Here For Now

Angel Daughter Number One as Peter Pan at Disneyland on Halloween

A little fun because sometimes my mind gets so busy working overtime that I need to find some peace amongst the chaos just to quiet it down.  Nothing in particular other than life continuing on whether I feel well physically, or not, and for the past month the status quo has been well into the or not category.  I hate to focus on my physical pain and most of the time, I am able to push through it to a place in which it becomes nothing more than a dull ache, a nuisance lingering remotely in the recesses of my mind, a gremlin in my brain.  But sometimes, it is very, very hard to live a life in constant physical pain.  And no matter how much I rest, how much strong(almost frighteningly strong) pain medication that I have on board, or how hard I try to push my mind back into a positive place, I begin to feel beat down, beat up, beat period.  I have been here before, and I accept that I will be here again.  The weather has been funky with heat and then rain and then cold and then heat, again.  This is Southern California after all, and although we do not have the changes in seasons that other parts of the country experience, we do get weather.  This time of year is notorious for some pretty extreme changes.  So here I exist.  Until something nudges my physical body into a better place and suddenly I stop to realize that an hour has gone by without any mind distracting, mind numbing pain.  And then another, and then if I am lucky enough, a decent reprieve so that I can take a decent full-body breath.

Tonight, as I was scrolling through photos, some that I took, some that I (a-hem) borrowed from my daughter's Facebook pages and some that they texted to me, I began feeling the joy that can only come from loving so hard that the smiles make your face hurt and that is the kind of pain that I know that we can all use more of.  Please indulge me as I remind myself that these are the most important reasons that I keep on truckin' along when I might feel as if I am running on empty.

For Halloween, Angel Daughter Number Four and her darling friend, Daisy, dressed up as Harjuku girls.  They were absolutely adorable.  The blow-up pirate ship in the background was on our front lawn at our main home on the ranch.(as opposed to our smaller homes on the beach and in the mountains)  The girls are seventeen years old but they wanted to go out trick-or-treating anyway.  Heck, I wanted to go out trick-or-treating!  When they dressed up, they kind of looked like they were around fourteen which is fine with me:)  I only wish that I could keep them that way for a while.

I love this picture of Angel Daughter Number One and Angel Daughter Number Three.  They got up very early in the morning because they wanted to visit the Tim Burton Nightmare Before Halloween exhibit at the LACMA in Los Angeles on the very last day that it was going to be there.  I love it when my daughters make plans to just get together in different combinations.  It reminds me that they do feel connected even when outside of the whole family as a unit.  I have been feeling very disconnected from that type of bond lately because my only brother is gone and I am no longer a part of his children's lives.(for now)  I truly am very blessed to have the family that Mark and I have created together but aside from them, I am pretty alone in the world now.  Yesterday my doctor reminded me that this is the time of the year when people tend to focus on losses and that it really is not quite as jolly as all of the retailers would like for us to believe that it is.  That resonated deeply with me.

I love this picture, too.  I borrowed it from one of my daughter's Facebook pages.  Angel Daughter Number Two and Angel Daughter Number Four found out that a very popular band that they love(Mumford and Sons) was playing at a local store without publicity and for free.  They were not sure if it was a rumor so they decided to meet there anyway along with around fifty other lucky people. The band showed up.  My girls were in the front row only a head-shake away from the lead singers sweat.(very cool and big yuck at them same time)  Sometimes life can really shine upon us when we take a chance to follow a lead that others might not bother to.

Angel Daughter Number Two and Luis, her new marmalade cat, a self-portrait.  She rescued him and now he rescues her from loneliness and a cold lap.

AD3 arrived home from work, one evening, looking content and happy.  The glow was back.  There is nothing more in the world that I could wish for her.  I love the way the shadow from her eyelashes gently kisses her cheek.  She spent around three weeks shaking the mud out of her wings, but she is learning to take flight once again.  I suppose that is what being nineteen is all about.

