Tag: relationships

Being Different

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“People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they’re not on your road doesn’t mean they’ve gotten lost.” – Dalai Lama

I’ve only met one other person who intentionally choose to have kids as a single parent. Of course, I’ve heard of plenty, and known a lot of wonderful people who have become single parents because of circumstance, including my dear blog friends. I also know others that think they’d be better off as parents without their partners. Clearly, there are so many ways to do this parenting thing and no matter how we do it, it comes with plenty of challenges.

But back to the story about the woman I met who intentionally became a single parent. I was with my kids at the local wading pool last summer when I started talking to a woman who was there with her five-year-old twin girls. We hadn’t talked long when she revealed that she had chosen to become a single parent at 50-years-old and was just in town for a couple of weeks to visit her mom because she and the twins lived on the East Coast. She also had a 16-year-old son from a previous marriage.

Does it matter to meet people who have made similar life choices? It took me a long time trying everything else that I thought would work to have a family before I moved forward to become a single parent. It felt so vulnerable to have to intentionally walk down this path. As if everyone would know that I was the one that wanted to have kids and I couldn’t hide behind a “shared decision.” I’m laughing as I type this because now I don’t care at all if people know that. Hello? Obvious, please meet irrelevant.

And I thought it would signal that I wasn’t capable of a relationship. Well, that may or may not be true but again, who cares? After all, I created two people that I now have a relationship with so that worry seems beside the point.

But the instinctive social programming to not be different is strong, isn’t it? And I know you all are nodding because I believe there’s something each of us have done differently that caused angst – maybe being a vegetarian in a family of meat eaters, moving away from a family home, being an introvert, being an extrovert, going to college, not going to college, coming out, getting divorced, the list goes on and on.

In the case of meeting this woman who also chose to become a single parent, I’m glad that I didn’t meet her before I choose to have kids because she might have made me more neurotic about walking this path. She kept asking me over and over again, “People in your life didn’t tell you not to do this?” And I answered repeatedly, “Nope.” She was distracted, overwhelmed by her young daughters, and not at peace, like she was in the midst of some battle with naysayers.

I gave her the benefit of the doubt that life was more stressful because she was traveling. I know that without the regular supports of routine and familiarity, being alone with two kids, no matter how you got there, is harder.

But it reminded me we all represent something to someone – whether it be a choice, a lifestyle, a belief, an attitude, or anything else remarkable. Would I recommend choosing single parenthood to everyone? No, for a lot of reasons, including the fact that I adored my dad and I think it would be great if everyone had at least one awesome dad in their life.

But do I want people that I meet to know that parenting, even when, or especially if, you choose it later in life, is full of joy, inspiration, and wonder? Absolutely!

Do I want anyone that I meet to feel a little energy and inspiration for whatever notion inside them tells them to do something in a non-traditional way? For sure!

Do I want to represent the message that there is goodness when we stop caring what other people think and pursue our dreams? Most definitely.

I think about that sometimes when I’m out with my delightful little ones. Who knows who we are going to meet and how we’ll rub off on them. Let’s hope it’s for good.

Speaking of people who inspire for the good, this week Vicki and I got to talk with writer, and blogger, E.A. Wickham on the Sharing the Heart of the Matter podcast. Elizabeth reveals so much inspiration and wisdom about leading a creative life: Episode 21: A Creative Life with Elizabeth Wickham.

It’s a great episode, please give it a listen and subscribe! Search for Sharing the Heart of the Matter on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, or PocketCasts or click on the link above.

Holding Out for a Hero

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“Go into the world and do well. But more importantly, go into the world and do good.” – Minor Myers, Jr.

The other day my 6-year-old daughter asked me “What is a hero?” As I stumbled through the words to describe someone who is admirable and inspires us to be better, I wondered if the idea of having heroes resonates as much in our world. Sometimes it feels like we know too much about our public figures these days to pick someone from that realm.

It also made me think of my personal hero, my dad.

It took me years to realize that he was my hero. It wasn’t until I’d traveled enough through life to have failures as well as successes that I started looking closer at my dad who was then in his 70’s. I wanted to try to identify what made him so unstoppably enthusiastic and delightful.

On first glance, it was easy to attribute his goodness to his career as a Presbyterian pastor for 40 years. Certainly that made him a person who worked hard to do good, but there was another equation that underscored who he was. Here’s what I’ve boiled it down to in three points, the number he always used for sermons:

He was dedicated to being useful. For him that meant rolling up his sleeves and pitching in where help was needed. If he came to my house for dinner, he would jump in to do the dishes before the dinner was even served. Sometimes I had to tell him to stand down if I wasn’t actually done with a pot. He’d laugh and look for something else. And that applied to plumbing, tiling, gardening, service projects, whatever he could find.

