Home is everywhere you go. Home is both here and there for them.

There are so many variations of describing what "home"means. Honestly, I feel like I've spent the majority of my life being homesick for some distant place I have yet to identify. In the meantime though,  I take pride in building little nests all over the place.

This fall is no different. I recently moved into a house that truly hugged me. A home when I first crossed her threshold. I'm a big believer in presentation and ambiance. Smells, sights, feelings of a place can deeply affect my mood, and in thirty - eight years, I've learned it does the same for others too.

Let's face it, I am in one of those little vacuums of time in life, when one is sandwiched  between stages. I am not yet divorced, but not living as a married person. I am a single parent building a new Homefront, but my ex lives two minutes away and we see each other daily. That said, my only concern has been to transition my children as comfortably as possible. (This is why I had my house set up 24 hours after the movers left.) I want them to feel the big embrace of comfort and sanctuary when everything else seems to be fluid and in flux.

I am reemerging from the wreckage of all this now. I am fully aware that I most likely won't have such freedoms to design and decorate my house like this if I ever choose co-habitation with others than my kids. Even with them, I'll have to "normalize" so as not to embarrass them. But for now, I hit the big ol' "F*ck it" button and created a gypsy tent-bed, painted the stairs to look like books, put inspirational quotes and love reminders all over the place, painted the door, the external window shutters, and am working on stained glass window hangers with my kids handprints and favorite flowers.

From the outside, in a stuffy (but beautiful and safe) suburb, I'm "Weird." So what? My kids love the whimsical and very personalized touches. But everything can be started anew, or changed or readdressed with new perspective (or paint). That will be yet another good life lesson for them.

There is a blessing from  John O'donohue's "To bless the space between us."

"Home is where the heart is. It stands for the sure center where individual life is shaped and from where it journeys forth. What it ultimately intends is that each of its individuals would develop the capacity to be at home in themselves. This is something that is usually overlooked, but is a vital requirement in the creativity and integrity of individual personality. It has to do with the essence of a person, their sense of their own inner ground. When a person is at home in his life, he always has a clear instinct about the shape of outer situations; even in the midst of confusion he can discern the traces of a path forward. When one is at home in oneself, one is integrated and enjoys a sense of balance and poise. In a sense that is exactly what spirituality is: The art of homecoming."

I know things don't last or stay the same very long. I also know that when my children feel loved, creative and confident in themselves, my divorce or mistakes or mean girls and life's unexpected disappointments won't topple them.

I've worked really really hard to get through my own childhood and lack of any of those things to provide and permeate self-love, self-trust and the overriding truth that YOU (they) are everything they need already and that trusting that and standing sure-footed in themselves will only help them bend in the winds of change.

Happy Friday. Happy home-in-yourself wishes to you,

xxoo
L

Wing-Maker - Motherhood is many things. Three poems about my best accomplishments.

So,  It would only make sense that on the day I felt compelled to do watercolors and write about my children, my oldest had the kind of attitude that makes one question what they are doing wrong. I'm glad I had finished before we had to have the talk on gratitude and perspective.  I meditated, let it go, and here they are.  It's the way of motherhood: The grace, the growth, the thankless and the thought of how fleeting it is. I always hear a voice in my heart telling me that I will miss these squabbles and the countless "Mama!" screams my two-year old belts out.

One of my favorite quotes about giving 

freedom and space is from The Dalai Lama XIV.

Below are three little poems I'm going to put in each of my children's photo books. 

"The Wing-Maker."
Every mother taking good care to raise her children well have

raised them to have wings to fly. What I'm too often reminded of, is how hard it will be when they actually DO...fly. I want them to be independent, and strong and fearless in most ways, but I'm human and know that I'll miss the little in them, and the little things of now. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Shimmer with a smile. Life is hard, bloom anyway."

The Huffington Post

Google+

Twitter

Facebook

Instagram

A Letter To My Children For When Life Gets Harder: “So you know..."

I wrote this on May 5, 2015 because I think it’s important enough to be said and read. Maybe you think I’m clueless, annoying, embarrassing, bossy...all valid on all kinds of levels. 

But, I have watched you since birth and I have lived fully before your existence, during it and since. You are the greatest thing I’ve ever created or been a part of and you still evolve and grow and teach me. I’m always here. I have never loved anything more than I love you three.

You are always valuable. You are never alone. You are precious. Seek no one’s permission to be you.  These are four  truths I try to help you learn every day. 

"So you know...”

To my incredible, inspiring, beautiful, unique and precious children,

There are going to be days that hurt and hollow you out. Those days are the kind you sit staring at a computer, at the wall, or out of a window, just looking but not seeing anything. You can’t think, you can only feel your chest expand and rise to inhale and then purse your lips to exhale slowly. Each breath feels no better than the last but you know, somewhere deep within yourself that you have to just keep on doing it.

