*raises right hand*

I, Heather King, do solemnly swear to,

Never say any version of the following to you, ever:

• “OH you think it’s hard now? Just you wait!” (terribly invalidating and unproductive)
• “You just need a break!” (HOW? HOW DO YOU GET A BREAK? And then HOW, HOW IS IT EVER GOING TO BE LONG ENOUGH?)
• “Oh I remember those days!” (No. No I won’t. No matter how clear I think it is, it is not clear.)
• “Well, you’re going to miss this! Mark my words.” (Sure, fine. But that’s not NOW, so…)
• “It goes so fast!” (Yes, in some ways, it does. But no, NOT today.)
• “Those were the best years!” (Yes, they were. And also, NO they were not.)

I will not say these things at the grocery store, the big box store, the gas station, a parking lot or the medical clinic. I will not say them at my home or your home or at church or at the park or a party. I will not say them anywhere. Heather I am.

I, Heather King, upon seeing your sleepy eyes and slumped shoulders, do solemnly swear to,

Always say (and do) the following, always:

• “OOOF, you’re in the trenches. It’ll get better, Mama. I promise.” (Even if it doesn’t get easier, only different, every new mother needs to hear this.)
• “Can I return that cart for you?”
• “It’s okay. When mine were toddlers, they did some crazy stuff too.”
• I will give you a big smile if I see you feeding your baby in public. I don’t care if you will be using your bottle or your breast.
• If your hands (and brain) are full and your toddler is doing all sorts of things while you try to change a diaper/feed the baby/attach the car seat to a cart/etc., I will entertain said toddler with my hilarity.
• “HI! I’ll see you tomorrow, cause that’s when I’m bringing you guys dinner!”
• I will not offer you advice unless you seem to want it/ask for it.
• When you talk about this being hard, I’ll simply listen. Maybe I’ll nod a lot. If I say anything, it will only be to validate you. “YES. It is SO hard.”

Honestly, I won’t remember exactly how hard the earliest years are either. But I will remember that it was such a different kind of hard. That answering to every physical need/want of tiny new people is exhausting in ways that leave you a bathroom break only if you schedule one. I’ll remember that this is the real deal, an initiation into parenting like none of us dreamed. I’ll remember that the me time people told me to keep was elusive not because of martyring, but because life today is one big blur of rapid fire technology, a rat race  of to-do lists and a mostly solo venture into the unknown. I’ll try hard to create community for you because of just that.

I’ll pull out an old email that I sent to my friend Ann and I’ll suddenly remember what it was like on the night I wrote it–every detail of the witching hours, the way I ran from one end of the house to the other back and forth, keeping Elsie from harm and wiping a butt and then another, stirring the dinner and repeating and repeating and picking up and putting down. I was answering and answering and breaking up the fight and carrying the tantruming toddler to her crib for a minute out of my hair. I was asking the boys, again, to pick up all the things and I was noticing that everyone’s fingernails were soooo long and then I put it off again because there was homework and a climbing toddler and everyone was saying MAMA at once. I hadn’t slept but three hours the night before and Ryan was out of town. I hardly ever looked in the mirror for the fright of the darkness under my eyes. When I encountered silence, it was so unknown that it felt eerie rather than peaceful.

I’ll remember that at one time, when I could finally go grocery shopping on my own, leaving the baby and older brothers at home with Daddy, I walked around the store and everything seemed so bright, so colorful, heavenly. I felt like I had a secret. A secret like the one I had about which floor boards would creak and maybe wake the baby.

The later years will prove harder in some ways, yes. We’ll probably really wish we could go back to handling a blow-out diaper in a minivan instead of fighting with a snotty teen. But for now, you better believe you have it hard. You are only one you and there is too much to do and you have no control a lot of the time. Not over time or yourself and especially not bodily functions. It’s gross and so tiring and kind of thankless a lot.

And yet, these really are some of the best years and yes, we will look back on them and think them totally lovely. They are. We can be totally in love with these demanding little creatures and be totally tired and DONE at the same time.

