The funny thing about our world these days is that Social Media vehicles like Twitter and Facebook have made it much smaller than it once was.  Due to the recent events in Newtown, Connecticut and the immediacy of shared information, other countries are suddenly offering their input and participating in a dialog that was once uniquely American.  I’m new to Twitter, but I’m becoming more and more aware that I could be talking to someone across oceans, and certainly across thousands of miles of tundra.  I could be talking to someone who isn’t American, about a topic that concerns Americans, because suddenly it weighs heavily on the hearts and in the minds of the world.

Such was the case last evening when a dialog began about gun control and mental health between two mothers in two different countries.  In the shorthand that is unique to Twitter, we only whispered at the surface, but I am building a great deal of respect for her views on success and failure, and we and the brilliant minds at Leadership Voices agree on the need for an urgent global discussion on mental wellness.  Irene Becker is a business coach and consultant with Just Coach It in Canada, and I am actually working with a business coach, Nancy Kaye, of Define Your Destiny in San Diego, California.  These women and others like them share a vision of the potential that can be reached by many who may have previously seen themselves as failures.  And it’s quite possible these two fine, smart, beautiful spirits who are trying to heal the hearts and the minds of the clients they work with, one at a time, may share some other similarities in their views on gun control.

I have a unique perspective on the issue of gun control, in that my husband is an ex-police officer/ firefighter/ paramedic and is a nationally recognized security expert who specializes in Business Continuity Planning that encompasses active shooter and violence in the workplace programs. 

We’re from Michigan, and we tend to be prepared sorts.  That being said, neither of us is against federal mandates for stricter gun control policies as they pertain to the consistent vetting (across the country) for past criminal and mental health issues, right to privacy be damned—I would not be opposed to such background checks on all members of legal age in a prospective household, a waiting period not to exceed a week, for example, safety checks and required safety courses.  With his background, my husband was part-owner of a gun store in our town for a time and served as gunsmith and armor to many of the local law enforcement agencies.  On occasion I worked in that gun store, and thus had to go through the extensive training and testing and obtain a Concealed Pistol License (CPL) myself.  I understand there are those who have very differing views on and feelings about guns than many of the rest of us in the US, as I’m sure we do on other issues.  Much like the taboo of mental illness, this wasn’t something I often felt I could talk about in California, as I imagine it wouldn’t be in many circles in Canada and other countries.  I must tell you, however, as a 5’0” woman who has been the victim of date-rape and who spent years as a single mom, I rather enjoy feeling competent and prepared; less scared and less like a potential victim all the time.

I suspect the incidence of all crimes is lower in Canada than in the US.  But here we are, and suddenly taking guns away from law-abiding citizens while leaving them in the hands of criminals and psychos who don’t abide by the laws of the land, amounts to piss poor planning.  However, Leadership Voices, Irene and Nancy are definitely onto something when they speak about the amount of stress under which our society lives and functions on a daily basis.  I’ve seen it first hand, having lived in Chicago for a time when our daughters were young, and more recently having lived in San Diego for two years.  We have chosen to return to our small, Midwestern town, where the pace and the demand and the traffic and the competition and the stress is far lower than what we experienced in either of those two bustling metropolitan areas, and frankly where I’m less afraid (and better prepared) to walk the streets.  There was a school shooting at Kelly Elementary School in Carlsbad, California, not fifteen minutes north of our house when we first arrived there.  There were two incidences of highway snipers that occurred in the short time we lived there, the 2nd one ending with an incident AT our freeway exit.  There were robberies in malls, there were home invasions, there occurred two murders of cab drivers two exits to the south of ours in an area we frequented with out of town guests; all and much more in the short time we lived in California.

In our experience and in fact, the problems don’t stem from those of us who legally and responsibly own guns for the protection of our homes.  The problems tend more to come from those for whom guns have been purchased by others, or from those who illegally possess guns.  My hometown in Michigan sits on a stretch of highway that runs between Detroit and Chicago.  There is a great deal of drug running that occurs, and there is plenty of gun violence that occurs in the socioeconomically depressed and welfare dependent town that sits right across the river from ours.  We cross the river to go to the movies, and we cross the river to do our Christmas shopping.  Thus, we are occasionally the victims of muggings and other crimes, particularly this time of year, and shoplifting and petty larceny is rampant. 

