stories

I don’t know about you guys but I have a pretty good relationship with my “inner boss” (some call it their Guardian Angel, mine is way to bossy to have wings).

I know this because she has kept me out of trouble for most of my life. Guiding me toward what makes sense, and away from my most idiotic tendencies. That is when I listen to her.

What I often forget to factor into my daily discourse with all of the idiots (I say that with love) around me, is that THEY also have an inner boss who is guiding them away from idiocy. 

But can we trust that? 

Can I trust that the guy driving sixty-miles-an-hour next to me on the 101 and TEXTING is going to put down his phone long enough to hear his “boss” try to convince him that the fight—texting with Debra is a really bad idea?

I heard a woman talking the other day about her twelve-year-old son wanting desperately to walk on their frozen pond. It was early March and she wasn’t convinced the ice was still thick enough to support him. 

In other words, FUCK NO!

Just to back up her concerns she told him all the “falling through thin ice” stories she could think of. Especially the ones that didn’t end well. She even showed him the videos on YouTube. By the end of her lecture, he was yawning and SHE was the one who was hyperventilating and needed a cocktail.

She was so worried that he’d disobey her warning that she forbid him to go outside at all.

Seeing that it was the first nice day they’d had in months, he pitched a hissy fit and she felt like Cruella D’Ville. Even the dog showed his disapproval by pooping in their downstairs bathtub. 

Maybe we should all just wrap ourselves in bubble wrap, live in a hermetically sealed room, and call it a life, right? I mean at some point we have to trust that those we love (and even those we don’t) have their own inner boss who will keep them out of danger. Ewwwww, that’s a haaaard one!

I’m practicing this in real-time with my own husband—who is a twelve-year-old boy in a man suit. 

He wants to go on his annual motorcycle ride up in Northern Cal barely two weeks after getting out of ICU due to a nasty interaction between his motorcycle AND THE GROUND. All the doctors advise against it. They warn him that the margin of error is, well, zero. If he falls again, it will be bad. 

Like, fall through thin ice bad. 

But I’m not his mom. I can’t forbid him to go.  I have to trust that his inner boss will take the wheel. That he will realize the idiocy of taking a chance like that—and make the “right” decision.

He asked for my opinion and I gave it: Go on the trip, just drive a car.

“That’s what my better angels were telling me to do!” he admitted. 

Whew! I guess that “trusting” shit really does work sometimes! With sixty-five-year-old men.
Mother’s—I still wouldn’t let my kid walk on the frozen pond.

What do you think?

Carry on,
xox

“So wake me up when it’s all over, when I’m wiser an I’m older.”
~Avicii

So, things around me have been more chaotic than usual, like times a thousand, which has led me, forced me, to change my behavior…a lot!

Because had I continued along my usual path, my head would have exploded or even worse— I may have started speaking in tongues, and not the religious kind, the spooky kind, leaving me with a vocabulary so…perverse that it would have left even you guys at a loss. 

Sometimes in life, you just have to come to terms with the fact that nothing is working and you need to step away. It becomes evident that if you proceed, you do so at you’re own peril — and by peril I mean you risk alienating everyone within earshot. Maybe even the one person on earth who loves you first thing in the morning.

So, for the past 6-8 weeks the fan blew shit and here was the struggle on any given day:

What I wanted to do– Rage, yell out my car window, flip this table, write an op-ed to every paper in the country, send nasty cards, sue my oral surgeon, relitigate every perceived wrong (which is the actual opposite of a genuine wrong), call people and tell them I hate them and list all the reasons why, marinate in sadness, punch strangers, kick my dog, send hate mail, cut my own bangs, change my phone number, run with scissors, eat every carb that wasn’t nailed down, run away from home, pick nits, cry for days and basically burn my life to the ground. 

I know none of you can relate, right?

