Small Step No. 2

And so, a small reminder for myself...

Be the thermostat.

My friend Kelly taught me this once, and her dad taught her. While I’m prone to measuring the temperature, to reading the room, to quietly adjusting my own layers to better acclimate, a thermostat declares the room cold and makes it warm.

We all hold in ourselves the power to transform – in ways small and large – a room, a year, a Christmas Day. We can make it hot or cold. We can make our homes into caves or havens; we can make our days stretch or crumble.

It is ours to decide, and we can decide.

Yesterday, we all woke up in stormy moods. The clouds hung low outside the window, mocking our attitudes. I puttered around per usual – frying eggs, washing pans, wrapping presents – and as the day went on and the coffee wore off, the sun still hadn’t come out. My responses were shortened, strained. Morgen carried a furrowed brow. Markus grew grumpy.

I practiced deep breaths, spritzed some rosewater on my face, willed myself to snap out of it. The Christmas dance party playlist wasn’t cutting it; I found the extra noise to be annoying.

Be the thermostat, I reminded myself. Set the tone. Rise above. You’re the grown-up. Make it warm.

I dug out an old puzzle for Morg, did 20 sit-ups for myself. Read Christmas Stories. Made a few silly faces for Max, then a few more for Preslee. In very little time, with very little effort, the energy of the room offered teenage smiles and grown-up giggles yet again.

Eventually, the sun peeked out from behind the clouds, but it didn’t matter: the house was warm enough without it.

—

Tell me: how did you spend your Christmas day? I’d love to hear!

p.s. These are a series of small steps that will (hopefully) provide one giant leap to greater things. Not for mankind, but for me, and perhaps for you, which will always be good enough in my book. More to come.

P.S.

p.s. These are a series of small steps that will (hopefully) provide one giant leap to greater things. Not for mankind, but for me, and perhaps for you, which will always be good enough in my book. More here.

Small Step No. 1

How To Change Your Day With A Single Smile

I do not consider myself to be a leader by nature, more of a follower. I identify most with the term “observer,” far preferring to sit at the proverbial corner bistro table and watch the world unfold as it does with little interference from me.

If asked, I’d tell you I’m an empath. I can sense when you’re feeling heavy or light, whether you’re overwhelmed or tense, how your emotions might dictate our plans. I observe, observe, observe. I react accordingly, adjusting my own demeanor based on the given mood, or moment.

And sure, while important to offer flexibility, this does not often bode well for a parenting strategy. We can only do so much observing-and-reacting before we’re required to steer the ship from emotion and circumstance to truth and perspective.

-

More to come.

For The Sophomores

my hope for you today

& every day in your continuation

is that you will witness this miracle

... each bruise and breath and leaf. That you will see your generation as I see your generation: one of strength and wisdom and great, great hope. One that mesmerizes me, like a fire we can’t turn away from, like a fire that enchants.

Like a fire that sparks, spreads, warms an entire nation.

Other hopes: that your parking meter be ever full. That you eat your vegetables. That you will meet your future spouse after a terrifically poor haircut, so that every day after he/she will marvel at your vast and inexplicable improvement, at his/her vast and inexplicable luck.

I hope the futon is on sale. I hope you wear sunscreen, call your grandmother. I hope you remember your pin number and forget your phone. I hope you floss. Hum in the hallway. I hope you take a Jeep ride under the moon, taste dandelion wine on a rickety front porch. Bathe in a creek, sleep on a floor. Break dance in Chipotle. Carry your friends. I hope for you more love than loss, more questions than answers, more books than nightstand. I hope you’re kind to the waitress. I hope you get leg room on the way to Ireland.

I hope you look to your future, yes, but also lock eyes with your past. I hope you see that it has mattered, every scrape and shout and smile.

But mostly: I hope you dare to be ordinary. I hope you allow yourself a handful of terrible jobs and long commutes and bad dates. That you get tongue-tied on conference calls, botch the interview. I hope you find the miracle even then, in the most uncomfortable, unfortunate of instances.

(I hope you forgive yourself when you can’t.)

Small Steps

A Small Step

To Kick Our Multi-Tasking Habit

Boone Pickens perhaps said it best: When you are hunting elephants, don’t get distracted chasing rabbits.

This week’s rabbit: Stranger Things.

I’m not a TV watcher by nature, but every now and then, a show will grip Markus or Max so tightly that it becomes a focal point for conversation after conversation, theories and recaps and findings passed around the dinner table with the mashed potatoes.

The show sounded fascinating enough, even without the 80’s factor and the Indiana plot and of course Winona’s hair. And this is precisely how I wound up staying up waywayway past my bedtime last Saturday night hitting Play on Season 2.

I have been searching for pockets of time to hit Play ever since.

