M2M is on the Move…

Well, friends, the time has come: I’m moving my blog over to join the collective forces at Urban Bliss Life. I am so very excited about this new adventure, and hope you’ll join me over there! In addition to editing the site, I will be contributing my usual Maternity to Madness stories over in the STORIES section; writing about design and products in the STYLE section; sharing my love of food in the SAVOR section; and writing about social media and communication strategy in the STRATEGY section. Please be sure to sign up for the Urban Bliss Life RSS feed either via your reader or you can also sign up to get the feed via email. Then join us on Facebook too!

I’ll be keeping this separate site up for a while, but you can access all of my archives also on the new Urban Bliss Life site as well.

Thanks for reading my mom/life ramblings – hope you’ll continue to join me over at Urban Bliss Life! Keep the madness going, y’all!

motherhood

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Friendships, French Press, Pen + Paper

Last week, I broke my coffee maker carafe. Again. I’m talented like that. Luckily, I had a lovely French press that my dear friend, whom we’ll call Agatha, gave to me the last time I broke the coffee carafe. It’s beautiful and an almost-Tiffany blue, which is my favorite color in the whole world. It was SO thoughtful of her. Now, each morning when I make myself a cup of coffee, I think of her and how incredibly lucky I am to have her as a friend.

{French Press of Friendship}

Agatha and I go way back. We met in middle school, and there are some days when I think there couldn’t be two women more different from each other in the whole world: she’s a beautiful cheerful blond with sparkling blue eyes… I’m a short, sarcastic Filipino with dark hair. She’s a healthy triathlete… and I’m a certified channel-changing bacon-&-beer lover. Her kind words are like butterflies dancing across paper … and I swear like a sailor. She was talking about the Eagles once when Nine Inch Nails was playing in my head. We both, however, liked to write, listened to Billy Joel and watched/read Anne of Green Gables.

Through differences, distance and time we’ve remained friends. I credit that mostly to her incredible thoughtfullness & forgiveness. She’s truly one of the most amazing people I have ever been lucky enough to meet.

So when I sat down to pour my second cup of coffee from the French press she gave me, I wrote her a little note and mailed it. You know, pen and paper? Envelopes and stamps? Those old school tools are still used on a daily basis by old school me.

Then if timing would have it, the next day I received a Facebook invitation to join the Write a Letter & Send It In The Mail event for July 9th. I LOVE the premise of this. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, e-mails…they’re all wonderful, but I truly believe that there’s nothing better in conveying how you truly feel than good ol’ pen to paper.

I may not be the best friend in the world. I’m awkward and clunky and weird. I’ve been known to say the wrong thing at the worst time. So it’s important to me that the people I love know how much I love them, how much they mean to me and how much they shape my life. It’s important to me that Agatha knows how much her friendship means to me, and even if I will honestly never be as thoughtful as she is and as she was in giving me this French Press out of the blue when I needed it. What I can do is what I’ve been doing and loving doing since I was four: I can write. Sometimes it’s the most I can give, sometimes it’s all I know how to give, and I am thankful and lucky to have friends who somehow love me for it/despite it.

Share how much someone means to you today, on July 9th, and everyday. Put down the iPhone, and pick up the pen and paper.

friends & family

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Love & Letting Go

My son has a poet’s soul and an overflowing, heavy heart. He feels so deeply, so genuinely, so purely. He is able to see and feel things in situations that sometimes adults miss. This creates a sweetness in his intentions and a gentleness in his actions toward others and the world around him. He gets it. He really does.

But it also means he hurts. So much. I love that he is able to feel so deeply but hate when that feeling is sadness, hurt, pain. My mama bear instinct is to protect his little heart as much as possible. But the older he gets, the more I have to let go. And that kills me. That absofreakinglutely kills me.

It’s been an hour since I dropped off my son, crying hysterically, at school. His dad’s been away at a design conference and comes home today. My son, who has been amazingly wonderful and happy while his dad’s been gone, suddenly lost it. My son, who hates being late to school (which is always my fault) and hates missing anything at school, did not want to go to school today. He wanted to stay home until his dad came home. He missed his dad. Badly. It’s like suddenly a pipe burst and the realization of all of those emotions just hit my son hard and he couldn’t stop it. Watching my son feel all of that pain so suddenly, so fiercely, just ripped my heart out.