What I actually did—Slept, took baths, slept, binge-watched Netflix, slept, ran my bad ideas by people I trust who assured me that they were a mistake, cried, slept, ate what I wanted but in moderation, cut down on caffeine, stayed off most Social Media, cut myself some slack for being so angry, cut myself a break for being unable to hike, started forgiving myself (but only a little) for being human, and searched like a fucking bloodhound for gratitude.

What I didn’t do— write this blog, spew toxic shit out into the aether, talk to people, visit friends, say or do anything I couldn’t take back. 

Usually, I run toward a situation like it’s a house on fire. It’s just my nature. Quick, direct, confrontation. Bing, bang, boom!

If these past two months have taught me anything, (besides the fact that giant serving spoonfuls of peanut butter do, in fact, give me zits) it’s that the only sane solution was to back away. Now, in hindsight, it was the right thing to do, but OMG I have to tell you that did NOT sit well with me! 

I don’t know about you, but when I’m sad and I haven’t come to terms with it yet, RAGE shows up, and if I’d listened to that turd I would have irrevocably torched my life into one of those crispy, black french fries that lurks in the bottom of the bag. 

All this to say, hey, you haven’t heard from me in a while because I didn’t really have anything nice to say, and the Universe cooperated by hijacking my website. 

But just know I  love you, and I’m back—tears cried, anger in check, bangs intact and eyebrows unsinged.

Carry on, 
xox

I have a question for ya. What is your exit strategy? In other words, how do you plan to depart this big, blue marble? I’m not so concerned with what comes after the dying thing it’s just the way I have to get there that makes me anxious when I think about it—and unfortunately, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

I know, Debbie Doom.

But hey, none of us can escape it—we can neither buy our way out, bribe our way out, talk, bargain or cajole our way out of the inevitable.

Death is an equal opportunity sniper on a hill.

It’s just the way this game is played. So…knowing that, have you thought at all about your exit? I read about a man who did.

Thursday, a 104-year-old Australian man chose to die in Switzerland from assisted suicide. He was neither terminally ill (which is the condition required for most legal assisted suicide) nor was he mentally impaired.  

He was just so fucking old that his quality of life had diminished significantly enough to cause him to make what we can all agree is a pretty drastic and permanent decision. Or is it?

Even his family was on board. As a matter of fact, he was accompanied by his grandson… to Switzerland, silly, not the great beyond!

Do you want to live so long that you outlive everyone you’ve ever known and loved? I for one, think that would suck.

The reason I’m asking is that my husband was in a motorcycle crash earlier this week and although he had to spend a couple of days in the hospital, he’s going to be fine. But it made me think about all the ways to die and how  there is a part of me that every time he goes racing or off-roading waits for “the call”.  

If you were to ask me on any given day over a beer and a taco, I would tell you that dying on his bike would be the way he’d want to go. But it would have to be quick. No severe injury that would force me to make the decisions no spouse ever wants to make. A friend of his in his eighties had a heart attack on his bike, so, maybe like that.

Right? Quick and nasty. Here one minute, gone the next. He would like that. 

But when I got “the call” which was actually a text, “I had a bad fall, I’m in a lot of pain, they’re taking me to the hospital,” well, all of that flew out the window. 

No, no, no, no, no! I bargained. You MAY NOT take him now! He’s too young to go, I’m too young to be a widow and besides that, we have tickets to a thing in June!

I’m here to report that I’m a fraud and a phony where the “just let him die fast” shit is concerned. Every molecule in my body was just so fucking happy he was still alive. 

But what am I waiting for? When will it ever be okay?

Do you want to die of a disease? Yeah, me neither. 

So what does that leave?

I know I don’t want to choke on salad. What a fucking waste of a last meal!

I know I don’t want to survive a zombie attack only to be forced to live in a post-apocalyptic society. Attention all Zombies: If you’re reading this—just take me in the first wave, I’ll be the one waving the white flag. (That’s a lie too. I know me. I’ll probably lead the resistance, storm the zombie perimeter with a fire gun and make it to the freezer where they keep the antidote).

I know I don’t want to die sitting in traffic on the 405 because ALREADY KNOW HOW THAT FEELS!

