13 Lessons I’ve Learned While Being Your Mom

Today is Big Sprout’s 13th birthday, and this letter is for him.

Dear Big Sprout,

I started out the morning by writing my annual man-you’re-getting-so-big-I-can-hardly-believe-the-time-is-going-so-quickly blogpost. It is never an easy post to write, but today’s was especially difficult.

Just after dropping you off at school, I learned Zach lost his battle with cancer this morning. Actually, out of respect for Zach I want to amend that statement. Like he said in this Soul Pancake video, My Last Days: Meet Zach Sobiech, he wants to be remembered as “the kid who went down fighting and didn’t really lose.” There is nothing about Zach’s story that says cancer won.

I cannot get Zach and his friends and family off of my heart today nor can I stop thinking about life and your own movement through it. I struggle to keep from imagining what it must be like to be the mother of such an incredible son and to watch him slip away.

We mothers have to do that, you know. In little ways with each passing birthday, when milestones come and go, when college creeps up and marriages happen. We have to let go a little at a time and sometimes, in heartbreaking fashion, what seems like all at once.

Today you’re asked to share the day with Zach. A celebration and a reminder to live life purposefully. To learn as you go and to make the biggest difference possible.

I’m not sure what it is you’ve learned in your 13 years here, but I have a list of a few things I’ve learned from you along the way. Inspired by a recent interview with Jim Higley at www.bobbleheaddad.com, I have compiled a list of some of the lessons I’ve learned from being your mother.

There is such a thing as love at first sight.

I fell in love with you the minute I saw you. It was an overwhelming sensation I had not expected. Don’t tell your dad, but you were the one and only boy I have ever fallen in love with at first sight.

Babies fingernails are hard to cut, and sometimes the pain kids feel comes from a mom who tries too hard.

I vividly remember cutting your fingernails for the first time. (or rather filing because oh my gosh are you kidding… baby nails bend so unnaturally… yet they cut through steak?!?) I filed too closely and your finger bled and you cried. (harder than usual) Trying hard and caring deeply doesn’t make my attempts at motherhood perfect, it just makes the mistakes that much more painful. For both of us.

It’s awesome watching a kid touch grass for the first time. (and all the other firsts he gets to do too)

The joy in your smile when you felt grass for the first time was something I’ll never forget. It is a privilege to witness people’s firsts, and it is worth celebrating each and every one.

Toddler boys don’t sit for story time. (and that’s ok)

Chasing you through the library when I had envisioned a pleasant toddler story time taught me that I need to pay attention to who you are in the moment…and to let go of the made-up version living in my head.

Big brothers can be kind.

You have shattered my expectation that all big brothers are mean to their little sisters. I’ve learned that compassion can come in big brother bodies.

There are scary things in the world and praying is a good defense. 

When you brought me over to the rock pile to show me the black widow you had wisely decided not to touch, I realized I would never be able to watch everything you do nor would I be able to protect you from every harm. It’s true that sometimes I just need to lean harder on my belief that you don’t really belong to me… God has you in the palm of His hand.

People want to feel important.

Someone once told me you were like the mayor of preschool. You knew all the kids names and you would regularly inquire about their well being. Not much has changed since you were four and you’ve taught me a positive way to live is to try to make other people feel important.

Determination comes from within and parents have the power to damage the naturally determined kid. 

When you were five and you refused to stop spinning to catch a tennis ball I had encouraged you to drop-spin-and-catch I learned that you take parental pressure way too seriously. I’ve learned to let you lead the way since.

It is important to listen to stories. Dreams and wishes live there.

Walking into your school conference for first grade, you confided you had made up a story that was supposed to have been true. You said shyly, “I might have written that we have lived in Hawaii and we have a dog named Hunter.” You were reeling from a new baby in the house and your made-up story reminded me how important imagination can be. That… and you really wanted a dog.

Singing is cool.

