...but just barely. Life is a little overwhelming at the moment. But I promise to return to blogging as soon as I am able (not as soon as it calms down because then will never happen.)
Please return soon to the A Wild Ride Blog. In the meantime, enjoy all the great information and stories on the A Wild Ride Web site.
Cheers, Elizabeth
Photo by Mary Pohlmann
If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. ~Nadine Stair
Photo by Mary Pohlmann
"Pondering" -- I'm not sure this is the right word. It's not really "meditating" or even "introspection." It's more like "thinking" but without results.
Now that the weather is warming a bit, I've been "pondering" how the fates brought me to this time and place. How did I managed to have two children and neither one cares what I have to say? Most of the time I'm not sure I care what I have to say. Blah. Blah. Blah. Why do I bother to remind my children to take out the garbage, do their homework, eat their vegetables, put gas in the car?
Maybe I'll save my energy today. Instead I'll ponder on how a single flower can grow through a crack in the sidewalk, or how the face of a newborn makes everyone smile (even though I think most newborns look like Yoda). I'll think about how the sound of frogs croaking tells me it's almost spring or how the smell of steaks grilling reminds me of my childhood home.
To all my fellow stressed-out parents, I wish you a moment to ponder.
Photo © Gethin James - Fotolia.com
Have you read Mary's Strategies for Building a Toolbox of Comfort on the A Wild Ride Web site this month? Mary offers some excellent ideas for Breathing and Relaxation Techniques. My personal favorite is: "Focus on your breathing to reduce tension, slow abdominal breathing – 8 breaths in – 5 breaths out. The slower you breathe the calmer you will become."
Mary also suggests that you find a quiet place where you won’t be interrupted for 15-20 minutes. Okay, I can usually find the quiet place, but the problem is that my mind won't stay quieted for more than 30 seconds.
So, for those of us who have trouble letting our mind go and/or simply breathing, I offer this idea from Boston yoga and meditation instructor Joshua Summers (excerpted from Whole Living: Body + Soul, February 2008):
"Start Slowly. If you'd like to meditate but feel you don't have the time, start with one minute a day. The amount of time itself is somewhat irrelevant. They key is to start with something manageable and build on that. After a week, add another minute, and keep adding a minute every week. In 20 weeks, you'll be sitting for 20 minutes."
Okay, one minute. I think I can do that. I'll keep you posted.
Any other relaxation strategies? Send them to me or to Mary Scribner.
Photo © Saniphoto - Fotolia.com
From Terri Mauro's About.com/Parenting Special Needs Children:
Children with special needs often react badly to stress; they need us to remain calm and even-tempered even in the face of the most frightening symptoms or the most provocative behavior. A stressed-out, tired-out, emotionally drained parent can't provide that; but how do we manage to recharge our own batteries when it takes so much energy to care for our kids? Here's how to find everything from a respite provider to a support group to an e-mail list of understanding friends. Read Respite for Parents: Finding Ways to Take Care of Yourself.
For more on Respite Care, visit the National Respite Network.
Also, check out Terri's Web site. My favorite entry is How to Worry More Constructively.
My son's teacher, and our good friend, suffered a major stroke earlier in the school year. His recovery is slow but steady. He's an amazing man. His wife is an inspiration to all of us as we individually deal with our own challenges. Almost every day, Judy writes on her husband's Care Page, letting all of their family and friends know what major or minor progress Kim made since the last time she posted. Today, at the bottom of her update, Judy wrote:
May I continue to trust the turbulence of this river we're in.
Thanks, Judy! I needed that reminder. ~ Elizabeth
© Impala - Fotolia.com
Today is my birthday and I wanted to share a sense of celebration. Rarely do we Mothers take a moment for ourselves, even on our own birthday. For some reason, we feel it's selfish.
So, take a few minutes today to relax, breathe deeply, and honor Mothers young and old, with special emphasis on yourself.
Elizabeth
Another Love Note from Terri Mauro at About.com.