There are going to be nights when you lie on your back, and tears slip out the sides of your eyes without permission. They stream, cold and chilling on your neck and you lay frozen. The sadness has a weight words cant carry. The mind can’t quite decipher how much loss you feel, how broken and tired your heart is. Below the surface, deep behind the horizontal heart that keeps beating and bleeding out, there is a spark that flickers. It is so faint, you can’t even acknowledge it, but fumes from it’s attempts to light sneak into your senses.

There are going to be mornings when the sun doesn’t bother to beam past the grey, heavy clouds spilling rain and rolling like the pain and fear from your tears. You find you thrash from your left side to your right, as if arguing a silent point against yourself. The strength to throw the corner of the top cover down to get up is equally matched by the strength of your resolve to roll over and hide in the cool warmth under down feathers and darkness. Without committing to either urge, a voice without noise pushes you to abandon the fight and start the day.

There are going to be weeks that drone on as if to torture and test your absolute capacity to absorb disappointment, shame, shock and alienation. It will feel so much like personal assault from the universe that you will drop to your knees in a visceral scream just because you can, and nothing else feels like it will help. The echo of it, and the strange and unexpected confirmation that you are indeed still alive, mobile, able to be heard, and very present soothes an ambiguous wound you can’t identify.

There are going to be people who make you feel small, weak and inferior. You will let them rule your thoughts and their version of you will create a negative rhetoric inside yourself that poison your spirit and deflates your self worth. But strangely, as you listen more to them, you’ll start to see the fissures in their false confidence, you may even start to pity their own darkness that needs to hold you down to create an illusion that they are higher up. You might even start to believe that just because someone says something, and just because you may believe it temporarily, it is not necessarily the truth.

There are going to be events in life that shake you to your core. Huge, life-altering cracks in the ideal or comforts of a life you think you built. You will fall hard, crashing into fragile pieces of the glass perception that existed before you hit the bottom and saw, slowly, that you are more beautiful as a mosaic, than a perfectly packaged projection. Something feels more comfortable and empowering about refitting yourself and holding the most sacred, albeit once broken, parts of yourself together with the mortar of self-discovery and the solid embrace of yourself as you truly are.

And then…. the unimaginable happens:

The days feel more vibrant, more full. The clarity of sunlight on the leaves of a tree feels like putting on prescription glasses for the first time.

The nights become a ritual of comfort and gratitude for the days giving’s and the emotional intelligence to simply be without expectation or disappointments of what you “thought” the day was supposed have been. You accept what is. You cherish it.

The morning feels new like a fresh cut grass scent, a glass of coffee, a clean slate of glowing white to be colored and painted however it will present itself, and you take a deep breath with full heart and open eyes, happy to have slept well.

The weeks fly too fast because the precious and the fully lived moments are so bursting with presence and life it all happens too quickly. Perhaps you start creatively recording them better, through pictures, words, stories, or some sense of passion performed through art form to slow it down.

The people in your life are fascinating and enrich that deepest part of yourself that you didn’t even realize was so big, loving and deeply affected by the magical palette of differences the human condition allows for.

The events, you realize now, that change and shape your life are all gifts to bestow a lesson, a message or a hint to something deeper and deliberately woven into exactly who you are meant to become.

This is your life. This is ugly, and sad and hard and messy and at the very same time it is the most incredibly multi-petal flower blooming to rise and expand only as yours can. No vein in a leaf, no pollen of potential spread will be the same as yours because each beauty is owned in itself, and the love for all blooming things is a universal truth that few, but more and more are beginning to recognize.

Bloom. Bloom big and spread your beauty as you grow. You are loved, always have been and everything is here now, and has existed specifically to get you to exactly where you are. Trust it, let go, and unfold into the beaming light that shines on you. It always has, you just had to fight the mud and elements to truly appreciate and understand what type of amazing power you possess to push through the dirt and rain.

You are here, in all your splendor and the entire light, love, energy and universe conspired to let you find yourself, blooming, right now.

With all my love (which is limitless and paralleled by NO ONE, except....maybe, if I’m lucky, yourself! Love YOU  like I do, 

Your mother. 

Mom-life balance: Creativity through conduction? Only time will tell, but Life is Good.

Today, like most days begins with a small, blond boy holding a stare of innocence to my hazy yawn. He greets me with the easy spirit of a dawning new day. More often than not, he will recite a list of things he wants to eat: "Kiwwwwi, Waaaffffleeee, Yoooo-guuuurt...."

Every day as a mother in this new light of life is different. Cast and characters change, routines fall to the side in one "tummy ache" or fever. Plot twists drop without foreshadowing. Everything can be a small variant to the plan set forth with best intentions. The very nature of change, so clearly in my recent life, is the most reliable of things, that holds me at its mercy.