But he had the gift of making it a two way street because he’d ask for help. When he and my mom were building a cabin in the San Juan islands, he recruit people for “work parties” to clear the land or raise the foundation. Or if you were a member of his church, he’d recruit you for committees and service. And this back and forth made it feel not like his help was charity but that it was community because he wouldn’t hesitate to ask when he needed help.

He loved people. For him that usually meant listening. Although he was a preacher and a very good one, he thought that was a very small part of his job. He loved people for who they were and that included their imperfections too. If I ever asked him about people who he found frustrating, he’d shrug his shoulders and say something like “You never know all that’s going on with someone. We’re all weird and once you accept that, you can just love them anyway.”

He didn’t often give advice but when he did, there was no penalty for not listening. As the pastor who was performing my wedding to my now ex-husband, he sat us down for marriage counseling as he did with everyone he married. He very eloquently described what was wrong with us (my words, not his) because our personal and professional lives were too intertwined. We did nothing to correct this and he did a beautiful job of marrying us anyway.

He was obedient. That was his word for listening to the small voice of God within him. This was the part that most interested and confounded me. He was such a delightful person with many talents and a great attitude so what part did faith play in his life? It took me a long time to come up with an answer I could understand. And that was, he listened to where God led him, he abided by what he thought a Godly life was AND he lived life in partnership with God. He knew when things were above his pay grade and then he turned them over to God. That gave him an enormous amount of comfort and confidence.

My dad died suddenly in a bike accident at age 79. One of his friends eulogized him perfectly as “a battery on feet just looking for someone to jump start.” Fortunately in the years before he died, I’d started developing my own faith and the small voice of God within me led me to ask him questions about his life and record them. It was all part of my hero worship and a such a gift to be able to delve into this man from whom I’d inherited much of his way of looking at the world.

This is what was running through my mind as I answered my daughter about heroes and why we need them. They show us a little bit of the way so we can go further and faster. We stand on the shoulders of those that go before us. Recognizing heroes who resonate most with each of us is one great step forward in knowing what to study. They are part of our stories and give us connection and warmth to the inspiration we glean.

My memoir about my father is available on Amazon: Finding My Father’s Faith

The Art of Packing

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“Strip away the non-essential, and the essential will reveal itself.” – Tao Te Ching

Mr. D has been really excited about vacation, or as he says it “bacation.” For several days now he’s been piling rocks into the car for us to take TO the beach. He tells me, “This is a rock for vacation water.” Also, in his suitcase – two pairs of pjs, a robe, three books, and a toy boat.

What’s not in his suitcase? Undies, socks, or shoes. But hey, he’s only three-years-old.

Miss O at seven-years-old is a little more practical. She’s got her toiletries, two pairs of pajamas, some skorts and tank tops, her iPad, and a lot of room for stuffies.

Also, no undies, socks, or shoes.

Packing fascinates me. Mostly because it can be so illuminating to see what’s top of the list. Like on mine is a scrub brush for dishes because we’ve rented this AirBnB before and they have no tools for scrubbing dishes. Also, undies and socks because last time I was so focused on packing those for everyone else that I forgot my own.

Isn’t that terribly utilitarian? What about remembering to not bring my busy-ness? And speaking of things to leave at home: my penchant for schedules, the belief that I have to get everything done on my to-do list, and my expectation that I’ll time while on vacation to catch up on some emails I missed. Instead, I can have room to bring an expanded sense of wonder.

My inspiration for this is from one of my favorite meditations from my meditation teacher, Deirdre. With our eyes closed, she leads us through feeling the pack on our backs as we hike down a trail. We feel the breeze tickle across our skin, the sun peak through the trees to create occasional warm patches as we glide along the path. But then, when we are a couple of minutes in, we realize that the pack on our backs feels heavier than the water and snack we put in there for the trip.

Deirdre offers us the opportunity to sit down and unpack what we don’t need. For me that is when I get a good look at the things I carry along without thinking about it: the worries, the hidden expectations, the weight of past failures, the anxiety about where I’m going in the big picture. Then, as I repack my backpack, I can decide which one of those things, if any, are worth bringing along.

