Tag Archives: blessings

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The sisterhood. 

Today dad’s sisters and their husbands flew in from Ontario and a cousin flew in from BC. My happiness moment was watching him sit with a sister on each side of him while he held their hands. He listened while they told stories and we all visited and caught up on each other’s lives. It’s been 8 years since my sister and I have seen them. 

There is something so special about that family bond. It ties through miles and years. That sibling bond is unlike any other relationship. All those shared experiences. All that shared history. I feel blessed to have been a part of that moment. 

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An eclair to share 

Today, after a very busy and emotional  day I found a quick moment of happiness with Jacob. We came home and abandoned all responsibilities to sit in front of the TV, watch The Golden Girls, drink a cup of tea, and enjoy the sinful indulgence of an eclair. In that little moment all was good, all was right, all was happy. 

And isn’t life really all about the little moments? 

Quiet, simple, easy moment to breathe and regroup with one of my favourite people in the world. 

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Mother’s Day 2015

For the first time in 10 years I got to spend Mother’s Day with my Mom. What a blessing and my happiness moment for the day all by itself. But the day was made better by the fact that it also included my dad, sister and her family,bmy aunt and uncle (who have always been an extra set of parents to me), and my cousin’s daughter. What a blessed day to bring the family together for a meal and a visit. 

It was pretty relaxed and we were able to actually sit together and laugh and have conversations about everything and nothing.  Having family is such a special blessing and if I ever took it for granted before we moved I never will again. 

Extra happiness moment was sneaking off with my sister for a walk and some bonding time. We don’t get to spend enough time together just us and I treasure it when we do. 

Happy Mother’s Day. Mine was spent exactly as I wanted it. I am so blessed to have the kids God gave me. They have taught me how to be a better version of me. 

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When life gives you lemons…. Eat lemon cake 

Today was a day that in many ways felt like life really had handed me lemons. This afternoon while  I was at the grocery store thinking about my lemon day, I looked down and there was this lemon cake. I figured what the heck, when life hands me lemons darn it I’m going to eat lemon cake. It was delicious by the way. 

   

I have sometimes wondered how my exit from this world will be. I hope at the very least it’s somewhat dignified. It probably won’t be. But one can hope. 

Today when I was driving my kids home from school I had a little preview of what that could be like. Trust me it was not dignified at all.

We were driving on the highway following some other cars when suddenly a very large gravel truck with an extra trailer pulled out from a side road and started making a left hand turn across the two lane highway and in front of us   

I was doing 100 km/hour and suddenly there was a monster of a truck just a few feet away from us and moving in our direction. I hit the brakes and the horn as we skidded/flew across our lane and onto the shoulder I screamed FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUU – well you know the rest – as loudly as I could. Either the horn or my swearing caught the attention of the truck driver and he stopped – blocking all oncoming traffic. Thank goodness no one was coming right at the moment. We were somewhere between 2-4 feet from the front of the truck when he stopped. 

So while my motto has always kind of been this:

 
Apparently it’s more likely that I will slide in screaming the F bomb. My poor children.  

I took away several things from this moment. 

1. My guardian angel works hard and probably falls into bed exhausted at night. 

2. My life has been saved several times by my being behind the wheel of a Volvo. 

3. I should always take backroads. 

4. Sometimes when life seems to be all lemony it’s not really so much so. That living in the moment thing. Sometimes the moments are good and sometimes they’re not so good. But they are moments and there is something to be gained from each one of them.  

My happiness moment today was that I got to spend most of the day with my parents and my sister. While it was a day that seemed to want to hand us lemons we did our best to make lemon cake. In fact we ate that lemon cake together tonight before my sister headed back home. 

Happiness is those small moments with the people you love. 

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Easter Sunday

This was our Easter morning view. A little snowy but beautiful all the same. To me Easter is a Vancouver Island thing with flowers and the ocean and walking logs by the beach on the way into Sidney for lunch. 

But Easter here is pretty amazing too.   

  

 We saw this on the way home from church. Pretty majestic.  

