K=Kindness

When I was a little girl my sister and I shared a bedroom. We had twin size beds with red metal frames with bars all along the headboard and footboard. Both of our beds were on wheels. Every night we would go in to our room and we would be very, very quiet but we would not go to sleep. Without making any noise we would push our little beds together and begin to put all of our stuffed animals and dolls around the edges.

I remember either having a discussion or just the mental thought process of working out where the toys would go. I wanted to sleep with the toys but not suffocate them and I wanted each and every one of my toys to know how much I loved it. I determined that my only option was to sleep in the middle of the bed without covers so I could make sure the stuffed beings could have what they needed. I had to sacrifice for their needs. Something strikes me really hard when I write this story today. At the age of 5 I was already utterly and dangerously co-dependent.

I went along continuing to behave in this pattern until just 2 years ago. At that time I made a huge and fairly drastic life decision. The first 3 days I just cried. After that it was 2 years of remembering and digging through, falling down and getting up. I spent long bike rides pulling apart my own thinking and hours on the phone with my mentor Jennie. When I got hung up I called my husband and asked him to remind me how bad things were before I made the decision to change my own life. My good friend Julie got to hear my rants or my sobs more than once. Other people knew nothing, could not possibly understand that the me on the outside was barely holding things together while the me on the inside completely fall apart.

That was scary, probably the most scary thing, watching me fall apart and just having to have faith that somehow, someway I was heading in the right direction.

Step by step, that little girl learned that love contains respect, that healthy people have boundaries (not to be confused with walls my friends) that taking care of your own needs has to come first and only leaves you more able to take care of those that depend on you. That little girl learned that when whole people come together magic and beauty and joy light up our lives, even in the midst of chaos and destruction.

Most importantly, I learned that kindness is not something we do. It can be something we do, but first it is something we feel. Kindness comes from an open and willing heart. It comes without strings and it can come from anywhere. And I am thankful to many people who knowingly and unknowingly offered even the smallest kindness in the past 9 years when I have most certainly not felt very kind.

This ride started long ago, I thank those who have taken it with me. Those who have known me from the earliest of days that always knew who was inside the facade. I thank those who joined on late, who have only known me during some of the most tumoultous years of my life, the nine years since I gave birth and first started to open Pandora's Box. And, I even thank those who sort of left me on the road. Of course, this ride is not over, it has just taken on a different tone and any and all of you are welcome to stick around to see where our adventures take us to next.

J=Joy

I have a picture of myself that I carry around in my planner. The picture was taken when I was about 4. The 4 year old in that picture had already experienced many things other people won't ever experience in their entire lives. Yet, that 4 year old is joyful, vibrant, buoyant. It is my favorite picture of myself and I carry it around to remind me that this is the most essential part of me, the joy that has always been a part of my being.

There are times in life when I have forgotten that person. When I have been angry, resentful, sad, when I have wanted everyone to leave me alone. That is part of who I am too. The grief, sadness, and even the anger have made me more in touch with the joy, even though that seems strange. And all of these emotions and feelings are part of what it feels like to be human.

Lately, when I am around people who are unhappy, I have a keen awareness that I know what it feels like to be unhappy. I know the years it took to be able to even think about my brother and his death and not be completely overtaken with anger, sadness, or loss. I know about running away faster and faster thinking you can out run the past or at least pretend it did not happen. And I know what I know now, that sometimes people get through it and get on with their lives. That peace can find you at the oddest of times in the most unexpected of ways. I am also aware that I cannot assume when meeting someone where they have been, what they have seen, and the events that have made them who they are.

I=Intention

Several times recently as I have been working through one situation or another I have found a common thread. The common thread always comes back to the intention I have when I am pursuing an activity. In the past couple months, every situation that has led to discomfort, bad feelings, and challenges for me personally can be traced back to not having the proper intention when making choices. Some of my choices have come from a desire for me children to do something I want to do or want them to do and others have come from feeling pressure to do culturally "normal" things.