When you and I were locked out on the balcony of a mountain condo for a few hours, we passed the time by huddling in my jacket and singing any song we could think of. You haven’t stopped singing since and I think it is one of the coolest things you do. Other things will come and go in your life, but music is forever.

It’s important to teach a man to fish…no matter the weather.

There was a time when you felt incredibly uncomfortable being alone. Since finding your peace in fishing, you have calmed that unsettled energy. You’ve taught me to celebrate rain and cold and to relish time outside alone.

Thirteen-year-olds are pretty awesome.

They may wear headphones, laugh at crude jokes and flip their hair to get the flow, but they are loveable and I enjoy being with them.

And finally,

Letting go, in even small ways, is hard…really, really hard. But when we carry something with us, we’re eternally tied to something bigger.  

What comforts me, and what I hope will be of comfort to Zach’s friends and family who are having to let go, is the light that Zach has left for us to carry.  Life is a series of lessons and we are meant to learn from experiences and from people. Lessons are the lights we pass to one another. Zach was very intentional about his light. He carried a huge flame through his short life and he managed to light millions of candles along the way.

Son, you are challenged to carry with you a light from this shared day with Zach. You are challenged to take in all the lessons you are meant to learn and to pass on a light of your own to as many people as you can convince to carry it.

I love you more than I can adequately express and I truly hope this is a birthday you will never forget.

Love,

Mom

 

The Difference of Blogging

I am assigned the task of writing about the difference blogs/books have made in my life. I am taking part in a bloghop hosted by the magazine I work for, Books Make a Difference. It’s harder than I thought it would be. I have procrastinated all month, and although I could blame my husband’s annual departure, our impending house sale and move, or the general expectations of my job and child-rearing, it is also true I have not made time to write through this piece.

Blogging hasn’t always been this way. I used to have to restrain myself from putting out too many blogposts in a week.
Blogging with small children was as necessary as breathing.

I started blogging fall of 2003, and I found the support, encouragement, friendship, wisdom, connection and sounding board I so desperately needed.

That’s what writers do essentially, right? We write to hear an echo back from the world. We write in the hope our words will be important to someone else. Maybe not every writer needs emotional feedback, but I sure did. I was a stay-at-home mom unhappy with having made the deliberate (and seemingly permanent) decision to stay home and raise our children. Motherhood wasn’t what I had expected and I needed to know I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

As I grapple with the focused subject of this post I am sitting in the back hatch of my car. My laptop is open on my legs and I am lounging near an elementary school playground . I glance up occasionally to make sure the girls are happily playing and taking frequent breaks to pet the dog. Big Sprout is building his muscles and stamina at a dryland hockey practice at a gym in town and I’m admittedly a bit nostalgic.

I never thought I would be at this point in motherhood.

Over and over again, in the early years of blogging, I’d write about the permanence of motherhood with small children. It was either pervasive frustration, or bouts of hilarity. I’d catch the sprouts teaching me things, and without a classroom to hash out the life-changing reality of the motherhood experience, I decided instead to put my stories out into the world for commentary.

I am most grateful for the commentary.

As I write this, I am watching a young mother with her little boy. He is about the age Big Sprout was when all of this blogging madness started. When I started to blog, Big Sprout was four years old and starting preschool, Middle Sprout was just over a year old, and Little Sprout was merely an idle egg in my ovary. I felt as though life were never going to be any different. Big Sprout turns 13 this month, and long gone is the permanence of mothering small children.

Blogging, instead, has been my permanence.

I was talking with someone yesterday about the shelf we have moved seven times during our marriage. We are preparing to move it again. It is a plain, white, cheap, particle-board bookcase, but it is the most important piece of furniture we own. On one side of the bookshelf there are hand-scrawled marks denoting the height of each of our children at various points in their childhood. If I’m grateful for any of my ideas, I am grateful I made the decision early in their lives to put this record on something portable. I didn’t ever want to have to paint over the marks or leave them behind. I guess that is sortof what blogging has been for me too.

