Month: May 2016

Summer Fun, Are You Having Any?


So here we are, while there is still a month until the calendar says summer has arrived, here in Central Florida the 75 days of summer break have arrived. I love those posts about how those of us who came of age in the bygone era of the ’70s and ’80s spent copious amounts of unscheduled and unsupervised time outside. They talk about how we made up our own games, rode our bikes, walked the neighborhoods looking for our friends, and drank from water hoses. We went away to sleep away camp and returned with crafted pot holders, camp fire stories and tales of the horror of being on kitchen duty. Did your summers as a child look like this? With some exceptions, many of mine did, and while I wish for similar experiences for my own children, I’m sure I am forgetting all kinds of problems and only thinking of the fun of freedom from schedules!

As a result of recognizing the overwhelming pattern of scheduling and over scheduling our lives in this day and age, I have spent the last few summers making sure there are limited amounts of must do items and lots of time for what do you feel like items. I would love to send the kids outside to make their own fun, but my kids make this difficult. One has developed an aversion to the sun (“It’s toooooooo hoooooot” he says) and the other has an aversion to being alone (“I want you to watch meeeee” she says)! What happened? When did they start to think I was in charge of their fun? It is all my fault and I am working to break the bad habit. Go entertain yourself, go find you own fun! So, I work on a here are things you can do, go do them and we will be accomplishing this scheduled item type of summer. The other thing I throw in are small school items to keep their growing brains from atrophy. The school items don’t always go over well, but hey, what kind of parent would I be if I didn’t upset the little darlings every once in a while?

So, think of us as we try to live peaceably over the 70 days of togetherness we have left. Let me know what kinds of activities you will be enjoying this summer.

Have you lost that loving feeling?

So, yes, it is a pretty overused term and the line from a well known song, but what does it mean for you? I was reading a book, I know big shocker there, and one of the characters was talking about how her work gave her a loving feeling, she had always been most happy doing what she was doing now. She had fallen in love with a vocation early, then taken all the steps she felt necessary to have a career in this vocation. It lead me to think, had I ever had a loving feeling about something? If I had, had I done all I could to nurture it or had I indeed, lost that loving feeling?

I can tell you I used to nourish a loving feeling about the written word and history and was an avid reader early in life. For years my dream was to study at Oxford and edit books to the delight of my heart and other readers everywhere. I journaled habitually and once even dreamed I could be a writer. What happened? How did that dream of loving everything about my chosen path change to, well change to something else. Now this something else was not my dream, but the elusive ‘they’ told me I had an aptitude for this something else and could do well with it financially. And listen, when you grow up with few monetary extras, doing well financially at something was a dream hard to deny in any form. Everyone who grows up with little, wants to have that extra, no one wants to continue to struggle for their daily bread. I felt pressure to use my aptitude to forge a path that would bring me the elusive extra to my world. Who cares if it didn’t make my heart happy, I could make my heart happy later. But what no one tells you is later sometimes gets forgotten in the messy now. I didn’t just dream of being a editor/writer, I also dreamed of marriage and kids and family and community involvement. As I deferred the writing to a corner of my heart to forge a financial path, I did fulfill some of the other dreams. Those of marriage and children and family. But that something else I had pursued, left me aching on the inside and that ache bled throughout my life coloring everything with a not good enough brush and almost ruined my ability to see the joy in my life, to be happy. I learned that sometimes, losing that loving feeling for your life, is really close to feeling like you are actually losing life.  How much loss of life can a person handle before it all goes up in smoke?