AD1 is my woman-child at twenty four years old.  Listening to her talk about her own plans, ideals and goals for the future really makes this momma proud.  I do not really spend too much time worrying about this one anymore.  She has proven that her wings work really well.  I am proud of her beyond compare and I just know that life holds wonderful stuff for her.  Watch for her Ask.com commercial coming out soon!  This one will be on national television so I will let you all know when it comes out.  This way we will all be able to be proud of her at once;)

My baby and her baby, Micah.  This child was born under a cheerful star.  She is filled with warmth and joy and compassion.  She came into this world with a twinkle in her eye and a dance in her step.

When people talk to me about nurture vs. nature, I must admit that I used to believe that the emphasis was on nurture but when I look at my own children, I can see that who they were as babies and as children is a lot like who they are now as young women.  Mark and I are the very same parents with the same values and ideals who are raising four female children in mostly the same way.(I say "mostly" because each child has different needs, strengths and weaknesses.)  Yet our girls are all unique, all special and all different. Some things just are as they are, inherently.

I will try my very best not to draw back into my cocoon of chronic pain.  There are times when I end up here and do not even remember the onset. I try to pinpoint an event or a day when I overdid it, or even something emotionally overloading that burst like an infected cyst into the rest of my body.  I only know that my soul feels broken open and that my body feels beat by the pain, right now, and I want it to stop.  I need for it to stop.  But in the in-between, I will hold myself accountable by doing things as if the pain has subsided.  I will continue to cut myself some slack(fighting with oneself is mostly futile) but I will remind myself that in spite of it all, I have a pretty darn amazing life and that unlike my brother, I am still here to care for the people I care for and to love on the people(and pets) who I love.  When I breathe into that thought, it momentarily soothes my soul enough to get me into the next minute, and then the next one, and then the next one...Until I know that there will be better days ahead. I just have to hang tight for a bit.

With love to all,
Debbie

And Sometimes the Waves Will Block the Sun

It has been a rough couple of weeks and sometimes it feels as though coming up for a deep breath is something that might just never, ever happen.  Amongst a rise in blood pressure(at a regular monthly check with my pain doctor) which was precipitated by a seemingly never-ending conversation with my mother and her husband that stressed me out in a way that is not at all healthy and finding out that my best friend's father whom I have known for thirty-seven years passed away that morning, I became even more focused on the numbers flickering frantically at me from the monitor.  That caused the numbers to increase even higher which prompted my doctor to inform me earnestly that if she made me sit there for another ten minutes so that she could take it for a third time, it would more than likely rise even higher at which point she would be forced to send me to the ER just to be on the safe side.  Considering how much I dislike the ER, coupled with the fact that I have not had a problem with high blood pressure in the past, I hightailed it out of there.  When I reached the safety of my car, I promptly called my general doctor to schedule a long overdue physical for next week and then, I called my husband and cried.  I am not a crier by nature, but the toll that all of this had taken on my body caused a flood of tears to rush to the surface and before I even knew it, I was sobbing uncontrollably.  I am a very strong woman living inside of a body that I feel has failed me over the past ten or so years.  Each day, I wake up in pain following night after night of terribly disruptive sleep which is another reason that my blood pressure might have been high.  Pain causes elevations in blood pressure, but chronic pain can cause a constant elevation in blood pressure.  This scares the hell out of me.  My brother had high blood pressure for most of his adult life and although he was being treated for it, his heart eventually failed.  His heart failed.  Rationally speaking, I know that my brother and I have/had very different bodies and since both of our parents are still alive, there is a very good chance that I will be here for a very long time, as well.  But still.  I get scared sometimes.  And when things are extra hard, I absorb too much emotion from other people which really causes my heart to physically ache.  My mother is a master of bringing me to the edge of my own sanity with her constant guilt-tripping and it just breaks my heart.  First I become devilishly angry with her, and then my heart just throbs because it should not be this way.  She thinks that she and her husband should be my responsibility.  I have watched them behave in ridiculously financially irresponsible ways for over thirty years and now, they have reached near-bottom, yet it is not their fault.  Never their fault.  And even though Mark and I have given them $1500.00 in the past couple of months, it is never enough.  It can never be enough.  So the waves in my soul rise up with pain and anger and it can take days for them to calm down enough to show the sun again.  But I know that the sun is there and I will always bring myself back to a place in which I can calm the waves.  It just takes time and the older that I get, the harder it is to bring my body back into a state of balance after one of these incidents.  I see the lessons that I am meant to be learning in all of this, but how can I totally ever walk away from my own mother?  Especially when I am all that she has left at this point in her life.  After all of the tests that we must experience during this lifetime, why can't there be an answer key that we can refer to, just to make sure that we are coming up with the correct answers after each test is complete?  I want, so badly, to do this right.

