Tag Archive for 'family'

When Families Happen

Published
by
Melissa
on September 10, 2008
in being connected to everything, change, expectations, following your heart, friendship, inner beauty, inner peace, partners, stuck at home with a child, traveling with toddler and vacation
.
0 Comments

The remarkable thing about my taking Jake to visit my sister-in-law Maureen last weekend was that it seemed so very unremarkable to me.

Mike, you see, had brilliantly realized that even if three of us couldn’t travel to Napa for three days to attend a wedding I had, quite frankly, been dying to attend, he could go without me and Jake.  The bride, after all, was the sister of one of his closest friends, and Mike knew his support would be appreciated.

Never mind that this same friend had been the officiant at our wedding, imbuing me, I felt, with a legitimate claim to lend my support to him as he gave away his sister in this one.  Never mind that I quite love his sister myself and am truly, deeply thrilled for her.  Never mind that I love a wedding in the same unabashed way I love a good romantic comedy — getting dressed up, feeling pretty, dancing with my husband, ending up all teary and thankful when the couple says their vows.  And never mind that — to twist the knife a little deeper –  the wedding was at the Culinary Institute at Greystone, for crying out loud, and the bride knows how to put on a party.

Never mind all that.  I’m a mother, and one who knows better than to believe a 20-month-old would willingly travel a total of 5,000 miles in the space of three days to be left in a strange hotel room with a strange sitter while his parents yuck it up at a big, once-in-a-lifetime party.  My job, plainly, was to stay home with him.

My first thought — if you start counting after the many less than charitable thoughts that went through my head as I sweetly agreed with Mike that he should go on his own — was where I could go with Jake that would feel like a getaway and not like three times as much work as staying at home.  It’s not that I was scared to stay home for a weekend alone with my child, really.  It’s just that the thought seemed so … exhausting.  And if Mike was having fun, shouldn’t we as well?

And so I thought of Maureen.  She and her family live about a four-hour drive away in West Virginia.  Managable, especially if I could count on a two-plus-hour nap from Jake along the way.  We haven’t been to see her since October.  And, best of all, she has an eleven-year-old daughter who both adores Jake and is itching to start babysitting.  Suddenly, Lewisburg, West Virginia, was looking as relaxing and resort-like as Cabo San Lucas.

Truly, it didn’t once cross my mind that going to see Maureen without Mike would make him jealous.  I didn’t even think about, say, sticking it to him like he was sticking it to me by going to a fabulous wedding in Napa without me.  And, perhaps most to the point, I didn’t think I needed him along to visit myself.

Which means it didn’t seem at all remarkable that I was going to visit my sister-in-law without her brother.  Which, as I mentioned, is actually quite remarkable.

Continue reading ‘When Families Happen’

MIA Part Three: Not Doubting Your Path

Published
by
Melissa
on July 11, 2008
in awareness, balance, being in the moment, centering, chattering mind, expectations, following your heart, inner peace, intentions versus goals, letting instead of making, motion, sense of self, structure, the bigger picture, trust, vacation and work
.
4 Comments

Sometimes there are good reasons you don’t have time to, say, write a YogaMamaMe post for two weeks. And I don’t mean “good” in the “eat your spinach, it’s good for you” sense of good. I mean good, like good for my soul, happy, fun.

I mean, to get to the point, Coon Dog Day.

Not just specifically Coon Dog Day, which didn’t happen until Saturday of the long July 4th weekend. I mean as well the uncharacteristic for us rush of parties and activities — a Thursday night party, Friday picnic, Friday night block party, Sunday ball game, and, yes, Saturday Coon Dog Day. It was a full, fun weekend, thrillingly free of any of those moments where you wonder how to entertain a toddler while sneaking just a few minutes reading the New York Times for, you know, sanity’s sake. Jake got to grow up in big ways, like splashing in the wading pools with the four-year-olds at the block party and noting with fascination — not in a consistent way, but still, he’s only 18 months old — the baseballs flying by our outfield seats. And Mike and I got to have fun, thoughtless, busy, not working fun.

But I did not write. I did not break the two-weeks-and-counting silence in the nascent YogaMamaMe world. Because I was too busy enjoying myself.

Which, naturally, has me a bit confused about my priorities.

Continue reading ‘MIA Part Three: Not Doubting Your Path’

MIA Part Two: Learning Who You Are

Published
by
Melissa
on July 9, 2008
in aging, change, chattering mind, compassion, expectations, following your heart, gratitude, inner beauty, intentions versus goals, letting instead of making, parents/being the child, sense of self and structure
.
2 Comments

So another reason I was missing in action for two weeks (even though, I say again to the empty echo-chamber of a deserted readership, I don’t think anyone really noticed): a visit to Louisville for my grandfather’s funeral.

Sad as this sounds — and much as the past couple of posts might, um, bring the mood down a bit — I feel that this was, in a pure, unselfish way, a happy thing. He lived nearly 95 years in comfort and amazingly good health. He left the world in his sleep, at home, in his own bed, surrounded by people who loved him. If you accept — as we all must in our own way — that this life will end at some point, you’ve got to be happy for someone who has it end the way it did for my grandfather.

Plus, I have been blessed with a gain to equal the loss — new information about my grandfather, things I never knew and am proud to know now. And this information, in turn, tells me things that — incredibly, gloriously, awe-inspiringly — tell me more about myself.

It has been, overall, a wonderful reminder that, even at 41 years old, even with all I’ve learned (some of it the hard way) over the past 18 months of having a child, I sure don’t know everything there is to know about me.