I’ve already said I don’t want to out-live every one I know but I also don’t want to die on a really good hair day doing something fun with my friends.

So…licked to death by puppies?

I may need to give this a little more thought…or not.

Carry on,
xox

I watch the news these days with one eye closed. One eyes worth is all I can bear. The reason I even watch it at all is to stay current on politics which is the basis for a new screenplay I’m writing. 

You can also mix with that a dash of “car wreck” mentality. You know, when you drive past a bad car accident and you WANT to look away but you just can’t. You’re so afraid of what you’re going to see that you pull your glasses out of your purse and slow down. 

Is that just me or is it human nature? Please say human nature.  

Anyway, the events of each news cycle have been so “stick-your-head -in-the-oven” horrible for the past year and a half that local stations have actually started to devote an entire three minutes of a 1440 minute day to good news.

This morning it was about a recent medical miracle.

A thirteen-year-old boy in Alabama suffered a brain injury and actually died—for 15 minutes.  Although they got his heart to beat again, the lack of oxygen for such an extended period of time (a brain can survive without oxygen for only 4-6 minutes) left him brain-dead and on life support for several days while his parents made the agonizing decision to donate his organs.

All of the sudden, the day before he was scheduled to be taken off of life support he started to show weak signs of brain activity. That was two months ago. He still has a long recovery ahead of him but he is walking, talking, and nowhere near the vegetative state he should be in. 

“There’s no other explanation but God” he says. 

He should know.

My husband also suffered severe brain trauma due to spinal meningitis before he was my husband, so, BH. He was a healthy forty-seven-year-old man in the prime of his life and then he died. Once in the emergency room, they brought him back, did a spinal tap and pronounced him ”terminal” which meant he was pumped full of Morphine and wheeled into a room to die. As luck or fate or the angels who had listened to me cry my eyes out for a good man would have it, one lone doctor decided to treat him with everything at her disposal and within 24 hours she informed his family he’d live but would most definitely be a vegetable. (Which is why we currently have a health directive.)

But after three days in a coma, my before-husband-husband woke up quoting Proust and I.M. Pei. Okay, maybe only I.M. Pei, but my point is this: He could see, hear, and speak knowledgeably about French architecture—all of the things some of us humans can do that vegetables most certainly cannot.

“He’s a scientific miracle!” They all declared.

They should know.

Here’s what I know—

The boy is right. There is no other explanation but God. I mean, come on! 

Science can’t explain EVERYTHING. They try. We listen. They have rules and stats that are true for MOST of us MOST of the time, however…

If it ain’t your time—IT AIN’T YOUR TIME! 

If your brain dies and you wake up fine, I’d say it ain’t your time. 

If a piano falls on you while you’re walking down the street eating an eclair, I’d say carbs kill, no, I’d say sorry, it was your time. 

Nothing is certain. Apparently, not even death, (let’s shoot for taxes next).

Nothing is cut and dried, black and white, end of story, that’s all she wrote. Nothing.

I believe, or rather I know, there is a special ingredient, a secret sauce of sorts, a power greater than doctors, science and statistics. 

Call it prayer, hope, a miracle, or Miracle Whip, I don’t care, just as long as you know it exists.

That’s my good news segment for you this fine morning. Now skedaddle! Go out there and make it a glorious day! (And watch out for falling pianos.)

Carry on,
xox

This is a reprise from 2016 and as is often the case, I need to take some of my own advice and keep my mouth shut more often.  Unless it causes mouth sores, then I need to speak up. Still figuring out how to make that distinction. How about you?
xox

“Dear Lord — Please keep one hand on my shoulder, and the other hand over my mouth.”

Hard to find a better prayer than that.

When you are in the act of defusing a situation, be it a political argument or an obtuse disagreement about the pronunciation of the word foyer; and I say that because everyone knows there is only one correct pronunciation of the word foyer—Foy-yay—anyway, I highly recommend, if at all possible, a minimum of talking.

