And then I met Bonnie Harris.  Bonnie is a faithful yogi like me, and we often find ourselves side by side in the challenging class we both like to take on Thursday nights.  I’d known since moving to town that Bonnie is a revered family counselor and parent educator, that she’s in demand as a speaker all over the world, and that we even shared a New York publisher.  I’d heard good things about Bonnie’s book When Kids Push Your Buttons even before meeting her in person.

But what really impressed me about Bonnie was her headstand, which she performs with ease right out in the middle of the room.  (I’m not the only one who admires Bonnie’s ability to hang out upside down; in class she’s known as Headstand Bonnie.)

Eventually, Bonnie and I became friends outside of class, and that’s when we first exchanged our books.  “Reading The Gift of an Ordinary Day was like having coffee with my best friend,” Bonnie told me, as we finally did sit down to have coffee together.

And reading Bonnie’s most recent book, Confident Parents, Remarkable Kids, was like meeting my long-lost parenting soul mate.  It made me a little sad, too, as I found myself wishing we HAD been friends for years, instead of waiting so long before we finally rolled up our yoga mats and started our conversation.

I try to stay away from regret for what might have been, but I’ll admit to some here.  “If only I’d had Bonnie in my corner fifteen years ago,” I found myself thinking on every page.  “If only I’d read this book back when the gap between the parent I yearned to be and the day-to-day reality often seemed unbridgeable.”

There’s no doubt in my mind that my own parenting journey would have been much smoother if I’d known about Bonnie’s philosophy of Connective Parenting all along – back when my son’s temper tantrums were so scary and confusing to us both, or when every instinct I had was telling me that “time-out” wasn’t a great idea but I wasn’t certain enough to try an alternative, or when my desire to be the best mother I could be came up against other people’s ideas about how my children should behave or how I should discipline them.

Bonnie is the parenting guide I yearned for during all those years of raising two very different, uniquely challenging little boys.  She’s the wise teacher I searched for in vain in my stacks of how-to books, books that never quite spoke to what I knew in my heart to be true:  that the key to success for both parents and children isn’t to improve our kids, but to improve our relationship with them.

And here’s the funny thing:  I was absolutely wrong about not ever needing any more advice about motherhood.  In fact, there isn’t a single relationship in my life that couldn’t benefit from a little more compassion and empathy, from a little nurturing attention, from a wise observer’s thoughtful insight.

The foundation of  Connective Parenting is pretty simple, and it’s all about perception.  Connective Parenting begins with the understanding that a child’s resistance or defiance doesn’t mean that he or she is being a problem, but rather that he or she is having a problem.  That’s it.  And suddenly we are looking at our child’s behavior not as something that we need to “fix” but as an important clue to their inner struggle in any given moment, a reminder that the way forward is to turn our anger into compassion.

To put this in Bonnie’s words:

Connective Parenting means that the parent takes responsibility for 100% of everything she says and does but does not take responsibility for the child’s feelings or behavior. That is his job, which he learns well through connection, problem-solving and conflict resolution.

Connective Parenting gives parents the methods of connection that nurture, encourage and focus on the child’s strengths rather than inadequacies while setting necessary limits to ensure self-respect and respect for others. It engages the child’s innate sense of fairness and logic.

If we want our children to listen to us, we need to say what they can hear. Not give them what they want, but simply acknowledge and respect what they want. Connective communication encourages listening and talking and feeling important to someone — interaction. Disconnection occurs when we are indifferent as well as critical, blaming and punitive — when we unintentionally push our children away.

It probably goes without saying that this truth doesn’t just apply to screaming toddlers or cranky ten year olds or surly tweens.  It goes across the board.  As soon as I pause long enough to remember that my husband, my grown son, my dog, my neighbor, my sister-in-law’s behavior arises not from some secret desire to drive me nuts, but from their own pain or fear, then we are well on the road to connection.  It’s amazing how quickly anger can be transformed into compassion, resistance into cooperation, annoyance into empathy.

Once every other week, Bonnie’s Connective Parenting newsletter arrives in my email inbox.  Usually, when I see her later at yoga, I can’t resist telling her that the latest issue seems as if it were written just for me – even if she’s advising a mother of a twelve-year-old who’s just been caught lying, or the parent of a kindergartener afraid of the dark.  It’s not the ages of the children, or the specific parenting issues, that make every post she writes so relevant, but Bonnie’s reminders that no matter what problem I’m struggling with in my own life, there is always something else going on beneath the surface.