To me it’s an exercise of intention. It’s okay if I want to bring along whatever agenda I have for a vacation as long as I’m doing it purposefully. As soon as I say that, I know that I don’t want to. As much as I gently tease my kids for what they don’t bring along, it also reminds me that they might have the right spirit.

When I was coordinating with my friend, Eric, when we should meet up to leave for “bacation,” he offered we better meet earlier. Because after hearing what Mr. D was packing to bring to the beach, he quipped it might take him some time to get his driftwood in the car…

Secret versus Private

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“Travel and tell no one, live a true love story and tell no one, live happily and tell no one, people ruin beautiful things.” – Kahlil Gibran

My daughter’s elementary school just had their annual book fair. One of the things Miss O selected was a fuzzy journal with a lock. She took it directly to my mom and had her sew the keys on to the journal so she wouldn’t lose them.

Miss O and I have been talking about secrets lately. Her second grade class is doing a section on identity and she’s learning the distinction between what is secret and what is private. One of the large parts of Miss O’s identity is that she doesn’t have a dad. Is that secret or is that private?

When she first asked me if she had a dad, she was three-years-old. It went like this: “Did I have a dad when I was born?” I answered “no” and waited for the follow-on question. And then she asked, “Did I have a dog when I was born?” I said “yes” and then she moved on to, “Did I have a cat?”

Following her cues, I’ve told her more and more as she’s asked. Mostly that I wanted kids so much that I went to a doctor to help me have them. It’s not a secret in any way and I want them to feel complete openness from me about how we came to be a family, even if they choose to keep it private.

The other day, Mr. D asked for the first time if we had a dad and when I said “no,” Miss O jumped in to say, “We’re special because Mama had us without one.” Okay, so I have to work on the messaging but not having a dad definitely isn’t a secret.

I suppose we all go through the figuring out the difference between what is secret and what is private. For me, what is private doesn’t take any energy to keep boxed up. It’s like inviting people over to my home. I don’t invite everyone I know into my house. And, for those that do come over, most people just visit in the kitchen. There aren’t many people that I invite up to the tiny space on the third floor. It’s messy up there but I don’t keep it locked.

When we were talking about secrets, Miss O wanted an example. I dug deep into my memory from high school to find an appropriate scenario understandable by a seven-year-old. I came up with the story about my best friend who was dating a boy named Craig. A new girl had recently been hanging out with my best friend and me, and one day when my best friend wasn’t present, the new girl told me she’d been making out with Craig behind my best friend’s back. But of course, I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, especially my best friend. Ugh, I can still feel the weight of that secret.

I landed on the distinction that secrets are something you’d be ashamed if anyone found out. Things that are private aren’t anyone else’s business.

Maybe the keys sewed to the journal are a great metaphor. The lock reminds others to stay out but the barrier isn’t so high that you have to hide the keys away.

I wrote a related post about my learning not to keep secrets on the Wise & Shine blog: Can I Tell You a Secret?

Looking in Through the Sliding Glass Door

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“May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.” – Nelson Mandela

The other night, I was standing at the kitchen sink putting the final dishes for the day in the dishwasher when my kids walked into the kitchen after bedtime. I caught sight of them – seven-year-old Miss O in the lead hugging her stuffy close and three-year-old Mr. D seeking a little comfort by standing in the shadow of his sister and wearing his little dinosaur shorty pajamas. I had to turn back to the sink for a moment to try to put my game face on. It was a clear violation of bedtime rules and I needed to try to assemble some sort of serious countenance because seeing them quietly standing there had totally melted my heart.

It was like I caught a vision of the reverse of Brené Brown’s sliding glass door moments. She describes those as the small glimpses where you see the life you could have on the other side and have to decide whether or not to cross the threshold.

In this case, it was like I was on the outside looking back in at the life that I created for myself when I made the choice to have kids. I had a fleeting flash of what walking through that sliding glass door into this life has delivered.

I saw my life has been redefined to drop most standards of cleanliness and order, and all attempts at perfection. Instead it has become a continuous re-sorting of my priorities so that I’m trying to do what is important in the moment. And in the shuffling, I’ve come to discover that I can repeatedly choose my kids, myself, and family instead of arbitrary external markers of success.

The glimpse let me see that I’ve gotten better at “being” instead of “doing.” My kids are a lot of work and in a strange paradox they have taught my how to let work go – to relax and slow down. I get so much less done – but I laugh so much more while I do it. And when I don’t laugh, when I’m all bound up and tight – these two are my sanity check to reground myself in why.