Among the difficulties of the recent events in Newtown, CT, for me, is the fact that it has taken away an insular sense of security I once treasured here in my hometown.  Mine is very like the town of Newtown: lakeside, quaint, picturesque, we parent and love one another’s children without restraint; we look out for our neighbors.  Sandy Hook Elementary is a school very similar to my son’s.  The staff and the children who lost their lives, and ALL of the town’s and the nation’s and the world’s parents and citizens who grieve them, look and sound very similar to those in our town.  And even while I grieve my own and my children’s loss of innocence in such times, I have a strong sense that the past several years of economic destruction in many American families has left us heartbroken and emotionally, mentally, and financially battered.  Those with the capacity for hope and the mental stability to do as Irene so aptly describes in her essay, Winning the New War, to use our Constructive Discontent to Fail Forward, will survive and with the help of people like Irene and Nancy use our skills to grow and perhaps even to excel in these times.  It is the perpetually poverty-stricken, the sick and the tortured, the ones who suffer from undiagnosed and untreated mental illness, PTSD, and even chemical imbalances that can sometimes be attributed to something as simple as food sensitivities, who are clearly more susceptible to urges that lead them to take their pain and their anger out on innocent victims.

But patting them on their heads and holding their hands and telling them that it will be OK and being afraid to discuss mental illness or to reach out for help that isn’t there; caring more for their civil rights than for their mental health and the safety of others, clearly isn’t doing enough to ensure the health and safety of the public at large, and it must be immediately addressed. 

Americans will always feel differently about guns than Canadians and those in other countries do, because Americans have had to fight hard for our freedoms, and Americans have had to fight for the weak and for those who have been inhumanely treated by their own governments.  But what of our own?  We are the self-appointed and globally-appointed protectors of freedom and justice in this world, and that ideology isn’t likely to change any time soon.  Now we just need to find a way to heal our own troubled nation and protect the children in our own backyards and schoolyards, classrooms and hallways.

Taking the right to bare arms away from law-abiding Americans is akin to “changing the minds” (a la Paul Ryan in the vice presidential debate) of Middle Eastern nations or changing women’s minds about the right to choose—from either perspective.  That’s a war nobody wants to take on.  Perhaps we can, however, come to a reasonable compromise about important things like background checks for all persons of age in a prospective household, waiting periods, trigger locks, safety checks and safety courses.

I wouldn’t be GlutenNaziMom if I didn’t relay the fact that much of the anger and the malcontent that exists in our country can be attributed both to what is lacking (vital nutrients/ variety) and to what is present (GMOs, sugar, chemicals and additives) in our Standard American Diet—S.A.D.  And there’s a reason the acronym is so very, very SAD.

We must realize that all of the pieces and the parts are connected.  I am a sometimes reasonably liberal and sometimes reasonably conservative chick—founding member of the Enlightened Middle Majority—who occasionally likes to very safely shoot guns, who has chosen both life and otherwise, and thus could never presume to “choose” for another woman, and who has pulled herself out of the depths of poverty as a single parent and for a season contemplated suicide, and who believes that Health Care Reform as it sits is faulty, at best.  How can it support itself if NO ONE is paying a copay?  The math simply doesn’t work.  And what earthly good can it do if we don’t address mental health in the process?  If we continue to fail to address or even discuss Welfare Reform?  Mind, Body, Spirit; it’s all interconnected, from an individual standpoint, and from our nation’s. 

Guns and the right to bare arms, religious freedom as well as the freedom not to worship are organic and fundamental pieces of the ideology on which this country was built.  Mr. President, you may have won the election because for just enough the alternative was unpalatable, but you have a long way to go before you win over and heal the hearts and the minds and the pocketbooks of the Greatest Nation and of the world.  And until we as a nation come together, support one another, and collectively do so, unthinkable and unacceptable horrors such as the one in Sandy Hook Elementary school last Friday, such as the one in the mall in Newport Beach, California, three days before, and the one in the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, before that, will only continue to happen and likely continue to escalate.  I think we can all agree that nobody wants to see that happen in their corner of small town America, or anywhere.

AUTHOR NOTE:  Please be advised, this may contain a trigger for single mothers (parents).  But its intent is to convey and contain hope.  It gets better.  Updating for the Suicide Awareness and Prevention Blog Carnival.  Follow along at #SABD13 (and check out what the tweeps were tweeting about).  I'm also linking up for Suicide Prevention Day with Time Warp Tuesday on Bereaved and Blessed, for their theme this month: Learning.  This is definitely reflective of what I've learned since my daughter was this little peanut.  

AUTHOR UPDATE 05/13/14:  I performed this piece for Listen to Your Mother 2014 in Northwest Indiana. You can view my performance and those of my fellow cast members (and countless others that took place in 32 cities across the US) on the Listen to Your Mother YouTube channel.

I had a recurring nightmare as a child:  It started with my brother and me sitting in a parking lot in my mother’s Pink Panther pink ’69 Mustang convertible. Its white ragtop was down, and its rumble seat was hidden away in the trunk. 

