Fill the Cracks with Love

Today is the one-week anniversary of a terrible day for the people of Boston. Author Sarah Eden, in her post here, has issued a challenge for today. It comes from a comment her daughter made after the school shooting last December.

"When your heart breaks,

you choose what to fill the cracks with.

Love or hate. 

But hate won't ever heal.

Only love can do that."

So I invite you to join Sarah today in looking for an opportunity to do a random act of kindness. It can be as simple as a word of encouragement. 

Right now, we've got a lot of cracks to fill. I, for one, am going to fill mine with love.

Happy Valentines Day . . . or Single Awareness Day

Happy Father's Day!

Source

Happy Father's Day to all the fathers out there or the guys who serve as fatherly role models.

Some years ago a local phone company offered free long distant calls to the men in a local prison, so they could call their mothers on Mother's Day. It was so successful, with men lining up for hours to talk to their moms, that the company decided to offer the same thing on Father's Day.

Not one man in the prison came forward to call his father.

Now, it would be simplistic to suggest that only men with no relationship or poor relationships with their fathers end up in prison. But it is a profound indicator of the power a good father has in the lives of his children.

My own father died last year. This year all my father's day cards went to either my husband or my sons and son-in-law. I'm grateful for my dear husband who always has our children's' best interest in mind and does so much for them day or night--they may disagree at times with how he goes about it but they always know his loving intent. I'm grateful for my sons who are now fathers. It's fun to watch them interact with their children. They were all so excited to be dads.

"A father is a guy who has pictures in his wallet where his money used to be."

I Love Life . . . and Motherhood (in its many manifestations)

I love my book. 

 I better. 

I'm its mother.

No one, not even my sweet hubby who's been so supportive of my journey, is as deeply invested in it and my characters as I am. Friends and family try to be good sports about it. There's a lot of eye rolling, but I'm used to it. I went through that with them about Harry Potter, too.

They love me me anyway.

With this R&R, I'm on the 13th edit/rewrite. I've spent so many hours in my characters' company that I know them really well. Better than some of my dearest friends--because real people don't spill all their guts.

My life changed when I had my first child, a son. Until that moment, I'd never truly realized the depth of human love. Of a mother's love. It worried me as I prepared for the birth of my second child if the love I felt for my son would be diminished, divided, with the new addition. Or if I might not be able to love the new baby as much.

Stupid woman.

The love for my son didn't lessen with the coming of my daughter, and the love I felt for my beautiful daughter was no less than what I felt for my son. I discovered an important lesson.

Love defies mathematics.

I'd been operating on the assumption that my capacity to love was a finite thing.

Wrong!

With the addition of each child, I found that my capacity to love increased. It grew so I not only had a greater ability to love all these wonderful little people I had the privilege of mothering, but that I had more love for everyone else as well.

So how does this relate to my book? My other baby?

It means it's okay to fall in love with new projects, new characters, new worlds.

*sigh*

I love being a writer.

Have a wonderful weekend. Summer is almost here. 

 Life is good.

A to Z - Love

I'm going to talk a bit today about a mother's love. Having children changed my life in way I could never have anticipated. People can talk to an expectant mother but it's not until she bonds with her child that she really understands the depth.

Following is by Erma Bombeck--loved her humor and her heart.

Some day when my children are old enough to understand the logic that motivates a mother, I will tell them:

I loved you enough to ask about where you were going, with whom and what time you would get home.

I loved you enough to insist that you buy a bike, that we could afford to give you, with your own money.

I loved you enough to make you return a Milky-Way—with a bite out of it—to the drug store and to confess “I stole this.”

I loved you enough to stand over you for two hours while you cleaned your room, a job that would have taken me 15 minutes.

I loved you enough to let you see anger, disappointment, disgust and tears in my eyes.

I loved you enough to admit I was wrong and ask for your forgiveness.

I loved you enough to let you stumble, fall and hurt.

But most of all, I loved you enough to say NO when you hated me for it. That was the hardest part of all.

I found that one of the hardest things about my children growing up was when I went from being the brightest, funnest, most beautiful woman around to being the stupidest creature God put on the earth.

The pendulum has (generally) swung back the other direction, and now my children have a more balanced and practical view of me. It's just proof that you need to hang in there. The terrible twos do turn into the terrible teens--except then they can drive. But the teens years, for all their volatility, can be an amazing journey of discovery and decision.

Maybe that's why I enjoy reading YA so much.

How about you? You've got children and/or you've been a child. How powerful have you found a mother's love to be?

The Next Great Adventure

I found out yesterday that my uncle died. He was in his early 90s and lived a long full life, but he was also a survivor of not just the bombing of Pearl Harbor but the assault on Iwo Jima. For decades, he wouldn't talk about what he experienced.

He was from a small town in Wyoming, spent twenty years in the Navy, and returned to that same small town in Wyoming where he bought the farm next to his father's.

He was the husband of my beloved aunt, my mother's only sister. In his later years he became rather crotchety, according to his daughter, but I'll never forget how he chased me down after I got my finger embedded in the twines of a music box and was running screaming through his house (we were visiting). My uncle was fond of getting comfortable after work. He'd get down to his skivvies in the summer or his thermals in the winter and was never bothered to greet company however he was dressed.