Hang in there, Mama. Don’t forget to give yourself credit for all of the thousands of things you do in just one day. All those babies and toddlers really want is YOU. Sit down, take a deep breath, ignore the mess and focus in on chubby cheeks and wrinkly little pudgy fingers. Sometimes, that’s all you can do.

Mostly, I wish you extra hours of sleep tonight.

Peace.

We let them stay up late. The neighbor boys were out and it was finally so warm and there was so little wind to blast through and take our fun. The boys all had light sabers and Elsie Jane had bubbles and a truck.

That was after she climbed in the minivan (no keys in there, thank God) and blasted the horn by pressing her chest against it.

OH HELLO.

She got really mad when I took her out, kicking and screaming and walking away like I’d just told her to go to bed. But that tantrum was for later.

Now she’s in her bed, calling out over and over Mama, Mama, Mama and there are nights when she only says it a few times. Tonight she’s not giving up because that’s what being over-tired does. The opposite effect. She asks for water and then the next time she has thrown All The Pacifiers out onto the ground into the dark.

At the end of the bed, after my feet there are piles of laundry. After writing this I’ll fold and sort, to be put away tomorrow. Listen To Your Mother is over, and I’ve been slowly catching up. Very slowly. I have that in flux feeling, like I’m hovering just a bit over my life, watching me. I’m waiting to see what comes next. Obviously, there’s the move, but there’s also a hole where Listen To Your Mother planning, collaborating and connecting was and now isn’t. We’re all a little sad. It was such a good night and then there was a joy hangover and then some post-production grief.

Elsie is quiet now and every night I have tea, a routine that settles me in for bedtime and usually I’ve even started drinking it by now. It feels weird to not have it at the same time every night. What a creature of habit I’ve become. Of course when I was a kid I looked at adults and their habits and routines and rituals as boring. I thought the small routines were there for them because they had nothing else to do. Ha!

Now I see that these are the parts of the daily grind we can control. Soft places. The Known. Creature Comforts.

Miles and Asher are asleep in their bunk beds too, and thinking of their sleeping faces reminded me of Mother’s Day, their sweet gifts to me.

Miles filled out a question book about me at school. He said that I’m nice and beautiful, that he would love to snuggle up to me for a day and watch movies together, and that I love drinking coffee and tea.

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This is the 85th installment of Just Write, an exercise in free writing your ordinary and extraordinary moments. {Please see the details here.} I would love to read your freely written words so join me and link up below. You can add the url of your post at any time. Just be sure it’s a link to your Just Write post, not to your main page, and please don’t link to posts that are not freely written in the spirit of capturing moments–you know, don’t link to how-to lists or sponsored posts. Also, please link back to this post in your post so people know where to go if they’d like to join in.

Please take a moment to visit someone else who has linked up! It’s a really good way to meet new writers and get inspired by the meaning behind their moments. Word? Thank you!

When Elsie Jane’s head is on my shoulder and her back has a little curve to it, when her legs are dangling and her hand is patting my back, that’s my favorite. She got sick a few days ago and I held her a lot, her head on my shoulder like that.

She’s starting to say a few more words together and lately sometimes she stops to hug me and then she looks me dead in the eyes and says, Mommy. Home.

She loves it when I’m home, which is most of the time and still she occasionally just stops what she’s doing to point out that this is how she likes it.

Me too.

On Saturday, for most of the day, I wasn’t home because we had rehearsal for Listen To Your Mother. Thursday is our show, at the Riverview Theater in Minneapolis, and how did the time fly like that? Like how our children grow, with so much work and trying and re-starting and then all of the sudden, grown.

I sat in this small room on Saturday and looked around at these women we’ve gotten the chance to meet this way. We are more than lucky. Some have auditioned and performed hundreds of times and others never before until now. Some have children who are grown and some have lost children from this life and some are just beginning to grow families.

We each love the head of one of our children on our shoulder and a hug with back-patting and we always have.

This morning after I rushed the kids to the van and wasn’t patient at all, I came back home and found a note from Miles. It said, Dear Mommy, Thank you!!!  I love you very much! 

How can it be? These little gifts in the midst.

The thread that runs through us all will be felt on Thursday night and tonight I’m so nervous and I’m de-germing the house and texting and texting with the most amazing co-director and producers to ever be teamed up and we’ve grown something.

