Hi friends. I slept in. I am fatigued. This year has been full of big changes for our own family and for those whom we love, and I think that this is all catching up on me right now. So, in conservation of time and energy, I am going to reprint one of my more popular blog posts which tends to trend at this time of year (which is fitting!). Here it is:
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Thanksgiving is the comfort food of holidays. Thanksgiving is warm slippers, a hot mug of coffee, non-glitzy, down-to-earth, deep sigh of relief, wholesome goodness. Thanksgiving is a cozy, fuzzy blanket, wonderful smells wafting in the air, the fading beautiful colors of a summer well spent. Thanksgiving is easy laughter, easy going energy, a building of anticipation of a fabulous feast and an exciting holiday season ahead. Thanksgiving marks the start of the end of a year. It is the awards show of the year, where the award receivers are looking back at all which the year has brought to them, and thanking everything and everyone who deserves to be thanked for helping to get the award receivers to this point of evolution and elevation in their own lives. Thanksgiving is the joy of a parade, the celebration of man’s best friend, and the communion and camaraderie of fans of the same teams. Thanksgiving is the reminder that there are few feelings better than the overwhelming reassurance of all of our blessings constantly provided to us. Gratefulness is probably the largest ingredient of love, and Thanksgiving makes this fact abundantly clear.
As I say (and I feel deeply) every year, thank you friends and readers for supporting and being a vital part of my blog. I love this blog and so by extension, I love you all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Now go get going on your turkey . . . . . See you tomorrow!
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
A friend recently confessed that lately she feels like she doesn’t want to be a parent anymore. It was over a text, but I imagine if “the confession” had been in person, she would have sat tentatively, her eyes darting around the room to see if we, her friends who are also parents, would be looking down at her with glaring supreme judgment, even worse than what she was doing to herself.
And what she got instead was a lot of support, love, understanding, and relating. Parenting is hard. Caretaking is hard. Life is hard. Making those statements doesn’t mean that you are a terrible parent, an awful caretaker and that you hate life. Parenting is hard and wonderful. Caretaking is hard and rewarding. Life is hard and overwhelmingly beautiful.
Give yourself a break when you feel overwhelmed by your life and your responsibilities in your life. These are the times to lean into self-care and trust the Universe/God/Life with the rest. Give yourself the love and the care and the support and the advice that you would give to your partner, or to your child, or to your best friend. (in other words the person or people whom you love the most, because honestly, you, yourself, should be on that list)
I’ve shared this on the blog, before, but it seems appropriate to bring it back. Before I even became a mother, and I was spending some time in my head thinking about what kind of parent I wanted to be, I came across this wonderful poem by Kahlil Gibran. It has become my parenting mantra/philosophy/reminder throughout my entire twenty-six years of being a mother. It helps me to remember that I am co-parenting with a vast and loving and mysterious force of Life, and that I can lean into that wisdom and comfort whenever I need to just let go. This poem puts me – a fiery, sometimes control freakish mama, into her rightful place. And when I am in that place, I am freer to live in my own faith and to trust that bigger arms are wrapped around us all. I am freer to be loved, and to be Love. Gibran’s poem:
And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.
And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
“If you listen closely, when people give advice they’re actually talking to younger versions of themselves.” – Dr. Nicole LaPerla
One of my horoscopes today talked about using this month to turn “wounds into wisdom.” I think that this is what aging is all about. I believe that life is a constant cycle and process of turning wounds into wisdom. Sometimes we don’t reflect enough, or we aren’t honest enough with ourselves to do true introspection, and thus we just keep tearing apart at our wounds, making them bleed more and not allowing for the healing process. But we eventually, usually get it. And when we do “get it”, we are sad that our younger selves didn’t quite “get it” in what we deem to be a timely manner, so we at least try to save others, by spouting off advice.
It can be off-putting to get advice, especially unsolicited advice. Bernard Williams calls unsolicited advice, “the junk mail of life.”
“Wise people advice from experience. Wiser people, from experience, do not advice.” – Amit Kalantri
That’s the thing, we get most of our deepest wisdoms from our experiences. And so we desperately try to save others from having similar tough experiences that we’ve had, yet it is those very experiences which gave us our own deepest, best wisdom. What a Catch-22!
I’m guilty of spouting off too much advice, and I do it all of the time. I do it to my kids, my husband, my friends, my pets (“Trip don’t provoke Ralphie, you know where this leads . . . .), strangers I meet on the street. Hell, I do it here on the blog all of the time. Please forgive me. It doesn’t come from my wisest self. My advice comes from my desire to “save (“control”) the world.” (or if I am honest, like Nicole LaPerla says, my advice is my desire to prove to my younger self that I’ve learned and I’ve grown. Perhaps trying to save others from my own mistakes, is a gift that I am trying to give to my own younger self for putting her through a lot of tough experiences, that often took a long, long while to alchemize into wisdom.)
