By The Sea

It is the new fad. Spit in a tube, send it to the lab and poof you have a list of countries your ancestors came from. I’ve fallen to the fad. I’ve spit into two different tubes, Ancestry and 23 and Me. I have my results form Ancestry already but I am still waiting on 23 and Me. It has been fun and exciting to see the migration of past relatives but nothing that truly surprised me. I am a little more mixed up than I originally thought but only in small amounts. This has fascinated my family so much that my three daughters, my husband and sister have recently spit into their tubes. I even had a cousin find a brother she didn’t know she had because of a connection with my DNA, talk about a BIG SURPRISE. Before I started all this DNA research, I visited the high school where my daughters attend. It was Special Friend Visitors Day and I was a guest for my daughter's classmate. She needed a special friend to attend classes with her and I was honored to be her special friend. As ...

Why do I find it so difficult to take care of me and my needs first? Or to say it another way, why is it so easy for me to take care of everyone else first? I think regularly, I am going to change. I will put me first this time. I pray about it. I journal about it and I talk to my friends about it but I continue to find myself in this same situation.  It's not that I don’t have the drive or the desire to accomplish self-care, I do. It’s not that I don’t have the resources or the support around me to help achieve this goal, I do. So what is the real reason or reasons that hold me back? If you ask a self-help guru they might say something like, set goals, be kind to yourself, acceptance is key. I work on that. That same guru may continue to say, set aside time, even if it is only 20 minutes per day, small steps to bigger goals. I find I am able to accomplish that for one day and then this happens; three teenage daughters, with three very different personalities, three very distincti...

Carina’s sophomore year in high school I picked my daughter up from school the other day. During the twenty-minute drive home she announced that she had finished her personal essay for English Class. Well, of course I was thrilled. She had a busy weekend ahead of her and she needed to finish all of her assignments before she went off to participate in a Lacrosse Camp. She asked me if I would like to hear what she wrote. I said of course as I drove her and my two other daughters home after a long day. It was dark out and I was prepared to listen but I was not prepared for what I actually heard.  I thought it would be another one of those English essays that she rushed through or did the bare minimum. I will admit to a time or two when I have told her, “That was horrible” or “I believe that was the worst paper you have ever written.” I have always known she was capable of more and I was always hoping she would discover that as well. As she read ...