You Are a Good Parent
There may be people in your life who would tell you different. Your discipline seems too strict, or too lax. You don't shuttle your child to all the right activities. You're not pushing her to be at the top of her class -- happy and passing is a pretty good goal. Sometimes he acts up in church or melts down at the mall, and you feel those judgmental stares. You may hear that you're causing your child's problems, or handling them all wrong. But you know your child better than anybody. You know what works; you know what he can handle; you create an environment in which she can be successful. Doing what's best for your child, without worrying what others might think -- isn't that just what any good parent would do?
Another Love Note from Terri Mauro at About.com.
You Are Tough!
Those wimps on "Survivor" have nothing on you. "Outwit - Outplay - Outlast" could be your motto, whether you're dealing with manipulative children, uncooperative educators, unresponsive insurance companies, unsympathetic family members, therapists who refuse to listen and doctors who don't seem to care. You stay focused, you develop your strategies, you form alliances, and you do what needs to be done. Because you are understanding and caring and loving, people may mistake you for a pushover. You may even prefer cooperation and compromise to force and subterfuge. But that doesn't mean you don't have the latter two weapons at your disposal. Your other motto? "Whatever works."
In honor of Mother's Day and National Women's Health Week, Terri Mauro, the guide for Parenting Special Needs Guide on About. com, offers a series of Love Notes for Mothers. Here is one of my favorites. Check out her site for other words of inspiration.
I received this recently from a friend. A good friend. A woman who I know I can count on. Always. A woman who is a mom and who knows what it is like to have her hands full with childhood needs, sometimes ones that nothing in life seems to fulfill. I don't know who wrote it, but it speaks to me. It speaks to the power of trust and the power of people who truly understand.
Time passes. Life happens. Distance separates. Children grow up. Jobs come and go. Love waxes and wanes. Men don't do what they're supposed to do. Hearts break. Parents die. Colleagues forget favors. Careers end. BUT... sisters are there, no matter how much time and how many miles are between you. A girl friend is never farther away than needing her can reach.
When you have to walk that lonesome valley and you have to walk it by yourself, the women in your life will be on the valley's rim, cheering you on, praying for you, pulling for you, intervening on your behalf, and waiting with open arms at the valley's end. Sometimes, they will even break the rules and walk beside you... or come in and carry you out. Girlfriends, mothers, grandmothers, daughters, granddaughters, daughters-in-law, sisters, sisters-in-law, aunties, nieces, cousins, and extended family, all bless our life! The world wouldn't be the same without women, and neither would I.
When we began this adventure called womanhood [and motherhood], we had no idea of the incredible joys or sorrows that lay ahead. Nor did we know how much we would need each other. Every day.
The month of May is a good time to reflect and evaluate our role as mothers. We know very well how vigilant we can be while nurturing others, especially our challenging children. Why are we not as dedicated to ourselves? What would you suggest to a stressed girlfriend to help her lighten up and feel better? How about encouraging her to focus, for a change, on what she can do for herself. And for yourself, don’t wait for a crisis to hit. Begin taking better care of yourself today! Here are a few self-care suggestions:
• Start small. Set aside even 10 minutes a day to do something that you love doing.
• Build a strong support network of reliable resources – friends, family, co- workers, spouses, babysitters, social networks. Consider joining a support group, or create one.
• Notice when you feel irritable or judgmental or find yourself complaining a lot. These are red flags alerting you to the fact that you are producing way too much cortizol (stress hormones).
• Appreciate your accomplishments, even the small ones. Give yourself a pat on the back when you remember to breathe instead of snapping at your child or grinding your teeth.
Whether you are just beginning to practice self-nurturing, or are an old hand at it, remember these three operative affirmations when guilt, fatigue or "I just don't have time" set in and doing something for you seems out of the question:
• I deserve to appreciate and take care of myself.
• My family deserves to have me take care of myself.
• When I feel refreshed, I am happier and a more patient, less frustrated mom.
For more self-care ideas, visit Strategies.