I can’t wait.

This is the 84th installment of Just Write, an exercise in free writing your ordinary and extraordinary moments. {Please see the details here.} I would love to read your freely written words so join me and link up below. You can add the url of your post at any time. Just be sure it’s a link to your Just Write post, not to your main page, and please don’t link to posts that are not freely written in the spirit of capturing moments–you know, don’t link to how-to lists or sponsored posts. Also, please link back to this post in your post so people know where to go if they’d like to join in.

Please take a moment to visit someone else who has linked up! It’s a really good way to meet new writers and get inspired by the meaning behind their moments. Word? Thank you!

Looking back at the beginning I see this person that I’m not. She’s familiar and still has many of the same parts, like tense shoulders and a sleep-deprived furrowed brow. She is meeting the demands of life as a new mother with a fierce determination and resistance all at once. She is almost always the martyr, trying to win The Hardest Award, a competition created in her own mind, mostly played against her husband. He doesn’t know they’re playing, so he’s always losing, which is her point, I suppose.

Make up the rules and then keep them between yourself and your ruminating mind.

I still do these things, sometimes. I get tired and stressed and fall back into the easiest way, which is the hardest way. Like playing a bass drum in a sound-proof room, alone, expecting the world to sit up and pay attention to the way its too loud for your ears and your nerves.

But no one could hear it at all, so what a waste of time I spent, beating that drum.

I could tell you all the ways I fought for control, but this would be way too long if I did that. From scheduling and reading all the books and way beyond, I was a fighter. If I could just keep going, keep cleaning and straightening and de-germing and living green and buying organic and documenting their every move and and and….

These (and many more) were the ways I tried to keep fear at bay. The fears born of my mind and heart, in me, so I could fight them…could fight myself, I guess.

This is maybe common with first-time mothers, as much as it’s common for many (most likely healthier) women to have a baby and then face the shock that they have no idea what they’re doing with more of a grain of salt. I had friends like this, that came into motherhood around the same time I did. They would just shrug and laugh at themselves, roll their eyes and throw their hands in the air. I don’t know how to get her to sleep?! they’d say, like, OH WELL….

and I was astounded at this. Well….try harder! something in me would say. A baby shouldn’t be up in your bed with you until 11pm! That’s insane! It made me feel as out of control as I was to witness someone else letting things go. I prefer control. I thought part of being a good mother was being in control. Conquer a baby’s sleep issues and you can surely solve every other problem that will ever arise, right?! RIGHT?!!

I was a perfectionist-control-freak-people-pleasing-martyr underneath what may have appeared to those that don’t know me well as confidence and mothering well. I even threw great birthday parties and I scrapbooked! I went through all the motions like an actress taking her cues from Pinterest.

Did you ever notice that when people talk about being a “good mother” they don’t talk about things that really matter? I mean, in the bigger picture of life? They talk about perfect meals and a clean house and scrapbooking and playing toys on the floor with the kids whenever they demand it. They say “I didn’t even read any of the parenting books” and “I let them eat pop tarts for breakfast! No “Mother Of The Year Award” coming my way this year!”

And yet this isn’t another post about what really makes a good mother like hugs and “I love yous” and being there to listen when you’re needed. (Did you remember to feed them today? Well, then you’re a “good mother”.) Those are good things but it doesn’t make sense to list them either. After all, there are mothers who don’t get to find a way to feed their babies for days at a time and they’re still good mothers. So yes, it must be our love that gives us our goodness,

but I’ve finally realized that this entire Good Mother discussion, within myself and with other mothers online and off is better left unspoken/un-thought of…

I am always all kinds of things at once and always waffling and hovering and in flux and in-between.

Today I am calmer, more at ease, for reasons I don’t even understand and maybe never will. Yesterday I was completely out of sorts and could hardly follow through with a damn thing and now today I’m accomplishing more. I was on edge and ornery and scared. Today I’m not. It was just a hard day all around. Today has less in it. I so often feel thrown around by circumstances within family life, because I am. I can either accept that or have a hard time accepting that and most of the time that’s what defines the way I behave.