So many of my childhood memories are tied to these dear people in Wyoming. We spent a couple of summers with them. One was the summer after my mother died. My cousin and I were very close, and my aunt suggested that I stay there for the school year. My father didn't want to split my little sister and I up, so I didn't get to stay. I was brokenhearted at the time, but I can see now my father's wisdom. My poor uncle, though. He liked to put honey in his morning coffee. My little sister thought it was funny to put a bunch of salt in the honey. It only took twice and he was able to convince not to ever do that again.

My sweet cousin, who in so many ways was another sister to me, said it best. He's in a better place now where there's a happy reunion going on with my aunt and their son who went before. She and I are both Harry Potter fans, and I think she'd agree he's gone on to his next, great adventure.

Even so, he leaves a huge hole.

Love you, Uncle Ned.

Tribute

My dad died yesterday.

It was sudden. Two weeks ago he was working in his garden. Last Thursday he was hospitalized from a doctor visit, and Wednesday we found out he had one lung almost completely full of cancer. My brother and I were able to fly home to be there when they took him off the respirator.

I wish to pay tribute to my dad. Who was he?

• He was the oldest son of a "Missouri Puke" -- that's the term Dad said they called people from Missouri who made the migration to California during the Dustbowl (like Okies for the folks from Oklahoma). He was born in 1930, so he entered the world when the economic times were horrible and it took a decade and a world war to recover. (Dad's the little guy on the left--his twin is on the right.)
• Dad grew up in southern California before the L.A. River was cemented, when it was a river to swim in and not a place to shoot Terminator and Transformer movie action scenes in.
• As mentioned above he was a fraternal twin--one of those sets where what one doesn't think of the other one does. The kind of kids who really give their parents a run for their money.
• I honor him especially for a major life choice he made--not to carry on the family tradition of spousal abuse. My grandfather used to knock my grandmother around, and that behavior was their model of manhood. One time my grandfather had been drinking at a bar and brought home a woman he met there. Yes, he brought a woman to the home where his wife and children were at. My 16-year-old dad decked his father and laid him out, telling him that he would never do something like that again. You go, Dad!
• At 17 the twins decided to join the Navy. Dad made a career of it, serving for 24 years.

                                 (Dad's on the right)

• My dad was a man to go after what he wanted. Because he was tall (6' 3 1/2"), people always thought he was older than he was--which meant he was able to get into bars before he was 21. He celebrated his 19th birthday at a bar ... and saw my mom. She was 21 and thought my dad was celebrating his 22nd birthday. He didn't correct her. They met in August and married in November, and Mom was more than a little dismayed to discover Dad had to have someone come and sign for him to get married (that was when you had to be 21).  She said she wouldn't have dated him if she'd realized how young he was, and my dad informed her that was why he hadn't told her.
• I have an older brother, but my folks had a hard time getting pregnant again after him--and when I was born they discovered a blood inconsistency in the RH factor. I nearly died, and they gave up the thought of having more childrenfor a while. But they decided to risk another baby. Unfortunately this little girl was strangled by her umbilical cord and is buried in South Korea. A year later my little sister was born, and she was the same blood type as my mother. No problems.
• My father was highly involved in my brother's sports events and willingly coached the teams as needed. When no one would be a scout master for the local Boy Scout troop, my father stepped up. Many of the boys he coached became involved in Scouting as well. A couple of the boys went on to play professional ball.
• He was so proud when my brother was accepted to the Naval Academy, but my brother's leaving  for the Academy came at a tragic time. My mother had been ailing for a couple of years and technology finally advanced enough to identify the problem. A brain tumor. It wasn't malignant but in a dangerous place and swelling after the surgery killed her. We went from Mom's funeral to my brother's high school graduation. Dad remarried a couple of years later and worked to pull two families with teen children into one family. When I was 19, they had a daughter together. She's been wonderfully supportive of them in their old age, and this week we were all able to talk about how many of our standards came from Dad.
• Dad was supportive but also firm. We'd just moved to a new military base a week before Mom died. I knew no one, and school had just gotten out. I was desperately lonely and thought summer school would provide me with a chance to meet friends. But it included taking 6 buses each day into San Franciso and back, and then I found out it wasn't even the school that fed the one I'd attend in the fall. I wanted to quit. My dad strongly discouraged me from doing this, citing his own experience in high school (he was a dropout). He didn't want me to be a quitter. I trusted in him and persevered, and that lesson has helped me throughout my life when I was tempted to give up. I'm proud to say this daughter is not a quitter.
• He was the perfect kind of father and father-in-law (to me). We were raised to be independent, and he stayed out of our adult lives as much as we wanted. He was supportive and willing to do whatever we needed, but he was not one to tell us what to do or to offer unsolicited advice (or sometimes any advice--as in me joining the Army). He knew there were some decisions only we could make.

Years ago I heard a saying that I've always taken to heart:

The father is wiser than the son because

the father was son before he was father.

I'm fortunate in the father I had. He observed the mistakes of others and had the sense to learn from his own. He had a high code of conduct and built and preserved family traditions to be proud of.

It was an honor and a privilege to be his daughter and to call him my "Dad."

Love you, Dad.