Continue reading ‘MIA Part Two: Learning Who You Are’

Mothers, Daughters, and “The Eye of the Tiger”: How a Bad Song from 1982 Moved Me Closer to Stillness

Published
by
Melissa
on June 16, 2008
in Mama instinct, awareness, breathing, centering, change, chattering mind, compassion, expectations, following your heart, inner peace, letting instead of making, motion, parents/being the child, partners, practice, sense of self, stillness, structure, too much to do, vacation and work
.
0 Comments

On Father’s Day morning, when I started the car in the parking lot of EarthFare (Asheville’s local Whole Foods-ish place I love to shop for groceries even though we really can’t afford it), I had one of those delicious moments that happens when I hear “Eye of the Tiger” on the radio.

Immediately, it was 1982. I was no longer sitting in my practical Honda CRV but in the passenger seat of my friend Deb’s Prelude, sunroof open, music blasting, the two of us singing in unself-conscious joy some of the stupidest lyrics ever to grace a Top 40 song. We were sixteen years old, pumping our fists in the air as only sixteen-year-olds and sadly misguided middle-aged men with beer guts and Confederate flag tee-shirts can. We screamed of the fierceness of the eighties, with Deb’s short-over-the-ears, long-and-puffy-on-top hair style and my inclination toward wearing a rolled bandanna around my forehead under my bangs. Combine the two of us, and you had the lead singer of Loverboy.

(Hey, guess what! Loverboy has a website and they’re still recording, albeit without the useless forehead bandanna action. This fact for some reason brings me renewed joy at the thought that maybe I’m not so terribly old after all.)

At the same time, I was sharing a grin at the memory with Jake, sitting there in his throne of a car seat, his ready smile on display. And I was deeply in love. With my boy, my place in the world, maybe even — despite the fact that I had spent the past two days with my parents — my forty-one-year-old self. For just a moment, it all clicked into place. The alternate universes of the days when I was independent and child-free and these times of confusion and love that come with motherhood folded together like an accordion card so that one unifying picture sat on top.

It was a brief moment of clarity on a day I would uncharacteristically spend with both the father of my child and my own father.

Continue reading ‘Mothers, Daughters, and “The Eye of the Tiger”: How a Bad Song from 1982 Moved Me Closer to Stillness’

At Least Now I Can Eat Dinner at a Normal Time, or Something I Actually Can Control

Published
by
Melissa
on June 10, 2008
in bath time, bed time, change, expectations, feeding my child, letting instead of making, partners, structure and you can't control everything
.
0 Comments

Most people probably consider it an obvious choice to eat dinner with your child. It is, after all, the foundation of all those sitcoms we grew up with, isn’t it? Remember Richie Cunningham … eating hamburgers at Arnold’s restaurant with The Fonz. Or … the hijinks taking place in the otherwise unused kitchen during those forbidden episodes of Three’s Company I snuck up past my bedtime to watch. Now that I think about it, the only dinner eating on television I can remember seemed to take place during the once-a-year Thanksgiving episodes of Friends.

Okay, so maybe that explains why, until last night, dinner as a family wasn’t part of our family ritual.

Honestly, we figured with Mike getting home at seven o’clock, dinner as a family was sadly out of the question. By seven I am usually drawing a bath for Jake because I once read it’s a good way to relax your child before bedtime. Never mind that Jake resists any such relaxing bathtime properties and any modicum of tiredness the bath might inspire is cast off the second his father walks through the door. In fact, the Daddy-inspired adrenaline mixed with a good dose of daylight savings time and a lack of decent curtains in any of the bedrooms upstairs makes bedtime a chore, so whoever does the honors tends to creep wearily downstairs to face a 9 p.m. dinner in front of the television.

You’d think we would have come up with a new plan a little bit sooner.

Continue reading ‘At Least Now I Can Eat Dinner at a Normal Time, or Something I Actually Can Control’

Acronis Universal Restore for True Image Echo Workstation 9.5 AcroPlot Pro 2008 2.13 Actify SpinFire Professional 8.3 Actinic Ecommerce 7.0.6 Actinic Ecommerce UK 8.5 Actinic Ecommerce USA 8.5 Active Alarm Clock 3.6 Active Boot Disk Suite 4.0 Active Desktop Calendar v7.32 Active Fax Server 4 Active File Recovery 7.3 for Windows Active Lock 1.4 Active Lock 2.0 Active Lock 3.0 Active MediaMagnet 5.6 Active Partition Recovery 5.3 Active Screen Saver DevKit 3.0 Active ScreenSaver Builder 4.6 Active To-Do List 1.4 Active UNDELETE 7.0 Active WebCam v9.9 ActiveAT Data CD DVD Burner 2.1 ActiveAT File Recovery 7.3 ActiveAT ISO File Manager 2.0 ActiveAT UNDELETE 7.3 Enterprise Edition ActiveAT ZDelete 5.7 ActiveState Komodo IDE 4.2 ActiveState Komodo IDE 5.0 Actual Virtual Desktops 1.1 Actual Window Guard 5.2 Actual Window Manager 5.2 Actual Window Minimizer 5.2 ActualTools Actual Window Minimizer 5.2 Actysoft Global Downloader 1.4 Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner 4 AcuteFinder 3.0 AD Sound Recorder 3.5 AD Sound Recorder 4.2 AD Stream Recorder 2.5 Ada Email Address Search XP 5.28 Ada Email Extractor XP v2.8 Ada email Search XP Gold Bundle 2.2 Adapt Builder Abi 2009 Adarian Money for Windows 5.0 Addendum Batch Convert For Adobe Acrobat 5.0 Final Addendum Batch-Print 4.1 for Adobe Acrobat Addintools Assist for Microsoft Excel 1.5 Addintools Create for Microsoft Excel 3.0 AddNewFriends MySpace FriendBlasterPro 10.4 Unlimited AdeptTracker Professional 3.1