Remembering When

Remember When...

Do you remember when we went to the American Girl Store when I was seven?

And going to the "Dora" show and getting the back pack?

Do you remember when we went to the Country Club for the

American Girl tea party? And when Maya was born I sat with you

to hold her?

Do you remember when we were at my conference in 3rd grade and Mrs. Rubel farted?

Making my sea turtle in 4th grade?

When you and the family came to my pre-school circus?

Do you remember when we went exploring together?

You came to my share day in Kindergarten?

The time we went to Madison to have 'the talk?'

These are the special memories I have of you.

Happy Mother's Day!

This is the poem I received from my 12 year old daughter, Peyton, on Mother's Day.

I cried when I read it.  I do remember all these times.(And many more!) 

It does my heart good to know that she does too and she holds them special. 

As a parent, I often find myself remembering the moments where I lost my temper and yelled or slammed a door.  Or the time I left a grocery cart, full of groceries, in the middle of the aisle because of a screaming toddler.  And, yes, the proverbial saying that every mother says through her clenched teeth, "JUST-WAIT-UNTIL-YOUR-FATHER-COMES-HOME!"  As if that ever helped my dear daughters stop the undesired behavior! Can you relate?

And then one day, out of the blue, you get a poem like this; that let's you know YOU HAVE made a difference despite the sinful nature in us.  That your child DOES remember and despite the fact that she rolls her eyes each time we tell her "NO" to a cell phone she still holds special memories of her and I.  That just makes me smile. BIG smile.

How was your Mother's Day? Any thoughts shared by your loved ones to make you feel like you've done the job right?

PS: Peyton peeked at this posted and said that I need to let her know how many 'likes' it got.  I had to remind her that this was a blog and not Facebook.  (LOL)



Writing MoJo

I have been journaling for years.  I have at least a dozen journals going back to 1996!  (Perhaps you can call me a closet blogger) I write feelings, notes, prayers, things I am grateful for, questions, and answers to questions.  You can mostly find me writing in the morning but really if the moment begs a thought...I will write it.

I'll let you in on a secret.  I hated writing. I used to find writing painful.  During my freshman year of college I had an English professor by the name of Anders.  Anders sat me down in her office about mid way into the semester and told me I was a horrible writer.  She told me I had no voice, no fluency, no ingenunity and I wrote way too many sentence fragments.

Nice...huh?  Anders words scarred me and it bothered me that she never taught me what good writing was.

It wasn't until Leaver came into my life that I thought differently about writing.  Not Leaver the soap but Mr. Leaver.  Leaver taught English 102.  I decided to meet with Leaver right away so I could tell him about my struggles with writing.  On the way to his office I remember telling myself not to get worked up...  "You did pass English 101 and you can only do better."  I had brought him some older English papers to read so he could see my terrible writing.  Sitting there in his office brought back painful memories and I am pretty sure my palms were sweaty.  After reading the papers, he removed his glasses and looked at me and replied, "These papers are not terrible."

What? Can you repeat?

He continued with, "You have interesting ideas and voice. If anything needs some work it may be punctuation and we will go over that in class."  I sat stunned in silence.  Oh, what sweet music to my ears and my heart!  My writing mojo was back.  Take that Anders!

Have you ever gotten discouraging advice? What did you do? How have you overcome 'bad' words that someone may have said to you?