Earlier this week, while I needed to make dinner, so I chopped cauliflower while watching Joyce Byers trash her own house again, and of course, it wasn’t twenty minutes before a pot of spaghetti was bubbling onto the stove and I still hadn’t figured out where the heck Hopper was.

I turned off the TV, realizing there were enough rabbits for me to chase without adding a virtual one to the mix.

And so, a small reminder for myself, courtesy of this simple trick my therapist friend shares with his patients:

Pay attention to your hands.

It’s the perfect cure for multi-tasking, he says. When you’re writing an email, watch your fingers on the keyboard. When you’re folding laundry, watch your hands sort through the whites. When you’re at the park with your children, pay attention to your hands pushing them in the swing, brushing a leaf from their hair, holding their bike helmet as they run wild in the grass.

When I do (or think of doing) a million things at once, I do them less well. When I multitask, I'm teaching my brain to distract itself and things just take infinitely longer, my fuse growing infinitely shorter.

But there’s something inherently lovely about single-tasking, about focusing on just one thing at a time for as long as we’re able. And it turns out, I only need to retrain my brain with what I already have available: our hands.

It’s a small trick that snaps my mind back to the present and – better yet? – preserves energy for my next task.

(Like hitting Play on Stranger Things the very second those little dishes are done.)

Work With Markus

“This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.” -A. Watts

One Way of Remembering

There are two ends of myself, continually in the midst of battle with one another. There is, on one end, the desire for posterity. For being the memory keepers for my boys, for being the memory keeper for myself. There is a desire to document these tricky beginnings of each other – all throughout the muddled middle of life. If I'm lucky, we’ll look back to witness decades of growth far beyond pencil scratches to the kitchen pantry door frame.

But then there is the other end of me: the one that wonders what good can possibly come from housing 7,625+ photos in my camera roll. The one who thinks I might be a smidge less stressed if we untethered our minds and hands from the self-given role of daily family historian. Surely the moment exists if not captured in pics? Surely I can keep it forever, stored in my heart and not in my hard drive.

How To Read This Blog

I want you to read this blog knowing two things:

These are examples, not expectations.
These are experiences, not posts.

I want you to read this blog in your voice, not mine. I want you to wrestle with what is written, to pin it down and hold it up to the light, see if it works for you, move on if it doesn’t. I want you to second-guess the ethical shoes I just bought you for school, and I want you to ask yourself if the pair of Adidas in your local thrift store are just as good (they are, if not better).

I want you to think about yourself – your complex, hopeful, curious self – and I want you to regard that self, protect that self, honor that self.

I want you to feel comfortable here in tenth grade. I want you to enjoy your time, and I want you to leave encouraged and rested and rejuvenated – ready to serve the ones you love in all of your daily complexities.

And then I want you to click “X” and let it be.

Sharing

A Few Ground Rules

For Reading This (or Any) Blog

“[F]or just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there’s nothing else. It’s here, and you’d better decide to enjoy it or you’re going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.”-Lev Grossman

Waimea

Waimea Canyon, Kauai

 

A Thousand Miles

On Leaving

On coming home to yourself

Vacation came, vacation went.

I’ve spent the past few days in the post-getaway rhythm of folding whites, restocking pantries, shaking sand from the shoes. This morning I unpacked my suitcase and returned an unread pile of books to my nightstand – a welcome reminder that even beloved hobbies pale in comparison to watching fully-grown boys feed fish food to the Koi.

The truth is this: our family hasn’t been a family of four in a short while. We’ve been a family of three and one, or two and two, the familiar parent equation that lends itself well to balancing children with fulfilling work, but leaves little left for much else.

We needed time. Togetherness. Attention, wholly and undivided, if only for a week or so.

Togetherness we were granted, to the tune of 6 hours in a plane. There was hotel bed jumping and sand crab hunting and – fulfilling my every dream imaginable – a rousing Monday night Laua. (Spent $35 on a dinner, which Max didn't attend, all on account of fish bowls and a margarita.)

We lazed around in the mornings. Played pool volleyball at night. We lugged coolers to the shore and ate sandy bologna with salty hands. Endless Chess matches. Rode surf boards and paddle boards and body boards up and down waves, rivers, to and from the restaurant a block away with the best mud pie I’ve witnessed yet.

It was all so necessary, this last July inhale, and I found myself dizzied with gratitude more often than not.

Now that I’m home, I find myself feeling a singular shift in a familiar direction. It began tonight with a failure to fall asleep at 6pm, unable to adapt to my old schedule. It began with tossing and turning, throwing hard dreams around a soft pillow. Rising around midnight to chip away at a project bigger than myself, heading back to bed to sneak in a few hours of rest before the alarm wakes with the sun.

It began with the understanding that a small part of me was waking alongside of them.

I have always known myself to be slow in adjusting to life post-children around. The empty nest that many mothers describe as a 3-week haze takes upwards of 2 years to burn away for me, and then some.

