Category Archives: Uncategorized

“What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding.” – Elvis Costello

11 Sunday May 2014

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It is Mother’s Day morning at 8:06 AM and all I can think about is a father. My children’s father.

It starts the day before Mother’s Day. Every grocery store, every flower shop, every gift or women’s boutique you enter is unusually filled with men, their children in tow searching for something to give mom or make her for brunch. I hear in one aisle, “Mom loves Pop Tarts!” “No, she doesn’t.” I think, nice try. The sight and sound of it warms my heart and at the same time breaks it.

It’s the same feeling I have on the football field watching the dad’s coach their sons or on Boys Scout camp outs where they are all geared up and outfitted like they were heading to Mt. Everest instead of a local park. My husband loved the beach, so there especially, watching them throw the ball to their sons or helping their daughter’s build a sand castle or playing a game of Kadima.

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“Don’t sell the dreams you should be keeping”- The Lightening Seeds, “Pure”

04 Sunday May 2014

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One of my biggest and most recurring dreams when I was a kid of about 9 or 10 years old was to be Strawberry Fields and marry Peter Framptons’ character Billy Shears in Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band – The Movie. No, really. I dreamed about this constantly. I was obsessed. I was young enough to think that this was an actual possibility. That I could be a fictional character in a really bad movie based on a Beatles album! I was definitely floating up there with “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” I was reminded of this the other day when “Strawberry Fields” popped up on my playlist and it started me thinking about dreams and why we give up on the ones we should keep and cling to the ones we should let go. Because there are some we need to let go. Let go of our dreams?! She just said what? I know! We don’t usually get this kind of advice. Just take a look at a small sampling of “dream” quotes:

“If you can dream it, you can achieve it.” -Zig Ziglar

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams” – Elenor Roosevelt

“All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them.” – Walt Disney

“Don’t stop believing” -Journey

You get the picture.

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“There is no greater tragedy than discontentment. The worst of faults is wanting more – always. Contentment alone is enough. Indeed, the bliss of eternity can be found alone in your contentment.” – Tao Ti Ching

27 Sunday Apr 2014

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I’ve been thinking about the ways we don’t think we measure up. That we think we aren’t enough. That you just aren’t “cutting the mustard” in your life whether it be with your family in your role as parent or child, your career, your social or financial status, or even with your aspirations, your dreams.

By now, if you read my writing, you get that I am a single parent. I am a widow. (Checking that box for the first time is laser printed in my memory.) I actually don’t like that term, “single parent” for me.  It implies that I am just single, not married to my childrens’ other parent when in fact I am, yes, sadly single but more accurately I am an “only parent.” There is no other parent. I am it.
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“Happiness is an inside job.” – William Arthur Ward

20 Sunday Apr 2014

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Have you ever woken up reluctantly after 2 snooze button hits, searched for your glasses on the night table, then on the floor so you can make it to the bathroom without running into the wall, slumped on the toilet and thought – only 15 hours until I can get back into bed!? Or are you one of those people – “happy” people, who bounce out of bed no matter what nightmare is on tap for the day and hum your way to the john with your rose colored glasses firmly in place?

I hate to admit it, because damn! if I didn’t wish I had been born in the gene pool of the latter but truth be told, I am more in the former. I had to work at happy. Every step of the way. It didn’t occur naturally for me. I was born with my baseline level on the lower end of the spectrum of “happy”. Happy was a destination I was always on my way to like the kid in the backseat asking his parents, “Are we there yet?” No, not yet.

Sigh.

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“Our capacity for wholeheartedness can never be greater than our willingness to be broken-hearted.” – Brene Brown

13 Sunday Apr 2014

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We learn that we are vulnerable in a very real way when we are young. It’s like that little kid in kindergarten who excitedly runs over to his best friend during gym expecting them to be partners for rope climbing and his friend says to him, “Jimmy is my new best friend. We are partners now.” ouch! THAT is how we learn to close our hearts. That vulnerability is a bitch. And we start to build walls to protect ourselves so we can avoid or minimize criticism, ridicule, judgement, blame, hurt and disappointment. Brick by brick, we build the walls of our own prison.

To me, vulnerability is like running with scissors hoping no one trips you. Hoping you won’t get impaled. It is risky business. Risky business. And not the fun kind like in the Tom Cruise movie.

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“I don’t mind living in a man’s world as long as I can be a woman in it” – Marilyn Monroe

24 Friday Jan 2014

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I was having a conversation last time I was in getting my hair highlighted with my colorist about how much work it is being a woman.  The plucking, the waxing, the dyeing, highlighting, straightening, shaving, bleaching (yes, lots of this involves hair of some kind) but there is also the filling, the freezing, the plumping, the toning, the wrinkle, redness and blemish reducing, the lifting, the painting, the styling, the lasering and so on and on and on….

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