Our youngest daughter and I play cello duets.
While neither of us is Yo-Yo Ma, I have experience powerful healing in this shared experience with our fifteen year old daughter.
Never mind she plays much better than I, her
Of Cello Duets, Adolescence and The Art of Living …. Read More »
My brother continued pleading to attend the sports camp.
Two days prior to his fellow teammates and coach leaving for the summer sports camp, my brother made a final plea for my mother to allow him to go.
Irate and frustrated my mother held her ground,
Of Sports Camps, “Beloved” and Fears … Read More »
Despite all that I endured with my mother under her care, or lack of it, I was never ambivalent about my ability to love.
Even in the worst of times during my childhood, and while undergoing the nightmare of relationship with my mother, it has always seemed the easiest thing to love, the hardest to mistreat and push away, speak harshly to.
I cannot imagine being to my children as my
Of Ambivalence, Epiphanies, and Sonnets of Compassion … Read More »
Something shifted inside me the day of the car accident, when the driver of the Jeep SUV slammed into the back of my SUV. Being hit from behind unearthed, exhumed all my fears of being caught off guard, being ambushed.
That’s what it felt like each time my mother criticized me and/or as a result of the anger and rage she experienced either in response to me and my actions of events out in the world, physically punished me.
As a child you believe that your
Of SUV’s, Omnipotence and Depression … Read More »
Not a day has passed during the three weeks since posting my last blog that I have not felt guilty for failing to hold to my schedule of blogging.
It is a promise I give to myself, and a responsibility I maintain as a published writer.
The nagging feeling that has haunted me now abates as I write this post.
But what occurs when life happens and disrupts our goals and the tasks we have set our energies to?
What do we do when
Of Life, Revelations, and Our Differences That Bind … Read More »
Elizabeth Kolbert asks in her New Yorker article, Spoiled Rotten, “Why do kids rule the roost?”
More specifically she poses the question, “Why are American kids so spoiled?”
On spending several months living with and observing the Matsigenka tribe of the Peruvian Amazon, Carolina Izquierdo, a medical anthropologist at UCLA, grew impressed with the helpfulness and responsibility of Yanira, a six-year-old girl and member of a family within the Matsigenka tribe of 12,000.
Dr. Izquierdo witnesses Yanira’s self-less behavior, what some might call daily altruism, when she and Yanira accompanied a third family of the Matsigenka on an expedition down the Urubamba River for gathering leaves from the kapashi palm tree used to build roofs for the Matsigenka’s houses.
During the trip, Yanira, not a member of the family she and Dr. Izquierdo had accompanied, assisted others in performing daily chores and tasks without having to be asked.
Yanira made herself useful and all the while, Kolbert writes, “ … asked for nothing …”
This ability to give assistance without request, and in so doing,
Of American Children, The Matsikenga, and Self-Absorption … Read More »
A former prosecuting attorney, now full-time mom and blog host, recently shared that many mothers with promising careers, had upon giving birth transformed their job skills into home businesses that allow them establish a base for present and future income, and continue pursing our passion, while maintaining the ability to shape our work schedules around our work that we equally love, that of wife and mother to our husbands and children.
Like the former attorney now mom and blogger, I, a
Of Bloggers, Mothers’ Work, and ‘Ann Romney and Me’ … Read More »