Blogging is my portable marker. I can go back to old posts and I hear the voice of a woman I hardly recognize. I see linkbacks to women who have remained important friends in my journey through writing and motherhood and I can hardly imagine what type of mother I would be without them.

So, what difference has blogging made in my life? Having a space to write through and mark the growth that has happened for our family, and for me personally as a mother, has truly made more difference for me than I have words to explain.

 

Meagan is constantly moving, but you can sometimes catch her these places:

Website: www.meaganfrank.com

Twitter: @choosingtogrow

Facebook: MeaganFrankAuthor

Email: choosingtogrow@meaganfrank.com

 

Copyright 2013                     Meagan Frank                     Choosing to Grow

 

Practice does NOT make Perfect: It Makes Practicers

This was taken a few years ago when my husband and son were “practicing” catching garder snakes in our yard.

Yesterday while at coffee with a couple friends, the subject of malpractice came up. One of my friends wisely pointed out that doctors are not perfect…they only “practice” medicine. It got me thinking:

Doctors practice medicine.

Lawyers practice law.

My husband and I are practicing parenting.

Yesterday afternoon, when I was working through some difficult emotions with our almost-thirteen-year-old, I borrowed this idea of practice.

He is in the midst of confusion about life and his place in the world. (did I mention he’s in seventh grade? or that his dad is getting ready to leave for out-of-state work for 6 weeks? or that we are preparing to move to a new town?) His confusion is explicable, even if his behavior is not excusable.

After hacking away at what seemed to me to be surface excuses for his recent behavior, he worked to identify the feelings he couldn’t quite express. I gently pushed him a bit further. Much of his behavior has revolved around what seemed like anger toward me and my husband. (shocking for a teenager, I know!) So, I prodded him to talk through his feelings toward us. As hard as it was for me to hear his perspective, I did my best to listen without reaction.

I sat for a few minutes, taking in his viewpoint about what we are not doing quite right as parents. Honoring his feelings, I told him I was grateful he shared with me.

Then I asked him, “How long have you been here?”

“Thirteen years,” he said.

“How long have I been here?” I asked.

“Almost thirty-eight years,” he smirked, frustrated because he thought he knew where I was going.

I said, “You know what? You are practicing being in seventh grade. You’ve never done any of this before. Your dad and I have done seventh grade, and high school, and college, so we have a perspective that you do not yet have.”

He subtly rolled his eyes, because I did go where he thought. Then, I changed gears.

“The thing is, we are practicing too.”

He looked up from his hands to make eye contact with me for the first time.

“We have NEVER been parents of a thirteen-year-old before and we only get one shot to get it right.”

“No,” he sunk back into his annoyed posture. “You get to do it two more times with the girls.”

“Ok, let me rephrase. We are practicing being parents of a thirteen-year-old boy named Nate, and sometimes we try harder than we should because we so desperately want to get it right.”

He softened and made eye contact again.

“Everyone is practicing something,” I said. “We get better with more practice, but we’re never perfect. You are practicing life as an almost-teenager and your dad and I are practicing mid-life and parenting. All that matters is that all of us keep trying to get better at what we’re practicing.”

How about you? What are you practicing? Are you choosing to grow through the experience, or are you going through the motions?

www.meaganfrank.com                                                                     

Copyright 2013 Meagan Frank Choosing to Grow

 

Washing off Dust with Water

 

Let’s pretend that this is new. Better yet, let’s pretend I’m young.

I was okay in the dust when I was younger because I didn’t know about water.

We lived in Monument, Colorado, with a surprisingly arid landscape full of cacti. I had never seen a natural lake.

Dust felt natural.

You and I stood at the indoor balcony of our first house and watched the water pour as a paint bubble down the front, two-story wall. It wasn’t supposed to rain for four straight days. We didn’t believe the compromised roof was going to fail so soon. We tried to call for help, but learned your energy to work was going to fix things faster than any delayed contractor could.

Water started our path through dust.

We renovated that house.  I trod off proudly to my teaching job with signs of your labor carried in lines of dust on my skirts. It was a declaration of home ownership.