I spent the day still in this manic-like "white hot" spell of creative writing...but with no time. Feverish within in me is a kind of focus and abundance of thoughts, that make everything else feel like an awful intrusion.And intrude, life does.

From my waking moment I am forced to choose: sideline a pumping, breathing, growing idea or deal with an absolute? A boy falling on his face without any arm support is an absolute. A requested glass of water can wait the two minutes I need to "finish a sentence" on my Mac Book.

 It's hour by hour, and any mom can agree, the more you try to control it, the less anything goes your way. The fourth-grader didn't go to school, so there is that to contend with now. (This limits time away from the house.) Gym plans squashed doing some editing and negotiating an iPad between two children.

 I noticed that my website page-views hit 61,313 and I'm one "follow" away from 100. Not too shabby for five weeks, and what started as an outlet my restless thoughts with no particular audience in mind. I sought the "pressure" on myself to sit down and write, not the outcome. It's transforming into a platform to display my writing, which has brought serendipitous connections with both strangers in my own town sending sweet notes, and professionals in the writing industry inquiring for more.

 I would be lying if I said it didn't feel rewarding. The analytics graph is trending pretty well from last week. A seemingly-controversial post hit nearly 200 shares and "views" when up by 5000 overnight. My husband actually got scared. (cue "Crickets"sound...Nothing happened.) I don't assume anyone cares, but somebody IS clicking on posts. I've been on twitter for three weeks, my following doubled last weekend, and that social media forum is so much more full of intelligence and beauty and inspiration than my earlier perceptions of teenagers typing: "#YOLO, I drunk a Cola, it good. #Winning."


I tried meditating for fifteen minutes (half a "Peppa Pig" show) and was interrupted by my son, a magnet to moments of attempted serenity. He was trying to pull the bolster from under me, a quiet mind that did not make.

I stayed fluid, unattached, and chose to surrender which meant I had to defer my meditation yet again.  Then, I found myself isolated in public by other mothers/peers trying to punish me for something that affects their lives in no way whatsoever. My two youngest children witnessed this with puzzling awareness to the awkwardness.  Nap?  "LOL, I  only do that for the nanny." -My toddler thinks. The day twists and turns with little regard to whatever goals I dared to have.

I should be pissed, crabby, reaching for the bottle of Xanax. It's 9pm and I find a book, that looks like it must have been a gift to me at some point. It's called "642 Things to write about." It is a "workbook" for creativity. In the introduction, a writer from the "SF Writers' grotto" name PO Bronson, starts by saying: "This book was written in a single day. A single 24-hour period, with no advance notice. Nor was it our idea."

The two paragraphs below elicit that simplistic "YES!" reaction from me after a seemingly mundane, possibly-bad day.

Excerpt from the Introduction to "642 Things to Write About."

I could let those words: "bad-day" be my conclusion. Instead, I sit here in retrospect and make mental notes of the little blossoms of creativity peppered into the madness. answered a simple "How are you?" from a  literary expert/new-friend with: "Every day comes in a sunrise of fresh palette and ends in the spectrum of colors; some dark, some bright. Writing is the only thing that clears the canvas." I typed this while brushing my teeth, and using my body to keep my 30b-son steady on the bathroom counter top.

Putting my kindergartner's love of her friends and social events, before my own comfort, I subjected myself to the silliness of forced isolation by grown women. It was empowering and a little funny. I feigned a theatrical voice to my husband on the phone and said: "Into the hot hen-house I came! Luckily,  false heat only warms me. The true burn of real fire already emboldened my sense of self."

Realizing a "nap" was not a possibility for my youngest child, I trolled on Google+ and got inspired by the random quotes and photography. From that, came this:

After talking to a loving friend, with whom I had not spoken in some time, I remembered not everyone thinks I've changed entirely. There is an indelible mark on me, sure. But let it be mentioned that same person I was months ago, still exists on some level, too. They are not mutually exclusive, for that wouldn't be growth, would it?

After all every day is what you make it. I made it.....alive.
Unharmed, without drama, (my definition has changed drastically.) and if anything, a glimmer of hope. That's a win. A big win.  No, I don't have massive pages, or word-counts to feel productive going to bed, but I learned a few very important things in the small moments "in between" life's tasks that count far more than words on paper.

I know one thing: I'd rather be here, learning, than on the other side, judging. The life-altering connections and events happening for me with this "silly writing" thing, far outweigh the prudence required to stay quiet until the fruits of my hardship and hard work speak volumes.

So until tomorrow's unique mosaic of responsibilities and creative flickers, I bid you good night.

Life is tough, busy, crazy, relentless, yes, yes, I know. Look closer at the end of the day. Inspect it from an unassuming, "Why-shouldn't-I-be-happy-to-be-here?" viewpoint of a toddler first thing in the morning...

You may just find that LIFE is good, indeed.