I glimpsed how the power of believing this all is my choice has carried me through some really tough times of sickness, sleeplessness, and carrying too much weight. Simply knowing that I chose this has given me strength I didn’t know I had before.

I saw my transformation to believe in miracles – because I’m living with two. And my kids continue to be miracles long after they were born because they’ve become my teachers. I thought I would be the teacher and they would be the learners – only to find out that I’m the one learning about how to have a meaningful and authentic life. Those lessons come from the myriad of interactions that we have had to crouch and look at bugs, stuff our pockets full of rocks, snuggle together to talk about feelings, quietly draw and color together, run excitedly to the beach on vacation, fold into each other while reading books, lash out in anger at boundaries, fear, and discomfort, and heal together holding hands when we’ve talk/acted/laughed it out.

By becoming their lightening rod for big emotions, I have learn to cultivate my own emotional intelligence about the weather inside me. They’ve taught me to choose joy. Not happiness, but joy!

In that moment, I caught a sense of how everything that transpired before I had kids has come together to help – my love of outdoors, my family, my gaining a sense of going with the flow, the endurance training. And most of all, my faith, and that has the goodness of my dad all wrapped up in it too.

I saw that “me” had been completely replaced with “we.” That I have given up the ability to make unilateral decisions and in return have been gifted with a life filled with heart.

From all of this, I was left with a heart melting feeling. Seeing my kids both as the precious, earnest, and delightful little ones that they are and the courageous, free, and integrated people they are becoming. And seeing myself as the same.

After being gifted with this glimpse of things, I finally turned to my kids to hear them out as to why they were out of bed. They’d been fighting and needed a referee. My little flash of perspective helped me choose not to be irritated or impatient but instead just listen. I told them I loved them and sent them back to bed.

My post on Wise & Shine today is about my mom’s choices: The Choices We Make: My Mom the Spy

Cultivating Abundance and Perspective

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“Wear gratitude like a cloak and it will feed every corner of your life.” – Rumi

When I wrote the post the other day about The Games We Play, Jane Fritz (of the delightful, informative, and inspiring Robby Robin’s Journey blog) posed the question of why kids act that way. We bandied about some ideas like competition, and while I don’t know the answer, it made me observe my kids a little more closely to find some clues.

My completely unscientific survey of my little family, and I’m including myself in these results, reminded me of a couple things – that we don’t come hard-wired with a sense of abundance and that it takes some work to see a bigger picture.

The method that works again and again for me on both these points is to be grateful. And I say again and again because somehow I forget and have to find my way back to my gratitude practice. This makes me think of a quip that Brené Brown made on the subject – that having yoga clothes in her closet didn’t qualify to make her a yogi and neither does knowing the concept of gratitude make her grateful – it has to be practiced.

So, needing to cultivate the feeling of abundance and perspective, here’s my gratitude list today:

Let’s start with the basics – that I’m awake, alive, and typing this.
For the science and people that remind me that it’s also good to write things out longhand sometimes.

I’m grateful that spring has come to our neck of the woods to warm my bones.

That I got to sit in the warm evening last night and watch my kids in their uninhibited nakedness run around the back yard and squirt each other with (warm) water guns.
That they didn’t squirt me.
That when they need a break, they run into my arms, wet, out of breath, and loving life.

For the smell of BBQs coming out for the first time in Spring and wafting into my yard.

That I was able to do yoga this morning and since I was alone, groan and moan through all the tight places in my body.
That doing yoga reminded me of how grateful I am for my body that I often forget to thank for all that it does well.

For my neighbor that has planted an incredible garden of tulips and daffodils so that I slow down and enjoy it every time we go past.

For the neighbor that surprised me with a loving touch on my back at Costco and asked me to grab something from the top shelf. And for the warmth lingered long after the conversation ended.

For the warmth that exists between people.

For friends, near and far, that share their stories and lives with me.
That I get to talk with them about the things I haven’t even begun to process and then receive their wisdom.
That I’ve gotten old enough to be able to receive wisdom.

For the quiet feel of my house early in the morning.
For the way the glow of the candles I light each morning as I meditate makes me feel lit from within.
That I’m able to find peace at least once or twice a day.

For words like momentous and singular that wake me up to my experience.

That words come pretty easily for me.

For the tenor and vibration of male voices, the light touch of female voices, and the joy in young voices.
For my five senses that vie for attention and also allow me to shut my eyes and open my ears for a different experience.