My job isn’t to come out swinging and attack the problem, but to explore the root cause – to lead with my heart and to go in search of the truth.  With truth and compassion as my compass, I do feel more confident – whether I’m hashing out a budget with my son, disagreeing about a vacation plan with my husband, or engaging in an inner dialogue with my own closet-cleaning-averse self.  (I can beat myself up for being a hopeless hoarder of outdated clothes.  Or, I can unravel the complex emotions that go along with admitting I will never wear a certain black lace dress again.)

No matter where you are on your own parenting journey, my guess is that Bonnie will meet you there, just as she did me.  (To experience her warmth and wisdom first-hand, spend a few minutes with her video.) A few weeks ago, after yoga, Bonnie and I hatched a Mother’s Day plan: to introduce our mothering communities to each other and to give away signed, personalized copies each other’s books on our sites.  Bonnie and I are both all about connection, and it’s our pleasure to connect our readers to one another!

So, here’s how you can win:

Leave a comment below.  If you have a favorite parenting book, or a beloved novel or story about motherhood, make a recommendation. (This will turn into a great reading list for all of us.) Or, if you’re feeling shy, just say, “Count me in.”

Then, to double your chances to win a book, head on over to Bonnie’s blog and leave a comment there, too.  I’m giving away signed copies of When Your Kids Push Your Buttons and Confident Parents, Remarkable Kids here.  And Bonnie’s giving away signed copies of The Gift of an Ordinary Day and Magical Journey over at her place.  We will both draw winners, using Random.org, after entries close at midnight on Saturday, May 18.  Good luck to all, and Happy Mother’s Day!

Even now, though it’s been years since I reminded anyone to look both ways, the sight of a mom crossing the street hand-in-hand with a little guy with sleep-tufted hair and rolled up jeans fills my eyes with sudden, unbidden tears.

Arriving at an elementary school to give a talk one morning not long ago, watching parents bending low to kiss their children good-bye, observing the sea of bobbing backpacks, the bright art on the walls, the exuberance of  six-year-olds beginning their day, I was so overcome with emotion that I had to slip back out to my car for a few minutes and compose myself. Still, standing up at the podium in that room full of young mothers, I wasn’t quite sure I could trust my voice.

“Do you know,” I wanted to say to them, “how quickly this will all be over?  Do you realize just how sweet and rich your lives are right now? How fleeting?”

Of course, this is what older people have been saying to younger ones since time began.  And no one wants to hear it.

Busy, distracted, wondering how to transport the kids from point A to point B and pick up some food for dinner and get the homework done without too much of a fuss, an over-stretched, over-tired parent isn’t worrying about the end of childhood so much as how to survive the hours between 3:00 and bedtime.  I know that.  I’ve been that mom, too.

But it’s been a while since we had two boys still living at home full time, and what I’m most aware of now is not how endlessly long those days could be, but how quickly those years flew by. Adjusting to my new empty-nest reality, after over two decades of 24/7 mothering, has been a slow, bittersweet process.

         At times my nostalgia for our family life as it used to be – for our own imperfect, cherished, irretrievable past – is overwhelming.  The life    my husband and children and I had together, cast now in the golden light of memory, seems unbearably precious; what lies ahead, darker and lonelier and less certain.

When I first wrote those words, just two years ago, I couldn’t imagine ever feeling differently.  Even as my days slowly filled with new joys and occupations, I felt as if I also lived in the shadow of that darker, lonelier future.  With both my sons grown and gone, I wondered if any as-yet-unwritten life chapter could ever feel quite as right, quite as challenging and fulfilling, as those years of intense, day-in-day-out togetherness.

It is such a raw and relentless business, motherhood.  There is the constant physical engagement, at once exhilarating and exhausting. But there is also the vehement, insistent emotion; the frightening, thrilling ferocity of our love for these souls we’ve delivered into the world.