The parking lot was outside a crumbling brick building in a southwest Chicago suburb, near where we lived for a couple of years when I was in elementary school.  My mom was my Brownie leader.  Once, she left us in the car when she ran in to buy patches.  I’m sure it wasn’t that bad of a neighborhood, but it’s also where a mentally disabled man-child tried to kiss her outside a convenience store.  Compared to where we came from, this had a lasting imprint on me.

My brother had once hooked his diapered behind to the gear shifter in my mom’s old car.  It tumbled down the dirt driveway at my grandparents’ with her running after it, shouting at no one, “Stop, Stop!” After my brother dove out the window, she managed to jump in and the old green Ford Torino lurched to a stop.  My mother’s white knuckles and heaving breaths are still vivid through the dappled windshield.  I suppose I had a well-hidden desire to rescue my little brother from that.  

So, my recurring dream took the two of us from that parking lot near Chicago, to a familiar street.  All of a sudden, we’re bouncing along the bluff in our quaint lakeside hometown across Lake Michigan.  I am in third grade; my brother is in first.  I am behind the wheel of that Pink Panther Pink Mustang convertible and we’re careening and hanging on for dear life, until I can’t keep control on a curve and we go sailing off the cliff, into oblivion. 

Each time I woke, sweating, frightened, and feeling like a failure.

A condition that is oft repeated years later when I’m a single mom, trying to survive with a delightful, sparkly-eyed little toddler to care for.  Alone in my conservative hometown.  With no child support. 

After much convincing, my mother had co-signed a lease for me and my daughter to escape the 1200 square foot house we’d shared with her and her second husband, three dogs, two cats, and my skooching infant half brother who came a year and nine days after my daughter. 

I moved us into a back alley apartment downtown.  It had one bedroom, just wide enough for my daughter’s twin-size bed on the floor and an old cane rocking chair from my mother. The room was long and narrow.  Her changing-table-turned-dresser occupied one wall, and an overloaded pink metal bookshelf stood just inside the doorway.  There was little room for her to play on the floor, and no carpet to cover the distressed hardwood.  I read to her in the cane rocker every night before bed, where her projectile spit-up still crusted underneath the swooping wooden arms. 

I’d hand-stitched a pink balloon valance for my daughter’s room, a blue one for our living room that doubled as my bedroom, and stayed up for almost an entire weekend straight to hand-stitch a blue-flowered comforter for myself.  I have it in the guest room to this day.  My daughters and their husbands sleep under it when they come to visit from their respective homes in Minnesota and New Mexico.  My daughter used to curl up under it on the pullout couch with me.  She’d watch Looney-Tunes on Saturday mornings while I slept in. 

She’d curl up in my lap on the bathroom floor, and lift my tear-streaked face, and say, “Wudge you, Momma.” 

It was so hard.  Paying for daycare.  Keeping the lights on, which I didn’t always.  Keeping the heat going. 

And the loneliness. 

A cavernous loneliness from working and earning never enough; from returning bottles and cans from my dad’s office for their 5-cent deposit to buy bread and milk and eggs to feed my little girl; from raiding my dad’s change jar for quarters to go to the Laundromat to wash our clothes. 

There were boyfriends on occasion. We both had our hearts broken more than once before we met the man she would eventually call Daddy.  Who walked her down the aisle and cried at her wedding and danced with her under a spotlight into her husband’s waiting arms.  He gave her an equally impish and delightful stepsister to grow up with, for us to love and to be the only person who could properly send her off to married life with the perfect Maid of Honor RAP.

Since my husband’s daughter, younger by exactly two Januarys, stepped into my daughter's room and said, "This place is a mess," they've shared every birthday.  They've shared Barbies®, Practical Magic, potions, and pets.  They've whispered under covers and behind closed doors, over phone lines and across air.   They've rescued one another from childhood loneliness, and young adult mishap.  They welcomed a long-sought brother into their teenaged lives, whose baby’s breath, sweet, meaty little hands and nighttime cries provided an excellent source of birth control.  

Just like their father and I, my daughters are bonded by so much more than blood.  They're bonded by history.  We're all bonded by exactly what the other needed at precisely the right time.

So, what if…?

What if the recurring nightmare I would remember years later while driving my toddler around that same curve in my 1981 Dodge Omni with no radio; sucking her binky and clutching her soft yellow blankie, her trusting eyes watching me in the rearview…what if instead of putting on the breaks and slowing down and taking that same curve cautiously during a blazing snow-storm and thinking time and again through my tears that long winter that I couldn’t possibly do it without her—to leave her with a lifetime of thinking it was her fault?  What if I’d closed my eyes, took my hands off the wheel and decided to just drive into that icy lake?

