” – Henry Miller

I was working on my office yesterday half-listening to my daughter and her best friend chattering about the project they were working on when I suddenly felt a wave of grief. This has been happening on and off since I learned that the best friend and her family, our next door neighbors, will be moving in three months. It’s a very sweet sense of “Wow, I’m going to miss this.”

And then I want to turn it off knowing that it will last for 3 months. That seems like a very long good-bye.

In his book, Predictably Irrational, behavioral economist Dan Ariely talks of his experience when he was a teenager spending months in an Israeli burn ward getting treatment. The hardest part was when the nurses had to change his bandages and they’d work quickly to remove them. They were operating from the reasoning that it would hurt him less if they ripped off the bandages faster.

After he recovered, he actually studied the adage about ripping off the bandage – it turns out that it doesn’t hurt less for the patient (I believe he found that it was the same for the patient either way) but it is easier on the nurse because they don’t have to witness the patient be in agony for as long.

Which tells me what I already intuitively know – that it’s hard to stay open to pain. But the alternative of ripping off the band-aid faster, in the case of my daughter’s friend moving, would be to close ourselves off to the sweet litany of “lasts” that we’ll be able to do.

Instead I snapped a picture (the featured photo) of the two girls sitting as they usually do, practically on top of each other, taking up about one foot of a seven foot couch. We won’t always have the luxury of being so near so I’m working on celebrating every inch of it.

The people that I haven’t had the opportunity to say goodbye to, like my dad who passed suddenly in a bike accident, have left me with an appreciation for the bittersweet good-bye, even though it is so hard to do well.

What about you – do you rip the band-aid, real or metaphorical, off slowly or quickly?

Sacred Objects

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“Everything you can imagine is real.” – Pablo Picasso

My two-year-old son has a stuffy he likes to carry everywhere. It’s a small pink bunny that fits perfectly in his hand and he carries it when we are biking, hiking and most everywhere else, except swimming.

Knowing how important this bunny is, I ordered a backup of the same stuffy. Fake stuffy isn’t worn in the same way so it doesn’t work to soothe if he’s lying down for a nap and I can’t find the real one – it just infuriates him. So when fake stuffy went missing for 6 months, it was no problem.

Until he resurfaced a month ago and now my son likes to carry around both the real one and the fake one, multiplying my problem of making sure we have the necessary parts before embarking on the next part of the schedule.

So, I ordered 6 backups of the fake stuffy for $2 each on eBay and implemented a rotation schedule so there’s only one out at a time but they all look more of less the same amount of worn.

It’s a silly routine but it’s made me appreciate the power of sacred objects. I drink my tea every morning from a mug that says “LOVE” and was the first thing my daughter ever bought me with her own money. Everything tastes sweet in that mug.

And when I use the tools that used to be my father’s, I feel his warmth, energy and enthusiasm welling up inside me and I’m more certain the project will turn out fine.

I have a gold-plated Angel token that I bought for $3 and carried in my pocket a dozen years ago when I was going through my divorce. The touch of it reminded me to have faith that life would work out. Although I don’t carry it anymore, when I come across it in my drawer, I smile and celebrate what faith has delivered.

I can visit the places I’ve traveled in a short trip through my house remembering the laughter with friends as we picked out Tibetan singing bowls or travel through time when I touch my stuffed koala from childhood. They are just objects but they open doors that are shortcuts to places that I want to go.

So I happily do the stuffy dance with my son. He’s taken to telling me “Don’t say ‘Yay’” when I want to celebrate a potty training victory. Something about my natural enthusiasm is overwhelming to him in that private context. Instead I channel it along with my love, sending it along with him in his sacred objects.

What are your sacred objects?

The Flow of Life

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“Travel light, live light, spread the light, be the light.” – Yogi Bhajan

In 2014, I had worked up the nerve to have a child on my own. I’d chosen a fertility clinic, gone through all the screening and work-up process so by November 6th, I was sitting at my desk signing the last document I needed to begin the invitro fertilization process. I clearly remember that moment at my desk with my beloved dog at my feet thinking wondrously, “Life is about to change.”

Then the next day I got a call from my mom that my dad had died in a bicycling accident in Tucson. Sh!t! That wasn’t how life was supposed to change.

Seven years later I think through all the changes, big and small:

I have a beautiful baby girl.

My gorgeous dog dies.

My mom moves to be only 1.5 miles from me.

I miscarry a baby.

I get pregnant again and have a beautiful baby boy.

The pandemic happens.

My daughter turns 5 and goes to Kindergarten.

Kindergarten is virtual.

My son learns to walk.

And it goes on and on. Perhaps it’s because my kids change so quickly that’s making me learn to just enjoy the flow. One minute they have a habit that’s irritating me – like playing with water at the kitchen sink and getting it all over the floor and the next they’ve moved on and can now zip their own coats.

Yesterday I got a delightful message from someone I went to high school with offering me and my family free accommodations in Colorado for 4 nights in April. Yay – what a fun surprise. And it was also my dad’s birthday so he was close to my thoughts and I missed him.

The longer I go on, the more I realize that this is the flow of life – we go up and over some things and under others. It’s when I try to grab on to some branch to cling on and stay in one place that I suffer most. The more I work at my spiritual depth and faith, the easier it becomes to stay centered in the flow and live it all with openness and curiosity.

What a ride!

(featured photo from Pexels)

Not Love Actually

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“Don’t be afraid of the solitude that comes from raising your standards.” – Ebonee Davis

Driving in the car the other day with Miss O, I checked in with her on her playground crush. This was the young man, Will, that I wrote about in the COVID crush post, who lines up on an adjacent heart, 6-feet-apart on the playground to go into a different 1st grade classroom.

When he initially told her that he had a crush on her back in October, Miss O said she had one on him too. But when I checked back in the other day, she told me,  “the interest had gone away.”

I asked what happened. She explained he started hanging around another kid, a kid she thinks is a bully because he yells “SORRY” when he apologizes. And she changed her attitude because the playground supervisor, Mr. C, is handing out awards for being good in line and Will is always messing around.

She stopped finding him attractive because she doesn’t like his friends and he wasn’t a good influence?? My job as a parent is done…. 😊

(featured photo from Pexels)