How many times was I brought to my knees by the visceral intimacy of tears and blood and poop, fevers and sweats and strange skin rashes, sibling battles and wild nightmares and crazy, irrational fears? And then, within the same hour sometimes, I would be lifted right up again, exalted and turned inside out by the accidental, extravagant grace of wild laughter or a whoop of glee, a whispered confession, a cuddle, an imponderable question, a kiss delivered to an elbow or a knee (why there??), some random joke without a punch-line that made us all giggle anyway.  When all of that ended, when first one son and then the other had the audacity to grow up and leave the nest, I was sure our family life would never again be quite as good.

Last weekend, both our boys were home.  We still had about three feet of snow on the ground and not much on the agenda – a lot of March Madness basketball on the TV, a couple of family dinners, unplanned hours. I made chicken potpie from scratch.  Jack (a skilled body worker after three years of interning at a studio in Boston) offered to get me up on the massage table and work on my stiff muscles.  For an hour he patiently stretched and manipulated my arms, neck, and shoulders, with extraordinary sensitivity and attentiveness.

On Sunday morning we went to church and listened to Henry play the organ.  As the light poured in through the tall windows,  as the choir sang the Palm Sunday anthem he’d chosen and rehearsed with them, I was flooded with memories of our son as a little boy straining to reach the foot pedals, practicing hymns on our old upright piano in the living room.  The tears that sprang to my eyes then weren’t tears of longing for what was, but of gratitude for all that’s come to be.

The journey between dreaming and becoming, between childhood and adulthood, doesn’t end, of course, when the kids head off for school or leave home or embark on careers or marriages.  It is ongoing, full of twists and turns, detours and disappointments, surprises and sudden revelations.

Who knew that what seemed like a catastrophic loss for one son – freshman year of college missed, two broken vertebrae and constant, chronic pain – would inspire this strong-willed boy who once fantasized about being a tennis star to become a compassionate healer instead?  And how could we have ever imagined that the shy, dreamy child who seemed almost too frail for this world at times, would one day grow up to be a competent, self-assured music director, perfectly at ease performing in front of a congregation and coaching singers four times his age?

In the afternoon last Sunday, between basketball games and my marathon in the kitchen, Steve and the boys and I all put on our boots and took a walk, our favorite loop through the woods.  Gracie trotted ahead, glancing back every few steps as if she couldn’t quite believe her good fortune.  For a border collie, heaven is having your entire herd in the same place at the same time – ideally, out in the woods and sticking close together.

I knew how she felt.  I was happy, too.

In fact, as we tramped along the path it suddenly occurred to me, for the very first time, that I wouldn’t turn the clock back now even if I could.  Not for one hour, not for one day, or for one year or ten.  Not for anything.

It hit me with the power of epiphany:  this sudden, unexpected end to the nostalgic longing I’ve carried like a bruise upon my heart for so long that I’ve nearly forgotten what true ease in the here and now feels like.

Who we are, what we are, where we are at this moment is different from what was, absolutely.  But it is in no way less than.  And the surprising truth is, I wouldn’t trade our family’s beautiful, complicated, ever shifting and fleeting present for any simpler golden-hued yesterday.

Instead, I am pausing each day of this Easter week and giving thanks for what is, right now.  I am grateful for who we are in this moment: four still-growing human beings, each of us irrevocably, mysteriously, wonderfully connected.  Each of us finding our own unique way to be in the world, and at the same time, each of us gratefully returning to this hallowed place of our own creation:  this piece of earth, this house, this dinner table, this history, this tangled web of us-ness.  Yes, we are each still and always unfinished parts of some greater, unknowable whole.  And yes, we are still and always something else, too.  We are family.

BIG Magical Journey News (and some Mother’s Day inspiration. . .)

I imagine Cheryl Strayed has gotten used to the accolades by now.  But for ME a rave in PEOPLE magazine is, well, a big deal.  Was I pleased to find this link in my in-box this morning, under the heading “Memoirs We Can’t Put Down”?  That would be an understatement! 

Maria Shriver is a role model for many of us, and her Architects of Change website is a treasure trove of inspiration, support, and wisdom.  So it’s a huge honor for me to be listed now among her “guides,” and especially to be featured by her this week.  Thank you, Maria!  You can read my essay HERE.

