Pondering on the Days of my Youth

While my childhood, for the most part, is a bit of a blur to me, there are a few things I do remember rather fondly from the days of my youth.

I was not particularly graced with an abundance of toys, and therefore, the ones that I had become all the more special to me. There was one very treasured toy in my somewhat small collection. My beloved Mrs. Beasley Doll. I vaguely remember for years, how I carried this doll around with me and showered her with the most adoring love and affection a child can bestow on one’s most treasured toy. Aside from my beloved doll, I can remember distinctly how from a very young age until well throughout my teenage years, my next greatest love was my radio. Whether it be a small portable cassette recorder, to a small pre- “boombox” era radio. I can still remember the day I finally got my very first Sony Walkman! Boy, did I sure think I was somebody then. I had been blessed with the ability to have portable music pretty much throughout my youth, but now, with the tiny little speaker that fit just over my ears, my music was more private, it was mine, and I did not have to share it with anyone. I am not entirely sure why the idea of having my music all to myself was so appealing to me. Given that today, as an adult, I love to play songs for other people, and I enjoy sharing songs that mean a great deal to me with people that I am closest to. I suppose, in retrospect, during my childhood, there were a lot of things that were out of control and far beyond my scope of comfort, and when I could put on my personal speakers and control the music that only I listened to, it was a form of escape. Ironically, music has long been a form of escape for many people, and I am among those plenty.

I did not have the luxury of having a large group of people in my life throughout my childhood. My family was very reserved and kept a pretty tight circle. Growing up as a child, I only had a handful of cousins, and only three of them were even within my close proximity. The other family members were only present in my life once a year, during Thanksgiving, and then there was one family that I saw sporadically throughout the year, but we were never close. One of my cousins that did live next door to me became my best friend. He was a second or third cousin; we never did actually figure that out. However, it did not matter. He became closer to me than I was with my first cousins or even my brother. We went through a period, as young teenagers, in which we wanted to escape our lives. We had a lot of things in which we wanted to run away from. But we were too young and far too scared to even try running away. So, we created these imaginary fantasy lives for ourselves. I had always dreamed of being a drummer in a rock band and he loved the guitar. With a badminton racket and a few sticks carefully selected and snapped off an unsuspecting tree, we would fire up some music, normally on the portable radio outside, and instantaneously become the heroes in our own little world of rock and roll. Music videos came on the television on weekend nights late into the night. Even though, I knew we would both risk getting into more trouble than we ever wanted, I would let him slip in the front door after midnight on the weekends, and we would sit quietly in the living room, watching videos, and dreaming of one day escaping the world in which we knew and becoming famous in our own rock band. Aside from music, we actually created our own pretend identities. Looking back now, it is really funny and really sad at just how much we craved to be someone else to the extent that we began to really take on the personas of our make-believe personalities. Our alter egos even evolved with us as we grew up as teenagers. We created the identities in our youth, and as we became older teenagers, we changed our characters names and personalities to adjust to our newfound lives from childhood to teenager. The saddest part of it all, looking back, is that my alter ego was always a boy. Things had happened to me that I felt like if I had been a boy would not have happened. My pretend persona was a boy because I despised how being a girl made me feel weak.

As a child, I remember developing a strong love for reading. I suppose it was yet another means of escaping reality. I could sit for hours and read about anything or anyone. I still remember one of my most favorite books of all that I read at about the time of transitioning from a child into a teenager. I cannot remember my exact age, but I remember I was young, but still old enough to comprehend reading a young adult fiction. The book was titled, The Summer of the Sky Blue Bikini. I have long since looked for that book in my adult years, as I would love to sit and re-read one of my most favored reads every. But, alas, I have yet to find it. We had a small creek that was behind my house, it was just a small hike through some deep woods, but definitely worth the trek down to it. There was this bend in the creek that had this huge rock tucked in the curve that made a perfect place to sit and watch the water streaming by. It was deep enough in the woods that there was such a sense of peace and solace, yet it was close enough to the house that my parents never concerned with us being down there for hours on end. I would often take me a treasured book down to the creek and assemble myself comfortably on the rock in the bend. I would take in the serenity of my surroundings. The ferns, the moss, and the babbling of the water racing past me. Then, I would sink into my treasured book. During my teenaged years, it was mostly a Stephen King masterpiece. I would sit and read until the light of the sun was getting just about too dark to see to get home. Then, I would reluctantly make my way back out of the woods and back to reality.