For sure, these are pretty normal things to do and I am not beating myself up about my choices or the consequences I get to face because of them. On reflection, though, I feel that a huge part of my job as a parent, especially of my oldest daughter, is to help her make choices in keeping with her heart. And, for this reason, I feel lucky to have taken a long look at my choices and how they are actually not in keeping with my role as the person who helps her learn to listen to herself.

H= Heart's Desire

In the last month or so, I have noticed my little family has been coming upon challenges that are interpersonal in nature. Things that take a quiet mind, a kind heart, and a thorough examination before acting. This is not something at which I excel. My first instinct is to run or fight when in these situations, this is the skill set hard wired in to my biology and the same one promoted by my family of origin. Fortunately, I have honed a certain degree of skill in sitting and waiting. Waiting for an opportunity, waiting for an instinct, waiting for myself to settle, and more waiting. I know that the pattern I have had in the past of zooming in to fix, destroy, or otherwise just make myself more comfortable with a situation leaves an absolute path of burnt nothing, hurt feelings, regrets, and nothing I want to carry with me as I go forward.

It occurred to me this morning, that it is my utmost heart's desire to change these patterns. The ones my biology and my family superimposed upon my young self. It is my heart's desire to have something entirely different, something my soul can feel good about, and something my children can learn from. It is a deep yearning I carry within me to do what is kind, to evolve, move forward, and carry myself with more love tomorrow than I did today. So, though these varying situations had me a bit overwhelmed a day or so ago, I now see that I am being handed the loveliest of opportunities.

Whenever you reach the edge of your ability in anything, there is the opportunity to grow. The opportunity to push past what was once a barrier and to find a whole new person capable of more on the other side. So, though what I am looking at requires grace and tact, careful choices and the willingness not to run away and though these are all skills I have struggled with at some point in time, I feel capable and willing to wait and watch and act when appropriate and hopefully find myself on the other side.

Lenses

Monday night as I prepared for bed, I found myself thinking about the historic events of the day. I found myself pondering how my emotions were so different than some of the people who I know and respect. At first, I started concocting a rock solid argument for why I was right. It occurred to me that this, in itself, is an act of war. I intend to invest no energy in war. Therefore, I had to do something different.

Funny thing, even with the strong desire, the focused attention, and a background in yoga and meditation, I found it incredibly challenging, almost impossible to move my thoughts away from "being right" for very long. Even harder, was trying to have any notion of why a person might feel the way they did about an event or situation.

Every person comes from a unique background comprised of the culture they are born in, the family they are born to, and even the birth order in which they find themselves. I know from my experience as a parent, that the way you look at life when you have your first child and the way you see it when you have your second can be radically different. Each of us then has our own life experiences, both pleasant and unpleasant, and with our sophisticated brain, we draw large conclusions about life while living it. Each conclusion then becomes a part of the lens through which we view the world and each person's lens is very different. By the time we are adults these lenses are so ingrained in the way we think, that we rarely question them.

So back to me sitting on my bed. I realized the only thing for me to do was accept that each of us comes from someplace very different. I realized I must radically accept, especially those I love and respect, as having viewpoints equal in validity to my own. I understood that the situation at hand was calling me to make a choice. That choice was to either close down and make enemies with ideas and people whom I do not agree with or to walk a different path and greet these difference with open-hearted acceptance.

The next day my oldest daughter, who knows nothing of the war in Iraq or Bin Laden, asked me what I thought could bring peace to the world. I thought for a moment and responded that we can really only bring peace to our own hearts and that we have to be satisfied at some level with that. That our presence in the world peacefully was proof that peace was possible. And I remarked that this honestly is a huge challenge that most of us will struggle with for a long time.

I found this TED talk today that really illustrates the challenge of understanding another person's experience.

G is for Glee

A couple of weeks ago I was looking around for inspiration. Funny thing was, I was looking in all the wrong places. I noticed that my kids have an effective and omnipresent ability to find inspiration pretty much everywhere. Our oldest went on a Glee jag. Both of the girls then began to sing and dance around the house all day and night. It reminded me how much I love music, most genres and how quiet our house had become. From watching them use a television show as inspiration, I started noticing when I felt inspired, when I felt the most creative and open.