Look forward to how good you're going to feel - Mary
And it should be a hot topic every week, every day, every minute, every second, every nanosecond, every breath. OK, I'm getting carried away! But you get the point. It is just so easy to ignore, shove aside our health needs because that thing called LIFE gets in the way. We're caring for children, sometimes very difficult children, working, living, and before we know it our time, resources and focus have vanished.
But ignoring our health is a DANGER! DANGER! I know that expression, "If you have your health, you have everything." Or is it, "Without your health you don't have anything?" But either way, it's true. Check-ups, prevention, information, choices, initiative – they are all important to maximizing your health. They help us be happy. They help us be effective and patient parents. Here are a few good resources to check out:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offers a site just for women. You'll find information on healthy living, safety, hotlines, facts and stats, the Office of Women's Health, what's new, tips for a healthy life, and much more.
National Women's Health Resource Center . Read about National Women's Health week, contraception health, health topics from A - Z, columns, news room, and lots of other great information.
The National Institutes of Health has a website called Medline Plus that includes a women's section. The site offers important topics like domestic violence, osteoporosis, breast reconstruction, cervical health, gay and lesbian health, and heart hearth. This is matter-of-fact material with good definitions and many great links.
I hope you (and I) will create a little time to look at these and other resources. Keep them handy. You never know when you might want a little information. However, be sure that if you are concerned about a possible problem, don't overload yourself with too much information. Take your ideas to your health care provider and talk them over.
Here's to your health,
Nina
In honor of Mother's Day, some of us at A Wild Ride want to share our own mother's stories. Here's the first in the series:
Yes. My mother did not know how to slow down her life. Often she couldn't. And more often, she wouldn't. But the drive that kept her going began years earlier. The youngest of six in an immigrant family, she was one part babied and one part emboldened. Nervous around anger, but willing to go the distance when she needed to.
As a young child, herself a religious, discriminated-against minority, my mother's best friend was a little black girl with flaming red hair. For this, other children threw rocks at her head and called her names that make my ears shrivel. My mom, emboldened, played with her friend anyway.
My mother was a nurse. Her heavy, gray, wool nursing cape lives on an old hanger in my closet, years away from when she earned it – the rascal Jewish girl in a catholic hospital's nursing program. (Yes, she and friends did short-sheet the young nuns' beds. And the nuns loved it.) My grandfather, small and peaceful by the time I knew him, discouraged my mother from becoming a nurse. "I don't want a daughter of mine emptying bedpans!" he declared. (Only to trade his trepidations for pride three years later.) She went anyway.
She never wavered in her commitment to health. As a Mother & Baby public health nurse, she drove the Arizona desert, treating families and their newborns, some living in piano boxes to escape the blistering sun and winds. One day, during our stint in Arizona, my five-billion-watt brainy older brother's fifth grade teacher hauled him into the paint room and whooped his behind with a paddle. She was no doubt thinking, "This hurts me more than it hurts you." Yeah, right.
My mother, still nervous around the beast, anger, deftly walked into the principal's office, her curly hair smoking. "It might be okay with the school district to hit children, but it's NOT okay with me," she said. "I don't spank my children and neither should you. Ever!"
My mother hovered, always, around the bottom line. My dad was great. He was active in scouts, took us fishing, taught me to swim. He cooked salami and eggs and grilled steaks. He ironed his own shirts. He loved us. He loved and supported my mom. But at the end of the day (actually, all day) my mother held down the domestic fort. For someone called "Babe" by her parents and siblings, she felt immense responsibility for our family. As my father's heart troubles worsened, she worked even harder to balance our family axis. It didn't bend her, but it took its tool.
Study. Learn. Study. Learn. An RN and always top dog wherever she worked – she was even MY boss one summer – my mother burrowed into the academic world she loved. Not because she was motivated by competition and ego, but because she loved to learn, expand her boundaries, move beyond the echo of "I don’t want a daughter of mine emptying bed pans!"