Happiness moment of the day was a family meal at my cousin’s place   I so love those times. Lots of love and laughter. I was extra heart warmed that part of the blessing included gratitude that we have come home. 

What a blessed Easter   

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Quitters sometimes win (something better)

Yesterday was crazy sock day at my daughter’s school. She was so excited, two weeks ago we came across the ugliest, craziest pair of socks and she convinced me to buy them for her so she could go to school and have *the* craziest socks. Well, she did wear those socks and had a lot of fun at school with everyone enjoying her crazy socks.

After school they move the crazy sock party over to the local roller rink and she decided she really wanted to go skating. She’s not had very much experience skating, but I was all for her going and hanging out with her friends and learning how to be more comfortable on her skates.

We went to the rink, paid to get in, paid for the skate rental, and paid for the thing-a-magig that she used to hold onto for balance. She went out onto the rink and I kid you not was out for 15 seconds before she was at the wall crying because she couldn’t make her skates move forward and saying she wanted to quit. I insisted that she head back out to the floor and show me how it was that her skates weren’t moving and after many more tears she turned around shuffled her feet back and forth and wailed “see, I can’t move, this isn’t working. I don’t want to do this anymore.”

So, with her standing there crying about how this was completely impossible to do after her 30 seconds of trying something in me snapped. I said “you need then to make a choice. Either we stay here and you keep tying to skate because trying it is the only way you’re ever going to get any better, or we leave and we go home.”

It went back and forth with her trying to convince me that she could just sit on the side and watch, or that she could go to the playzone (more money), or go get a snack (more money and crappy food). I was trying to convince her that at 9.5 she needed to finally learn how to make those roller skates do what she wanted them to do. After a few minutes of me whisper-yelling and her crying she got off, took off her skates and returned everything. We left the rink with both of us in tears (mine frustration, hers sadness). I pulled the whole “you’re going home and to your room. I am NEVER taking you roller skating again.” And she was sobbing “I could have won the contest for the craziest socks.”

I cranked out in the car the wonderful lecture about quitters and how quitters never get anywhere and how it was better to at least try and fail than it was to just stop and quit. That we aren’t a family of quitters (you know, every guilt trip in the book about quitting).

As we pulled up to the house I said that because she had missed her running club after school to go to this party and since she had not skated at all that she had to come to the river and walk the dog with me. So she sat in the car and cried while I went in and got the happiest dog in the world and put her in the back of the car.

By the time we got down to the river she was still crying and honestly at this time I was at a complete loss for words as to what to say. I realized that I’d got much madder than I should have and also knew that her crying always brings out the absolute worst in me. We walked down the path holding hands and I said that what had happened was over and that what we needed to do was try and focus on the beautiful area we were walking in and see how happy Dottie was and try and let it go. And then I decided to just shut my yapper and try and take everything in.

When I did stop talking and just walked with her holding onto her little hand the most amazing thing happened. She started processing out loud what had happened. She started with how she wished she hadn’t quit, that she had quit because she didn’t want to look like an idiot in front of her friends because she didn’t know how to skate, and that she had ended up looking like an even bigger idiot instead.

That pretty much stopped me right in my tracks. Who hasn’t not tried something new because the people around them already could do it and they didn’t want to look like an idiot? I think of all the things in school I was never brave enough to try because I didn’t want to look stupid in front of everyone else.

My heart went out to her. I shared what I was feeling and said that unfortunately almost everyone has had that same thing happen and that I was sorry I hadn’t been more sensitive to how she was feeling.

She kept on walking and talking and processing what she had been feeling and how she had handled it differently and how she wished she could go back in time and change it.

Then all of a sudden she stopped on the path and looked all around her and said “You know what mom? I’m pretty lucky that I’m here, it’s so pretty and this is actually a much nicer thing to do than to be inside roller skating. I will just let all that go because all it does is make me feel sad and I’m going to really take in how wonderful it is to be right here, right now.”

