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Breathe in through your nose for four slow counts.
Hold the breath for four.
Breathe out for four.
Hold the breath for four.

Repeat these breaths until your children give up hope of getting your attention ever again.

One More Drop is a series of tiny missions to help you add more Drops of Awesome to your day.

One More Drop is a series of tiny missions to help you add more Drops of Awesome to your day.

“Please, oh please wear black lipstick for Halloween,” she begged in the car, “You would just look so BEAU-tiful and so CREEPY! You have to do it.”

I told her I’d think about it.

Sometimes it’s painful spending my days alone with Wanda. When she talks, my cheeks hurt from smiling. When I look at her, my heart travels into my throat and it’s hard to swallow. When she hugs me, my eyes leak.

Today I was just dropping her off at preschool and she was washing her hands and I started to weep. I wasn’t bawling, but salty emotion water definitely made its way out of my ocular cavities. I didn’t want to leave but I made my way out of the preschool and into my car. I would weigh 400 pounds if I sat around staring at her as often as I want to sit around staring at her.

She’s the last one.

I have been blessed with gorgeous, sweet, adorable little people who have come into my life with huge personalities and endless sweetness and have let me love them. And they’re getting big. And they’re growing independent. They read and make their own breakfast and sometimes even shower.

Laylee’s in middle school and it’s changing her. It’s not bad. Just different. No longer is she the portable little friend who follows me around everywhere I go in her snow white dress. She is a lady-girl. She has things to do and people to see and chores to be annoyed about.

Magoo isn’t far behind.

I miss my babies and they’re not even gone.

There was some point a few years ago when I went to a wedding and instead of identifying with the bride, I started identifying with the mother of the bride. Instead of thinking about my own wedding and comparing our dresses and decorations, I wondered what Laylee’s wedding would be like. It scared me.

I am not ready to move on from this phase of my life. I am not ready to be a daytime empty-nester, to have conversations that never involve ninjas or why we don’t paint on our bodies. I am not ready to grow up.

After I left Wanda at preschool, I got in my car and “A Thousand Years” by Christina Perri was playing and I cried. I remember when love songs were all about cute boys and romance to me. But being a mom has opened up so many more kinds of love.

You’re-growing-inside-of-me-and-I-feel-like-I-know-you-even-though-we’ve-never-met love
Rock-you-to-sleep-and-stare-at-your-peaceful-face love
Duct-tape-you-into-your-diaper love
As-I-rush-you-to-the-hospital-I question-whether-I’d-be-able-to-go-on-without-you love
Calmly-explain-for-the-hundredth-time-how-the-toilet-flusher-works love
Kick-me-in the-face-all-night-long-but-when-I-carry-you-back-to-bed-I’m-still-overwhelmed-by-how-much-I-love-you love
Let-you-experience-negative-consequences-even-though-it-makes-me-cry-when-you’re-not-looking love
You’re-PMSing-so-I’ll-cut-you-some-slack Love

The list keeps growing. And I guess I’ll keep growing too. I don’t cry every time I think about Wanda starting kindergarten next year and it will probably keep getting easier. But sometimes I have to cry in my car, cry like a baby, because I don’t have any of those anymore.

Put your wet sponge in the microwave on high for 2 minutes. The water will boil inside the sponge, killing 99% of the microscopic ickies. The steam from the sponge will loosen all the junk on the walls of the microwave. Let the sponge cool to a safe temperature and then use it to wipe out the gunk from the walls of the microwave.

One More Drop is a series of tiny missions to help you add more Drops of Awesome to your day.

One More Drop is a series of tiny missions to help you add more Drops of Awesome to your day.

As we took the rattling elevator up to the second floor with a rough looking man and his dog, I began to seriously question my decision. We walked down the long, dim hallway, noise greeting us from nearly every room and the choking smell of cigarette smoke radiating from the walls.

We locked ourselves into our filthy room, helped the kids brush their teeth, checked for bed bugs and turned out the lights. The room was cold, dark, and noisy from the heater and the neighbors to the right, left, and above us. It smelled horrible. But we’d paid for the room and we needed the sleep before we started out on the road again the next morning. Wanda, a year old at the time, stood up in her pack ‘n play and screamed, reaching out to me and Dan in our cramped double bed. I picked her up. I sang to her. I comforted her. I laid on the stained carpet next to her and shushed her to sleep.

We didn’t get much rest. We had a horrible night. And we paid a hundred dollars for the experience. To put it mildly, we regretted the decision to stay there.

But the rough night was over. What could I do to fix the problem? I could apologize to Dan and the kids for my poor hotel choice, for not planning ahead and for not getting us out of there once I knew how gross the hotel was. I could decide never to stay there again.

What could I do to make the problem worse and ensure we stayed miserable for years into the future? I could decide that it was a tragedy that I’d chosen such a skeezy road trip hotel because since I’d chosen that hotel once, we were doomed to stay there every road trip for the rest of our lives. I could talk about how awful it was non-stop and decorate our home to match the hotel just so that every day I would remember what a bad choice I’d made. I could turn that hotel into the focus of my life.

Now that seems ridiculous, but how many times do we let our mistakes determine our entire future? Or even enough of our future to make us waste one day or one week in crippling regret? I recently said some things I regret. Stupid things. Thoughtless things. Things I thought were funny during a moment of heightened stress. I apologized to the people involved. I prayed and asked God to forgive me.

But the next day I still felt awful. How could I say those things? What did those things say about me as a person? How could my friends ever look at me the same way again? Should they ever look at me the same way again? These thoughts of shame and regret cycled through my head over and over again.

So because I was so upset about my mistake, I decided to live in that mistake for as long as possible. If it was a bad thing and I didn’t want it to be part of my life, then why did I let it take up so much time in my thoughts and in my heart? I had done everything I could to fix it… Except let it go.

By focusing all my energy on my poor choices, I was magnifying their negative effects in my life. I was decorating my house with pictures of the bad Hotel.. And I was succumbing to the inevitability of booking a room there again.

“That’s where I always stay. It sucks but I stay there.”

When you are bogged down by the things you’ve done wrong, you start to believe that you have no choice but to do them again, that it’s just the way you are, that you’re somehow defective or incapable of changing. If, after all, you spend your time dwelling on them, you aren’t changing.

Now, do I want to completely wipe the bad hotel from my memory? No. Not exactly. I want to remember it just enough at the back of my mind so I avoid going there again. I don’t want to think about it, but if the experience is buried way down deep in my brain, it can pop to the surface if I ever drive through that town again and find myself looking for a place to stay.

Next time I’m hanging out with my friends and I come to a place where I can go for a cheap laugh or speak words of love, I hope I remember just an echo of what the cheap laugh felt like and I hope I make a different choice. But for today, I need to let it go.

Today is so much bigger than yesterday’s mistakes. Today is a thousand choices waiting to be made and the first one will be to live where I am, because with the next choice I make, where I am can be a pretty beautiful place.

Dan pointed to the number crossed out and said, “That’s a pretty creepy way to get a cat. You just go around and find a cute lost cat poster, cross out the phone number and put your number in its place.”

Yeah. Fritzy seems to be just the kind of cat I’m looking for. Hand me the Sharpie.

Jerks.