But I couldn’t do it with her either.  She was too precious.  Too beautiful.  Too full of life and possible and hugs and Wudge You Mommas.  I needed her, and she needed me, and she saved my life in more ways than I can count.  But it was all so much more than one girl should have been asked to carry on her tiny shoulders. 

We made it through that winter, and another, and another after that.  We made it through me losing a job, and my car getting repossessed, and quietly not being able to pay rent the winter after we met her daddy and her sister.  We made it to the day we moved into a new place with them when I saw the weight of more than two thousand days before float off her shoulders with the imagination of two little girls, who were both for once, just being kids.  They were playing with the dollhouse my Gramps had made her on the floor in her new bedroom, which had room enough for two small girls, with the same birthday two years apart, to sprawl out on their bellies.

Thank God I didn’t…Just Drive.

AUTHOR UPDATE 03/16/13:  I read a blog post today by Les Floyd on the topic of Suicide and Cowardice.  In the comments I shared a link to this one, because it's certainly relevant, and I added what Kathryn and I said below about driving through life's challenges, because you never know what has the potential to be beautiful around that next turn. 

I gave a talk a couple weeks ago to the Depression and Bipolar Alliance, about the relationship between gluten intolerance and depression (and bipolar, and anxiety disorder, as well as neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer's, dementia, etc., etc., etc.) that only years later I have come to understand, and to understand how the avoidance of gluten now helps me to cope so much better with the curve-balls that life inevitably throws our way.

Suicidal thoughts can often be as a result of chronic pain and chronic illness, including infertility, which can lead to anxiety and depression. Please know that your life matters, and that getting help matters, and changing your diet and helping yourself absolutely matters and could absolutely make a monumental difference.  We all have a story to tell and we all have a place in this world.  There might be someone right around that next corner who needs you in their life; possibly even to save it.  Please, save your own first.  Suicide prevention, compassion and empathy is so important.


RECLAIMYourFertility.com


Dr. Mercola on wheat: "Three Ounces of This a Day May be Harming Your Brain"

Says my fourth grade son, very seriously, today after school.  The deep breath and pursed lips told me this was going to be big. 

“I know you put my presents under the tree.”

“What are you talking about?  We don’t even have a tree yet.”

“At Christmas, before, I know you’re the one that puts my presents under the tree.  Matthew Owen said.”

My disappointment was surely palpable.  I didn’t want this day to come.  Had I known that last year was the last year he would believe, I would have savored it more. 

I do remember thinking to myself that 2011 would likely be the last Christmas my last baby would believe in Santa Clause.  Sometimes I hate being right all the time.  Well, most of the time.  OK, sometimes.

I took a long breath myself, stalling, trying to think of a way to convince him otherwise, “And what do you think about that?”

He thought a moment; even put his finger up to his lips, and looked skyward. 

Then he threw his arms around my ample middle and rested his head on my soft breasts, because he’s still that small, and said earnestly, “I just want you to keep doing it!” 

He looked up at me with the smile that always melts my heart, and the love that is always in his eyes, and I felt his thank you, even if he didn’t have the words to say what he was feeling. 

This boy of mine, who almost wasn’t.


Posted this to #JustWrite, please visit The Extraordinary Ordinary to read some other fantastic blogs--or perhaps even TO WRITE YOUR OWN!

I lack the sufficient number of fingers and toes to count how many times I’ve heard my dad say those words:  Change is Permanent.  Meaning, nothing ever stays the same, so you might as well stop fighting, stop trying to control and embrace it.  Neither embracing change nor giving up control, however, has EVER been easy for me. 

Take moving to California, for instance.  In September of 2010, we left my quaint little lakeside hometown and our home of 12 years in Michigan, still full of all our stuff, and spent two weeks camping our way across country to the destination of temporary housing and a new job for my husband, in San Diego, California.  We were towing a 30 foot travel trailer; me, husband, then seven-year-old son, dog, and a lizard experiencing Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride back in the trailer, his tank precariously and I’m sure mortifyingly bungeed to the dinette.  Every time we stopped to make camp, the Boy and I had to rearrange his tank and refill the water that had sloshed everywhere.  He was downright twitchy and clearly not a happy desert-dwelling leopard gecko. 


I knew the feeling.

There wasn’t a whole lot of conversation happening in our vehicle as the more than 2000 miles rolled beneath our rig.  I spent many hours on Facebook; trying desperately to maintain the connection to friends, family back home and the nearly grown daughters we were leaving behind.  Our middle daughter was already living and going to school in Florida and everyone and everything I loved was growing only farther and farther away, as we moved closer and closer to the unknown bustling vastness of San Diego and the west coast.  The thought of building a life so far removed from the one I’d known, grew only more daunting.