More importantly, one of my Angel Daughters is going through some very difficult heartache of her own right now and since my heart is spiritually connected to each one of my children's hearts, my soul has been so heavy with her sadness, only this is a sadness that I would gladly carry for any one of my children at any point in time.  We have been taking it one day at a time and I know that she will make it through to the other side of all of this, but to watch her going through this has been heart-wrenching.  To observe one of my typically happy daughters experiencing this depth of anguish is almost beyond any other pain that I have ever had to endure.  The other night, I watched her rock back and forth on my bathroom floor as she expressed to me the amount of pain that she was feeling.  And although I could completely relate to the level of loss that she was coping with, there was so little that I could do to comfort her except to allow her to sink down into the treacherous waves of her own deeply wounded soul while acting as a lifeline if she needed it.  She is such a sensitive spirit and her pain has been so palpable.  But I have put everything else on hold for the moment in order to focus upon being her mother and in doing so, she has expressed to me that I am the only one who has been able to make her feel better.  Thank you, dear God, for endowing me with enough maternal instinct to be able to soothe my child's tender soul.

Of course there have been sunny moments in the midst of all of this.  There always are.  They are what sustain me.  There are just times when we must allow ourselves to exist in the middle of it all in order to prove to ourselves that we indeed, can.  None of this will kill my mother, or me, or my daughter.  It will just prove to those of us who are capable of understanding that there are lessons in all of it.  It will teach us to learn from the difficulty and the anguish and then to move forward on to the next lesson.  If there was not difficulty or pain in life, then how would we really know what it means to feel unbridled joy?

Time to get back to my sweet girl.

Fragile-Reprise

*August 13, 2010-After writing this post, the other day, I leafed through the mail which was sitting on the counter in our kitchen.  Bills, junk-mail, an ad for a carpet cleaner, a small white package addressed to me in human handwriting.  I opened up the package and found the small, hand-needlepointed treasure which is pictured below.  It was made by a dear friend from Minnesota whom I have known for several years.  Like me, she suffers from CFS/Fibromyalgia/mystery illness and yet, she always cares SO much.  When I saw that it was a Hummingbird, I looked up toward the skies and smiled.  I smiled because sometimes, the messages that we need the most can show up in the form of a hand-needlepointed Hummingbird from a faraway friend.  And along with those messages, can come the whispers of angels telling us that we are not quite alone as we might feel.  Thank you, sweet Kar.  


And thank you to all of my wonderful blogging friends who always leave me notes that remind me of the very same thing:)

Wednesday, August 11, 2010-While in flight, the Hummingbird's heart rate can reach up to 1260 beats per minute.  Yet there are times, when the Hummingbird must slow itself down, that it has the capacity to lower its own heartbeat from 50-180 beats per minute.  It's tiny body understands the necessity to decelerate.  To rest.  To renew.  To restore.

I am experiencing a shift in my souls own need to bring it down a level.  I can't quite put my finger on it, but there is a nagging at the center of my being which is causing me to try to slow it down.  To back away.  To give myself some space.  My heart has worked so incredibly hard over the past several years to remain intact.  To decelerate from the excess, nonsensical stress that has been thrust upon it.  And even at rest, my heart often feels overworked.  Over-taxed.  Fragile.

So like the Hummingbird, who instinctively adheres to its bodies natural need for rejuvenation,  I must somehow find mine again.

A beautiful hand-stitched gift from a kind-hearted friend.

