This place feels like the arms of an old friend you haven’t seen in far too long, but whose embrace erases all the bubbles in time and you’re exactly where you left off. I miss it here in the land of blog and I’m ready to shout from the rooftop, dance my fingers across my keyboard and check back in with all my blog friends to see what y’all have been up to the last few months.

I look forward to catching up.

XOXO

Eventually the pull to meander through multiple ideas, stories and the issues I care about will bring me back to this space, but for now I’m simply not enjoying the clicking and hopping required to be a participatory community member. I want to spend time unplugged, listening to my child giggle, and more time quietly rummaging through my mind to more fully develop the writing projects that don’t belong here.

à la prochaine,

XOXO

Tricia

What is your altruistic dream? Would you feed the poor? Save the planet? Reform education? Cure cancer? Stop domestic abuse? End genocide in Africa? If there was one thing you could do and have a positive impact, and you didn’t have to worry about your current limitations related to family or career or…whatever keeps us stagnating, what would you want to accomplish? Just imagine the sky’s the limit…

So rather than anything even resembling a cohesive thought, I’m going to take the liberty to ramble on for a few minutes about nothing in particular.

Last night I went to dinner with two friends. We didn’t get home until after 11:00 and then I stayed up watching a movie with my husband until 1:00. Yes, that darn alarm clock still started singing at 6:00 this morning and I’m fried. Why is it that I can no longer function on minimal sleep? Maybe I never really could, it’s just my teenage mind made me believe sleep deprivation was a reasonable idea way back in the day.

Is the health care debate making your head spin yet? I’ve found it so difficult to cut through the rhetoric coming from opposing view points to develop a deep understanding of the proposed solution(s). What I have come away with is a tremendous headache and a new understanding of how complex the issue is. Yesterday a friend sent me the link to the 1,018 page Bill. She likes to torture me that way and knows I won’t be able to resist reading through the document since I know she will, and then if we haven’t both read it, how will we ever have an intelligent conversation about anything every again? Just thinking about 1,018 pages of government jargon is making my headache worse.

If my lack of sleep and health care induced head banging isn’t quite doing it for you today (it’s not for me either), there’s always day six…

Meet Max and Ellie, our 2-year-old canine siblings and reason our vacuum cleaner is about to blow its motor.

Max, like me, is Anglo Saxon…rather reserved and stoic, serious and contemplative. Ellie on the other hand is like my husband…Latin and loco. She’s got all the personality and would simply like to Salsa her way through life. Even her ears are crazy.

Why am I telling you this? Because it’s Monday and if that’s not enough in itself, all those serious posts I intend to write are floating around inside my head and still percolating.

Here’s hoping your Monday includes a nice combination of serious and loco.

Like most rites of passage in a child’s life, this moment is not only for the young person to whom we raise a glass and feast on table-side toasts. Children’s rites of passage are very much owned by an entire family, or at least they should be.

College graduation is its own success measured in promises for the future. It’s also an untold or softly whispered story of family triumphs and sacrifices made so that parents can provide for a new generation a hand up from our own beginnings. We always want something for our children, perhaps different, subjectively more, infinitely better than what we hoped for ourselves. To succeed in fulfilling our own dreams of what it means to provide stepping stones, we often have to make hard choices, till new ground and let certain desires take a back seat. It’s not a complaint. It’s simply a reality—one that we’d own again, and will.

As proud as I am of my stepdaughter for each and every one of her failures and her accomplishments, I’m equally proud of my husband and I, of her mother and her stepfather for finding our way through 14 years of step family dynamics. Sometimes we’ve muddled. Sometimes we’ve shined. Each and every time we’ve worked hard to remember there’s a bigger story that will be told one day in the eyes of our children and their pursuit of adulthood.

Today is a tribute to all of us—to the children, parents and stepparents who make up my rather odd little family world—today we all graduate.

You can help me reach the goal. Is there something I’ve previously written about that you wish I’d follow up with more information? Do you have a miscellaneous question or prompt you want to throw at me, a soapbox you want to invite me to stand on…go ahead,  nothing’s off limits (I think) and you’d be providing sanity-saving medicine for this out-of-practice blogger.

Yes, this is a preemptive call for help.

In addition to losing my mind through simultaneous work deadlines, I learned something about myself and blogging in the last three weeks. It’s like sex. The more you have it, the more you want it. The less you have it, the less you want it. Or, maybe that’s just me? Sorry, was that TMI?

Anyway, I seem to take periodic blogging breaks, which I know is the worst thing a blogger can do if she intends to deepen her online relationships, but I learned something else about myself and blogging. I seem to think every post needs to have a purpose; that it needs to be somehow poignant and meaningful. And then I get stuck. You’re not surprised, I can hear you chuckling and saying, “Now Tricia, stop that sniveling and get on with it.” I know, I know.

Follow along with my sex analogy for just a minute longer, if you will. If you’ve gotten out of the habit, if you’re tired; if work, kids, family drama or whatever other excuse we lay at the feet of passionate denial keeps you wrapped up in a flannel night gown, you know that you have to break the cycle and make a date to engage that primal part of your brain.

I think it’s the same thing with blogging. Sometimes it’s simply, excruciatingly amazing and sometimes it’s just an afternoon quickie, but the point is that you’re still connecting, you’re still creating intimacy and you’re not leaving out an important part of your life. (You had no idea blogging and sex share so many similarities, did you?)

To help prod myself back into the world of blog, I just joined NaBloPoMo and I’m committing to blogging every day during the month of August. I’m absolutely certain this means I’ll push myself to create engaging content at least once or twice in a 30-day span, but more than likely it means you’ll be subject to hearing about how frustrated I am that my son’s toilet aim still isn’t perfected or how when my husband does laundry, he keeps holding up my torn and tattered underwear and threatening that if I don’t find some time to splurge at the mall, he’s going to go shopping for me.