There’s a theory in psychology called tabula rasa, or blank slate.  Meaning that every child is born with a clean slate and that they grow and become the people they will become because of their experiences, the environment in which they grow, how they are nurtured and, perhaps most importantly, because of the people they meet along the way.  I think I was a bit of a blank slate for much of my life--floundering, questioning where my place might be in the Universe, and what my purpose could possibly be.  I didn’t so much make choices and decisions for myself, as I allowed them to be made by others, or procrastinated to the point where they were made for me.  In many cases, I failed to actively participate in choosing my path, and often blamed others when I didn’t like the outcome; my poor husband being the frequent place for my blame to land.

Even as I blamed others, I always felt a niggling, deep down, that I was the key; that I had the power to give my family the freedom to build our lives, thrive and contribute something truly special to wherever we chose to live, but I had no idea how to get there. 

At first, San Diego was no different.  After an initial period of mourning (OK, more like wallowing), and making exactly one truly wonderful friend, to whom I will be eternally grateful for recognizing how pathetic I was and reaching out to me anyway in the park, I ultimately decided that for however long we might be in California, I was going to grow and take advantage of opportunities that weren't as readily available in my small hometown.  I decided.

I began to follow local San Diego authors, novelist, Margaret Dilloway, and self-help guru, Debbie Ford, and I read a debut memoir by an author from my hometown, Patricia Gibson.  I liked her first book so much, How to be an American Housewife, that I e-mailed Margaret Dilloway.  She kindly replied and suggested I seek out classes at UCSD Extension, join a writers group, and attend a writers’ conference.  I took my first Creative Writing class in the fall of 2011, and magic began to happen.  I was blessed to study under Don and Nancy Kaye Matson, and under their patient tutelage and encouragement, I have experienced a dramatic life change and have positively bloomed.  Nancy Kaye has a website, Define Your Destiny, and I swear that I did just that, purely by osmosis and her proximity in class.

I remember when we first arrived, as we drove over the last big mountain in Arizona into California, I saw a rainbow.  I wondered if our pot of gold could possibly be waiting at the end of it.  I even posted a picture of it to Facebook, and asked that very question.  Well, financially?  Not yet.  But personally?  I’d have to say that California has taught me much about myself, and if my own pot of gold is the light inside and the confidence that I now recognize and seek to share with the world?  Then yes, California has contained that pot of gold I’d hoped for.

I turned 46 years old in July.  But it wasn’t until I spent my 45th year in California that I finally figured out that I want to be a writer when I grow up.  Not even that I want to be, but more that I always was, and I’d suppressed it all these years.  I’d always used the excuse that because I lack a college degree, no one would care what I thought or what I had to say; that my words couldn’t possibly be profound enough.  Being willing to stick my neck out and try it, and realizing otherwise, I suppose, means that over these many months in California, I did actually grow up. 

I did grow up and amid all the crowds and all the rush and the competition to spend more, lookmore'beautiful'earnmorehavemoredriveabettercar, I discovered something pretty amazing. 

I discovered that I have the power to bring people together and to be a light, even in this huge place.

I came to this vast land that is San Diego, and I didn't disappear.  I didn't crumble, though I was cracked for awhile.  When I decided finally to stop wallowing and take control of my San Diego experience, I discovered I was no longer invisible, and in fact I bloomed.  I became someone I could be proud of, besides just my kids' mom, which of course isn't 'just' at all.  But because society seems to tell us so at every opportunity, as stay at home moms with the dreaded holes in our resumes, it’s easy to forget that what we share, manage and grow in our families, translates into an ability to share, manage and grow other things as well.  Women aren't merely capable of building homes, communities, governments; we build people--little human beings, for goodness sakes.  That isn’t ‘just’—we’re not ‘just’ moms.

Remember the movie, City Slickers, with Billy Chrystal and Jack Palance?  Billy Chrystal plays Mitch, an angst-ridden suburban husband, and Palance won an academy award for his portrayal of a trail-hardened, Curly Washburn.  Curly turns out to be more than a simple cowboy, but a wise mystic who advises Mitch to focus on the “One Thing,” that is most important in his life to solve all his problems.  I didn’t really get it, and I always wondered what that “One Thing” was.

I’ve come to learn that the “One Thing,” for me, is in that sharing.  The secret is in supporting one another and in our innate humanity toward one another; in caring enough to discover the beauty and special something that lives in every one of us.  It’s in being willing to open up and share the pieces of ourselves that are special, even if we or our families and friends are the only ones who think so, or even if no one does…yet. 

With only a genuine smile and a look in the eye, I have found the power to disarm a cranky clerk and maybe change their bad day for the better.  And I now know that within each of us exists the power to make all our wishes come true; we need only to decide it, believe it, reach for it, and trust that the Universe will put us right where we need to be in order grow.