Moment to Moment

Yesterday, I stumbled outside after a pretty rough night of sleep to walk my precious pup Becca.  One of the many amazing things about living on a bluff is being able to witness an entirely different scene from moment to moment.  Sometimes, the sky is a cerulean blue and the ocean is as clear as glass.  Other times you can watch as a storm dramatically rolls in off of the Pacific.  Angry grey clouds and white-capped waves threaten the shoreline.  Yesterday, I observed as there was a momentary break in the storms that we have been experiencing.  A momentary lapse in my focus on the pain.  As I squinted against the sun, I knew that I needed to take some pictures of the moment.  For trying to describe the changes is something that is sometimes difficult for me to do in words.  I needed to capture the moment.

The coming week will bring with it both radiant sunshine and difficult storms.  On Tuesday, my littlest angel daughter will be turning sweet sixteen!  My memories of her tiny newborn body sleeping nestled closely against my breast, come racing back to me as if the moment occurred only yesterday.  And yet, so much has happened over the course of sixteen years.  So many other moments, some forgotten, some remembered, that I cannot even begin to imagine what the next sixteen years will bring.  For most of this week, my focus will remain right there.  Celebrating the life of my beautiful daughter.

With this week, will also come my deposition.  This is not typical protocol in a grandparent/aunt visitation case.  What can I possibly offer her attorney that might strengthen whatever his case might be?

"Mrs. FourAngelsMomma, what gives you the right to continue loving on these two little girls who have already lost their daddy?"

"Umm, eleven previous years of happy, loving "moments", with the hope of a lifetime of many, many more?"

What else could I possibly want out of a relationship with my angel nieces?  And yet, the joy of so many moments celebrated must now come with explanation.

But there is more sunshine in my life than storm clouds, more blindingly happy moments than sad ones.  And so, here are some pictures to explain when my words might not do.  From year to year, day to day, moment to moment, the only thing that I have truly been promised is now.  Right now.  The singularity of this moment and everything that comes along with it.  For me, there is so much comfort in that.

The Storm Before the Calm

California has been a soggy, rain-soaked mess lately.  We have experienced everything from pounding rain to hail stones the size of marbles to tornadoes!  Yes, tornadoes.(Look Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore.)  We are experiencing an El Nino year, I am told, which tends to occur around once every five years.  El Nino translates to mean "the boy" which is a reference to The Christ Child.  Typically, El Nino years begin in December around Christmas which is why this weather pattern came to be named after Christ.  Along with the wild weather, there tends to be a more abundant number of fish which is why the fisherman began referring to this weather pattern as El Nino.  With the difficult weather, comes the "gift" of extra fish stocks.

Down at the beach, where I spend over fifty percent of my time now, the roar of Mother Nature hits even harder.  The many moods of nature gush forth in the waves of the ocean.  The sunsets are more vibrant, but so are the storms that blow through.  If it is breezy inland, the winds at the beach clamor in with a force that knocks over our patio furniture and pelts the windows of our home with a shear curtain of fury.  This is life on the edge of a bluff.

Watching the storms from my bedroom window can be both a mesmerizing and frightening experience. For living on the bluffs of the beach can leave us extremely vulnerable to the forces of Mother Nature.  Upon an angry whim, it is possible to lose a portion of our cliffside.  The waves come fast and furious without regard to that which is manmade.  We understand that we leave ourselves open to the intensity of nature, yet we would not have it any other way.  The storms can leave me feeling vulnerable, but they also leave me with a sense of ethereal safety which can cause me to lower my head in a humility that is unlike anything else.  I am humbled and awed by the forces of that which I can and cannot see.  And I accept my place in the pathway of that which occurs around me.  I trust.  I must trust.

