Thank you sincerely for your support of Mona’s Musings with a Hint of Romance for so long. I apologize for having been absent from blogsphere while writing my book, Wife for Life: The Power to Succeed in Marriage, available in early 2013.

The project has taken all my concentration throughout 2 years of research (including analyzing over 100 marriage books and academic studies) and one full year of intense writing. A top NY literary agent, as well as the former editor of Ladies Home Journal and Parents magazine are heavily involved, as well as a team of women who are managing other aspects of the project.

I would dearly love your support because Wife for Life is not only a book, but a crusade encouraging and empowering women to succeed at lifelong marriage.

You are warmly invited to read what motivates me and everyone supporting this project; as well the beginning of the book (including the account of my own near-divorce) at: RamonaZabriskie.com

You can also subscribe to my new W4L Blog there. My first post went up Saturday: Can Breaking Dawn Break Your Marriage?

I would also love to connect with you at Ramona Zabriskie Author on FB. Your LIKE would mean a lot to me personally and helps more than you know.

I look very forward to resuming our blogger-friendship at RamonaZabriskie.com now that I have my head out of the books and my fingers are not glued to the keyboard quite so much!

Love, Mona

“The spell survives, and just as powerfully as if the natal spot were an earthly paradise. So has it been in my case.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

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I was one of those teenagers who left the old home town at the first opportunity, but not because I wanted to. Opportunity called me away. I still have very deep feelings for beautiful, quirky Olympia, Washington and am glad my parents still live there. After spending last weekend at my 35th high school reunion, seeing all the old faces, I felt more in love with Olympia’s east side than ever. So here’s my little IPhone homage to the capital city on the bay, Puget Sound’s postcard.

My daughter, Hannah, is a professional genealogist who works for the Oregon Historical Society. She has created a blog about our fascinating ancestry in the Pacific Northwest, dominated by mariners:Pioneers on the Waterways of the Pacific Northwest.  As for related Musings, you will enjoy Where I Love Best: America’s Pacific Northwest about my feelings at our homecoming after 13 months in Europe, as well as this tribute to my parents including their origins and commitment to Olympia: No Place Like Home.

 

Wife for Life: The Power to Succeed in Marriage update: Over 65,000 words, 2 (out of 10) chapters to go. Digital publication, website, and social sites coming soon!

 

Related Musings:

It’s Smashing Being Grandma

Let’s Hear It for the Boy

With the backing and direction of a top New York literary agent and with the support and expertise of my recently assembled “DREAM TEAM”,

my new book….

WIFE FOR LIFE: THE POWER TO SUCCEED IN MARRIAGE

is coming together FAST and I beg you to stay closely tuned for all kinds of thrilling announcements coming very soon via Mona’s Musings on Facebook and at Twitter including BRAND NEW accounts at all three. (YES! that includes a brand new blog and website!)

In the meantime, you can spin along with us by following the Dream Team at Bri Colorful. Bri will be keeping everyone abreast of the process in the coming forth of WIFE FOR LIFE. Her first post is Old World Authorship Meets New World Collaboration and she will have another out this week introducing the DREAM TEAM.

I would also LOVE it if you would enjoy my WIFE SUPPORT series at MMB Community, which has been running for about six months. The latest…

WIFE SUPPORT SIX: SEVEN: HUSBANDS AND HOUSEWORK

posted just today.

Stay with me and stay in love. I’m going to need you!

He was worried.
Mostly about what he might be when he grew up.

A fireman?

A jockey?

Maybe a gymnast.

His Grammy thought he should be on Broadway.

For a day or two, there was golf.

And swimming in an Olympic size pool.

They even bought him an astronaut uniform.
Just in case.

The most serious consideration was a Ninja.

The least serious was a catalog model.
(Too much holding still.)

For all the fuss and nail biting though..

he already knew…
deep down…
all along…
what he wanted to be…

most of all:

SUPER DAD
to a little boy
who could be anything.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SON!