As much as I thank California and the wonderful people I’ve met here for helping make me the person I am today, and the person I will continue to grow to become, however, it is time for us to return home to Michigan and the responsibilities we left behind.  My husband will go back to consulting, which is what landed him the job opportunity in the first place, and I will continue to write.  And we will pool the many resources we both possess and make life work there.

We're going back, but we're not going backwards.  As the lizard survives to make another terrifying trip across the country, so do I, and the person I'm bringing home with me is better than the one who left.  She believes in herself.  She believes she has something to offer her community; that she can make a positive impact on herself, her daughters, her nieces; her Posse on both West Coasts and all points in between and beyond, and even to her husband, father, brothers & son.  She is more confident and more willing to share the lessons of life that no college could have taught her, and she is more open to the lessons others have to teach.  She is an author. 

I am an AUTHOR!  A dream that will be realized when the book in which I will have an essay published, 51%: Women and the Future of Politics, is released in the fall, before the elections.  I never would have stretched, never would have reached for such a lofty goal, had I not been so desperately lonely and sick of myself that I had no other choice than to begin writing the thoughts and the stories that had wrestled for years in my mind.  I even sleep more peacefully now, and I am excited to bring the best that I have to offer back to my hometown and to have a positive impact there. 

Even so, after almost two years, it turns out that saying good-bye to new friends is just as painful as saying good-bye to old ones.   I dearly wish I wasn't breaking a heart in order to heal my own; to return to my hometown, our families, old friends, to help raise our nephew and to be closer to our daughters and the support system we left behind, and to my beloved lake.  I am leaving California, but I thank her for all she has taught me, and for the wonderful friends here who have found a place in my own broken heart forever. 

Perhaps in order to find our true selves we need to step away for a time from that which defined who we were.  We must stretch our wings and venture off in order to find who we hope to become and to find the true potential we all possess and the selves we can be proud to share with the world.  I’m not sure what it is that makes it so hard for some of us to love ourselves and recognize our worth as young women, but I hope that I can share the self-esteem and the light I’ve found, and teach other women and young girls to be open to the Universe, to see it in themselves, and to recognize their own power and their own true potential.  To realize that change isn’t just permanent, it’s positive.  If only we can recognize it and accept it for what it is and for what it might be, and for what it might possibly define in us…our destiny.

At the start of one of the last couple sessions of my Creative Writing class, one of the few men in attendance asked me to sit next to him.  I didn’t want to offend him—because I was raised that way; to be polite at all costs—I said, OK. 

“Wait, are you single?”

I showed him my ring, “Nope, sorry.  I’m married.”

“Oh, well leave that seat open then.”

K.  Thanks.  EVER so.

He then went on to ask whether another female in class was single, and lament how he just wanted to meet a nice woman who wasn’t crazy. 

Er, reap what you sow, much? 

And then his writing was really genuinely funny and entertaining, so I had to forgive him, and even like him just a little bit.

Fast forward a few weeks to the first meeting of our invitation-only writers’ group…and there he is.  And my project, that I will have to read aloud, is smut-filled.  ***Warning, warning, Will Robinson!  You may want to stop reading now, daughters & nieces.****  It isn’t really.  But by way of introduction to the characters, it’s kind of right there in your face in the first two chapters.  Sex is a part of life; an important part of life.   Do I relish the idea of reading it aloud to a mixed group?  Nope.  Not one bit. 

In this age of tablets—which have changed EVERYTHING about the Publishing Industry, including a rapid growth in women’s erotica, because no one knows what you’re reading or downloading—and Fifty Shades, however, I want to write a better version of the sexy novel.  I want to tell a great story, with dynamic characters who engage in believable dialog and who appropriately engage in consensual, grown-up sex.  I don’t wish to glorify the sex, or gratuitously slather it all over every chapter, but it’s an important part of all our stories. 

It’s how we all got here, whether we like to think it of our parents or not. 

Sex is how partners connect and remember they love one another, even when life gets all other kinds of messy and sometimes ugly, in between.  Americans don’t easily acknowledge sex and its appropriate place in our collective rites of passage growing up, and they don’t like to talk about it much.  Even grownups snicker and laugh about it behind their hands, and we’re too often mortified at the idea of discussing it with our kids. 

While I don’t see myself reading the Fifty Shades series, due to the many reviews that suggest it may be poorly written and filled with too much purple prose, the fact that I just don’t enjoy the S&M (nope, not taking any chances linking to that!) idea myself and I don’t really want to read what I’ve heard referred to as “wall-to-wall sex,” I must allow that perhaps it’s had an important place in modern literature if it’s gotten people to talk and read about sex more freely, and thus created more opportunities for its consensual enjoyment.  I’m all for that.