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February 12, 2020

Chasing Dreams and Finding the Way Back Home

Often times in our lives, we are prompted to develop a desire. A dream. A longing that keeps us up late at night, dreaming and plotting. Whether it be figuring out a budget over and over to achieve the means with which to chase this dream or planning out the right time in life to pursue this desire. It is not uncommon for anyone to have dreams and goals that may be considered unrealistic by others around them. Or, at the very least some may say that your dreams and plans are not easily obtainable. They will chastise you for such dreams, and even try their best attempt at directing you back into a state of realism in which you will see the insanity of the dream and think more logically on how absurd it is. Then you can settle back into your little life of balance, and structure, and mediocrity.

For some of us, however, the irrationality of the dream is what drives us. The idea that someone, anyone would dare be so brave to tell us that our dream may never be ours to realize, is a mere fuel to the fire that burns within us. The more that people tend to push us in the opposite direction of our dream, the harder we fight to hold on to them. They are, after all, the only thing that is truly ours. The one thing that we hold on to, that no one else gave us, and therefore, no one can take them away from us.

There was a time when I once believed that my life belonged in my tiny little hometown. That I was destined to grow old and eventually die there, without ever knowing anything of the great big world outside of that town. Little did I know that a walk on a sandy beach would one day change everything. The first time I got out of the car and stepped on to the powder soft sand of Gulfport Mississippi, I was forever changed. I quickly developed a love for the feel of the winding knots about my face, and the smell of the salty air. I had always believed myself to be a “mountain girl” and never considered that I would have a life beyond where the North Georgia mountains fell. The ridgeline of the mountains seemed to draw the proverbial line in the sand, and I never even questioned that I would have any desire or reason to cross that line. Yet, here I was, rapidly becoming fond of the beach life, and the more I was around the quaint little beach towns of the Gulf of Mexico, the more I was determined to have more and more of it.

As time went on, and I later found myself in a broken relationship. Facing the death and subsequent ending of my marriage, I longed for something different. It was not that I did not love my little hometown, or the people who dwelled there. I had family and I had friends. They meant a great deal to me. But, at the end of the day, when the world had grown silent, and it was just me alone with my thoughts, I had come to realize just how alone I really was, even in my own town amongst my family and friends. The demons of my past were all around my town. They were among the people that I knew and would encounter on a generally regular basis. I was close with my children, but my son was true and true devoted to our hometown. My daughter, however, she had begun to come of age, moving into her teenage years, and she found herself also wishing for a fresh start in life, far away from our hometown. We had made the decision that once I finished with school, with my marriage ending, and no better time to make a fresh start, we would pack what we could fit in the car, get rid of what did not fit, and head out west toward Biloxi and Gulfport Mississippi to find us a new place to start over. A clean slate where no one knew our names seemed to be the ideal place for us to start embarking on our new lives.

But, then one day, something happened. Something that would change everything. As I was nearing the end of my degree program at school, and we were making our plans to get away, my son informed me that he and his fiancé were now expecting. My daughter and I concluded that there was no possible way that we could ever leave and miss the birth of my grandchild, and her niece or nephew. It was not even debatable; we would remain in our town and gladly welcome this incredible blessing into our lives. My granddaughter was born in the fall of that year. She was beautiful and an absolute treasure. She gave me a hope and a reason to remain in the place that I had spent so many years trying to get away from. Someone once told me that moving away was no more than running away from my ghosts of the past, and that was not going to solve any of the issues that I had. Perhaps, they were right. But, then again, just perhaps, I had already thought of that. Both my daughter and I had endured a lot of hardship and heartbreak in our hometown. It was never as much about running away from our past as it was just looking for a clean break of those memories that haunted us, and start over in a place where we could have the chance to make new memories without the continual reminders of people and things that had broken us in the past. But, Kenlee had taught us that starting over meant merely to take that first step with an open mind and open heart. We did not have to leave our hometown to get a clean story to write. I was now a grandmother, and she was an aunt. Both roles in which we accepted and leaned into with the reverence and anticipation of a child on Christmas morning.