Power of Moms is, quite simply, an amazing website.  Described as “a gathering place for deliberate mothers,” it’s part hang-out, part retreat, part educational resource — and an altogether very friendly, helpful place to be.  I had such a great time talking with founder April Perry that I nearly forgot we were  recording a podcast; it was more like talking with a lively, like-minded friend.  Relax, take a few minutes with a cup of tea, and listen in HERE.

             Appearances

It seems to me that the best book conversations (well, the best conversations in general) are the ones that take place over a good meal. So my writing buddy Margaret Roach and I are both looking forward to reuniting at a luncheon hosted by The Hickory Stick Bookshop in Washington Depot, CT, on Friday, April 19 at noon.  For the price of a book, you will get a catered lunch, a reading, and time to chat with the two of us too! Call the store at (860) 868-0525 for more info and to reserve your place.

I first “met” Priscilla Warner right here last June, when she left a comment on a blog post I’d written.  I immediately read her wonderful memoir Learning to Breathe, she read my manuscript of Magical Journey and encouraged me through every step of the final revision, and pretty soon it felt as if we’d been friends forever — even though we STILL haven’t ever laid eyes on each other.  That will change next month, when I go to Larchmont, NY, to speak at the Public Library  on Sunday, April 19, at 3:30 — an event Priscilla helped organize, in part, so I can finally come visit her.

Other spring-time journeys:

Margaret and I are doing our very last bookstore “duet” at the Concord Bookshop on Sunday, April 28, at 3.  (Think daffodils, home made cookies, and wide-ranging conversation– everything from the thorny questions of midlife to composting secrets revealed!)

I’ll be back at Ann Patchett’s beautiful Nashville bookstore Parnassus on Thursday, May 2, at 7 pm.

And from Nashville, I’ll go straight to Minneapolis for my final two readings this spring: The annual Motherhood and Words talk at the Loft Literary Center on Saturday, May 4 and, finally, to cap it all off, a reading at Common Good Books, Garrison Keillor’s beloved bookstore in downtown St. Paul on Monday, May 6.  Minneapolis friends, St. Olaf connections, Twin Cities readers, I want to see you all there! 

                  Housekeeping . . .

MOTHER’S DAY isn’t far off.  Yesterday, I signed and personalized 24 (!) copies of The Gift of an Ordinary Day for readers who’d ordered them from my local bookstore, The Toadstool, here in Peterborough, NH.  I asked Willard, the owner, if he’d be willing to gift-wrap books as Mother’s Day gifts, and he said “Sure.”  That’s right.  Now, you can order personalized, signed copies of ANY of my books just by clicking HERE.   This will bring you to an order form at the Toadstool’s website.  Leave a note with your order, letting us know if you want your books personalized and/or gift-wrapped.  I’ll sign them, we’ll wrap them beautifully, and we’ll get them right off to you or to the special moms in your life.

I’ve loved hearing from so many of you!  Your letters never fail to make my day — they remind me all over again how lucky we all are, to be part of a community of readers, seekers, thinkers, nurturers.  If you feel inclined to write a bit MORE, however, each and every reader review on  Goodreads and on Amazon is hugely appreciated (by me!) and helpful.  (Doesn’t have to be long, just kind and, preferably, enthusiastic!)

Thanks too, my dear friends, for continuing to share my video with others, for inviting folks to “like” my  Magical Journey Facebook page, and for sharing my blog posts on your own Facebook pages and Twitter feeds.  There is no denying the power of word of mouth!

 

 

 

 

 

Waiting to find out which colleges will accept Jack for next fall. (So far, one yes, one no, one wait list.) Waiting to see what choices he’ll make and which school — after a year of working and living on his own and figuring out whether he even wants to go to college at all — will finally feel like “the one.” Waiting to see if the next round of X-rays will show further healing in his two broken vertebrae. Waiting for his pain to disappear. Waiting to find out if he’ll be able to play tennis again or have to content himself with being a passionate fan. Waiting to learn which doors have closed in his young life and which have yet to open before him.

We’re waiting to hear if the job Henry has his heart set on will pan out. Waiting for the musical he’s co-directing to be performed. Waiting to know where he’ll be working for the summer. Waiting to find out where he’ll be living next year. Waiting to see if he’s going to need a car. Waiting for him to decide whether grad school is still part of the picture. Waiting to see if the pull of a someday-maybe Broadway dream turns out to be as powerfully alluring as the illusion of security conferred by a paycheck and a plan.