I still find myself mortified, however, at the idea of reading aloud in [a mixed] ‘Group’ next week—and I will likely request an all female escort to my vehicle at the end of it.    

I’ll let you know how it goes. 

If I don’t die of embarrassment, that is. 

The list of healthy publications he’s created is long: Clean Eating (to which I’ve personally been a loyal subscriber since its introduction in 2008), Musclemag, Oxygen, Reps!, American Curves, Maximum Fitness, and The Eat-Clean Diet® series, featuring his wife, the lovely and supremely fit, Tosca Reno.  Robert Kennedy has had an incredible influence on health and fitness over a career that spanned more than 50 years. 

Those for whom fitness and healthy eating isn’t a priority anyway, may site Kennedy’s passing as a reason to say, “Why bother?  Look at what it did for him!”  Well let me tell you exactly what I believe it did for him and why we should absolutely bother.  It is also why I will be stepping up my own fitness efforts, reaffirming my Clean Eating efforts, and NOT in the least pulling back.

Robert Kennedy lived a full and vibrant life up until his last six months or so.  He spent every day doing exactly what he wanted to do and fulfilling all the dreams and ambitions he had from an early age.  For more than 70 years of his life, he rose each morning free of pain, with boat-loads of energy; “abundant good health,” he states in his poignant and thought-provoking farewell message in the July 2012 issue of Clean Eating.  Robert Kennedy exuberantly tackled each new day.  He enjoyed and shared great success and great health throughout his life.  

In contrast, we have come to accept daily aches and pains and multitudes of prescriptions as a rite of passage associated with aging:  Sallow skin, brittle bones, diabetes, high cholesterol, robotic knees and hips, pig valves, gout, obesity, Alzheimer’s, dementia and chronic pain…these maladies and a host of others have become widely tolerated by the American public with the advent of drugs and their abundant commercials that increasingly populate the evening news (whose apparent demographic is diabetics who have to pee urgently, can’t get it up, have heart disease, high cholesterol, gastric reflux & dry eyes) as well as every other page in many magazines.  And it makes me angry.  Pick up a copy of Reader’s Digest and you will find umpteen advertisements for a variety of drugs directed at aging Baby Boomers, and if the ads aren’t for drugs, they’re coupons for highly processed and chemically laden foods that are directed toward those on a fixed income and busy moms.  Pick up a Robert Kennedy publication, and you’ll see very much the opposite.

We are the most developed nation in the world, and yet we’ve about “developed” ourselves into oblivion.  We have come to accept feeling bad as simple truths in life and as part of the aging process: 

·         ADD/ADHD

·         Asthma

·         Autism

·         Autoimmune diseases that assign an acronym, but we don’t know the cause or the cure; we simply manage

·         Celiac Disease

·         Diabetes

·         Heart Disease

·         Infant mortality/ prematurity

·         Infertility

·         …unfortunately I’ve only grazed the alphabet. 

But it doesn’t have to be that way.  We need to wake up and smell the colostomy bag, stop making excuses and MAKE BETTER CHOICES!!  Demand better choices of ourselves and of our families.  EVERY bite matters, and EVERY day that we fail to fit in purposeful exercise absolutely matters.  As does each day spent in a dead end job or career or in a toxic relationship that does anything other than feed our souls.  I don’t want to be in my 70s and wake up each morning, hobble to the bathroom, remove my soiled Depends® and sit there and wait for nothing to happen.  I’d much rather my refrigerator be overflowing with a rich variety of colorful produce that I must toil over and prepare than carry around a Rubbermaid® container filled to the brim with multitudes of prescriptions, and constantly worry about how I’ll pay for those prescriptions, because without them I’ll die. 

We have been brainwashed to believe that this is the only way to age and that there is no such thing as aging gracefully.  Despite his unsavory ending, and I’m deeply sorry for his family that he wasn’t able to write himself a better, more deserving one, I remain convinced that Robert Kennedy not only found the way, but shared the way to live.  If not always longer, he’s certainly given us every example imaginable to live a comfortable, healthy, vibrant and happy life before our bodies, as he said, “go the way of all flesh.” 

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.  There is no alternative to that.  But how we get there is up to us, each and every day.  It’s never too late to embrace Hippocrates’ philosophy, “Your food shall be your medicine and your medicine shall be your food,” infuse our lives with positivity, a multitude of friends and loving family, laugh often, figure out how to make a living doing what we love, move—as our bodies were created to do—and begin living our best possible lives today.

[Picture courtesy of Jeff Bond: January of '82, Grampa & Me--he always made me feel so special, snaggle tooth and all.]