“It is because of the years invested that
friends are able to put us in touch with happy times in the past”
Dr. Wonnell Cowan & Dr. Melyn Kinder in Women Men Love, Women Men Leave

********************************************

I’m so happy. Dale and I are in California for the next couple of weeks. It’s not a vacation. In fact, I’m going to be holed up working at the Residence Inn in Palo Alto while he’s working at company headquarters in Mountain View. But that doesn’t matter. The happiness comes from being both apart and together: apart in doing what we are passionate about and together in being passionate about each other.

In the old days, I couldn’t travel with Dale. Not often. But in these new days, when we’re old, I can go with him and he really likes that. I really like that. We like it so much because we are friends.

Best friends.

It’s a sad thing to think how many marriages dissolve before friendship can ripen. You have to pass through fall and winter before spring—and finally summer. And it ‘s a funny thing how many people think you can’t be friends and lovers at the same time.

Best friends make the best lovers.

After one of our easy evenings this week, after conversation bubbled and ebbed and spurted and stilled, after we edited my book to death and then solved the world’s problems by putting our brains together, I wanted so much to put our lips together.

I leaned back in my chair so that the feet came off the floor. “Hey, you know what?”

He stood up to go to the fridge. “What.”

“We’ve been friends a long time.”

I have just finished studying my fourtieth book on marriage and am to the point that I’m ready to write my own book. In fact, I’ve finished the first several thousand words. It is completely different than anything I have written on romance and marriage; it is spilling out of me like magic – clear as a bell – non-stop; a whole new paradigm I have not heard or seen anywhere, plunked down, the full score, in my brain. I have, in fact, sat at the computer for three days straight without getting dressed.

When it’s over, the battle will have just begun. Though I’ve been doing some speaking already, I expect to put a lot more energy and resources into reaching wives, especially young wives, in live presentations, webinars, and conference calls. My blog will go VERY live and I’ll pump out the podcasts and newsletters. I expect it will be my personal focus and passion for the next ten to twenty years of my life–next in importance to my own relationships. And though I will be just one voice, I visualize becoming mann voices: wives supporting wives.

In the meantime, I’m withdrawing from as many of my regular activities as possible so as to concentrate on writing the book: serious musing. It’s the great wrestle of the writer to find time and space and privacy, a match  I refuse to lose this time. This is a hill that I will not retreat from, not until I can wave my book from the top! I will bring you with me, post updates on the way. (Do you know how scary it is just to say that out loud? But commitment is the name of THE game, isn’t it?  Got to commit.)

Spring is the time for new beginnings, and my new book.

Please wait.

“If you want to be successful, it’s just this simple: Know what you are doing,
love what you are doing, and believe in what you are doing.” ~ Will Rogers

“Unless we make Christmas an occasion to share our blessings,
all the snow in Alaska won’t make it “white”. ~ Bing Crosby

Click here to view the embedded video.

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!

Lean into the wind
Let it freshen our sails
Give us strength and energy
A love so born of trial and storm
Will last all eternity.

On the best, most thrilling day of my life, I wore my mother’s wedding dress. Snowflakes cut out of plain white paper decorated the walls of the gym. Guests ate homemade sheet cake. I wore a ring bought by his father. And thank goodness someone took a Polaroid photo.

He had promised to give me “a beautiful life” and I believed him. Though he was nineteen without a rudder and I was eighteen without a paddle, we set sail anyway, thinking our waves would be ripples and our winds nothing more than breezes.

The storms came of course, and we held on with a white-knuckle grip. Shouting through the howling mayhem, our faces drenched with the salty spray of tears, ducking the wild yardarms of fate and circumstance and false expectation that threatened to toss us overboard, we managed to stay afloat by batting down the hatches.

And when the doldrums left us depressed and dangling in seas disturbingly still, we sweated it out until an invisible force swelled the sails with new purpose.

Of course, we had to work hard, if not frantically, at keeping our hull intact; sharp rock formations and icebergs hid on every latitude. We did our best to avoid them, but when our ship took on water faster than the two of us could bail it away, we dove below the surface to assess and repair the damage.