We are waiting for two young adults’ ever-shifting and unknowable futures to become the nailed-down and predictable present-tense, for dreams to become reality, hopes to be realized, expectations fulfilled, applications accepted or denied, next steps executed, careers  revealed, life to turn this way or that.

And then another letter arrives from a reader who has lost a child. I turn the calendar to March and realize it’s been ten years since my dear friend’s son was murdered three months before his college graduation while trying to save a teammate who was being beaten on a street corner. I open the newspaper and read the headline: “BU student dies at party.” A new friend on Facebook posts that, had her daughter lived, she would be turning twelve today. I find myself in tears as I read Emily Rapp’s fiercely moving memoir of parenting her son Ronan, who died of Tay- Sachs disease last month, just shy of his third birthday.

Life is long, I like to tell myself. But of course, that isn’t always true. Everything will turn out for the best, we assure our children, and ourselves. But that’s not always the case either. Sometimes life is cut short. And sometimes the most beautiful dreams are derailed by tragedy. Sometimes children get sick or hurt and sometimes they leave us. How foolish and naive, to think we think we can skim along on the surface of life without cultivating, at the same time, an intimate relationship with its dark and unknown depths. And how much we sacrifice when we trade the quiet, unobtrusive pulse of the moment that is right here, right now, for the false promise of some brightly imagined future.

Last night, while Henry and his dad watched the Celtics game on TV, I climbed into bed with Emily Rapp’s book, Still Point of the Turning World. Ronan’s brief life was never about making progress or racking up achievements; he was only nine months old when his parents were told their baby boy was going to die. Emily’s task, then, wasn’t ever to prepare her son to succeed in the world, but to love him just as he was for as long as he was here. Somehow, every moment of her mothering had to contain multitudes: both the joy of being Ronan’s mom and the grief of letting him go.

Perhaps there is no one better suited to speak to us distracted, harried, future-oriented parents than a mother who has had no choice but to live in the “now” and to embrace her child in the moment because he will not live long enough to have a “someday.”

“How does the knowledge that nothing lasts forever and that all of our time is limited change the way we approach the world?” Emily asks.

And then, like the best spiritual mentors, she answers her own unanswerable question with more questions:

“Will we be fearless in our pursuit to live a life we consider big and beautiful, no matter what other people might think of our choices and no matter what difficult changes we might have to make? How does this knowledge affect the way we parent? Not knowing what tomorrow will bring, would we be so concerned with our children’s ‘progress’ and perhaps more interested in activities that simply make them happy?”

The sun is rising as I type these words, pouring light into the sky after two days of snow. In a few minutes, I’ll shut down my computer, take a shower, go out for blueberry pancakes with my husband and older son. Later today, I’ll do a reading at the bookstore in the town where I grew up. I’ll hold up the 12-foot long piece of blue finger-knitting that Jack did when he was five, giving me the title for my first book, Mitten Strings for God, which contained everything I knew as a young mother about slowing down and paying attention. And then I’ll drive to the bus stop and pick up my 20-year-old son and bring him back to the house for dinner. We’ll light the candles, hold hands for a moment before we start to eat, say “Blessings on the meal and each other.”

I will mention, as I always do when we’re all home together, how happy I am to have everyone at the table. My husband will agree and our sons, who have yet to fully comprehend that each human life is a progression of farewells, will no doubt roll their eyes.

And then I’ll remind myself: there is nothing to wait for. All we need, we have.

To read an essay by Emily Rapp and watch her Today Show appearance, click here. 

And I cannot recommend her exquisitely written and profoundly generous book, Still Point of the Turning World, highly enough.

 

Magical Journey News

 

Months before my book was published, I told my friend Ann Patchett that my only real aspiration as an author was to do an event at her bookstore. So it was definitely a disappointment to get all the way to Nashville during publication week in January, only to have an ice storm shut the entire city down an hour before I was supposed to read. Happily, we’ve rescheduled just before Mother’s Day. I’ll be back at Parnassus on Thursday, May 2.