I have chosen to let the days of “failure” and bad moods and exhaustion simply pass…because they do. I say to me, “You will not always feel this way.” I do not let yesterday’s kind of day define me.

A day or a mood or a total screwing up cannot define a person. Especially not as good or as bad.

I hated yesterday. I wanted yesterday to be done and over long before it could be and still the hours dragged on. Everyone was out of sorts and the to-do list threatened to sit on me until I could not breathe. We made it to bedtime and that’s all I wanted. So I took it, when it came. I climbed under the covers and read things and went to sleep.

White flag raised. I’m still me and they, my one of a kind little creatures, are still mine and we are here and that is good.

Today is possibly brighter and better because of letting go.

In the earliest days, I would have been beating myself up, to a pulp, making it worse. I would have woken up hungover and pissed off. I would have done it all over again, resisting the plain hard truth that this is so hard. Sometimes, it’s harder than other times and I could not, did not, accept that truth. NO. If only I can get my act together, if only I can make myself make a great meal, if only I can calm down, it will be under control and good and fine and I will be their good mother who is swooping in to fix this day because that’s my job and I need to enjoy it or there’s something terribly wrong with me! 

glug glug.

Maybe it’s sobriety, I don’t know. Maybe I’ve miraculously learned (from really wise fellow surrenderers) to stand here in this home as the mother in whatever shape I’m in, whatever is happening around me in that day, and maybe I’m just right there being me and that’s okay. Maybe my kids are learning more about humanity and the mine field of real life by seeing me IN it, not running from it or trying to make it just so.

Surrender is a beautiful thing.

Sometimes I just sit with my kids, or get in bed with them at the end of the day or when we’re driving I just say it: This has been a hard day and I don’t even like it and I know you don’t either. I think we’re tired. I’m so glad to be doing life with you. Let’s help each other. I’m sorry for being so crabby. 

As Listen To Your Mother quickly approaches, I’ve gotten to listen to these stories, in person, through voices of many mothers, all unique and totally inspiring and real. These are stories of motherhood from women that have a depth of love for their children that astounds me. They are wise, insightful and emotional people. They have struggled and overcome and struggled and not overcome. Their definition of “good mother” would vary from person to person and that has confirmed this idea in me–that I am not a Good Mother or a Bad Mother and neither are you. Each of these stories, it is an unfolding of truths and bearing witness reminds me that this is what we’re doing:

We are living stories. Our children are living stories.

I am Heather, a person who is a living a motherhood story as a part of my stories. My children are Miles, Asher and Elsie Jane and they are living, each of them, so many many stories. They have sons and a daughter stories. Every one of our stories has all the parts, the hills and valleys, the drama, the mistakes and the triumphs. There are good things that happen and bad things that happen and then we grow a lot and we know more because of all of it. We’re here in our stories together. Just think of that. We get to live stories with these people that we brought here. Just think of that…

You are not a good mother. You are not a bad mother. You are a person with a mothering story with all of its unavoidable parts. 

What if that old joke “No Mother of the Year award for me!” stopped leaving your lips and what if every time you heard it from someone else you smiled to yourself while thinking, If there’s a “Mother-Story of the Year” award, I could totally win that….

We do give ourselves plenty of story fodder and so do our kids. Every one of us wins.

From snowing to seventy-something degrees in a just a few days, we jumped.

We’ve been soaking up sun like the pale and vitamin D depleted Minnesotans that we are. The sliding glass door bangs every few seconds, in and out and in and out. There’s dirt sticking to my bare feet from the muddy shoes. I don’t even care this time, this winter was just too long to begrudge a little dried spring mud.

We are going through all of our things and really considering each item, Do we need this? Are we taking this to Austin? Will we get there and open a box and say “Why in the world did I pack this? Now I have to find a place for it and we never use it.”

I’m a tosser, he’s a keeper. Our new garage is about a quarter of the size it would need to be to fit all of his tools and toys.

Let’s have a sale! I say. Because there’s so much extra time. Heh.

We rake and shovel, a winter’s worth of chicken poop straw, from cleaning out the coop. It has finally been uncovered, snow melting away and it’s like all the dog poop out in the yard, just everywhere. A minefield of yuck.