But I feel it today, a small lifting. The clearing of the sky, the making of a way.

I don’t know if it was the ocean air, or that Morgen picked up a hundred phrases between Kauai and Salt Lake, or that Max has been so quietly clearing his own sky for so many months and I'm swelling with pride alongside of him. I don’t know if it was Markus' warm hand reaching past the middle console for my own, keeping it there through half Hawaii.

But here it is, fully and finally.

The lifting.

Sometimes, it takes a thousand miles to find what you’d never lost.

Summer Camp

For Grown Ups

This year has been a season of deep renewal for me, and also for my family. We’ve trekked through mountains of dirt at sunrise, caught sunshine with our hands, slipped on wet rocks, kissed bloody toes, carried each other home. I left social media behind for the better part of it, choosing fuzzy memories over sharpened photos. Perhaps a friend last month said it best: It’s so good to see you! I’d forgotten you existed. 

Stay Where You Are

Last Month

A young couple purchased our home off the internet on "Homie"

Tonight as we were moving out my boys asked me this:

Q: What was your favorite memory in our home?

A: Right now - When I was no longer afraid of losing it. When I was no longer worried about what would be our last night in it, about “losing my home,” about ruining everything I’d worked 26 years for. When those questions stopped being scary, I knew I was ready to risk it all. I knew I’d enjoy happily floundering around in failure more than smiling my way through success doing something I didn’t love.

When I stopped thinking about what the home looked like, and started to think about how I felt in it.

—

I don’t know what sort of crossroads you’re walking toward. I don’t know if it’s a relationship, a lifestyle, a diet, a career move, a parenting decision.

Maybe you just want to start singing opera. Maybe you just want to quit singing opera.

Whatever.

How do you feel in the decision?

p.s. If you feel great in the decision, congratulations! Stay right where you are.

Time To Fly

Changing your life isn’t about having faith in your ability to fly,

to rise above

to conquer your dreams.

It’s about having faith that the fall won’t kill you.

It’s realizing that a failure elsewhere is better than a success here.

TOGETHER

Straighten Your Spine

Stand Tall

Make It Work

You'll risk screwing up, sure. 

This is where a mother pitches the paperwork for her PhD application.

Don't. 

--- 

You’ll risk ruining it all – the skills you’ve acquired, the small notoriety you’ve been given, the general comforts of knowing what the heck you’re doing, of feeling comfortable, of feeling good, of feeling right.

Editing the script, the job, your life is a risk. It might never look the same.

But then again, it might never look the same.

Make It Work

I started a new career path today. 

Huntsman Cancer Institute

I stopped blogging. I went on hiatus from the blogger.com show. I started reading more, about whatever the heck I wanted to read about: parenting, minimalism, truth, beauty, hope.

Stay in your lane, some said.
Stick to labor and delivery, others said.

Be grateful for the job, they screamed. So what if it doesn’t give you enough income with constantly called off shifts? Straighten your spine. Stand tall. Make it work.

How To

redefine yourself

He grew tired

He started complaining about small things. He started feeling like he was stuck, like he’d be doing this forever, like this amazing/incredible gift of a life no longer suited him, like his life had shrunk down a bit, or he’d wanted it to shrink down a bit, and this operation, this whole big wide dress of a gig was too big. He was swimming in fabric.

I told myself my feelings were normal, slightly entitled even. It’s called a leaving the nest, Brenda, not a joy. You don’t have to love it.

And I don’t have to love it, sure. Boys grow up to become men.

But what if I could shift it, just a little? Tailor the dress? Take it in an inch, maybe two?

Could it fit again? Was this salvageable? He had to move out to find out. And so he rented an apartment with Preslee and his friend Nathan and begun his new trimmed down life. 

Survey Your Surroundings

Focus

It is nearly impossible to navigate your path when you’re looking down, staring at the phone, scrolling through journeys on vastly different terrain. Do you see it? Your path is here. Focus. Pay attention. Greet the people you meet along the way. 

Lift Your Eyes

Look at the wide sky, offer thanks for your smallness.

Look Up

Survey your surroundings.

If you've been consulting your compass for long enough, your surroundings will look vastly different than they used to. 

Don't forget to peer at the path behind you. Don't forget to see how far you've come, see where you've tripped, see where you've detoured, see where you reoriented back onto your path. Peer at the panoramic...

Call it beautiful. 

Boundaries

We are a culture of more.

When we see a roadblock, the temptation is to throw more stuff at the problem ---

Distract, distract, distract. 

And yet, often times, the solution is to offer less. I felt buried by dish duty, but instead of adding more dishes, I simply offered less dishes: One plate/glass/utensil per day, per boy. If they wanted to eat their next meal, I'd simply say, please bring your dish cleaned and ready. Boundaries bring clarity, creativity and perspective. Insist on them.