It didn’t bother me then.

It didn’t even bother me the other three houses we’ve renovated. It was all part of our young adventure.

I am done with dust.

It has been so messy around here the last few days. Sanding drywall drops a layer of dust that doesn’t really ever go away. I’m certain I have dust from every house we’ve renovated imbedded in my skin… or buried in my ears. Part of me is so ready for the mess to be cleaned, while another part of me knows this phase of our lives is coming to an end.

I have to admit I’m a little sad to see it go.

This last project mimics this past winter and maybe with a new perspective I can avoid bitterness about both. Let’s imagine the story has just begun and the dust settling at our feet is magical instead of maddening.

Remember the way snow felt at the start of December? Yeah, me too. Now, let’s forget the snow that fell today has come in late March. Instead, let’s relish its freshness.

We’re at the last house renovation. This is the last time you’ll be covered in soot of your own work. From the very first house we’ve owned together, we have raised the dust to bring life to what was dying in some way.  I should embrace gratitude for our dusty story.

That’s why I need to stop myself from cringing with each footprint we leave as we walk through the dusty part we’re mending onto the wood floor we’ve already replaced.

This is it.

This is the layer of dust that, once blown away, will reveal the calming center of where we’ve been aiming to be.

A house on a lake…imbedded into a shoreline with humid leaves for blankets.  It’s not the dust-filled, wide open potential of a Pike’s Peak view, but it is the calmest place we’ve been able to imagine together that will let the dust of our crazy lives finally settle.

www.meaganfrank.com                                                              

Copyright 2013    Meagan Frank                          Choosing to Grow

 

Connected through Books…Related by Blood

“Hello. This is Meagan Frank from Books Make a Difference. I was hoping to connect with you this morning for the interview, and now I’m wondering whether I have the wrong time. I’ll try back in an hour in case I had not accounted correctly for the time zones. Thanks. I do look forward to talking with you soon.”

“She’s not there?” My husband asked from his adjacent desk that sits less than five feet away from me. He seemed hesitant to break the ordered silence. I had shushed him and built up the importance of the phone call, and as I relaxed from my interview posture, I turned toward him.

“I don’t get it,” I said,”I could have sworn this was when we rescheduled it. Maybe she got hung up with something, or she’s still not feeling well.”

I re-checked our email exchange…an ironic part of the whole story…and felt assured that I had at least remembered the appointment the way she and I had set it. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself.

I had looked so forward to my interview with Susan Maushart, and now I was wondering whether it was going to happen at all.

I left my ringer on and headed to the kitchen. I had managed to ignore the morning mess in my preparation for the call and now I found myself walking aimlessly through the room with an unsettled energy. What I did next made me laugh out loud. I went to the laundry room and took out the broom and dustpan. I started sweeping my way through the minutes of waiting.

“How ironic,” I thought, “I’m waiting to get connected to Susan Maushart to talk to her about her book The Winter of Our Disconnect and I start doing Wifework.”

It was in the pages of Wifework where I first came to know about Susan’s work. I don’t remember exactly how I grabbed her book off the library shelf in Monument, Colorado, but it was one of the titles I took home during my rather aimless search to save our marriage. That book became the source of one of the biggest fights my husband and I have ever had. She had the research and the data that explained part of my malaise and frustration in our marriage. I was doing too much of the work around the house, and it was not the work I really wanted to be doing. When I brought up this fact to my husband, I think it included the slamming of a basket of laundry and a launched pair of socks. Laundry has never been the same in our house since.

I was telling people about this eye-opening book, and I think it was at a family gathering I learned she and I are relatives. Somewhere far up the family branches on my grandfather’s side of the tree, (if I’m reading the family tree branches correctly) her great-grandmother and my great-great-grandmother were sisters. I like to think it might be a partial explanation for the way her work resonates so completely with me.