But. But…the world doesn’t stop for this kind of pain. The world expects you to compose yourself, take deep breaths, and move on. The world expects you to logically pull together your emotions, stuff them in a sack, stand up, and walk away as if everything is ok. The world expects my son to go to school, and me to go to work, and to table all that we feel for…what? Sometimes I’m not entirely sure, and I’m supposed to be the adult.

I’m torn. Torn between teaching my son how to accept his feelings and move on and allowing him time to have those feelings and know that everything is not ok. Sometimes everything can be as awful as you imagine. Sometimes loving someone means you will feel more pain than you could ever possibly feel physically. I want him to know it’s ok to feel this way, to acknowledge and allow the pain, and to move on with the pain.

I love the teachers at my son’s school. They are amazing with my children. They know them as individuals and respect their unique traits. I left after 20 minutes, and they called 20 minutes later to tell me he calmed down. His teacher asked him to draw a welcome home sign for his dad. Tears, and this time they were mine. I couldn’t ask for a better village to help me raise my child. Because sometimes I don’t know how to teach my son something I haven’t been 100% able to learn myself, and in this way, he and I can learn how to sit with our emotions and move on with the pain, together.

So he’s at school learning to love while letting go, and I’m in my office, trying to do the same.

kids, motherhood

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Found: The Forgotten

It’s an odd thing, when your parents move out of the home in which you lived throughout high school. I thought I had gathered all of my belongings from their house years ago. I was wrong.

From the depths of the garage, they found these choice nuggets of my past and handed them over.

A touchy-feely pre-teen self-help book titled “Your Changing Emotions” written by the esteemed doctor of….hang on…co-written by… Jill Whelan?! The spunky little kid from The Love Boat? Man, I wanted to live on that boat.

What’s left of my once-MASSIVE collection of Sweet Valley High books which I spent hours and hours reading in elementary school.

And what I call the Crate of Type-A Chaos: a white crate (hellooo college dorm memories) filled with speeches, articles, pictures, poems, and schedules neatly divided into manilla file folders. Yes, I really have always been this organizationally obsessed, apparently.

My favorite folder? The one labeled “MEN/<3/SCUM.” Inside? Empty. Apparently I just wanted to have this file folder ready, just in case I encountered scummy men whom I loved.

There were also photos of captured moments I had long forgotten with people who once were my world, notes from friendships that fizzled for this reason or that, articles that were published with my byline but in a voice and a perspective so different from today.

These boxes of paper goods that I haven’t needed in 15, 20 years are now sitting in my garage. Logically, I know they should all just go into the recycling bins. But they won’t. I don’t know why, but they won’t.

friends & family, home

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Throwback Thursday: First Work Trip With Baby {circa Oct 2004}

Boo's first plane trip! Oct 2004, 5 months old. PDX->NYC

I left Donald Trump’s presentation to go breastfeed my 5-month-old son. I got up while THE Donald was speaking, and walked out. I’ve never been apologetic about my life, my decisions, but reading this blog post from October 2004 makes me think that perhaps sometimes I am a little too strong in my stance. I mean, really: I could have waited a few minutes, right?

For my first Throwback Thursday, I share one of the first blog posts I ever wrote: Airplanes, Hotels and Formula…Oh My, written October 25, 2004. Our son – whom we had always called “Boo” on this blog since the very beginning – was just about to turn 5 months old. It was his first plane ride and our first time traveling with a child. I was headed to New York for a PR Directors event with Education Management Corporation, my former employer. My husband at the time (oh don’t worry, he’s still my husband; no string of baby daddy’s here!) was still producing the news for the local FOX station at that time while also working on his second Bachelor’s degree in Multimedia/Web Design. Luckily he was able to join us on the trip, which meant that our son could go too and I wouldn’t have to worry about the whole breastfeeding issue… or so I thought.

Read the whole long saga here. Do you remember your first plane trip with your first child? What age was he/she and where did you go? More importantly, HOW did it go? Please share! I just love other parents’ stories!

motherhood

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