My mother went back to school and earned an MA, MPH, and a PhD. At the age of 82, just retired, she had a Bat Mitzvah. Standing proud on the bema (podium) with the other women in her class, my mother read in Hebrew and delivered a talk that – as it should – thrilled her to the bone. I'm not sure an audience was even necessary!
As ambitious as I am to accomplish a lot during my lifetime, and leave even a tiny scratch of hope on the surface of many people's lives, I do not strive to be Energizer Bunny II. The consequences to personal wellbeing are too great. Yet I feel immense awe and tender appreciation for the trail my mother blazed, for the love she encircled me and my family with, and what she infused into the world she left behind.
Lessons I Learned from My Own Mother
Happiness is not a place.
Be frugal – not cheap.
You can do anything you want to do. (Just do it with dignity and class.)
Enjoy life now – don’t wait until the kids are grown, or you retire, or you have enough money.
Believe in yourself (even if no one else, except your mother, will).
Give people the benefit of the doubt – most people do not set out to hurt you deliberately .
Don’t play the victim role (it’s very unbecoming).
Don’t wear blue eye shadow (you look like a “streetwalker”).
Focus on your good health while you have it – you may lose it without notice.
As a mother, do the best you can. But remember you will make mistakes and some of those mistakes will be huge.
Love your own mother now with all her faults because all too soon she’ll be gone.
If your own mother has already passed away, remember her, faults and all, with love and understanding and forgiveness.
Photo by Mary Pohlmann
This afternoon, I read a wonderful article about mothers, our commitment to children, our abhorrence of war, our desire for peace.
Here are a few excerpts. You can read the whole article on the The Nation's blog:
The Real Mother’s Day Tradition
"Arise then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be of water or of tears!" So begins the original Mother's Day proclamation of 1870, written by Julia Ward Howe, who also authored "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" as an anti-slavery activist in 1862.
In a new video by Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films, in collaboration with CODEPINK, Gloria Steinem explains the original intent behind Ward Howe's Mother's Day idea: "Mother's Day really was in its origin an anti-war day, an anti-war statement. Julia Ward Howe was sickened by what had happened during the Civil War--the loss of life, the carnage. And she created Mother's Day as a call for women all over the world, to come together, and create ways of protesting war, of making a kind of alternate government that could finally do away with war as an acceptable way of solving conflict."
The video renews the original Mother's Day call for women's leadership in pursuing peace, offering support for the organization Victims No More as a concrete way to take action and help Iraqi children who have been wounded in the war.
Alfre Woodard [actress]explains her motivation to take part in the video and support this Mother's Day renewal: "My mother used to say all the time, ‘I look after people's kids, because one day I know somebody will look after my kids. I feed people's kids, because I know somebody one day will feed my kids.' That informs a lot of who I am as a mother. That I know I'm not only parenting Mavis and Duncan, but I'm responsible for every child that comes through."
"Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone bear and know the cost?" Ward Howe wrote in a journal entry.
Chocolates are great, and should be given frequently and generously to mothers, partners and friends alike. But there is nothing – nothing – sweeter than peace. Julia Ward Howe understood that, and this weekend we mothers resolve once again to pursue her cause.
Go the The Nation's site to read about Peace Pies and peace activities taking place all over the world this Mother's Day week-end.
Happy Mother's Day ~ Nina
I recently came across a site called The Comfort Connection while researching a blog entry for Mother’s Day. My theme: Mother’s Day is not always a joyous time, especially for mothers of challenging children whose special needs and narcissistic behavior can spoil even a cup of tea.
The Comfort Connection is the creation of Renee Wood, founder of the Comfort Company, an online retail store that specializes in the design and sale of meaningful sympathy gifts. Renee wrote a piece titled “Helping Moms Cope When Mother’s Day Hurts” geared to acknowledging grieving mothers. “It’s important to remember those moms who have had a failed pregnancy or who lost a child at any age,” she writes.
Her “ten simple ways to reach out to a grieving mother” applies to mothers of challenging children as well. Many of these mothers will not even hear the phrase “Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!” let alone hear words of acknowledgment or appreciation.