I also began noting all the different ways the girls use everything around them for inspiration, education, and exploration. What I saw really amazed me and what follows is a few pictures of the random ways the girls use the things around them.
The skull model that becomes...
a bed for a polly pocket complete with a diaphragm from another model that became a blanket.

The roll of tape that became a web...


that became a tape ball and then became...

an ice cream cone.
The metal frame, pool, sandbox lid, and umbrella that became a shelter from the rain.
The flash card box that became...
a house for little people.
The fallen tree branch that became a balance beam and jumping hurdle.
The limbs from the same fallen branch that added a little more shelter to an existing frame.

I really need look no further than the creativity of our children and their open minds about how something ordinary can be used in a new and novel way to know that inspiration is a state of mind.

F is for Friend

Last week I walked in to the kitchen to hear Ari engaging in a very interesting conversation. Without divulging too many details, I will try to give you a sense of the conversation.

Ari has a couple really close friends. Other than that she is not that interested in being social. Both my husband and I are a lot like her. I knew everyone I went to high school with. I mean everyone. I knew kids a year and two years older. I knew kids a year and two years younger. I knew a bunch of people no where near my age because of my mother's gas station and my older brothers. That is what happens when you live in one town for 15 years. And when that one town has 4 elementary schools that feed in to one junior high and eventually one senior high. But even knowing all those people, I had maybe 5 close friends.

So back to Ari. Ari does not do the acquaintance thing. Either you are someone who is her friend, someone she has not decided on yet, or someone she does not really want to spend time with. I used to obsess over this quality. I wondered if I was not giving her enough opportunities to meet other kids. I pondered whether our lifestyle had made her less social. And then I realized it is just her personality.

Last week a boy she likes to play with came over. I could tell they were not playing well together. The boy kept asking Ari what she wanted to do. Although she had plenty of ideas and found things to keep herself occupied, the two of them were just not playing together. This has happened many times over the last 6 months or so. At some point the boy said he was going to go and play with another one of his friends. This is where it got really interesting.

Ari very directly asked him if he came to our house to play with her or if he came to our house because it was convenient and he had nothing better to do. This is the point at which I walked in. The kid looked like a deer in the headlights. I asked Ari if she needed some help and she asked me to stay and help them talk this situation out.

Ari explained to the boy that she does not play with people she does not want to. She said it was important to her that he was coming over to play with her. And then she told him that she was trying to understand his intentions. If he made his decision to come play because he wanted to play with her then she was happy to have him over. If, however, he was coming over because there was no one else to play with or to play on our computers then she would rather he not come over at all. He mentioned that he did not want to hurt her feelings. She explained that she would rather have her feelings hurt by someone being honest with her than believe something that was not true. I explained to him that no one in our family was going to be mad at him or be mean to him. We had no ill will about what he chose to do, but that Ari was requesting that he be clear about why he was coming over.

The boy left. Ari went out in to the backyard and looked a little solemn. I went out to check on her and she said, "Don't feel bad for me mom, I have lost friends before." I gave her a look of "are you crazy", and told her "I don't feel sorry for you." I went on to explain to her that I felt what she had done was really mature. She was willing to state exactly what worked for her in a relationship, she was willing to lose a relationship that did not work for her, and she was so direct about what being in relationship meant to her. She was not mean or abusive in any way just very up front.

And once again, I get a much needed reminder that I have as much to learn from our kids as they do from me. And, a reminder of what my mentor/ teacher has already told me about being in relationship:

"...we cannot be truly powerful in a relationship if we are competing for dominance, or being subservient or avoiding conflict. We may even realize the simple truth that both of these methods are equally about controlling what happens in the relationship, the first dominating, is about winning the fight, and the second, being subservient, about avoiding the fight altogether. While the conflict avoider may appear to us somewhat as more sympathetic- "nicer" than the dominator- the reality is that energetically, both are playing the same game; they simply have chosen different poles on the polarity of domination and subservience. The real sacrifice is authenticity. There is no authenticity here. It is all a game, a competition, an exercise in the misuse of power and energy. What drives this behavior is the perception that losing the relationship or the person is worse than giving away power or abusing it. The authenticity must be sacrificed in order to maintain the relationship." Spotted Eagle