I am going through a stormy period of life right now.  It began almost two years ago, when my brother suddenly died at the all too young age of forty-one.  He was a strong and powerful soul who seemed to be able to take charge of a room just by walking into it.  He was funny and mischievous.  He was an attorney who began his professional life as a public defender.  His heart was in the right place.  He felt the need to defend individuals who couldn't afford to defend themselves.  His desire was to fortify the wrongly accused.  He ended up with the sad and frustrating knowledge that the "wrongly accused" were most typically liars and re-offenders, but that only made him want to fight for the innocent more.  He was considering going back to public defending shortly before his death.  He was a father, a husband and a loving uncle to my daughters.  He was a brother to my husband.  He was a son to my parents.(Although admittedly, not always a very good one.)   He was my brother.  It breaks my heart to think that I must live the rest of my life without him to turn to.  The tides in my life took a vicious turn when he passed away.  And there is a little bit of sadness, everyday, that bubbles just below the surface of my heart.

I expected to soar through my life in the company of my husband and our beautiful angel daughters.  But I also expected that my younger brother would always be there, raising his children, living his life and sharing more history with me.  Being "an only child" is my new normal and one that has not been very easy to get used to.  It is a very, very strange feeling.

This weather has exasperated my illness to the point of creating a cycle of nonstop pain.  Even the strongest of medications can only reduce the constant throbbing to a dull, steady ache.  And yet, I am not sure which storm has been more detrimental to my health.  The storms that brews outside, or the ones that have been created by this lawsuit that I have been forced to file in order to keep my nieces, my brother's children, in my life.  My brother's wife is furious at me.  That is the word that she has used with her attorney, as well as with the court appointed mediator whom she refused to enter the room to mediate with.  Furious.  Fury.  Destructive rage bordering on madness.  And all that I have asked to do for almost two years now, is to love her children.  Something that I have done for eleven-plus years.  Something that included her up until she began refusing us access to the children.  Now, we want visitation without her present.  She has created too much pain for her children, for us, and now, for my mother.  I am not sure whether or not the Judge will grant this, but I am praying.  I am doing everything I can to weather the storm.  I am battening down the hatches.(cue Wizard of Oz witch music)  And I am trusting.  Lord knows, I am trusting.

Even during an El Nino year, the sun breaks through the clouds most of the time, and such is the pattern of my life.  I am a naturally happy person.  I look for the breaks in the clouds.  I count my blessings, appreciate the small stuff, etc., etc., etc.  But I am also a realist.  I understand human nature and Mother Nature, even though I have a healthy fear of both.  And I know that even in an El Nino year, there is a very bright side.  Extra fish stocks for the fisherman.  A gift that comes with the storms.

So although I am now "an only child" on this journey called life, I am not alone.  I will not be pulled down by the crashing waves or even the murkiest of waters.  I will swim for my life.  I will take shelter in my husband, my daughters, my father, my pets, my friends.  I will stay afloat and eventually, I will learn how to soar above it all.  Because I know that when I am thrown a life-preserver from wherever it comes, that I will grab hold of it.  And because I trust that there will always be somebody there to throw me one whenever I need it, I can stay afloat.  Even in the most furious of storms...

When The Pain Blurs my Vision

Living with a chronic illness, sometimes means having a whole lot of downtime in which to count my blessings.  I view this as a benefit.  Something that can rescue me from the onset of a long-lingering bout of focusing on the pain, while going through the litany of the "Why me's?", only to feel worse for the wear.  When I awaken sometime around noon, most days, I am faced with unrelenting pain which forces me into an immediate state of reality that upsets my balance.  This morning was a particularly bad morning.  We have been experiencing a heatwave here in Southern California that is both unbearable and seems to be unending.  The high temperatures and humidity(Yes, we do sometimes have humidity in So Cal.) have made it harder for my body to recover, leaving me helpless against the outer conditions that I have little to no control over.  This morning, as my body ached and throbbed and rebelled against me, I quietly laid in bed praying for relief.  The pain began to worsen, as I began to make a mental list of each pang.  But then I stopped myself.  I began to breathe in and out more deeply as visions of my husband and our daughter's smiles floated through my mind's eye.  I began to focus on the joy that I have in my life.  My husband, our four daughters, our pets, the beach, and suddenly, the pain was only a background to the inner peace that I was experiencing.  Physically, I was still dealing with the pain, but mentally, I had created some images that had much more power.  The power of love.  The power of choice.  The power of knowing that everything is going to be okay, and that eventually the pain would subside.