So, with a nod of thanks to Renee at The Comfort Connection, I adapt some of her suggestions.
1. Recognize that you are a mother, but acknowledge that you too have suffered a loss – a loss of the dream.
2. Buy a flower -- put it in a vase in your bedroom.
3. Light a candle and sit still for a while. Mediate or just enjoy the silence.
4. Don’t try to minimize the loss of the dream.
5. Practice self-care. Take time for you. Schedule a massage. Go for a walk.
6. Chill a bottle of bubbly (champagne or sparkling cider). On Mother’s Day, grab a book, the newspaper, a magazine, and pour your bubbly into a special glass, sit back & relax (even if it’s only long enough to down a glass or two.)
7. Send a card to another mother of a challenging child – a mom who is also unlikely to receive a note of thanks from her own child. My personal favorite this year is:
“Cheers! It’s Mother’s Day….Not traditionally a drinking holiday, but why the hell not, I say!”
To all my fellow mothers in the world, those with typical children, those with challenging children, and those grieving the death of a child, I send you the wish of comfort when times are hard and understanding when you’ve had enough. I hope you wish the same for me.
Photo by Mary Pohlmann
The 7th annual National Women's Health week is May 13 – 19. The week is dedicated to raising awareness and educating women about improving their physical and mental health. This effort calls attention to the importance of preventative care and health screenings and encourages women to take time and “reconnect to your health.”
Participating organizations have identified five key areas of healthy living; visiting a health professional once a year, eating well, exercising, not smoking, and following basic safety rules.
If you haven’t already had your check-up this year, now would be a good time to schedule an appointment with your health care professional. What a perfect Mothers Day gift to yourself; the gift of self-care.
In addition to caring for your health, make sure you include having lunch at your favorite restaurant and enjoy a brisk walk afterward. Speaking of walking, I’ve just learned about the WOMAN fitness challenge that begins on Mother’s Day, May 13. I’m joining women from all over the country to embark on an eight-week walking challenge to improve my health. This program encourages participants to walk 10,000 steps or get 30 minutes of moderate physical exercise a day. The challenge includes motivational e-mails and health tips to help you reach your goal. Join me in the walking challenge. My goal is to walk at least 10,000 steps a day without leaving town. Check it out at National Women's Health Information Center . You can register to walk and choose from six different virtual routes across America. I’m still deciding on my route but I’d love some company. I have my pedometer ready. You can order yours from Oregon Scientific. Go to Weather Connection and search "pedometer." See you on the road (virtual, that is).
Let's face it. We mothers of challenging children are a special breed when it comes to Mother's Day. As Terri Mauro, Guide on About.com's Parenting Special Needs site, suggests "things like sleep. Understanding. Revenge." are much more appropriate for our mother's day than the traditional gifts. On her site this month, Terri wrote:
To my loving partner in parenting:
I know you're trying to figure out a Mother's Day present for me (and if you aren't, take this as a big, fat hint).
Jewelry is a lovely thought, but not exactly practical, given that our child might steal, break, perseverate on, or require us to hock anything nice to pay for medical expenses. Candy is always appreciated, but since I've just consumed all the children's Easter sweets to save them from obesity, diabetes, and allergens, I'm not really in the mood.
Instead, honey, why not pick one of these gifts I'd really love. They may take a little more effort than something in the Hallmark aisle, but they'll make a big difference to me.
To read Terri's list of ten possible gifts, visit A Special-Needs Mother's Day Wish List.
Terri has two children with special needs: a 17-year-old with language-based learning disorders and an 14-year-old with fetal alcohol effects, both adopted from Russia in 1994.
Terri is the author of The Everything Parent's Guide to Sensory Integration Disorder. Her website Mothers With Attitude, offering "humor and help for adoptive moms, special-needs moms, any old moms at all," was recognized as a USA Today Hot Site and a Good Housekeeping Site of the Day.
