Yesterday it was cold and rainy where I live.  I woke up at about 7:00 and immediately my dogs went into hyper mode…..there is no such thing as gently greeting the dawn in my house.  So I popped out of bed, let everyone outside, administered various contents of the 47 bottles of medicine that my canines ingest on a semi-daily basis, fed them all (which is no small feat I must admit - trying to put 6 dog bowls down in some kind of order so everyone won’t attack dog bowl #1 at the same time).  During this time I…

Linsey got mad when I told her. I think I need to be home tomorrow. I promise we’ll find another day to go to the snow. I could have just kept my mouth shut – been a good dad, a good husband. We were driving home from the office Christmas party, where I’d been a good employee and a good pastor, so why quit now?

On the other hand, a couple of days ago I was melting into the couch, summoning just enough energy to operate the mouse so I could play Chuzzle on PopCap.com. (Don’t worry, I’m not getting any endor$ement…

There is a parable in the book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People about a person who works harder and harder to saw down a tree because of a perception that there is no time to stop, take a break and sharpen the saw. I have never been a big saw sharpener. I like to push and push and say, “Just this one more thing and then I can take a break. I’ll stop when this is finished. It would be selfish of me to stop when other people aren’t.” And because I’m a perfectionist, I have rarely been able to…

I’m not one to keep busy during the summer, at least not in the sense of running the kids from place to place, activity to activity. Yet, not being busy — whether inside inside the house playing board games or (more often) just keeping the kids from driving each other crazy, or outside swimming or at the park or at a library or museum — isn’t always relaxing. Well, it is for the kids: just not entirely for the mama who has to make sure that those kids stay fed and safe and moderately hygienic, the mama who (since those…

There’s a picture of me somewhere, when my son was a few months old, sitting at the computer and uploading pictures of him to share. I got lots of advice to sleep when the baby slept. I was told by plenty of people that those early sleepless days of parenthood are temporary, that things settle down eventually and I would sleep again. When that shift happened, I would have time for those things I ought to put off in favor of sleep now. That all made sense to me, yet I look at that picture and think about how isolated…

In one of the Alanon pamphlets on detachment, there are a series of bullets representing the things we learn in Alanon.  Two of them are the following:

In Alanon We Learn:

Not to create a crisis, and

Not to prevent a crisis if it is in the natural course of events.

I am in a quandary right now.  How does one know if they are “creating a crisis” or allowing a crisis to occur “in the natural course of events?”  This has been gnawing at me for the last several days, since I have found myself in situations where I really don’t know if …

At the end of winter, I realized I was depressed. I’d let myself get into quite a state, and I went to our county mental health clinic to get some help. I got an antidepressant and something to help me sleep. The antidepressant did its magic, but I was still struggling to stay asleep, so at my follow-up appointment I asked about other medications. The nurse practitioner prescribed me something else, and now I can sleep and sleep and sleep. I can sleep forever. It’s wonderful, as I’ve been getting increasingly drained by waking up again and again throughout the…

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
-Leonard Cohen

I’ve always felt that my harshest tribulations brought me to the better places in my life. I was able to let in the light in by confronting extreme darkness, by using adversity to make me stronger.

No matter how it is you choose to identify the operating system that helps you process even the worst of times–a Judeo Christian God, animism, Buddhism, 12 steps, etc,–we all have an experience where adversity and pain made us stronger. Listening to the stories of…

I’m working on finding new and exciting techniques for calming myself down. I have remained surprisingly centered throughout my husband’s hospitalization and his release on Monday, but it’s requiring a lot of attention. I’m falling behind in my work again, and I’m noticing that small disruptions in my sleeping, eating, meetings, and yoga schedule can send me reeling.

I’m trying to take it easy, also, as I’d gotten used to the idea of my husband being gone, and now he’s back in my house. Before he was hospitalized, we’d been separated for about a month. I’d gotten a lot of quiet…

unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy.
I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world
as on what needs to be changed in me and in my attitudes.

~Alcoholics Anonymous (Big Book)

This past week has been one of those in which I look at my life, not with gratitude for all that I do have, but in despair for all that I don’t. I have been craving the things that others seem to have: time, money, older independent children (or no children…