1--As much as you want to believe you know better, mom will end up being right about most things. She has more life experience—listen to her.

2--As much as you want to believe you know everything, you don’t. Right now you think the older you get the more you know, but you’ll actually discover that the older you get, the more you have to learn. Stay humble.

​3--Life doesn’t move progressively upward in a straight line ending at happiness—you’ll have periods of good times & periods of tough times; progress, then setbacks, then progress again; thinking you have it all figured out and then unlearning what you thought was right. Growth is a wavy, sometimes messy line.

​4--You don’t know anything about parenting until and unless you’re a parent, so shush on the parenting advice. No, I don’t care what your child development textbook says, hush it.

5--You’re investing sooooo much time & energy into guys—how you look to them, what they think of you, how you’ll find one, how you’ll keep one, will he want to have children, yadda, yadda, yadda. Invest just a fraction of that time & energy into your own goals & dreams and your future self will thank you for it.

6--And, speaking of goals & dreams, that thing nagging at you—start taking steps toward it now while you have the time & energy. Your dreams won’t change as wildly as you think and you’ll wish you’d started sooner.

7--Save a dollar or two a day and don’t touch it.  Start TODAY.

8--Trade the tanning bed for a great tinted moisturizer. Please! 
😫
9--Rather than caring so much about what everyone and their brother thinks of you, focus on those you respect & care about deeply and how THEY think of you. Let the rest of them go and just do you. You’ll find your people. Remember, quality over quantity.

10--While I wish you’d listen to all this you’ll have to figure it out for yourself because real learning comes not from advice but from experience. So just know, while there will be rough times, it all works out. Breathe. Relax. Pray. Listen to your gut. It all really will be okay. And you’re okay, just as you are.

Some realizations sneak up on you slowly — you look back & can’t quite pinpoint the “when” or “where”…they just happen over time. And then there are moments when awareness hits you like a bolt of lightning.
⚡️⚡️November 24, 2019 ⚡️⚡️
That’s the exact day I realized a sad, inevitable fact: I’m getting old.
It was 8:09 p.m. & I had just laid down for bed (yes, yes, I know…that should’ve been Clue #1). I turned on the American Music Awards. I saw the first presenter & wondered “hmm, who’s that?” (It was one of the “Lil” somethings…) Then he introduced an act I’d never heard of and she began “singing” in a way that seems to be the new style — a seemingly intentional off-tune whisper/slurring (“whurring”?) that really just seems more like talking.

Can we just agree it’s talking?
And the outfit…I just can’t. (Or couldn’t, I should say.)
“Who are these people and what kind of noise is this?! They call this music?! I don’t get it! What the heck is going on?!”
⚡️⚡️ And that’s when it hit me ⚡️ ⚡️
👵🏻 👵🏻 👵🏻 I’m getting old. 👵🏻 👵🏻 👵🏻
​

​Can I share a little truth about myself? I am not naturally a super happy person. My default setting, from as far back as I can remember, has always been a bit serious & somber.

Look at me here—that little face says it all, doesn’t it? Happy to have the BEST parents & most loving home life a Kindergartner could ask for, yet also busy contemplating the world’s problems & how I might solve them. This was the year my mom found me barefoot one day because I gave my shoes away to a girl who said she needed them. My naturally bleeding heart has given me empathy, but it’s made me feel everything more heavily, too.

At times, too heavily.

My 25 year-old self never would’ve guessed I’d say this as I approach 40 and the highest weight I’ve ever been (pregnancy excluded), but I've truly never felt more comfortable in my own skin. I’m not technically overweight, I just have the kind of not-so-perfect body you might expect a busy teacher & mom to have: a decent set of love handles, thighs that rub together a bit, underarms that wave a little when I do, and, when I look down toward my stomach while in a plank, well…
it’s just not good.
​
Yet that extra "me" somehow still feels lighter to carry than the mental load I lugged around back when keeping it off was my biggest priority--fixating over calories and a certain number on the scale, imposing consequences on myself if I ate "too much" or skipped a workout. I couldn't keep up with that today if I tried, and I don’t care to. These days, if my cholesterol's good, my blood pressure's in check, & I can keep up with my five year-old and share an ice cream with him, too--then we're all good.