My ADD brain forces me to drop the shovel and walk to the lilac bushes that have gotten too tall. There are vine-y dead skinny sticks like a thread through the top. All connected, all sucking the life from the new growth. I reach up with my gloved hand, grab one part and start to back up and it all just keeps coming and coming, so long and so much. It yanks at the entire tree and it all bends as I back up and pull it free.

It feels so good.

I drag my reward across the yard and throw it on top the trailer and go back for more, again and again. It’s good hard work and I do it until it’s done.

Then my husband gets in the car with me and we take the trailer to the brush site to leave all of the straw and sticks, brittle vines and branches from all the pruning. We get to the gate and can’t go through, it doesn’t open until May 4th.

So we take ourselves and our work back home, unhitch the trailer and leave it for now.

Progress, not perfection, I think. We were going to load up more things to haul away but today is not that day.

We head inside and I started going through the kids’ clothes, item by item, sorting and piling up for the growing up. It hurts and feels good all at once, like all of the things we’re doing to prepare our lives for one ginormous shift that will land us in Texas. We are combing through and sifting and pruning and with each moment I’m remembering so many things from all these years.

From snowing to seventy degrees in just a few days. We jumped.

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This is the 83rd installment of Just Write, an exercise in free writing your ordinary and extraordinary moments. {Please see the details here.} I would love to read your freely written words so join me and link up below. You can add the url of your post at any time. Just be sure it’s a link to your Just Write post, not to your main page, and please don’t link to posts that are not freely written in the spirit of capturing moments–you know, don’t link to how-to lists or sponsored posts. Also, please link back to this post in your post so people know where to go if they’d like to join in.

Please take a moment to visit someone else who has linked up! It’s a really good way to meet new writers and get inspired by the meaning behind their moments. Word? Thank you!

I’m in the airport at 6:15 a.m.

The perfect time to write a post for A Deeper Family, no?

Well. I did. I hope I was awake enough to make sense. I do have a really large coffee and a big bottle of water, so there’s that.

What a whirlwind, friends. I’m all emotional about moving and I wrote about what a move means for a family and thank God for Phillip Phillips…

yeah, you can go on over to A Deeper Family to unravel that mysterious statement….if you’d like.

Peace.

Instagram: “Strangers across from me. Army guy. Girlfriend. Words With Friends. They are playing each other. Holding hands.”

I always ask for spinach and black olives and pickles and lettuce and spicy mustard. If I get the spinach, I’ll feel healthy. Doesn’t it make everythign healthy? Jared, the sub sandwich guy who lost all that weight, would be proud.

On the way to the airport, alone, I sat again with Ira Glass and This American Life. The two hour trip goes by quickly with Ira in the passenger seat. So to speak.

Spinach leaf stems keep popping out the side of my mouth with the bites and I suddenly am fully aware that there’s someone at the table next to mine and he feels too close. Too close for eating comfort. We are basically eating together but so separate, waiting for planes.

This trip was planned starting yesterday morning, and here I am, alone in an airport but not alone because of the strangers. But still alone.

This isn’t the easy thing to do. The easy option is to stay in what we know, but it’s become really obvious that moving to Austin is what we’re doing. All signs point….

we have roots in Minnesota and they’re deep and long and wide and there are so many years of knowing the spaces and places and people. I can feel this shift in me–like something is tearing even while we’re excited and happy to be making this change.

I’ll be house hunting; a whirlwind trip which leaves just tomorrow to see loads of houses. Wish me luck and say a prayer and cross your fingers and toes…

It seems like most of the time, the hard thing is the right thing. In given the right to choose, I have so often run from the hard thing and it feels good to not run. We’re turning toward the hard thing and doing it. We’re moving to Austin, Texas.

I say that and I feel a little bit like I’m looking around , not for strangers at tables too close, but for our extended Minnesotan families, to see if I’m caught. Because the hardest part is going far away from them and it still matters so much what they think and how they feel.

And now, as I finish freely writing this, I’m sitting in a hotel room alone the sun is coming through the window. This is surreal and good and hard.