For old friends that remind me of my journey through this life.
For new friends that come with that opportunity of discovery.
For the way we are all connected.

For the joy on my daughter’s face when she learned to whistle this week.

That I can ask Alexa to play Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah anytime I want.

For Jack Canfora’s gratitude list: Dear Lord, Not Another Post on This Blog About Gratitude and  WritingfromtheheartwithBrian’s 100 Things I Love that inspire me.

For the opportunities that I have to keep growing.

For the technology that allowed me and Vicki to have a podcast conversation with blogger, Brenda Harrison, from three different timezones and locations and then post it so that others can be delighted and inspired by her energy and enthusiasm. (Episode 15 of the Sharing the Heart the Matter podcast – listen and subscribe!)

That this blogging journey has allowed me to meet and converse with so many interesting people from all over.

For the hour I’ve spent writing this list and that the power of gratitude will touch me every time I go back to edit it and extend with each comment.

(featured photo from Pexels)

What Am I Training For?

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“Sometimes you have to travel a long way to find what is near.” – Paulo Coehlo

The summer before I got pregnant with Miss O, I did several long-distance bike trips with my friend, Eric. My first experience with a multi-day trip carrying only what we could stow in the bike packs was a trip where we cycled on a tandem bike from Burlington, Vermont, up into Canada to a small cheesery. Then we cycled back across the border into New York state, along Lake Champlain, rode a ferry across to Vermont, and then finally back to our starting point.

For this trip, I was riding on a tandem bike with Eric – a bike that supposedly Paul Newman once rode – a delightful bit of trivia that didn’t make the beast at all more comfortable. I figured biking was a lot like mountain climbing because it requires leg strength and an endurance mindset. And a sense of humor. Cheryl Oreglia (from the delightful and fun Living in the Gap blog) isn’t exaggerating when she says that everyone’s favorite joke for people on a tandem bike is, “She’s not pedaling.”

On that first day out, we rode for 81.48 miles which was a long day “in the saddle” as cyclists like to call it. When we finally reached our hotel for the night at some city in Vermont, I scooted off the back of the bike like it was on fire. If it wasn’t on fire, then my butt surely was. I followed my delightful teammates up to the registration desk only to find that the hot tub at the hotel was out of order. That was a deal breaker for Carol who was leading this trip.

She said we had to find a new hotel. Envisioning another mile on the bike that day, I think I just about fainted. Fortunately, we found a new place right across the street and I WALKED all the way there. When we went out to dinner, Eric found a metal plate chilling at the salad bar and gave it to me to sit on.

It made for a memorable trip – mostly because I was with a great group of people. But I swear what I remember most is the last half mile of each day as we ground out those last few feet to the blessed places we could rest our bodies for the night. That makes me wonder if I was training for endurance or enjoyment.

It’s the topic of my post for Wise & Shine today: Endurance versus Enjoyment

(all pictures from the bike trip – Vermont – Canada – New York 2014)

Just Beyond the Veil

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“Death is just a door that only love can come and go through.” T.L. Moffitt

Last week when I was walking in to Costco, the man in front of me turned and for an instant I was sure it was my dad. Next to me, Miss O was startled by the unexpected break in my fast stride and turned to look at me. I put my hand on my heart and said, “that man looks just like Bumpa.” Wide-eyed, she nodded – she’s only seen pictures but she recognized him too.

Then later last week, I was doing a technical training at the church that my dad used to be senior pastor of and was surprised by someone in the audience who asked me to say a few words about him. It wasn’t my prepared topic but since my dad is one of my favorite subjects, it was fairly easy to ramble on about him as a few errant tears rolled down my cheek.

All of this to say, my dad feels very near in recent days. He would talk about this phenomenon as someone being “just beyond the veil.” The way I’ve come to see it, I don’t exactly where he is but somehow he comes near, and then I feel the brush of his touch.

I know I’m not alone in this as I’ve heard so many great stories that give me that spine tingle of mystical knowing. Someone who picks up their voice mail and there’s an old message from a departed loved one. Or someone thinking of their loved one who has passed, and they cross paths with their loved one’s favorite animal in a completely unexpected place. Or a gift that arrives just after praying to our dearly departeds for help.

Why do I think my dad is near right now? He didn’t often tell me what to do when he was alive so I doubt he’s doing it now. I think he’s sending his love — a love that’s even more meaningful to me because we did the work to make our relationship closer in the years before his death. So that even though he died unexpectedly, he still left me with words that mean so much to me. That is what my post on W&S is this morning: Writing Last Lines That Count

(Featured photo is from my book about my dear dad, Finding My Father’s Faith.)