I have never been so proud of this little girl. I told her that quitting was when you simply stopped doing something and that I didn’t think she was a quitter at all. Nobody who was a quitter would be able to take a negative experience and be able to work through it so thoroughly and be able to see sunshine and joy at the end of it.

We held hands and walked along the beautiful path and my heart was so full of joy that I have been blessed with such an amazing teacher. I am thankful every day for my two kids, they have brought me more joy and love and fulfillment than I could have ever thought possible.

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Girlfriend Power

I’m lucky that I come from a family full of girls. I have one (awesome) sister and a ton of girl cousins, so I always had a lot of girls around me to hang out with. I never really thought about how lucky I was to have this built in support system until I moved away from home and for the first time in my life had to start building my own support system from scratch.

In the past 9 years we have moved A LOT. We moved from Alberta to Quebec, Rhode Island (lived in two houses there just to make it more interesting), and now Roanoke – and we are ready to be on the move again. This makes it really difficult to be able to have the time and emotional energy to build up a good support system, but I truly believe it’s one of the most important things I can do.

A few years ago my cousin got married in Italy and I was lucky enough to have been able to fly there to celebrate with her. A big chunk of our large extended family actually was able to go and it was a really fun family time. But, there was one day that really sticks out for me. It wasn’t something that happened with my family, and it wasn’t one of the beautiful sightseeing trips we did. Rather, it was a rather common incident that could have happened anywhere. But it was an incident that made me really stop and think about things and realize “I want that“.

I was walking down a street in Gaeta when I came across two ladies who were in their late 70s or early 80s. They were holding onto each other’s arms and laughing so hard they couldn’t even walk straight on the path. Whatever they were doing they looked like wonderful lifelong friends who were out having a bliss-filled afternoon. I was mesmerized and realized that that was something that was really important to my life.

I actually then went on to have one of those moments with my cousin. We went out on our uncle’s boat and went for a swim in the sea. We were floating along side by side and laughing so hard both of us could barely breathe. We both have looked back on that afternoon as a time when we had wonderful belly laughs and played like children. These are the rare moments that are so important to hold onto.

Little did I know that not too long after that trip I was about to enter what I now consider to be my “dark night of the soul” years. Years when I could have really used some good girlfriends but for various reasons I wasn’t taking advantage of the built in support system I already had.

Fast forward through some really crappy times that included me realizing that in order to have these great friends I so desired, I had to learn how to be a good friend to others. Not as easy as it seemed -still working on it – but now it is a conscious goal of mine.

This summer I was able to go back home and spend a lot of time working on these relationships I’ve had my entire life. Relationships with some pretty fantastic women. Having lived a life where we have been so transient and it was so difficult to make connections made me appreciate it all the more. I spent a great deal of time with my sister and really got to see how she’s flourished as a mom. I spent time with my cousins renewing the ties and realizing that the bonds that we made in our childhood were still as strong. It was so good for my soul to be able to go for a walk with someone whom I knew had known me my entire life – knew my quirks, my humour, my life – and I knew them the same way.

These are the ladies I will be clutching onto when I’m 80 years old. Laughing while we stagger down the street. I firmly believe that the girlfriend friendships are among the most important relationships I will make in my life. I am dedicated now to focusing on building on the ones I already have and making new and wonderful ones.

I also have realized in fostering these friendships that I have other important female friendships in my life that are unique and blessed. I have a mother whom I know would move heaven and earth for me, who is strong and kind at the same time and whom I have learned so much from. I have a daughter who is also incredibly strong and kind and so often like me (a learning experience for both of us). I have aunts who are like extra moms and I know I could turn to them at any time (and I hope they feel the same about me).

The realization that there are these in my life who have complete unconditional love for me and for whom I have absolute unconditional love for is a real blessing. It’s so often easy to feel completely alone, like the struggles I have are mine to bear alone, like I have no one to share the daily joys with. But, it’s important to remember that this is not the case. There is this wonderful tribe of women at my back.

There are many things that will come and go in life, but those friends who know you inside and out, who love and accept you, and who you feel the same about – those are true gems.

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