​

​If you've stumbled across this post finding yourself in the thick of it--
in a mess you can't imagine finding your way out of,
off-track in seemingly every area of your life,
at a depth you can't imagine rising above...
​
~ b r e a t h e. You have that. Start there.

~ know you're not alone. We've all been there at some point in our lives.

~harness whatever little faith & willpower you've got left in you & sort out what's within your control & what to give over to God. What's not within your control--hand it over. (And know that you're not somehow doing the whole faith thing wrong if it feels uncomfortable or even painful doing so.)

As a blogger I'm frequently cruising social media looking for content to share on my page.  When I find myself nodding in agreement or thinking "Amen!", I know that content resonates with me and likely will with my readers as well.  In my scrolling though I've noticed a certain category of motivational memes & quotes lately--the "females empowering each other" brand--that, while nice in theory, have just felt...well...inauthentic.  Ya know, ones of this nature:

Last week I attended a Montessori conference and had the pleasure of listening to Dr. Timothy Purnell, the Executive Director of the American Montessori Society. With the kind of energy that gets a guy walking through the aisles of an auditorium instead of standing behind a podium, he talked to us about the importance of connecting & sharing about Montessori through social media--a platform that has the capability of spreading good through its enormous reach.  It's through connecting and relationship building, he reminded us, that we are part of a movement.  But to be a part of something great--to be part of a movement--you have to stop keeping the good stuff to yourself and share with others. 

In other words, you have to "get off your island".

For the last few weeks I’ve suffered from a condition I can't quite name but seems to flare up from time to time, especially when a new year approaches. It impairs my ability to get words from my mind onto the actual page, to get my yoga pant-clad bottom to the place where the yoga actually happens.

​You see, it’s not an issue of intention, it’s one of execution.

There’s fortunately nothing physically wrong with me—my right (write) hand isn’t paralyzed and I’m thankful to have the ability to exercise my body. I can’t claim writer’s block because the ideas are there, just as I can’t blame my procrastination around exercising on not knowing how to do it…it’s just that I come up with every excuse in the world to NOT ACTUALLY DO IT.

And this is where the shame comes in.

"You're so sensitive."

Three little words I've heard over and over again throughout my life.  In Kindergarten I cried every time the teacher reprimanded the class because I thought she was surely talking directly to me.  Kids in school said I didn't know how to take a joke.  Boyfriends accused me of being overly sensitive when we fought.  Believe me, I've been told on way more than one occasion that I need to lighten up or toughen up. 

Do something to stop being "too much"--too sensitive, too anxious, too nice.

I spent thirty-some years being ashamed of my sensitive nature, trying to put on a front that things didn't really bother me when they did, acting as if I had a thick skin when I didn't, pretending jokes rolled off my back when they stuck to me like glue.

Mrs. Shaw

She was my 4th grade teacher and one of my all-time favorites--a bubbly, brunette, thirty-something woman with dimples that made learning fun and always wore the cutest high heels that perfectly matched her dress. She handed out Star Student certificates every Friday, signed in perfect cursive, to students who showed good behavior and boy, did I aim to please. That was my main goal at 9 years old really--to gain friends and the teacher's favor by laying low and being good at all costs. I was conscientious, polite, and on-task ALWAYS—a model student.

Until one day, when I made an uncharacteristically bad choice: when I thought no one was looking, I took a Sharpie to the head cheerleader’s jacket.

Whoopsie.

Addiction, in one form or another, has played a role throughout my life. Not because I've struggled with it so much myself, but because many of the people around me over the years have and, in turn, it's affected my life in a multitude of ways. Alcohol, drugs, food, spending...these addictions have all impacted my life in some way, whether it be through relationships with friends, family members, or romantic partners.