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This is the 82nd installment of Just Write, an exercise in free writing your ordinary and extraordinary moments. {Please see the details here.} I would love to read your freely written words so join me and link up below. You can add the url of your post at any time. Just be sure it’s a link to your Just Write post, not to your main page, and please don’t link to posts that are not freely written in the spirit of capturing moments–you know, don’t link to how-to lists or sponsored posts. Also, please link back to this post in your post so people know where to go if they’d like to join in.

Please take a moment to visit someone else who has linked up! It’s a really good way to meet new writers and get inspired by the meaning behind their moments. Word? Thank you!

To know a “spirited” child is to know extreme highs and lows in another person. To parent a “strong-willed” child is to continuously stand at the receiving end of these changing emotions, mostly dumbfounded.

Sometimes we walk away, hands thrown up in the air, no guesses.

I can’t help you, I wish I could. 

She gets over it, comes over and kisses a knee or your hand, says something akin to sorry, pats you softly with a dimpled little hand.

In this photo she is thrilled for two reasons.

1.She is carrying a little purse,

2. and she just got to feel the water coming out of the gutter…

I have known her for a thousand years

and every day I get to meet her again for the first time.

Happy weekend, friends.

We entertained them in the car with stories from our lives before they came. They asked questions about the most exciting parts. Daddy, do you think the eyes in the dark by your tent were a bear or a cougar? Mommy, when you got lost in Canada, where were you supposed to be? Why did you move to Michigan and then move back one week later?

We laughed and laughed, dramatizing parts of our true stories for effect, their eyes wide.

Back home, we shushed them and rushed them to bed. Miles came to the kitchen for “one more” drink of water and looked at me with big blue eyes over the top of his small glass.

He took a big breath after a big gulp and sighed out, Mommy?

Yes, Stall-y Stallerton? 

Has anything bad ever happened to you?

He says this softly and I feel my heart in my throat…

Yes, I told him, looking right back at him, our eyes connected.

I thought, Please don’t let him ask what the bad things are. Please don’t let him ask what the bad things are...

He took a step and stopped, turned around and then turned back and half ran to his room, quietly.

Yes, I’ve been hurt. And I’d take every one of your future hurts on myself if I could, my Miles-y. 

I thought this as I watched him skip into his room and I meant it.

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I flew to Phoenix for BBC and the speaking went fine, maybe even well. I had a great time with friends to meet and meeting up with old friends. For me, going is exhausting and revitalizing all at once. We are always “on” and going from one thing to the next and introducing and being introduced. We are rapid-fire questions and input, helpful advice, story-telling and heated discussions. These women are brilliant and informed and they have such wisdom from experience. They pass it on.

I told my friend and roommate, Gigi, that I have to stop myself from thinking of home very much while I’m away. Because this is what my work is, and I don’t go away that often, but if I’m being honest I am capable of growing terribly sad due to the pull I feel toward home. Ryan and I don’t talk much in the few days I’m away because I’m afraid of hearing the details of the day, that I will grow so homesick, I won’t be able to stay away. He is kind enough to understand this and truth be told, he has little energy for the phone either after long days solo parenting. Of course, I can relate after all these years of his travels. So we text. He keeps it simple. I keep it simple. I call him on the way home, when I’m almost there and we talk a long time.

Gigi was sitting next to her suitcase on the floor and looking up at me on the corner of my bed, her eyes wide and understanding. We talked about how strange it is to feel so much vulnerability in being away, despite how badly we need and want to go, to grow ourselves and our endeavors and to miss home so we can come back ready for more. Maybe it’s simple–that the constant socializing is intimidating and speaking is a risk, but maybe we mostly feel vulnerable to potential tragedy. To the idea of unspeakable things that creep into our crowded minds and tease us into thinking something horrible will happen to us or our children while we’re miles and miles away.

Obviously, this time, I returned home to find my children in one piece and happy to see me, or I wouldn’t be writing this. It turns out it was good for everyone, even if my quick-to-over-thinking mind tried to make that seem impossible while I was away. My positive and hopeful thinking made its way back to my heart this morning after a night of catching up on lost conference sleep. We are well and it is well and we are home.