Mantra for the day: Self, I forgive you. Self, I appreciate you. Self, your experiences were worth the gold of your wisdom. Self, let go and trust this process of turning experience into wisdom, for your own self going forward, and for all whom you love.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Happy 28th wedding anniversary to my best friend, my lover, my favorite person in the world. I treasure everything which we have created together – most specifically our family and the memories of incredible adventures, throughout our years together.
I know that happy, long marriages are rare and I am grateful to be in one of those long, happy marriages. I met my husband when I was 18 years old, the first weekend of my freshman year in college. For the most part, we have been together ever since. (We had a few youthful dramatic break-ups, during the college years – we are both hot-headed fire signs.)
If a young person would ask me what it takes to create a long, happy marriage, I would say that it takes two people who are fully committed to making that creation of “long and happy” happen. I would tell the young person that it takes two people who are willing to put long, happy, solid marriage, above every other individual goal in their lives. I would tell a young person who is thinking about getting married that you must come to an acceptance of who your partner is, and love them wholly. Do not try to change your partner. Focus on the parts that you love and admire about your partner, and notice how you complement each other. In my marriage, my husband’s strengths cover for my weaknesses, and vice versa. I would tell the young person thinking about marriage, to be with someone who can weather through the tough times because long marriages go through their fair share of storms. That’s just the way of life. When picking a life partner, always go with solid, not glittery. Solid withstands storms, whereas glitter flies away in the wind. Most importantly, I have always been eternally grateful for my husband’s steadfast, lifelong commitment to me and to our family. He gave me his life to share with me. This is the greatest gift anyone has ever given to me. I will never, ever take this gift for granted. My husband is “my person.” And I am “his person.” If our children end up in marriages like ours, I will sleep peacefully forevermore.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
I grew up in the northeast/midwest, but I have spent most of my adult life living in the south. Northeasterners often have the unfortunate reputation for being rude/abrupt/curt, etc., but this is not how I am experiencing the gracious people of New York City and New Jersey during my stay here. I am an observer and contemplator of life and what I have keenly noticed is a different kind of service style than we are used to in the friendly, hospitable south. Up here, it is clear that the servers and the clerks and the people who work in hospitality are not here to “make friends.” They are not about chit-chatting and God forbid, you appear to make anything close to a “demand.” That won’t fly. What I have noticed is that, in general, the Northern service workers are efficient, dedicated to excellence, and to getting the job done fast and well. And I can appreciate this experience. Like all things, “hospitality” can come in many forms, but no matter where you are experiencing any kind of service, the underlying theme is usually there – “I want you to have a good experience, and I am doing my best to give you that good experience.” And that sentence that I just wrote translates down to one word – love. As Kahlil Gibran famously wrote, “Work is love made visible.” Different styles of work is still love, and love is just one thing – love is love.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
I was twenty-five when I had my first child. He went everywhere with his two young parents – weddings galore, hiking adventures when he was just a couple months old in a colorful baby carrier, and a trip to Puerta Vallarta, Mexico where his favorite part was the bumpy ride on the public bus. Yesterday, when we were reminiscing with him about these times, before his three younger siblings were born, it occurred to me how somewhat reckless and fearless (and maybe even clueless) we were, and yet thankfully, it all turned out just great. Our eldest son is as independent and adventurous and “alive” as they come, and we still have a blast adventuring with him. Sometimes I wish that fearlessness and that bravado of my youth would come back to me. I long for that inner assurance to trust life, and to go at it with pure gusto. I desire to easily let go of so much caution, and to allow that caution to be thrown to the wind. Interestingly, I do feel my courage circling back again, now that I am into the first few months of my empty nest. However, it’s not blind anymore. This courage is not a cocky courage. This courage is full of knowledge, experience, and wisdom about the frailty and the preciousness of life, and all things in this life. And thus, it is a clearer courage. My middle-aged courage is clear and conscience about risks, and also clear and conscience about what you miss out on, when you don’t take risks.
I am headed out on an adventure with my curly, ginger haired 26 year-old baby boy today. He towers over me. My son teaches me a lot about the things that are popular with his young generation. Yesterday, he ordered a rare Korean thistle for dinner. (and I tried it and it tastes like chicken – kidding, it tasted like spinach) When we go on our adventures for today, we will both be brave and excited. He will have that fresh, free, unscarred curious courage of youth, and my braveness will come from my wisest most weathered place in my heart, which fully understands the risks of almost everything, and knows that it is important to take some of these risks in order to experience the uncontrollable exuberance of a fully lived life. The circles of life constantly circle back, in slightly different form, but always with the same simple lessons: to live fully, to love unabashedly, and to trust the experiences you have in life, and all that these experiences have to offer you.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
I’m adventuring with my eldest child this week, in his neck of the woods. It’s fun being a “mummy”! So, I’ve got to run now, and figure out what I’m going to wear. Have a great day!
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Happy Friday!! Happy Best Day of the Week!! On Fridays, I don’t think deeply (thus, I don’t write about deep or meaningful things). Or if I do, I quickly shut it down. Here on the blog, on Fridays, I discuss my favorites: things, songs, products, websites, books, u-name-its. Please share some of your favorites in my Comments section, so we all can even more fun this Friday.