Think about it. We mostly defuse anger or frustration. We seldom defuse joy. When I say seldom, I mean never. When was the last time you said,’Oh, Holy Hell, there is just too much joy in this room, I need to change the subject!’
See what I mean?

Defusing is an act best left to heavily outfitted bomb squads, street mimes, or those who have, through some cruel twist of fate, found themselves without a voice.
I say that from experience.
Words tend to get… wordy, meanings become misconstrued, and at a certain point, nobody is listening anyway so I say the fewer the better.

Silent nodding is my preferred method.

Then there’s petting. I’m a big believer in defusing a tense or uncomfortable situation with some awkward physical contact.
I’ve been known to braid a person’s hair or lint brush the shit out of their jacket in the midst of that kind of kinetic, twisty energy.

I do all of those things because it is next to impossible for me to keep my mouth shut. Hence the prayer at the top.

Question: Have you EVER helped this kind of situation by stating the facts, calling for common sense, or getting the last word?
Yeah, me neither.

There is always humor but humor is subjective and it can backfire and not in a funny clown car kind of way.

Let’s face it, there are times when people want nothing more than to vent. Or argue. Some like to pick fights.

It’s been my experience that this seldom ends well if I put in my two cents, so I’ve learned to keep my small change to myself and wait for people to ask for my opinion (which they don’t), or I keep my mouth full of cake. Cheese will do in a pinch, but cake takes forever to chew and swallow, especially without coffee, and by the time you do—the topic has usually shifted to something else… like the deterioration of the Antarctic Ice Caps and how the ice in my drink and the car I drive are contributing to the imminent death of the Planet.

Head… silently…nodding…

Cake anyone?

Carry on,
xox

(Ice pack brain freeze selfie)

I try not to go full-metal-wackjob about entire months you guys, but I’ve never been so happy to be done with a month In. My. Life. 

April sucked!

Hallelujah! It’s MAY!

Maybe it was the Mercury retrograde, maybe solar flares, all I know is that it was a shitshow. A circus full of monkeys, who drove tiny little clown cars filled with farts that followed me from week to week like a bad friend who insists on asking you to smell something horrible.

I started the month with a mouth full of sores. While they were all pretty painful, I had two the size of dimes on my lips that kept me from eating and drinking and of course, I didn’t lose an ounce which only added insult to injury.

Then I got an abscess. In a molar. On a weekend. Apparently, I broke the root of a tooth that had been killed long ago by a root canal. I probably did it by grinding my teeth due to some unresolved family issues that were torturing me while I slept. So, on the 30th, as a lovely parting gift from this month from hell, I had oral surgery to pull the tooth and install an implant. 

So, if you’re keeping score (and why wouldn’t you be) my mouth took a beating in April. I lost my ability to kiss and I get bitchy when I can’t kiss.

If I ask the Universe why, which I do about everything, I get that it was because I didn’t speak my truth. My words were filled with rage and I bit my tongue. Figuratively and literally. 

People, don’t do that! It always catches up with you! I’d tell you that but I can’t use my mouth right now, it’s swollen shut (my husband is beyond grateful) and I’m icing it with my homemade frozen corn ice pack. 

I’ve used my homemade, frozen corn ice pack twice this month which is twice more than at any other time in my life! I hobbled around like a bent over crone for a week after an almost-fall on my hike (which I’ve come to find out is just as bad as a real fall —same pain from all of the aerobic contortions I used to stay upright— just without the bloody knees). Only my trusty corn-ice-pack got me back on the hill so I have to love it, but truth be told, when all of this is water under the bridge I’m going to light it on fire and feed the popcorn to the squirrels. 

My husband told me once how his grandfather, a French titan of industry, hated the month of April. That is, until 1953, when my butterball, Buddha baby husband was born on the eleventh day of that very month. All of his life he found it to be a cruel and inauspicious month, which in French sounds gorgeous but wreaks havoc on your life if you really believe it.  I think it stuck in the back of my mind, so when all of the havoc rained down on me, of course, it had to be April!