From Nashville, I’ll go straight to Minneapolis for my last two appearances: The annual Motherhood and Words talk at the Loft Literary Center on Saturday, May 4 and, finally, to cap it all off, a reading at Common Good Books, Garrison Keillor’s beloved bookstore in downtown St. Paul on Monday, May 6. I can’t wait! (And then I’m looking forward to coming home for good, stowing my suitcase in the closet, and digging in the garden.)

Magical Journey is a book that seems to sell one copy at at a time, as one reader says to another, “Here, I think you’ll like this, too.” I haven’t seen it piled up on any bookstores’ front tables (except right here in my own hometown). There were no print ads, no big TV breaks, barely any reviews. And yet I am learning not to underestimate the power of word of mouth, of women’s passionate enthusiasm for books that speak to our real experience, and of our generosity toward one another. This morning, I signed 20 copies of Magical Journey and The Gift of an Ordinary Day for one California reader who is sending them to her special friends. This is word of mouth and then some!

Meanwhile, the online ripples continue to spread outward. If you’ve contributed to those widening circles — by liking my Facebook page, writing a review on Amazon, showing my video to your friends, or sharing my blog posts on Facebook and Twitter — thank you! (And if you’d like to help me by helping my book find its way in the world, these are quick and highly effective ways to keep it moving!) As you know, I’m always happy to sign bookplates (just drop me an email or FB message) and I can personalize copies of any of my books through my local bookstore, which will mail them right out to you. (That link is HERE.)

Loved these recent reviews and interviews:

Ali Edwards is a rock star to crafty types, with a huge and devoted following (and no wonder, her message about telling our own ordinary stories with words and pictures is as inspiring as it is irresistible). So of course I was pretty thrilled to be featured on her blog this week. Click here to read her lovely piece.

The Ali ripple effect actually began HERE, with Harriet Cabelly’s terrific Rebuild Your Life site.

I was honored when Amy Makechnie asked if I’d be her first interviewee in her new “fascinating person” series; I should have known she’d come up with questions as engaging as she herself is. Read the whole Maisymak interview HERE.

As I sat holed up in my bedroom today, making notes for the talk I’ll give to a group of parents on the West Coast on Tuesday, I realized that some of the quotes that have shaped me as a mother are really the spiritual equivalents of those guideposts poking up through the snow:  words that keep me on track when the familiar landscape of our family life is suddenly altered by some challenge or unexpected turn in the emotional weather.

It’s so easy, when things get stormy around here or seem a bit out of control, to lose my way.  But if being the mother of two sons who have now attained the impossibly grown-up ages of 20 and 23 has taught me anything, it’s that storms pass and that control is an illusion anyway.  Still, it helps when the weather is wild, to have some markers pounded into the earth, words that remind me of where I want to put my feet, of the solid ground I know is there for me, just beneath the blinding swirl of whatever’s coming down.

Attachment to outcome has probably been the biggest challenge on my own parenting path. Little wonder then that my central task as a mother seems to be practicing the art of nonattachment.  And so I look to the wisdom of others to remind me of what I already know:  I can love and care for my children, but I can’t possess them.  I can assist them, and pray for them, and wish them well, but in the end their happiness and suffering depend on their choices and their destinies, not on my wishes.

It surprised me to notice today that none of the quotes that keep me on track as a parent actually come from books about parenting.  But perhaps that’s as it should be. For the other thing this journey of motherhood has taught me is that my children are not extensions of me, and my real work isn’t about changing them, or shaping them into the people I think they ought to be. It’s about changing myself – learning to soften, to trust, to pay attention, to accept, and, most of all, finding the faith to let them go.

So, here are the guideposts I’ve placed along my own path, to keep me moving in the direction I aspire to travel.  What words serve as your guideposts on this journey?

(A word about this photo, taken ten years or so ago at sunset on a summer day in Maine:  I love the joy in these shadows, the memory of a vanished, distant time, the fact that Jack and I danced and played in that golden light and Steve grabbed his camera and captured the fleeting, precious moment.  It still makes me smile and get a little teary at the same time. And it reminds me: be present; we will not pass this way again.)