I hope you’ll tune in while I reengage and won’t think too horribly of me if I cheat and post photos of my child or dogs every now and then, but I’m looking forward to jumping back in with both hands (I’m talking about the keyboard…get your mind out of the gutter, we’re done with the sex analogy).

Check back August 1^st and wish me luck. 30 posts in 30 days…

The 15-year-old girl from a nice Catholic family and her 18-year-old handsome knight didn’t need the help of a shotgun to declare their love and commitment in front of family, friends and God; they’d decided on their own to consummate the pregnancy with wedding vows and a priest, but her mother’s insistence that white was for virgins and a ceremony initiated by shameful acts didn’t justify too much joy or celebration left sadness lingering in the young bride’s heart.

Their love was young but honest, simple and enduring, and although their hearts were quite pure, their families’ intent to hush whispers and brand a fallen daughter enveloped the young couple’s promise in strife and dishonor.

After a small ceremony in July, 1971 the newlyweds put the beginning to rest and focused on creating a future. With the baby’s outline no longer hidden behind figureless clothing, the pregnant child was forced to abandon her honor roll status, drop out of school, and take to task the pending glory of motherhood. Only 33 days after her sixteenth birthday she did indeed birth her very own family, a baby to love-a daughter to share and dream and hope with.

She only allowed herself random moments to look toward the past and instead of letting sorrow linger for long, she busied herself with the present. As her family grew, this mother of daughters and a son found certain delights she’d never been allowed. While her children skipped through their own rites of passage-proms and weddings-moments when girls wear flowing dresses and stand with shoulders poised amidst declarations of beauty, she basked in her commitment to give her girls their moments. But sometimes, even when she tried to swallow hard, she accidentally tapped into that long ago sadness and wondered what it would feel like to have had a moment of her own.

For 38 years she’s raised her first child and her second and third. She’s welcomed a grandchild from each of her children while she and my father countered the odds and proved false the projections for failure when starting so young; still holding hands everywhere they saunter, their eyes gleam and dance at the sight of each other. It’s a romance of endurance and lives entwined, of history and memory and dreams fulfilled and let go, of youth turned middle age and the strength to be humble in a lover’s arms.

Now with clarity and the perspective of half a century rather than only a decade plus five, the bride’s life is enough pleasantly seasoned that she’s realized her moment long gone and wondered about didn’t have to be dictated by a family’s false values and fear of public scrutiny. The shame was not hers or his; it was handed to them by people proposing to love yet really only self enamored.

When my phone rang Monday night I’m sure my mother was wearing a small smile I can only imagine when she asked if I’d stand at her side together with my siblings while she and my father marry. My satirical tongue acted before my mind could engage, but immune to my sarcasm she chuckled and explained, it’s never too late.

She’ll choose her own garb absent any yellow sashes or embroidered disgrace. She’ll stand with her children and their children at the side of her husband to declare once again to love and honor the path they’ve traveled and the one they’ve yet to explore while we’ll rejoice and eat and dance and proudly witness her moment.

For this week’s topic, WickedStepMom asked people to answer the question…

What event or time did you feel your most beautiful?  How did this event shape your view of yourself? Do your family, friends and children know about this event and how important it was?

I’ve written several times that I feel more confident when I’m in better physical shape than I am right now, but this question from WickedStepMom provides an opportunity for deeper self reflection. In all honesty, I feel the most beautiful when I feel smart.

When I land a new client, provide a solution to a problem, have an intelligent conversation with someone, break down an obstacle or absorb new information and insights, I feel the most beautiful. I seem to have more of these “beautiful moments” as I grow older. Perhaps it’s the essence of building blocks creating new foundations for extending knowledge, or it’s the realization that my brain is a lot more important than the size of my hips.

I can’t think of one moment in time when I’ve felt the most beautiful, but instead there are several moments when I’ve felt brilliant. Here are the first few that come to mind…

• The day I graduated from college, which I didn’t do until I was 28-years-old. The first in my family to earn a college degree, Magna Cum Laude, I felt incredibly beautiful in that shapeless black gown.
• The moment a nurse put Aaron in my arms and the ecstasy of realizing I was finally a mom. My path to motherhood was a direct result of thinking outside the box, and the intersection of all you can accomplish through friendship, love and a refusal to only play the cards you’re dealt.
• The night I finally decided to end my first marriage and to reclaim my life and my dignity.
• Last night when my husband put his arms around me and said, “You were just a baby when I met you, and now you’re quite the woman.” His comment had absolutely nothing to do with the number of gray hairs or wrinkles I’ve accumulated in the 14 years we’ve been together.

The second part of WickedStepMom’s question… Do your family, friends and children know about this event and how important it was?

I’m sure on some level they do. We talk a lot in our house about the importance of education, intellect and critical thinking, and these are life pursuits my own father made a point to discuss at my childhood dinner table. Do they know I think my brain is the most important feature to exercise and nurture and that it’s the one thing that gives me the most pleasure…well, we’d have to ask them.

People participating this week…

• WickedStepMom
• Amy @ Six Flower Mom
• Lisa P @ Use Your Wisdom
• Momma Miler @ Miller Memories

What about you? Is there a moment, a place in your life when you’ve felt the most beautiful?

In addition to other Beautiful Like Me participants blogging today, there are a couple of articles from around the blog world that are definitely worth a click through.

Vered’s recent articles: 10 Ways to Love Yourself As A Woman and 10 Ways to Hate Yourself As A Woman

From Skirt! magazine…A touching and inspiring letter written by a young woman, just barely out of her teens, that she sent to every teen girl she knows, Beauty or the Beast