So when the editorial team for Books Make a Difference was meeting to discuss possible stories for the magazine, I mentioned Susan’s latest project that included unplugging herself and her three teens from electronics for six months.

The story was approved, and I set out to connect with her via Facebook, email, website…and eventually smartphone. Hmm.

When I called her back the hour following my first attempt, she and I laughed about the fact she had not picked up the phone because she hadn’t recognized the number on the caller id. As I worked through the interview questions, I remained cognizant of the cosmic connection of both books and blood. I remain grateful for both. You can see the resulting article here: “Susan Maushart: Living Deliberately by Unplugging“.

In another time and place our paths would likely never have crossed. She jets back and forth from New York to Australia, and I flit from midwest town to midwest town landing regularly in Colorado for the summers. I probably would have found all her books on a library shelf eventually. Maybe we would have bumped elbows at a family reunion, but I am fairly certain if we had crossed paths in some other way, we would have somehow ended up connecting deeper through books too.

                         

www.meaganfrank.com

Copyright 2013     Choosing to Grow                         Meagan Frank

 

Feeling Grief…Embracing Joy

“They only have two hours of childhood left.”

It was this fleeting comment by a woman in Newtown, CT yesterday that has rendered me useless. I cannot shake her distraught and heart-broken expression as she explained to the rolling cameras that she was across town to console her friends while delaying the pick-up of her own children. She wanted her kids to enjoy their innocence for just a few hours more.

I sat with the same dilemma while at my desk in Minnesota. I sobbed at the overwhelming loss. At the grief that enveloped my every thought.  I longed to hold my children, to grab their precious faces in my hands and gaze endlessly into their bright little eyes. I knew they would come home from their school-days without a clue about what unfolded in horrific fashion hundreds of miles away, and all I wanted was to stop the vicious clock from ticking.

The clock is the problem, you know. We know all childhood, all innocence, all life will inevitably end, but we hate the truth of that. We pine for more joy than grief as we’re living, and we hurt so much for the children because they are our balance between hope and loss.

When my 12-year-old bound in the door, I greeted him in the kitchen and held him. We embraced in silence until he mumbled into my shoulder, “You alright mom?” “No” I explained and pulled back to make eye contact with him. He had heard some rumblings, and we talked about the news, and the horror, and the overwhelming feelings of grief, anger, sadness, confusion, and despair.

He knew better than to give me away when I hugged his sisters just as hard.

The girls are in fifth and first grades. They are who I picture cowering in closets or hiding in cupboards, and I was hopeful they would stay unaware for quite a while.

I knew the fifth grader would eventually catch on, and when she asked me about an Instagram photo she saw, my heart gently splintered. Our first-grader still doesn’t know, but I can hear that deafening click of the clock hand.

While I cannot help but to consider something will have to be done about this…measures will have to be taken…forward movements will need to be made, there remains this space of time that needs to be lived too.

It brings me to another scene I watched unfold this week reminding me that where grief exists, joy can too.

Most weekdays, about 2:30 in the afternoon, I watch a young man arrive at the house across the street to visit the teen-aged daughter who lives there. Most days he gets his crutches out of the car and slowly makes his way to the front door.

The young man’s name is Zach Sobiech, and he is a 17-year-old boy who is dying from cancer. His ticking clock is loud, and he hears it, but he has made a conscious decision to live in spite of it.

The last few weeks he has been in the news for a song he wrote to say good-bye to his friends and family.  I can never watch the video dry-eyed and I think of the grief and the loss for this boys’ family and for his girlfriend, Amy.

Then Zach gave me a gift of joy I will never forget.

One sunny and somewhat unseasonably warm day this week, I noticed Zach out of his car. His crutches were sticking out of the snow, and he picked up snowballs and threw them. He launched one down the street, one at his car, and he threw a few gently down at his feet. He walked painfully, without his crutches, over to the snowplowed pile of snow in the middle of the cul-de-sac. I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. He picked up another few snowballs, and after throwing them, he made his way back to the drive.