I've done enough self-reflection and Al-Anon meetings to understand that, in most cases, it was my codependent nature--my tendency to feel empathy for others, to want to help them--that attracted these people into my life. Just as an addict is never "cured" but forever in recovery, a person like me, whose tendency is codependency, has to take it one day at a time and be very conscious of how we interact with the people who continually impact our lives with their demons. 

​

I was just reading yet another article painting Millenials  in a negative light (seems to be the thing right now) and I wondered to myself "what generation am I considered a member of anyway?" At 38, I seem a little too old to be a Millenial, but a little too young to be a member of Generation X. I looked it up and, sure enough, my birth year of 1980 lands right on the cusp. As one site puts it, 38 years of age is the "oldest possible Millenial", like I'm some kind of rare relic still roaming the Earth, yet also young enough to be considered at least snowflake-light. In other words, the best of both worlds.

My twenty-year reunion is coming up next weekend.
TWENTY.
FREAKING.
YEARS.
Once the shock of that number has passed, what starts to set in is the realization that the dress rehearsal phase of life is over--it's showtime. It's been showtime.
​

I walked into the spa last week to get a long overdue facial (long overdue in the sense that I'm 37 & never had one before). The aesthetician asked me to lie on the table under a bright light to take a closer look.

​“We'll definitely need to work on the dark circles under your eyes--are they naturally this dark or have you had trouble sleeping?"
"Well I haven't had REM sleep since 2014, so..."
"And wow, your skin appears dehydrated...are you drinking enough water?"
"Hmm..Probably not.”
​

Earlier this week, as one of my students shared her biographical research report on Walt Disney, I remembered writing my own paper about him in sixth grade. My family had just moved to Florida from West Virginia and, having always been fascinated with all things Disney, I was super excited to now be living a little closer to the magic. I worked my tail off on that paper--I did my research, wrote in my neatest cursive, and just to throw in some flair, I cut out some pictures from Disney books I had at home and glued them to the cover for decoration (this was long before the days of internet cut + paste). I included my own dreams of working at Disney World one day in the conclusion. I anxiously awaited my teacher's response, but she was not pleased. "I'm shocked to get this level of effort from you...you normally hand in such great work. Cutting and pasting pictures from a book? You're going to have to do better than this if you plan on working for Disney one day," she laughed.
​

This is one of my favorite pieces of wisdom because I’ve found it to be so true in my own life. Any problem I've stuffed down, pushed aside, or ignored, only came back stronger until I dealt with it.

The "escalating whispers" in my life have come in many forms over the years, but one I continued to ignore most was the call of vulnerability — to allow the world to see me as I was, the real me, flaws & all. I spent most of my life having only surface-level friendships but very few close friends...and never really a best friend because the criteria for being someone’s BEST friend is intimacy.
​

Many, many years ago in my early twenties, I did something that NO woman in her early twenties EVER does: I fell for the wrong guy.

Shocking, I know.

The problem with falling for the wrong guy in your twenties is that you don't realize he's the wrong guy until after the fact and you need LOTS and LOTS of proof before you realize it. You're like the world's worst juror--overwhelming evidence, no conviction. Or you convict, acquit...convict, acquit...

Oh, the drama. Here’s just a few of the ways I figured out that he was the wrong guy.
​

​This is such an unreal post to write.  I still can't wrap my head around how it's possible to be told you have a perfectly healthy baby at 13 weeks, who showed no signs of issues on the genetic screening test and was moving around like crazy in front of us on the ultrasound screen, to being told your baby has no heartbeat at the 17 week visit.  There's nothing that prepares you for the grief of being blindsided by that.  All I could do was writhe on the table screaming out in shock, disbelief, and pain as I watched a second doctor look at me with sympathy in her eyes and shake her head "no", confirming my nightmare was real.  I wanted to crawl out of my skin, run out the room, catch my breath again, take the last five minutes of my life back.  As I sit here five days later I've accepted he's gone, but I'm nowhere near a place where I can understand why.  And I realize that day may never come.