Several of my friends fell into depressions, pets died, vacations canceled, kids suddenly went into the hospital, relationships that seemed stable failed. Even the weather went schizophrenic! It couldn’t make up its mind if it was summer or winter.

You and I both know that a month doesn’t have the power to ruin lives, it’s just a collection of hours, days and weeks. But we can also agree that sometimes it seems as if a certain month conspires to be our undoing. 

Many of you hide under the covers until December is over.

I know people who hate January—too may pounds on the scale, too many bills to pay, too many resolutions to break. 

Mine is April. (Thanks Grandpa!)

Now that it’s May, a month that is all clean slatey to me, birds will sing, the sun will shine, and I’ll be able to use my mouth again for more than just gargling warm salt water.

God help us all! 

Carry on,
xox

I didn’t expect to be beguiled. After all, it was barely 10 AM on a hectic Saturday morning filled with errands, but how could I ignore it?

He had to be almost forty. Lean and tan with the legs of a cyclist showing off under a pair of baggie, beige khakis. The flip-flops and Ray Ban’s attempted to shave a decade off that number but with more salt than pepper in his purposely disheveled bedhead…yeah, I’d have to say he was close to forty.

She was eleven.

I know this because I LOVE eleven-year-old girls! They are one of my favorite things on the planet—and she told me. But that came later.

They walked into the bustling nail salon holding hands, both wearing grins like of a pair of Cheshire cats as they finished a giggle that I presume had started in the car. They tried to put an end to it prematurely like you do an ice cream cone in an establishment that doesn’t allow food, but just like it does, the giggle melted and ran between her fingers as she attempted to stifle it with her hand.

Joy doesn’t often enter a building using the front door. It’s like…an anomaly.

Every head turned and we all stared because well—joy had replaced all of the oxygen.

“Can she get a mani-pedi?” He asked like a pro, his hand resting gently on top of her head.

“Sure, have her pick a color,” one of the women closest to the door replied.

Everyone else went back to their respective daydreams. Me? I was enchanted.

As the manicurist ran the water for her pedicure, our little eleven-year-old skip/bounced over to the wall where hundreds of bottles of polish are displayed. I watched her eyes scan all of the various colors like I used to discerningly pick from my giant box of Crayola crayons (the one with the built-in sharpener in the back).

He stood behind her, absentmindedly playing with her long brown hair as she showed him the colors under consideration, weighing in on each one.

“I don’t like that pink as much as the first one,” he said, and “Why don’t you save the neon orange for the summer?” Were a couple of the opinions he offered. He was thoughtful and PRESENT.

Clearly, he adored her.

Once she’d made that huge decision, (and we can all agree right here at the gravity of this right of passage, seeing that the wrong nail color can ruin your life, even if it’s only for a week or until you get home and take it off yourself, wasting $25 and a precious hour of time you can never get back) she plopped into the big chair and made herself comfortable.

I watched him adjust the seat for her, moving it forward so her skinny little legs could reach the roiling blue water of the built-in foot soaking tub.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he said, feeling secure that the twenty or so women in the joint would look after his little girl. “I’m going right next door to CVS.” We all shook our collective heads, silently agreeing that it was okay to leave her, but only for a little while. She grabbed onto his fingers as his hand brushed her cheek. “Are we sure about the blue?” she asked him. She seemed to want him to stay longer.

He nodded and walked slowly toward the door, her eyes following his every step. “Daddy!” she yelled above the steady buzz of nail salon gossip, he swung around, “Bring me something?” They both made a fist bump followed by a high five kind of special hand gesture.

Oh, that’s where it starts, I thought.

Fifteen minutes later he returned with a bag of stuff out of which he pulled an Abba Zabba. And even though I thought it impossible—this old-school choice of treat endeared him to me even more.

I fucking LOVE Abba Zabbas.
And Eleven-year-old girls with their dads.
I love blue toenails.
And mani-pedi joy.
And being unexpectedly beguiled on a Saturday morning.