Before I mention today’s favorite of mine, I want to gift you iPhone users, a bonus favorite. Text “pew pew” to some of your favorite people who also have iPhones. Fun, right? If you hold down the send button when you text someone on your iPhone you will find that you have all kinds of options, to add pizazz to your text messages. (my favorite option is the “Invisible Ink” option) Thank you, my dear friend (you know who you are) for teaching me the “pew pew” skill. Have you come to regret it, yet?? Pew pew. Pew pew.
Today’s favorite is a time saver. Shinery Radiance Wash washes your hands and your jewelry, all at the same time. It adds a gorgeous sparkle to your engagement ring without you having to take off your rings to clean them, and risk losing them. It’s wonderful stuff, and it can be purchased on Amazon. Speaking of lost wedding rings, we are having to replace my husband’s wedding ring for the second time in our almost 28 years of marriage. (Thankfully, he only loses his wedding ring when he is with me.) When we were on our honeymoon, my husband lost his first wedding band when we were snorkeling, because it was too big for his hand and it slipped into the water. A trip to the jewelry store in St. Martin was the first stop of the next day, because as a young bride, it was important to me for my husband to “keep a ring on it.” Last weekend, we were boating with our daughter. During the pandemic lockdown, my husband had his wedding ring made a size larger, because, as you may intimately know, the pandemic and weight gain went hand-in-hand for many of us. My husband has since lost his pandemic weight gain, and the ring was too big. Guess what came off in the water, again? So today’s date excursion, is a trip to the jewelry store. Why? Because as a middle-aged bride, it’s important to me for my husband to “keep a ring on it.”
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
I read an excellent thread on Twitter this morning written by Daniel Blackmon (@UncleRedLeg), who, in his own words, is this: “Army COL, Field Artillery Junkie, husband, dad, lifter and pretty good golfer.” It was in response to a family member asking Blackmon how he felt about the military having to deal with all of this “woke crap . . .You know all that inclusion crap, all that can’t call parents ‘mom’ and ‘dad,’ all that pronoun stuff.”
My husband and I are both children of fathers who served in the military. Our family has quite a few military veterans and I am extremely proud of that fact. I was curious about an Army Colonel’s response to this question, because quite honestly, all of our fast moving societal changes, has me, this sometimes obtuse and stubborn, middle-aged lady confused and muddled and frustrated and trying to balance and to explore what I think is right and is healthy and is worth supporting. I LOVE Colonel Daniel Blackmon’s point of view. I think what the bottom line of his essay is saying is to stop making assumptions. Get to know people, individually. Be earnestly and openly curious about everyone whom you meet. If you want to earn people’s respect and trust, ask questions and listen to their answers. Daniel Blackmon says it best:
“So, inclusion…why is it important? Inclusion is not about overtly empowering people who don’t deserve it. The cream will always rise to the top. It’s about applying a level playing field as much as that’s possible. Some folks will always have more talent, more brains, more acumen for leadership, more hustle. These are not traits that any one group of people have a monopoly on. Inclusion is about caring about your people irrespective of what they look like, what kind of background they come from, or who they love. Inclusion is about building trust that might not initially exist because of all of those previous reasons. . . . . . If I have to give an order to a group of people that will put them in harms way, they damn sure better trust me enough to know that I have done everything within my power to ensure maximum levels of success because if they don’t and I didn’t, the results will be catastrophic. . . . . I am committed to let my people know I care about them because trust is a two way street and if you don’t have the trust of your Soldiers, you don’t have their respect. The men and women of our Army are raised by all types, a mom and dad, just a mom, just a dad, 2 moms, 2 dads, uncles, aunts, grandparents, foster parents and the list goes on. What I’ve taken to doing is not asking about their mom or dad but asking, “Who do you call when you have some good news? Who do you call when you have some bad news? Who do you call when you want to laugh/cry? Who loves you back home?” Most of the time I get pretty generic answers but sometimes the answer is surprising and what is even better is the look on the face of the Soldier when they get to tell you who that person is. It also puts the onus on the Soldier to tell me as much or as little as they want to about their family situation and more importantly, it lets them know that when they’re ready, they can tell me or their leader and not feel like they will be judged. It’s not “woke” to care. . . . (I, the blogger, repeated this part once again for emphasis): If I have to give an order to a group of people that will put them in harms way, they damn sure better trust me enough to know that I have done everything within my power to ensure maximum levels of success because if they don’t and I didn’t, the results will be catastrophic. . . .At one point in my life when I was a young man, this wasn’t as obvious to me as it is now. I wish someone would have explained it to me better. Maybe then I could have built better teams, been a better leader, made more of a difference. But I am committed to it now. I am committed to let my people know I care about them because trust is a two way street and if you don’t have the trust of your Soldiers, you don’t have their respect . . . .”
My takeaway: Don’t decide anything or anyone is “crap” until you really get to know them. It is not “woke” to care.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