Your Voice In My Head

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“The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice.” – Peggy O’Mara

I have one child that says “sorry” too easily and another child for whom it’s an ongoing struggle. It makes me think of being neurotic versus character disordered ala Dr. Scott Peck.

“Most people who come to see a psychiatrist are suffering from what is called either a neurosis or a character disorder. Put most simply, these two conditions are disorders or responsibility, and as such they are opposite styles of relating to the worlds and its problems. The neurotic assumes too much responsibility; the person with a character disorder not enough.”

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

The problem is that I land on the neurotic side, as I’ve discussed on this blog before, so I think it’s my responsibility. By saying that, I’m not denying that it’s my responsibility, I’m just allowing for the circular logic about responsibility this question creates. It makes it hard to sit back and just let life and my children bloom.

Here’s what I like about being neurotic. I can always find something that I can work on to fix. And the downside, somethings aren’t my things to fix. As Vicki wrote so brilliantly in her post yesterday, Creativity of Being,

“I’ve concluded that relationship navigation is a creative, soulful effort.  Abandoning familiar scripts and roles, avoiding the rear-view mirror and the allure of the horizon requires ingenuity and loads of it.”

Dr. Victoria Atkinson, Creativity of Being

So I’m trying to ride the wave between the neurotic voice in my head (that came in part from my perfectionist mom) that says that I could help my kids avoid all troubles in life if they’d just get their outlook right and my curious side that asks a lot of questions when my kids come into conflict in the world. What I’m finding is that how they see an incident is the most interesting thing. Will I change their propensities to say “sorry?” I don’t know but if I become the voice in their head, I want it to be curious, not judgmental.

[A wonderful note about this title for anyone looking for a great voice – Julia Preston has a delightful, uplifting, and inspiring blog called Voices In My Head and has written a book Voices: Who’s In Charge of the Committee in My Head?

The favorite voice in my head comes from my dad and I’ve written about it on the Heart of the Matter blog this morning, “It’s Going to Be Great, Kid!”

(featured photo from Pexels)

Patience, Energy and a Little Bit of Flexibility

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“Patience is also a form of action.” Auguste Rodin

Yesterday, I was trying to get Mr. D’s pants on so that he could go to preschool. He was busy sitting on the floor playing with a truck and didn’t want to assist in any way.

When I consider the difference for me being a parent of young kids while I’m in my 50’s versus in my 20’s or 30’s, it’s this scenario with my kids that comes to mind. It’s like a silly sitcom – the same story line that happens every day but with slightly different entrances, exits, and accessories. And the thing that I bring to it as an older parent – a lot more patience. My egoic insistence that I am in charge, have to do it my way, with a rigid order has changed from my younger self.

This reminds me of playing tennis with my dad. When I was in my 20’s, I had loads of energy to run everything down and my tennis skills had got better. I thought I would have no problem beating my dad in his 50’s. But he had patience. He could steadily get all the balls back and not go for the risky winner. Instead, he had the friendliest form of banter/trash talk and he’d wait for the easy winner when I had run myself silly or was out of position.

If Mr. D doesn’t want to put his pants on at that particular moment, I let it go, do something else to get ready. When I circle back in one minute, he’ll usually cooperate with little to no problem. I can easily imagine what I would have done twenty years ago – worn myself ragged trying to either put pants on an uncooperative kid or talked myself blue in the face trying to convince him to cooperate.

Because on the flip side of this is that I don’t have the same high energy that I had 20 years ago so I have to give up the struggles that aren’t worth it. Worrying about what others think or sweating the small stuff like having a tidy house and matching socks has by necessity gone by the wayside because I simply don’t have the capacity to care about it. At the end of these days with young children, I am flat out exhausted. But with a little crafty patience, at least most days, I don’t end up as a sweaty mess.

If patience is my most useful tool as an older parent because I lack the energy of a younger one, then I’d name flexibility as the most predominant skill that parenting has taught me.

My guess is that this applies not only to tennis and parenting but also to most things we apply perspective to as we age. We learn to use a little patience to figure out which battles are worth fighting and which are avoidable skirmishes that our egos and inflexibility set us up for. Then, like my dad playing tennis, we can participate in some friendly banter and even sometimes get an easy winner in when we don’t overreach.

Still reading? I have another post today on creativity and the tools we can use to change our minds on Wise & Shine – Writing In The Dark