He came back inside after going out to use his cell phone as I was gathering my stuff to leave. He must have called his wife to ask her how much to tip because I saw him fold up a few bills and tuck them into the pocket of his daughter’s jean jacket.

“How old are you?” I asked as I walked by. “I’m eleven,” she replied cheerfully as she worked on her Abba Zabba. “You guys sure are sweet, “ I said, motioning toward her dad. Her face lit up with a big, nougat and peanut butter grin, “We sure are!” she replied without a self-conscious bone in her body.

Just imagine, I thought, with a father like this, what kind of woman this girl will grow up to become.

That thought and their joy stuck with me all day.

Carry on,
xox

I find myself, at the ripe old age of sixty in possession of a life I love, an extra ten, fifteen, twenty pounds, and a finely tuned bullshit detector.

It has been honed and calibrated through the years, no, make that decades, mostly by paying attention to how it feels when something or someone is serving me some “shit of the bull.”

It has become a visceral thing and by that I mean I can smell it—because it stinks.

And it feels really, really bad.

Like fall down the stairs bad.
Like hit by a meteor bad.
Like thirty car pile up on the Interstate caused by a jackknifed big-rig full of dildos (I swear that really happened to me) bad.

You get the picture.

With regard to the meme above, I’m terrible at hiding, well anything, most especially the bullshit—so I don’t.

Neither will I defend it. I may try, but the minute you look at me cross-eyed or call “bullshit!” I cave because
I ALREADY KNEW IT!
I had the t-shirt and the all-day VIP pass.

But throughout my life, the one that continually trips me up is that rascal— rationalization, and it looks like this: me getting out my old Weight Watchers scale and weighing up the pluses and the minuses. The good and the bad.
Tracking columns, keeping score, making lists.

All the while knowing full well that the bad feelings far outweigh the good, that the minus column is as long as the neck of a giraffe, but still, there is that nagging, underlying sense of…what?

What has caused me through the years (although with much less frequency) to override my bullshit detector TO. MY. DETRIMENT?

Obligation. Obli-fucking-gation!

And what is obligation anyway? It’s the “shoulds”. The unspoken agreements. The implied senses of commitment and duty. In other words, things we feel we can’t get out of…alive.

I refer to it as the dreaded seventh sense, and in most people (myself included) it is the most powerful sense of all. If you ask any Catholic, Jew or basically anybody with a mother, they will tell you that their sense of obligation can take over their common sense, their good sense, their sense of self and most importantly it rides roughshod over their sense of what is really important in life—and what is BULLSHIT.

I know I don’t have to plead with you to understand (the last mention in the meme) because, well, you’re here and you’ve read this far so I feel confident that you can relate.

After this most recent, calamity ridden trip down bullshit lane, a route freshly paved by an irrational sense of obligation, I am bruised, battered, beleagured—and smelly, but now my eyes are wide open and I’m hopeful that it will be my last.

How about you?

Carry on,
xox

I believe with every fiber of my being that we ALL have a superpower. The thing or things that we are better at than almost ANYONE else.

Mine is my memory. I remember every word you said, the shoes you wore, and the song that was playing on the radio when you dumped me.
And then there’s my ability to weave that into a story.
Ouch. Oh relax, I’m only joking…sort of.

I have a friend who can make a box of Girl Scout Thin Mint Cookies last for more than three days — I know — UNBELIEVABLE. Yet, I have seen it with my own eyes.

Most mothers, including my own, are able to hear the spoken and often un-spoken mischievous musings, whispered plans and naughty plots of their children clear across the house, sometimes from out in the backyard with a cocktail while listening to the Dodger game; or even from the neighbor kid’s treehouse,

“No, you most certainly are NOT going to rig that old clothesline and beat up beach chair into a neighborhood zip line!”

Is she kidding? Could she have cracked our code? How did she know that was our plan? She’s making baloney sandwiches — in a house —down the block.

