I was sound asleep in blissful dreamland when I felt a hand on me, shaking my body. Anyone who knows me will tell you it’s never a good idea to wake me up. I am not my best me when someone wakes me before my time. I shot up and was terrified to see there was a giant man standing over my bed shaking me. After breathing a couple of times and hoping to wake up from a nightmare I realized that this giant man was just Jacob. When did my little boy turn into this giant man?

“Mom, mom, wake up… there’s someone in the house.”

ughhhhhhhhh. No. No there isn’t. I lay there for a couple of minutes listening to the night sounds of the house. I knew that if there truly was someone in the house the dog would be attacking and since there was silence from below I figured we were safe. But, he insisted – someone was there. He’d heard noises like bubblewrap popping down stairs (Jenna and I had some good laughs at his expense at this one later on. I asked who would break into a house just to pop some bubblewrap? Jenna pointed out that I would do such a thing). Then he said someone had come and fiddled with his door handle. I said it was likely the cat trying to get in, but he insisted it was the boogeyman. I took him out into the hallway towards his room which was lined with filled clean, folded laundry baskets and the vacuum waiting to be used and pointed out that anyone trying to sneak down the hall would kill themselves tripping over all the junk in the way.

Finally I turned on the floodlights and did the walkabout of the house to prove to him that the house was safe. It was.

But, our moment of happiness today for day 36 of the 44 days of happiness came with the continued giggles at the thought of someone breaking into the house to pop all our bubblewrap.

He trundled off to bed leaving me to lie there thinking “great- it’s 4am. Too early to be up. Too late to go back to sleep.” So, I lay there pondering the great thoughts of the world. Actually, I started by thinking about how tired I was going to be and how I was never going to get back to sleep. Then I started thinking about my yoga class from Saturday and my spot of personal power. I was thinking about how I’d spent so much of my life looking for validation from outside sources. That finally I was starting to look inward for this validation. That at the same time as I’d begun doing this I’d realized that many of the people I’d been looking at to validate me were in fact huge energy drains on my system. How incredibly hard it is to spend a life trying to keep other people happy, and how often that came at my own expense.  I thought about how depleted I’d become and how difficult I was seeming to find it to regain strength and happiness and inner power. My first thought after that was ‘why bother, you just give all that strength away’. And that was my Eureka moment. My spirit was tired of replacing energy that I was letting get sponged away to fill other people’s emotional voids.

Not to say that we shouldn’t give with our emotions, our peace, our love. But, there are certain people who are takers. Who see your happy, peaceful, calm emotions and want them for their own and try to sponge them from you. I’ve had people like this in and out of my life my entire life. Once I’d started to realize the pattern I’d blamed them for stealing my energy, power, fun. But I’m realizing that the issue really lies with me. That while there is enough love, peace, power, fun to go around in the world for us all to have as much as we want – I don’t have to give mine away to someone else in order for them to attain it. In fact, all that happens is I end up depleted and they end up with a short moment of energy burst followed by a need for a “fix” again.

Somewhere in these thoughts I fell into a deep, deep sleep where I sorted all of this out in a way that had me waking at 6:30 feeling fully rested and at peace.