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Today it’s back to work. I am catching up on email and writing assignments and Listen To Your Mother things. I am catching up on laundry and life, cleaning things up and setting up another showing of our house. I feel good about how the speaking gig went even though it never goes exactly as the perfectionist in me would like.

The news about the Boston marathon came up one feed or thread or another. I looked at it for a few seconds and hoped it wasn’t real, but of course by now I know it is. It gets worse and worse and isn’t this exactly why we look at each other with big eyes like saucers? Isn’t this why we cling to denial and isn’t this where fear comes from?

Isn’t that the point of such an act–to bring us into more fear, to control us, to have the power. To laugh at limbs blown off and the dead. To laugh at how we stand around aghast and then explode with information. To treat us like puppets instead of people. Isn’t that the point everywhere and always, when violence crops up in any place?

Maybe I’m shutting down and maybe I feel so sad and hopeless to honor the pain, the agony, the grief.

Maybe tomorrow hope will win again.

For right now, a thick sadness hovers over us again and all I can do is know that you feel it too. This way, at least we’re still connected through these feelings, like two mothers making eye contact in a hotel room, away from their precious people, and seeing it,

we say without having to say anything at all, Me too.

I get it. I really get it. It’s horrible. Please hide my babies. Please hide yours. What are we to do?

I don’t even know how hope ever comes back. It’s magic, I suppose and magical undeniable and inexplicable grace and hope are what ignite my faith. The very fact that good exists at all in the face of tragedies like this one and Sandy Hook and Aurora Africa and India and Haiti and tsunamis and hurricanes and tornadoes and kidnapping and missing persons and rape and all of it….well, it’s impossible. Impossible that good can Be, right?

Hope. Here? Ever?

Somehow.

It starts in eyes that say they want to hold your feelings very carefully, in the palms of hands, until you are better. And then somehow it keeps going from one to the next, like it did inside the people in Boston when they ran toward the blasts instead of away. Then it moved on to crowds turning to each other with mouths agape and eyes wide, looking into each other. Me too, they said and then it moved through phone lines and TV’s and the Internet and in work places and homes.

We see in each other that thread of love that connects us to hope and we keep going,another mile or maybe a few steps.

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This is the 81st installment of Just Write, an exercise in free writing your ordinary and extraordinary moments. {Please see the details here.} I would love to read your freely written words so join me and link up below. You can add the url of your post at any time. Just be sure it’s a link to your Just Write post, not to your main page, and please don’t link to posts that are not freely written in the spirit of capturing moments–you know, don’t link to how-to lists or sponsored posts. Also, please link back to this post in your post so people know where to go if they’d like to join in.

Please take a moment to visit someone else who has linked up! It’s a really good way to meet new writers and get inspired by the meaning behind their moments. Word? Thank you!

You guys, it’s almost here! The very first Listen To Your Mother Twin Cities. (I know, one day you’re going to want to be able to say, “I was there when it all began!”)

That’s good because the Listen To Your Mother Twin Cities team is giving away tickets to our show! You can enter to win a 2-pack of tickets on EACH of our blogs AND on the LTYM Twin Cities site.

You have a lot of chances to win! Winners will get to go to the show on May 9th at the Riverview Theater in Minneapolis on us!

The LTYM directing and producing team–Tracy, Galit, Vikki and I are getting so excited to share this show with everyone who can make it. Our cast and their stories are truly phenomenal, and this is such a unique and powerful way to celebrate motherhood, just days before Mother’s Day! You can bring your mom or grandma or your friends and cousins and co-workers…If you’re a mother, consider this a Mother’s Day gift to yourself and if you’re a father and husband, well…hopefully you’ve gotten the hint by now. :)

(If you are not from the Twin Cities or surrounding area, take a look at the LTYM site to see if there’s a city near you hosting a show!)

If you haven’t heard about the show, you can learn everything you need to know by visiting the Listen To Your Mother website.

To enter for a 2-pack of tickets here, all you have to do is comment on this post. If you’d like extra entries, like LTYM on Facebook and Twitter:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Visit Vikki, Galit,Tracy and the Listen To Your Mother Twin Cities site to enter for even more chances to win!