I was convinced as a child that her pink plastic hair rollers were some kind of sound enhancing devices.

Or how about this other widely demonstrated talent — the eyes in the back of her head trick.

“I see you…give your baby sister her cookie back. NOW!”

How is that possible…she’s driving?

Maternal Superpowers — used mostly in the service of good rather than evil; although as a child, that point was debatable.

My little sister is a kind of Culinary Wonder Woman. She can put together an event or party at the drop of a hint and I can guarantee you — it will be SPECTACULAR.

If you want to feed 6 or 60, it doesn’t matter, call Sue.

She’ll cater it herself with eight to fifteen different appetizers, each more delicious than the next. Then she’ll serve a roast turkey AND a Prime rib, AND a smoked ham AND a goat; all lovingly prepared and garnished to perfection — with thirty-five gourmet side dishes — half of them using kale. That’s a talent.

Oh, and you’d better leave room for dessert. They’ll be seventeen pies, ten cakes, donuts, pastries and fountains of chocolate, both dark and white.

All of them homemade. In her spare time.

Every inch of her home will be decorated for the affair. Gorgeous fresh flowers (grown, picked and arranged by her own loving hands), tablecloths and centerpieces with white twinkle lights hung by Tinkerbelle herself.

You’ll receive a keepsake memento as you enter, and another as you leave (after she gets to know you better). They will be thoughtful and touching things that are personally selected for you and you alone. Things that will make you cry; items you will treasure for years to come. (We haven’t yet figured out how she does that; as far as we can guess she has a team of people who go through your drawers while you’re at the party, then shop, gift wrap and return before you’re ever the wiser.)

If you’re one of the lucky ones she may have put together a slideshow of long forgotten but favorite photographs which will play on an endless loop — with a tear-jerking soundtrack.

Her parties are so inventive and fabulous that Martha Stewart has installed a top-secret party cam just to swipe ideas.

At Christmas, the elves at the North Pole have a Pinterest page of several years of her winter wonderland home and decoration ideas, which they present to Santa as their own — tiny lying slackers.

Susan’s undeniable superpower? — Making people happy with delicious food, beautiful ambiance and her over-the-top thoughtfulness.

My husband has the good fortune to have been blessed, as many of you have, with two superpowers.

He has his MacGyver Superpower and his Sparkle*.
Our friends and I tease him about it…but if you’ve ever been on the receiving end, they are both equally indispensable.

He can build you a house out of eleven Popsicle sticks, a random shard of glass, nine paperclips, one stick of Black Jack gum, and a sweat sock.
With those exact items, he can also fabricate a life raft, patch a blown tire, signal a rescue helicopter, fix a motorcycle, design a prom dress, start a signal fire, and end world hunger.

You want him on your team when the Zombie’s attack.

As for the Sparkle*(ting)…well, those that have been caught in its spell have given us the best table at a packed restaurant, upgraded us to First Class at no charge, overlooking the fact that our three bags each were over the weight limit, and found us front row tickets to a sold out concert.

Men, women, it doesn’t matter, his superpowers don’t discriminate.

Does it only work for he and I? Nope, whole groups of friends have benefited from his equal opportunity Sparkle*.

If he switched to the dark side…the man could rule the world. Seriously.

We all have ‘em these Superpowers— have you figured out what yours is?

Carry on,
xox

Oh, man. Let’s talk boundaries…again.
Because let’s be real here, half of us never set them and get steamrolled and the other half have learned to set them and risk looking like heartless turds. So…
Boundaries — Find them — set them — enforce them.

Sounds easy, right? Yeah, not so much.

“Daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves, even when we risk disappointing others.”
– Brene Brown

Boundaries with family? Look up “complicated, messy, clown car” in the dictionary and it’s a picture of a family without any boundaries.

I cannot tell you that setting boundaries always has a happy ending. It does not. One player always walks away disappointed and resentful so I suppose the only question we have to ask ourselves is this: Why is okay for me to be that person?

(I’m asking for a friend…)

Carry on,
xox