It's important to do that.  To store up the mental and physical images that can restore your inner balance during times of pain, be it physical, spiritual or emotional.  To give yourself the tools with which to bring yourself to a better place.  To capture the moments that can make you laugh.  To remind yourself of the things which can bring your sight back into focus.  It is important to allow yourself a little time to wallow, but a lot more time to count the things that make you complete.  For me, this includes my family.  They can make me laugh like nothing else in this world can.
And this morning, these images are what saved me from the pain.  Images of Angel Daughter Number Three and Angel Daughter Number Four being silly with one another.
Angel Daughter Number Three is usually not too excited about having her picture taken.  Maybe it has something to do with being seventeen.  But yesterday, I caught her wrestling around on the floor with Angel Daughter Number Four, and we all laughed.
There is almost nothing that gives me as much pleasure and as much joy as seeing the way that my girls can love on one another.
The older that they get, the more that their childlike nature becomes submerged by more serious issues like boys and school and life.
But when I can catch them just being sisters, those are the moments that I love to hold on to.  The moments that make the hard parts of mothering virtually disappear.  The moments that can take away my pain.
These girls.  My four daughters.  My husband.  They are what bring my life back into focus.

What does it for you?

I See Charlotte

There are two sides to my life.  The first side is filled with the love that I feel for my angel family.  The wonderful life that we have conceived together.  The values which Mark and I have instilled in our girls.  The idea that life is beautiful.  It is the side of my life which I vowed to myself as a little girl that I would create.  A peaceful, contented life.  A family in which the members all love and cherish one another.  Mark and I have succeeded in building that kind of a life.  I am not saying that it doesn't take a lot of work and dedication, but I am saying that it is worth all of the effort that I have put into it.  My angels and my husband are worth it.  I am worth it.

The other side of my life is that side which I have eluded to in some of my previous writings here.  It is the side where people bear thirty year old grudges.  It is the side where the cruel irony of an early death leaves relationships unfinished.  It is the side that is filled with hatred and pain and lies.  It is the side of right-fighters.  It is the side that I never chose to live in, yet there I was, and sometimes, here I still am.

My brother chose a different kind of life and a different kind of wife.  He created a different kind of life.  He allowed the muck of growing up in a very chaotic household to color his life with different hues.  Whereas I saw bright, he saw dull.  Whereas I saw a chance to escape the kind of life that made me ill, he saw reason to continue the ugliness of how we were raised.  He remained stuck in the web.  He was a good guy in many ways, but that didn't prevent him from leaving behind an absolute mess.  A mess that my nieces must now live in.  A mess that I am now trying to sort out.  A mess that I know he would be absolutely disgusted to discover, yet still a mess that he had some responsibility in creating.

I have spent the better part of the past week in emotional and spiritual pain.  I have been containing my own feelings about my SIL's actions towards me and my family in an attempt to reserve any small chance that I will be allowed to continue a relationship with my two nieces while they are still children.  I have been told to be patient.  I have been told to wait.  I have been told, I have been told...  And then the letter came.  A letter filled with hatred that spewed off of the paper like a soda can that had been shaken before it was opened.  And my soul cracked open as did my mouth.  I am finished waiting.  I am finished being patient.  I am finished allowing my brother's memory to be ground into the dirt like some useless piece of trash.

When I took the picture of the garden spider above, I was watching it build it's web with awe and admiration.  In so many ways, just looking at the spider repels me and makes me want to run screaming in the other direction.  But in other ways, I can see the absolute beauty of it's intricate web.  I can see how the spider moves with such purposefulness and even grace as it spins the threads which will contain it's home for the night.  Some might just see a very scary spider.  I can see Charlotte.

And so, as I sit here pondering all this and trying to make some sense out of it I realize that every life must have two sides.  And what makes the beautiful side so much more vibrant is the fact that we must also live with the other side.  The side that hurts our spirits.  The side that causes us pain.  The side which we never chose, but if we remain brave enough, we learn to live with.