In so many ways, Kenlee saved me from myself. There were times when I was so broken, I had all but lost my will to function. I lost all hope in ever finding true joy again, let alone, ever knowing love. But one evening, as I sat holding her, it became so apparently clear to me. I had said that I wanted to know what it was like to love again, and to feel the love of another human being felt toward me. For so long, I believed that could only mean to be loved in a romantic sense. I had lost romantic love and had lost all hope of ever feeling passionate toward anyone else again. I thought all the while that I needed to feel the love of a romantic partner to understand and experience true love again. But I could not be farther from the truth. Kenlee showed me. I understood fully what it would feel like to fully love another human being again. Because I loved her so dearly. And, as she grew in herself, with her own little personality and her attachment to others, I felt, for the first time in so long, the unconditional love of another. I had the idea that finding a true love again could only come from a romantic relationship with a man. Yet, true love is perfect and it is unconditional, and when one gets the chance to experience it, no matter the source, it is something that should be held in the highest regard, never taken for granted, and always, above all, appreciated and valued.

Still, somehow, over the years, I always seemed to still have this inner longing for the Gulf of Mexico. Most people thought I was crazy. I have been thought crazy for most of my life, so this was nothing that was going to deter me. I eventually become obsessed with the idea of living in the Gulf of Mexico. As life and circumstances changed over time, my daughter found herself living in Minnesota with her finance, and my son and daughter in law had talked about moving away to Utah. At this point in my life, I had two beautiful granddaughters, and was crushed at the thought of them moving all the way across the country from me. Yet, my life had changed as well. I had, several years earlier, met someone who I had fallen in love with and we eventually got married. We had talked about taking the plunge and moving to the Gulf, once all of the kids had moved away. Just to get out of this area that had haunted me for so much of my life. As luck would have it, my son and daughter in law changed their mind about moving to Utah. They, instead, moved to Southwest Florida. My husband and I decided that it was an obvious choice, I would be close to the girls, and it was, after all, the Gulf of Mexico. There was no hesitation, the plans were set in motion for us to move down to Florida with my son. Within a few months, we were living in an apartment in the same complex as my son, and with the exception of missing my daughter who was still in Minnesota tremendously, my life was coming together in the most magical way.

However, sometimes, even the best laid plans go to waste. This was one of those times. It turned out that my son and daughter in law, could not fall in love with Florida, and within six months they were packing up to return to Georgia. Only this time, they had one more plot twist to add to the equation, they were now expecting my grandson. When they left, I was devastated. I missed them terribly and thought daily about the times I had spent with the girls while they lived there, and suddenly, it was far from enough. I wanted to make the most of still living my dream come true by being in the Gulf of Mexico, finally, after almost ten years of longing for this moment. Somehow, being there without my family proved to be less than all I had dreamed of in my gulf coast life. In addition to missing my family terrible, I had one other major factor that played into my less than dreamy dream life. My husband had also failed to fall in love with Florida. He missed Georgia and our family and friends terribly, and subsequently became depressed over the whole situation. Adding to the already crushing heartbreak I was already feeling, I knew leaving Florida was the right thing to do.

We have been back in Georgia for a short time now. Everyone is happy to have us back. My heart is still feeling a space of emptiness being that my daughter is in Minnesota and my family is not quite complete without her and her fiancé here with us My husband is happy to be here. It is fall and he is loving the cold weather and is heartily anticipating the first snow we will see. While I have to admit, I do enjoy a nice little snow myself, there are some days when I would still trade snowflakes for sandy beaches. I missed my family terribly and am grateful to be back with them. But I have to admit, there are days when I do miss the spaces where the sea meets the shoreline, especially the sunsets. As it turns out, Southwest Florida has some of the most breathtaking sunsets. I likely always will miss living in the Gulf, at least a little bit. After all, it was my dream for such a long time. But, just like Kenlee had taught me five years ago, sometimes our dreams and plans may take a detour, and starting over does not always have to be in a new or foreign place. Quite the contrary. Often, it is right where you began that you realize was the place you were meant to be all along. I love Florida, and the Gulf of Mexico, of that there is no doubt or question. But Georgia is family. Georgia is home.

December 11, 2019

The Best (Not So Average) Back to School Blog Posts.

Back to school- it’s that time of year again. A time full of hustle and bustle, and schedules. And, let’s face it, it is the second most stressful time of the year. The time of year when we want to pull all our hair out and finish off the last remaining drops of wine from every bottle. But, it doesn’t have to be.

