Then he said, “I sent a message out to the friend group that I’m inviting a new kid to eat lunch with us tomorrow. One of the friends responded, ‘Everybody be nice. Make sure he feels included. Don’t let him feel left out.’” Continue reading Invite the New Kid to Sit at Your Table
I love how much art and music envelop us at every turn, and how the boys have learned to channel their own feelings through art and music to take the edge off of some of those overpowering emotions. They know they are not alone in their highs and lows, because they listen to musicians who can speak their pains or their joys and allow their listeners to feel the connection and the parallels. Continue reading “Can Music Save Your Mortal Soul…”
It took work on my part to shed some layers of negativity and remember my somewhat bohemian wildness and happiness, my inner childishness, to allow myself to look silly in front of my kids. Continue reading They Became My Partners in Joy
So, within a week of one another, both my 13yo and my 16yo have had their hearts broken. They process things very differently. My youngest is open with me. My older one is shut down. I want so much to help, but know I have to let them have their feelings. Their dad is great at giving them a laugh every now and then. And … Continue reading While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Always the lists. Give me too much free time between calls at work, and a fairly slow day with no nearby neighbors to visit with, and I used pages and pages of scratch paper to make lists for the New Year. Lists about working out, and menus, and lists of chores and how to rotate them. Lists about writing and making time for the things … Continue reading Learning to Laugh
Driving straight into a thick blanket of fog, I wondered about our world, the darkness and lack of visibility we are entering. I remembered the blizzard in the Little House on the Prairie books that hit suddenly while children were at the school-house. They formed a line with outstretched arms – trying to get all the children home in a storm of wild whiteness. Only … Continue reading Microcosm & Minutiae
The conflict happens because she’s right and she loves you. And yet, we strive against all her rightness, her great ideas, Her prodding us into things that challenge and define us. She made memories for us, with the books she read us, The games she played, the places she took us, The worlds she opened up to us, The things she made it … Continue reading Mothers
Another bad thing in a world of bad things. I have not become numb, that is not what has happened. I crumble with each new attack, with each new assault – foreign or domestic. And then I disconnect, and block out the media, and become absorbed in my kids’ interests and the activities we can do together to fill our world with joy. I didn’t take … Continue reading We could Hug More!
As we rounded out the year of 2015, the boys and I sat up late-ish to watch Inside Out.
Of course, I’m raising boys after growing up in an all-girl family. It’s like Life doesn’t actually ever want us to feel capable or like we know one iota of what we’re doing. So, I can’t tell you if the interior landscape of boys during the upheaval that is Junior High is anything like that of girls, but I can tell you that I identified with every single thing that movie showed us about how an emotional world can crumble overnight.
Continue reading “Pre-Pubescent Insanity”
This is not a reference I throw around lightly. This is something I have studied. I worked at the Anti-Defamation League in San Francisco when I was younger, helping maintain their library of groups they watched for hate crimes or atrocities in the making. Every day, researchers would hand me stacks of articles from periodicals around the world to chronicle and file. They kept records … Continue reading Horrifying Comparison of Adolescence
Being on the right side of the brain is a little like being on the Left Bank in Paris: relaxing while watching the passing show, listening to the music on the corner. It’s a place to sit around and tell stories and wonder about it all – and most important, to slow down. Call it crazy or lazy, this wisdom may be found only … Continue reading Right Brain, Left Bank and Parenting through Teenage Angst
Today, while doing chores, I listened to a book on tape from the library called, “How the Universe got its Spots.” (This is a link to the Amazon book, because I couldn’t link to the book on tape for some reason.) The gifted young cosmologist Janna Levin sets out to determine the size of the universe, along the way providing an intimate look at the … Continue reading On Motherhood, Physics and Relativity
Reflections on The Tao te Ching – Chapter 1: The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The unnamable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things. Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations. Yet … Continue reading Darkness within Darkness
Because Ben and I are both artists, and experience a large range of emotions, we’ve had to learn about anger and how to handle it, manage it, subdue it, understand it and live with it. We each have a tendency to fly off the handle and we’ve had to study the Primitive Brain otherwise known as the Fight or Flight part of the brain that … Continue reading Primitive Brain – Fight or Flight – and Homework
Mystics hear voices. the question “Do you hear voices?” is used to sort the sane from the insane. And yet, as artists, we do hear voices and most insistently when we seek the guidance for our art. We are led. We are prompted. We are urged. We are called. ~ Julia Cameron, from The Complete Artist’s Way, the 2nd Book, Walking in This World Every … Continue reading Mystics Hear Voices
Let me preface by saying that after writing today’s reflection, I feel raw because of how much I have to learn. This motherhood thing is ever changing, constant learning, every day more to understand about ourselves and therefore how we parent. I choose to keep thinking that every day I am trying to be better, but a lot of times, I feel the weight of how … Continue reading Lessons in Learning
Filed under: Lessons learned from a Rap Artist, and Color Me Surprised. It’s not that I dislike rap music. I get the inherent poetry of the genre. It just hasn’t been a form of music I consciously seek out for pleasure. I’m close to fifty-years old, and I think I just missed this art form. Today I heard an artist speaking on the radio … Continue reading Remember to Remember
Chores. I remember being a kid and having chores, and thinking I was overworked and under-appreciated. I remember feeling like all I ever did was work. I know it takes a while to have a grownup mind, but wow, is the young mind a crazy place. I truly remember knowing for certain that our home would cease to function without my efforts, and that somehow, … Continue reading Chores, Homework & Accomplishment – Aha!
“Not Cool, Robert Frost!” It has been all the rage on the internet, at Ted Talks, on the Late Night Circuit – all over the place. If you have not yet seen The Pep Talk, by Kid President, please, go see it now. I will wait. My kids and I have watched this so many times, we have it memorized. We have gone on to … Continue reading Monkeys Flinging Poop, Friends Visiting and other Poetic Adventures
If there is anything we have learned from the last week, it is that life can be tiny and fragile and precious and dear. There is no guarantee that we will get our Someday. Perhaps the greatest monument we can build to the lives that have been senselessly lost, is to live our best and biggest dreams now. Let’s not wait for the Someday around … Continue reading Tiny and Fragile and Precious and Dear