Words for the Journey

“To bow to the fact of our life’s sorrows and betrayals is to accept them; and from this deep gesture we discover that all life is workable. As we learn to bow, we discover that the heart holds more freedom and compassion than we could imagine.”   – Jack Kornfield

“I try to remind myself that we are never promised anything, and that what control we can exert is not over the events that befall us but how we address ourselves to them.”   – Jeanne DuPrau, The Earth House

“It has something to do with submitting rather than dominating. Surrender, submit. Have faith, trust in the mystery. That’s not easy. Surrendering one’s life to living in, and serving, the beauty of a mysterious world is a big step. . . .The purpose of the journey is compassion.”

– Joseph Campbell,  An Open Life

“Who you are is made up of three persons.  There is the one you think you are, the one others think you are, and the one you really are.  Work towards making all three the same. Then there will be peace and bliss.”          –  Sri Sathya Sai Baba

“Live in the present. Do the things that need to be done. Do all the good you can each day. The future will unfold.”  – Peace Pilgrim

 “Life is change.  Growth is optional.  Choose wisely.”  – Karen Kaiser Clark

“The little things? The little moments? They aren’t little.”   – Jon Kabat-Zinn

 “Each morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.”    – Buddha

 “To look deep into your child’s eyes and see in him both yourself and something utterly strange, and then to develop a zealous attachment to every aspect of him, is to achieve parenthood’s self-regarding, yet unselfish, abandon.”

“We must love (our children) for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them, and that is a great deal harder to do.  Loving our own children is an exercise in imagination.”   – Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree

A Magical Journey update

Some books are review books. (Think a quotable rave from the New York Times).  That’s not this book.  Some authors appear on The Today Show or The View, with answers to all your questions about how to be happy.  (Think instant ascension on the best-seller list.)  That’s not me.  I am an under-the-media’s-radar kind of writer.  And I’m pretty sure  Magical Journey is a word-of-mouth kind of book.  That’s fine with me.  And I am deeply grateful to every single one of you who have bought a copy, shared a copy, or urged a friend to give it a try, saying, “Here, I think you’ll like this, too.”  Thank you!

Last week, Magical Journey was #1 on the best-seller list at Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord, NH.  Sure, it’s a small independent bookstore in a small city in the middle of my home state, but I’m pretty thrilled to be #1 anywhere.  And yes, readers made it happen.

Want to spread the word?  Here are three quick things you can do.  (With huge thanks in advance for your help.  It really DOES make a difference!)

1. Write a brief review on Amazon.

2.  Like my page on Facebook and share posts with your friends. (I update there often, and post news of every appearance too.)

3. Share the book!  (I just received a new box of beautiful, blank, custom book plates.  And I’m happy to personalize as many as you’d like and mail them right out to you.  Just drop me a line and let me know how many and where to send them. Valentine’s Day gifts, perhaps??)

Also, check my Events page to see if I’m coming this spring to a bookstore near you. Thanks to the generosity of fans and friends, I’m on my way to the West Coast this week:  La Canada, Laguna Beach, and Pasadena.

If you missed Priscilla Gilman’s thoughtful interview  Click Here.

 

 

So begins Kasey Mathews’ moving memoir Preemie, an account not only of a birth story gone terribly awry but also of a young woman giving birth to herself, learning to love and accept the person she is through the harrowing, humbling process of learning to love and accept her tiny, excruciatingly fragile baby girl, born more than four months premature.

Nearly twenty-three years after my own first pregnancy, I still remember a line from one of the many parenting books I read in preparation for my daunting new role of “mother.” The gist of it was something like this: “In the days after you give birth, you will grieve the death of the idealized baby you have envisioned for nine months. And you will begin to love and accept the real, imperfect, and perfectly beautiful child who has come to you.”

The very idea of grief having any part to play in the miracle of birth was too frightening to contemplate. And the notion that my own baby might be anything less than perfect was the kind of middle-of-the-night anxiety that I tried desperately to avoid. Much better, I was certain, to envision only the best outcomes: an easy delivery, a healthy baby, happiness all around.

But best outcomes are not always ours to call, and sometimes perfection is found not in our idealized images of the way we believe things “ought” to be, but in our fumbling, awkward, valiant efforts to grow up and become the people we are truly meant to be. For of course, before we can deeply love another flawed, imperfect, vulnerable soul, we must first be willing to love ourselves — even if who we are is so much less than who we still aspire to become.

