My friends, if you are like me, certain inspirational sayings crawl right up your back when you’re not in the right state of mind to hear them. Words can lose their meaning when I’m not in the right place to receive them, and yet, it doesn’t make their meaning any less true. I am my […]
Husband, my Love, All They Want is You
My friends, this is a story about my one true love, my family. My husband and I have always taken off the week between Christmas and New Years, it’s tradition we started once the kids entered school. It became our week to relax and recharge together. However, when we started our tree service, the seasonal […]
How to Separate Helpless from Worthless, a Work in Progress
My friends, I stopped doing my house work. The dishes from New Years Eve sat in the sink until January 5th. I walked over the same small plastic straw wrapper umpteen times without any regard. I devised a special laundry system that involved leaving all clean laundry in baskets . . . unfolded. When I […]
Withholding Love from a Child – Break the Cycle
Stop me if you have heard this one before. Or lived this one before . . . To a child, love was withheld and unconditional love was a thing with unending conditions. Love was only available for the obedient, so a child modifies their behavior to get the love need. Some people call that “manipulation” […]
A Perfect Little Girl
To all my girlfriends raising daughters ~ People say she is an old soul. They comment about her using words like remarkable, amazing, and self-assured. I’ve always said, “She just came to us like that.” As if, in some sweet offhanded way, we barely noticed her emotional maturity at the age of 10. The truth […]
This Mother’s Truth: Faith is my Superpower
Faith. Faith is like health, you don’t think about it until you don’t have it. I love the word faith. I have faith in many things throughout my day. Faith in my coffee to wake me up. Faith in my vitamin promises ~ not yet determined by the FDA to provide said promised results~ will […]
One Mother’s Post: How to Survive Christmas with a Hospitalized Father
Oh my friends, to suggest that I could teach you how to survive anything is incredibly presumptuous as to any sort of qualifications I have as a person. What the title should read is, I survived Christmas with a hospitalized father. Kind of . . . The aftermath of yesterday laid strewn all over the […]
COVID: It’s a Sibling Situation
My friends with difficult sisters, I know you’ll understand. My step-sister was angry and scared. Her mother and my father made a decision in May 2020 after 9 weeks of quarantine to see my children, their only grandchildren. Both were nearly 80, so it would stand to reason that seeing the children could be dangerous, […]
Gratitude: This is a Call to Action
My friends, I do not mean mandatory gratitude or mindless optimism. I suggest that gratitude is a Call to Action What are you grateful for today? Sometimes it is as simple as being grateful for the weather. The sun is shining, I can do my yard work. It is raining, I don’t need to feel […]
A Snapshot in Words
My friends, I absolutely love the change of seasons Riding home on this beautiful fall day. Rays of light danced through the open windows of our white Explorer, and although I didn’t know the exact temperature, I knew it didn’t feel like fall. We passed familiar stores and schools through towns close to ours until […]