Well, I don’t know the answer for you, but for me, circumstances played out until I stopped trying to be what ‘they’ thought best for me because I couldn’t succeed at it no matter how much aptitude I had. I hadn’t nurtured that loving feeling for years, had ignored it for a different path, but it would not be completely denied. It may not look the same, a lot of changes have occurred since the original dream, but I don’t ignore that loving feeling I get from learning and writing anymore. I recognize that it is an honor to have that feeling and some time to cultivate it. I believe the Bible verse from Philippians 1:6 speaks to dreams deferred. It says being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. We all have gifts to use, not everyone will be a professional athlete or musician or known around the world. Some of us have the gift of leadership and head businesses, schools, churches, or little league. Some get to be teachers of history, or art. Maybe your skills at fundraising help give people the chance to experience ballet, jazz, or a day at an amusement park. Do you joyfully photograph people and places? Does your heart sing working with laboring mothers and their families? Are you just soaring with joy at the thought of arranging the shelves at the store into an artful display guaranteed to make me part with my money? Every one of us has a gift, sometimes using it will be easy, sometimes you have to look through the fog and recognize your gifts utilized in a non traditional way. But then one day we look up and realize that the good work in us is being stretched and used to brighten not only our own lives, but those of the people we come in contact with. And if you give it a chance, you will feel that loving feeling overflowing in your life. Try to find your loving feeling, I think we will all be better for it.

International Bereaved Mother’s Day – Did You Know?

The holiday of Mother’s Day was founded by a woman to honor her mother, who had watched only 4 of her 12 children survive into adulthood. Let that sink in. I learned this news from CarlyMarie, who had the idea of a Bereaved Mother’s Day back in 2010. You can read about it on her blog, CarlyMarie Project Heal. She has helped make a comforting place to learn about the importance of celebrating all mothers, those with living children and those without. You can find information on helping bereaved mothers and ways we as bereaved mothers can help ourselves during the sometimes painful season of Mother’s Day.

Yes, we, for I am a bereaved mother also. My second son was born still 4 and a half years ago. The stillbirth of H catapulted me into the club of millions of women and their families who have lost a child through miscarriage, stillbirth or infant death. It is a club I barely knew existed, but once I was a member it seemed that many of my friends were already in the club too. Few people openly discuss the loss of child. There are many reasons why, some may feel it too private, some may not want to think about it, some want to shield the feelings of friends who haven’t walked this particular road. While I respect a person’s decision to share or not, both their joys and struggles, I found sharing to be a huge part of my journey. I didn’t start sharing because I was thinking about others, so don’t put me on a pedestal! I started sharing because I desperately wanted to make sure people knew H mattered, had made an impact, and that he wasn’t forgotten because other people didn’t get to meet him or know him. Later I would learn from brave mothers that my talking about H openly, with love and to anyone, gave them courage and helped start healing in their own hearts. This is a beautiful gift to me, these courageous women feeling lighter in their own stories because H had been loved by our family. Sharing my story is a way I honor H and in honoring him I help in not only the healing of hearts but the removal of the stigma connected to talking about our lost children.




This year Bereaved Mother’s Day was observed on May 1, it was nice to see some of my friends on social media post lovely words of love and grief, so weirdly mixed when talking about mothering lost children. I wasn’t in a place of intense grief yesterday, but I may be in one tomorrow. The grief comes barreling out of nowhere sometimes. It isn’t kept safe to show up only on the days you expect, like the anniversaries of birth and death, or holidays like Christmas. No, grief sneaks up on Saturdays when you have to attend baby showers, or Sundays when you are walking in the park surrounded by blooming pregnant bellies and strollers with slumbering babes. Sometimes it shows up as you drive by the hospital where you learned you would be burying a child instead of taking one home. Grief is unpredictable and never ending. I mourn continuously, yet my mourning isn’t all I have. I also have peace and that peace came from a strengthened relationship with God. My relationship was strengthened through my disaster, so whenever grief comes, I acknowledge it, I accept it, yet I do not have to wallow in it. I give grief its due, then I find a way to honor H, who brought new depths to the love in my heart and in my family.

This year, when you celebrate Mother’s Day, remember the millions of women who may be really struggling with this day. If you are lucky enough to be entrusted with her story, honor her and her child by listening and being. Maybe help her research the many organizations and ways she can honor being the mother of a child no longer living, because a child carried in our hearts is equal to the child carried in our arms.