The greatest challenge I think though – when two little people try to sail around the world – is the tendency to  fight over the wheel and the compass. We overcame near mutiny time and again by taking turn at watch and remembering that every ship needs a captain and a smart, loyal mate.

So, here we are, thirty-four years later, heading into the sunset of our lives.

Your cheeks are ruddy my dear, from weathering the toughest stuff nature can throw at at man, and my hands are calloused from scrubbing the deck, but I think we are beautiful.

Let’s keep sailing.

Click here to view the embedded video.

 Happy Anniversary to Captain O my Captain!

Last year’s anniversary Musing:
Forever Backwards Forever Forward Forever Now

Photos by Mona

“A good marriage is the union of two good forgivers.” – Ruth Bell Graham

If I were writing a book about marriage (and I am), the very last chapter would be on forgiveness. That’s a figurative way of saying that forgiveness is Advanced Living 500; it is the graduate school of relations. The smartest, most spiritual, most mature people on earth grapple with ascending this Mt. Everest, but like those who make it to the top say, the view is worth it.

Standing at the summit, with the crystal breeze blowing in my face, I think I can say, that, really, to be just about perfect, and therefore to have a just-about-perfect marriage, we only have to master two things: PURE LOVE (which includes a hefty amount of self-sacrifice) and FORGIVENESS (which often includes a significant measure of repentance).

At this precise moment, I am feeling mighty fine about my progress on both counts. The sky is clear, no clouds on any horizon. I feel fairly acclimated to the rarefied atmosphere. As my boots dig into the ice and the flag of truce waves triumphant, it seems my membership in the elite club of Superior Spouses is secure.

Then…crrrraaaaacccck.

Thunder rolls out of nowhere, the earth begins to shake, the mountain opens up, and suddenly – I am in a familiar crevasse – not that far actually, from base camp (my wedding day).

I have to choose again. To ascend or not to ascend. To forgive or not to forgive. To repent or not to repent. To love or not to love.

I have to choose again. And again. And again. And again.

And so does he.

Thankfully, forgiveness is not an emotion; nothing so elusive as that. It’s a choice. And I can make a choice. So, I scrounge through my backpack of mountain-climbing paraphernalia and pull out the three tools that will get me out of here, back into the sunlight.

*First: ASSIGN MY LOVED ONE VALUE AGAIN.

Accept that he’s not a monster just chomping at the bit to toss me over the edge; in fact, he’s in his own crevasse right now, dreading hypothermia as much as I am.

*Second: DECIDE NOT TO TAKE VENGEANCE ON HIM.

Put away the ice ax and screws.

*And Third: RESTORE OUR RELATIONSHIP.

This snow bridge may take time and careful testing. Important: get an early start. These slick slopes are easier to cross in the “morning” of – soon after – an incident. As the “day” (week, months, years) wears on, the mushier (more difficult) they get.

If practice makes perfect, my husband should be a world champion mountaineer by now. We both should. The rumbles and tumbles keep coming, but I think, after 34 years, all in all, we are increasingly expert at reading the weather and side-stepping falling rock; spending less energy crawling out of crevasses, and more time enjoying the summit. Thankfully, we have survived this thing called “marriage”: unquestionably the most daring undertaking in the human experience, because we refused to be buried alive by our avalanches of pride.

(Experience has taught us that if one climber falls, the whole expedition is in jeopardy.)

So, fellow adventurers: no need to fear! Though you may not always like being tied to the same rope as your partner, as long as it’s a line fixed on conquering together, anchored in forgiveness, you can avoid the hazards and minimize the risks.

And believe me – it’s all worth it. The view IS SPECTACULAR!

************************************

“Acceptance of what has happened in the past is the best way to change the future. You cannot change the fact that it happened. Why not accept that it did—face reality—and go from there?” Joe Beam, Becoming One

(*For more on the three steps of forgiveness see the book and author cited above: 2010, p. 119, Simon & Schuster, Inc., Kindle Edition)