1- 14 Tips for a Successful School Year– In the article, 14 Tips for a Successful School Year, author Joanne Foster provides 14 tried and true tips for strengthening the resilience, creativity, and productivity of children to prepare for a more successful school year. The tips range from fostering creativity through challenges and opportunities to providing abundant resources to promote growth and reflection. The tips also include providing comfort zones that offer encouragement and reinforcement, as well as establishing consistency and routines. Being aware and expressing pride in the accomplishments of the child are also conducive to a successful school year. Joanne also expresses the need for nurturing the children’s need for autonomy and developing the habits of gratitude. I have rounded up four back-to-school blogs that will provide you with enough ammunition to tackle those early mornings and sleepy routines with pride and vigor!

2- The Success Myth– In her article on Psychology Today, The Success Myth, Heidi Grant Halvorson approaches the idea of success. As parents, we naturally want our children to excel in any endeavor they set out to achieve. However, as Heidi explains, not every endeavor will come naturally to every child. We want our children to have the best teachers and the best school curriculum, and we place them in various after-school activities or sports programs so that they can have the best opportunity to go far in life. They say practice makes perfect. And, to some degree is does. For instance, many high profile athletes were not originally very good in their field, but they kept practicing and pushing themselves to achieve their goals. Therefore, as parents, we should always encourage our children to keep practicing. You child may wish to play football or gymnastics, but may not be naturally very athletic. Encouraging them to continue practicing and not give up when things seem hard will not only instill in them the drive to keep going when things get tough in other areas of their lives as they age, but the payoff will be when they make the team that the so eagerly hoped for. The opposite side of this spectrum is when parents push their child to excel at something because it is the parent’s wish for them to be great at it, or the parent uses the loophole of, “I paid for this, now you are going to play.” As parents, we should be encouraging and supportive to help them foster the dreams and goals they envision for their future. Parent involvement is important to a child’s success, both in school academics as well as any after-school activities like sports or music lessons. However, realizing that not every child can catch a fly-ball, or steal home base, or win a championship spelling bee, let them know that is okay too. They will find their niche in the world. They are young. They still have time to try many things to find that niche.

3- How to Help Kids With Social Anxiety– In her article, How to Help Kids With Social Anxiety. While many back to school articles will provide you with a plethora tips on how to pick out the best back pack or what lunch box will get you the most bang for your buck, Kate Hurley, LCSW, tackles an under talked about, yet equally important topic- social anxiety. Back to school can be a trying a scary time for kids and teenagers, alike. The stress of back to school can be significantly increased if the child is attending a new school, advancing up from elementary school to middle school or middle school to high school, or even just the thought of getting adjusted to a new teacher or new classmates. Kate breaks down social anxiety to help parents gain a better understanding of why kids can experience it, as well as signs of social anxiety to look for in your child. Kate goes on to provide valuable coping skills and strategies to help your child better manage their social anxiety.

4- 15 Back-to-School Hacks to Get Your Year Off to a Running Start- Finally, in the Good Housekeeping article, 15 Back-to-School Hacks to Get Your Year Off to a Good Start, we find Marisa Lascala providing 15 do it yourself ideas to help back to school with ease. The tips and hacks she provides can be done relatively easy and will help reduce the amount of stress for both parents and children as you adjust and trek through another school year. She starts her back-to-school hacks list with setting routines. I am a huge fan of routines, and use them myself in my daily life. It is important to keep children on a routine, as much as possible, during school seasons. When they know what is expected of them it helps to avoid, or at least reduce, unnecessary rebellion. Also, given that it takes at least a good two months to form new habits, by by repeating their routine daily, they will have a better chance for adopting this new routine and reduce the amount of time you will have to spend reminding them of their schedules. Routines vary for every family or individual. There are many variables that come in to play when developing a school routine for your children. Marisa also discusses the idea of setting up a command center. The size and layout of your command center can depend greatly on the space and location you have available for one. We live busy lives, coming and going. Some families have two parents who work outside of the home, others have only one. But regardless of parents’ work schedules, setting up a command center is an invaluable back-to-school idea. At any given time, any member of the family can easily access and look over the command center and see upcoming events or the schedule for the day. You can search on Pinterest for ideas and suggests for setting up a functional command center. It can be as simple or as extravagant as you would like for it to be.

Setting routines and fostering an encouraging and supportive environment are key components of any successful school year. Getting back into the school swing, doesn’t have to be an exhaustive and stressful time. I hope these related articles will help provide you with some insight and encouragement as you set out on the new school year. Happy schooling!

August 16, 2019 0