May you always honor the beautiful side of life even while sometimes having to face the darkness.  May you fight for what is good because you are worth it.

Happy Feet

These are my happy feet, but sadly, they are not feeling all that happy at the moment. I just had an Epidural Steroid injection done in my lower back, and so, very soon there will be 60 milligrams of steroids coursing through my central nervous system. This will wreak havoc on my ordinarily happy moods for the next several weeks. I must explain and apologize all at once. There is always that very fine line between the cure being worse than the ailment, hence the reason it took me quite a while to make the decision to have this injection performed. The previous one allowed me to stand on my feet for more than twenty minutes at a time, without experiencing excessive amounts of pain. I decided it was once again time to take the bullet out from in between my teeth, and allow my doctor to work her magic. Knowing how the steroids will effect me is a benefit, as I won't think that I am losing my mind for no good reason, this time. However, there will be moments, little pockets of time, when my irrational mind will try to convince my rational mind that I am indeed, losing my marbles. Those will be the times when I will have to dig down very deeply into my own psyche, to remind myself that I will once again, be able to find my "happy feet", and that they are not gone forever.

Our minds tend to play lots of tricks on us, especially when we are feeling ill. It is up to us to have things within our own "tool boxes" which can trick us back into believing that everything is going to be okay. A few of my favorite distractions are my books, my laptop computer, and my five kitties and our dog. I also love getting hugs from my husband and my angel daughters. Their hugs are one of the greatest cures in the world for me. I love chocolate which my husband supplies me with on a regular basis.(Part of the many reasons he is such a keeper!) I love reading your blogs. I also love reading the wonderful comments that you leave for me here. Your kind words make me smile. They make my happy feet even happier!

I was hoping that you would share some of the things that you keep inside of your "tool boxes", to help you move through the gloomier of moods. What are some of your favorite ways to bring your own feet back from dragging to happy? Please share!

May you always find a reason, even in the midst of sadness or pain, to smile just a little bit. And on those days when your feet are not exactly at their happiest, may you try your hardest to get them dancing, once again.

With Wings to Fly

Today began with a lot of physical aches and pains. Of course, I could not stay in bed and nurse my wounds, for very long, because angel daughter number two has been fighting the flu, and I had to check in on her. Then I had to rush out the door to make it to my monthly Pain Specialist appointment. This is something that I am used to doing, as without my pain medication, there are days when I surely would not be able to rouse myself out of bed. When the Physicians Assistant came into the room, I apologized for being late, and then explained to her that I was having a rough day. She barely took a breath before she went on to tell me that she, too, was having one of those days because her washing machine, which is on a second floor, had sprung a minor leak. I had to think about where the conversation started, and when I remembered, I corrected her by saying that I wasn't having that kind of a day. I was having the kind of day where my muscles feel like putty and I must add an extra hour on to anything that I cared to accomplish. She sheepishly remembered that she was talking to a chronic pain patient(I can usually put on a fairly good face.), and she stopped herself from continuing. I went on to joke with her about broken washing machines, and all of the little mishaps that take place throughout our lives. Broken washing machines, inconvenient, very annoying, but definitely not enough to ruin a day for me.

I came home and found daughter number two still prone on the couch, where I had left her. I went outside to get the mail, and noticed that there was an envelope with her name on it, and so I came in and handed it to her. It was a FAT envelope from a college(fat is a very good sign when evaluating college response envelopes). I listened to her tear into it from the next room, and then I heard the cheer! Angel daughter number two got her first college acceptance letter! We all high-fived, and I did some victory dances around the kitchen, to which my daughter actually laughed! My husband and I sighed a breath of relief. Another angel is about to fly from the nest, and although we will miss her, it means that we have done an okay job in preparing her for the flight.

So, as I was trying to say in a round-about sort of way. Aches and pains aside, today was definitely a good day. Congratulations, my angel daughter! You may still be grounded because of this past weekends indiscretions, but that does not mean that you will always have to live with clipped wings!

May your spirit always have the energy to take flight, even on days when you are feeling grounded...