Any woman who has experienced the trauma of giving birth to a premature baby knows just how quickly, and how devastatingly, a life can turn. One day you are choosing paint colors for the nursery, the next you are staring at the ceiling of a hospital emergency room; one minute you are diligently practicing your “hut” breathing, the next you are being prepped for anesthesia; one minute you are envisioning your own beautiful baby at your breast, the next you are swaddled in sterile scrubs, staring down at a pitifully small one-pound creature that looks nothing like the newborn of your dreams but, as Kasey so vividly describes, more like “a potato with tiny arms and legs.”

“I thought if I could figure out why this was happening, I could make it stop,” Kasey writes, describing the confusion she feels as emergency room nurses begin the race to save her unborn baby’s life. She searches for clues, chronicling the past week’s activities: the bath she took, the sushi she ate, a game of paddle tennis. The nurses assure Kasey it’s not her fault that her March baby is coming in November, that it’s nothing she did, nothing she can control.

Finally, I clutched a nurse’s arm. She was walking backwards, facing me, guiding the gurney down the hall. I dug my fingers into her flesh. I needed to know she was real. She looked at me. Her eyes, framed in dark circles, softened. I thought I’d found my sympathetic audience. “You don’t understand,” I said to her in a more coherent, controlled voice. “This sort of thing doesn’t happen to me.”
She held my gaze for a moment, and I waited. A gold cross swung at the base of her neck.
She continued to look at me. And then she said, “It does now.”

Last week, I wrote here about the momentous challenge inherent in the words “amor fati,” or “love your fate.” Preemie is the courageous account of one woman’s struggle to do just that, to love not only her fate but also the small, desperately vulnerable and miraculously determined little girl who survived against all odds to become her mother’s greatest spiritual teacher.

Kasey Mathews tells deep, painful truths about how it feels when a “perfect” life is jolted by reality. She writes about guilt and failure, shock and shame, loneliness and confusion and loss. And she writes about her own halting journey from darkness into light and from fear toward faith, a journey that surely illuminates our greatest and most universal human task: the work of learning to embrace imperfect beauty, of realizing that a good life is determined not by what happens to us, but by what we choose to make of it. Once again, amor fati.

I first met Kasey just three years ago this week. My own memoir, The Gift of an Ordinary Day had been in the stores for two days, and I was doing my very first book signing at a nearby book shop. There were all of four people in attendance; two of them were blood relations (my mother and my brother), the third was a mother from Jack’s class at school, and the fourth was a lovely woman I’d never seen before. She sat down in a chair near the back and waved to me with a warm smile, as if we were already friends. I thought perhaps she’d wandered in by mistake, so little publicity had been done for this event. But no, it turned out that she was an actual reader; she had in fact come that day to see me. I scrapped my prepared talk, read a couple of chapters, and then sat down to chat a bit with my charitable audience of four.

Kasey introduced herself, and told us she was writing a book. As she shared the story of her daughter’s birth, and of the fear and surrender and hard-won happiness of the last nine years of her family’s life together, I found myself wishing that she would hurry up and finish writing. I wanted to read it, to hear about how Andie persevered and grew, and even more, how her beautiful mom had grown right alongside her. I didn’t doubt for a moment that Kasey had a book in her. Her quiet eloquence confirmed her as a story teller, and her determination to offer hope and support to other women facing challenges of their own would surely carry her across the finish line.

A couple of weeks ago, I ran into Kasey and Andie, now a lively twelve year old, outside the grocery store downtown. Although I’ve followed each stage of Preemie’s long labor and triumphant delivery (nothing premature about this birth!) I had missed Kasey’s book publication party, earlier this summer. It was my first opportunity to say “Congratulations!” in person.

“I want to write about your book!” I told her. And with that, she reached into the back seat of her car, grabbed a copy, signed it, and handed it to me.

To win this signed copy of Preemie, along with a signed copy of my very first book, Mitten Strings for God: Reflections for Mothers in a Hurry, just leave a comment below. Write about how the words amor fati have resonated in YOUR life. Or, of course, just let me know you’d like to read this special book. I will draw a winner at random on Saturday, September 8. (In the meantime, visit Kasey at http://www.kaseymathews.com/.)