A silent tear streaked down my face and I said to my husband, who had turned from his work to watch Zach too, “he’s just a kid playing in the snow.”

The next snowball he grabbed was cupped and hidden behind his back as his attention obviously moved from what he was doing to something down the street. Amy’s car pulled into the driveway, and it was apparent he was readying himself for a surprise attack.

The driver’s door opened and when Amy realized the plan, she quickly shut it. He raised his empty hands in innocence, and Amy made her way out of the car. It wasn’t long before the two of them were in the powder of the yard.  Zach arm-swiped the snow toward Amy first, and she quickly returned fire. She approached him laughing and he offered her a hug. They embraced for a moment in the sun-kissed snow, and then she let him slowly pull her down into the snow with him. They splashed each other with powder and I found myself breathlessly smiling and crying in the same glorious moment.

Life is full of triumph and tragedy, celebration and sorrow, joy and grief. It is only what we choose in even the smallest moments that define the lives we live. There will be those who rise in anger about what happened in Newtown…there will be those who rise in action…and there will be those who will be unable to rise for quite some time.  There’s no telling how we’ll react until we are in any particular moment.

In this moment, in my small kitchen in Minnesota, I hear the girls making play-doh worlds to the backdrop music of some boy band. There is a clock ticking in the background, but maybe my job as their mom is not to do what I can to keep them in an ephemeral childhood, but rather to embrace the fleeting moments, and to throw myself into that proverbial pile of snow to make snow angels any chance I get.

 

Books Make a Difference…Absolutely!!

 Today is a big day.

For months I have used my writing time to piddle with story ideas, read new books, research stories,  interview some fascinating people, work through drafts of articles, edit the writing of others, and bounce ideas around with my friend, who happens to be the incredibly talented publisher of this new adventure.

This feels like a big deal…and, well, frankly, we think it is a pretty big deal.

The brain-child of my fantastically talented friend, Karen Pavlicin-Fragnito , Books Make a Difference has been on her mind for years. She has spent her life helping to use books to make a positive difference in people’s lives, and this online magazine is the culmination of her passion, our positive working relationship, good timing, and simply put… a really great idea.

Last week, when I was sitting down to electronically invite people I know to our Books Make a Difference magazine launch, I realized something. It was the first time, in my super-uncomfortable-get-the-word-out-promotional-style-because-I-am-a-writer-and-that-is-what-I-have-to-do life, when I didn’t hesitate to select people via the FB engine used to invite friends.

As I hovered over names, there was hardly a hesitation with anyone. “Oh, she totally loves books!” “That guy? Sure! He’s a writer for goodness sake.” “What about them…absolutely… I’m sure they read books.”

Before I knew it I was clicking EVERYBODY! I invited librarians, teachers, parents, obligated family members, ardent supporters of my writing habit, kids who were in my English class, kids for whom I taught English, classmates from college, artists, business folks who I have heard reference a book or two, …there wasn’t anyone, I didn’t think, who wouldn’t be interested in this project.

“Why is that?” I wondered. “What is it about books that makes them such an important part of all of our lives?”

Writing, words, and stories have always been such an enormous part of the human experience. As soon as humans found a way to do it, we wanted to share experiences with as many people as we could. That instinct for creativity hasn’t wavered much. With the advances of technology, we have just made it easier to do what we feel compelled to do. We create books… to share them, to be changed by them, and I am continually amazed by the advantages of this time we live in. We can do books better than they’ve been done before!

More than ever…books are making a positive difference in people’s lives. I cannot tell you how blessed I feel to be a part of uncovering the behind-the-scenes stories I’ll get to share. I invite all of you to become a part of this journey, and if books have ever made a difference in your life, I’d love to hear your story.

You can find the magazine here:  www.booksmakeadifference.com

You can like our FB page here: ReadtheDifference

You can tweet with us here:  @booksmake

Per the obligatory writer-plea:  Make sure to share this information with as many people as you can!

 

2012  Meagan Frank                       Choosing to Grow