From "Bluebirds Bring More Than Happiness; Omen of My Long Awaited Son," on 4/25/12:

I can still see their black silhouettes--bats soared overhead against the dark of the night sky.  The yard beyond was illuminated by a big farm light that buzzed on a pole, though it wasn’t much of a farm anymore.  Pieces had been sold off over the years to encroaching industry; plastics companies that left mounds and mounds of synthetic scraps of all shapes and colors.  Bits and pieces my brother and I would collect to play with as money or food or just to inspect and toss at the fence.

We played for endless hours at my grandparent’s house.  We ate small, firm green pears until our bellies ached and we climbed the graceful, swaying willow tree, with the beckoning low branches that met at its base, stretching up like a welcome hug.  Except for the bats, this was the place I felt safest.  It was the place I felt most loved and where all our family came to gather.  Cousins, aunts, uncles and all of us, around big lace-covered tables laden with my grandmother’s delicious, aromatic cooking and colored by the loot from my grandfather’s garden.

Mornings after I slept in the room that had been my mother’s, we woke to the smell of breakfast cooking.  Thin, almost rubbery pancakes were plentiful to roll around fat sausage links and dip into sticky maple syrup that dripped down my chin.  We drank sugary, milky children’s tea from my grandmother’s dainty porcelain cups, dotted with exquisite painted violets.  I remember many summer afternoons when my grandfather and I walked in his garden; his bare, hairless knees peeked out from his shorts as a corduroy-slippered foot pressed a pitchfork into the loamy soil, turning it to reveal clumps of sweet, round new potatoes.  It was my job to fish them from the earth and carry them enfolded in my shirt to my grandmother who scrubbed them and later served them doused in salty, buttery goodness.  My grandfather’s large, firm finger disappeared into the soil alongside a fat carrot that would be left submerged until it matched or exceeded in girth and length.  He handed me round, firm but yielding tomatoes, still warm from the sun.  I bit into them like apples, and their juices dripped down in scarlet rivers off my filthy elbow.   I was covered in dirt, pink cheeked and tow headed and nothing mattered but the bees and the bounty. 

I remember my grandfather’s fondness for birds—budgies—I later learned this was an English thing when I finally was able to visit my maternal grandparents’ homeland, after they both were gone.  He always kept bird feeders among the forsythias in view of the front picture window, and was proud of the many varieties he attracted; cardinals, my favorite, orioles, canaries, his favorite, gold finches and every other kind and color imaginable.  A firm believer in hard work and a daily nap, he would lie back on the sofa, smoke his pipe and watch the birds.  Once all the smoke-rings had wasped away and the scent of the blue-tinned, apple wood tobacco had faded, he would close his eyes in the stillness, only the ticking clock and his snores disturbed the cool silence I treasured. 

Perhaps that’s why bluebirds came to tell me after six long years that my son would finally be; perhaps my grandfather sent them.  Two days in a row, two bluebirds came to the feeder outside my kitchen window.  I knew they were a sign; an omen that everything would be OK.  We had just closed our restaurant and financially our future was very uncertain.  There was the work trip to Britain my husband wouldn’t have been allowed to embark on without me, but otherwise there was only uncertainty:  temperature charting, endless research on endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome, chiropractic visits, drastic dietary adjustments, yoga, chakra balancing, progesterone cream, cleansing and fistfuls of supplements filled my days when our teenage daughters were in school.  Failure and fear filled my thoughts, until I saw those bluebirds and experienced the lush, colorful spring of London.  Suddenly my chronically acidic pH was perfectly in balance, and hope was my friend.  This was April.  And by June, I would have cause to take a pregnancy test again; prayerful that this time would turn out better than the loss we experienced two years before.

The bluebirds weren’t the only sign my grandfather sent.  When I finally gave birth to the boy I’d waited so very long to hold, my grandfather, dead at 100 years of age just the year before, came to me in a deeply vivid, drug-induced dream.  Not the bent over, feeble, occasionally sound minded, but impish and twinkle-eyed nonetheless grandfather, but the Grandpa of my youth.  The one who sported Elvis Costello glasses, a dapper seer-sucker suit and straw hat; all of his five-foot-four-inch frame with its great, strong farm hands the size of a man’s over six feet tall, with their “educated thumbs” that could crack walnuts and put every man in our family on his knees during the required, humbling handshake greeting.      

Perhaps it was merely a memory of when I was not yet two and my baby brother was born; the hospital halls were lined with backless, vinyl, mustard-toned benches, and the hushed nurses hurried along in their skirts, white hosiery and clunky white shoes, not the scrubs and white Birkenstocks worn by my actual nurses.  Someone else was with him.  Man or woman, I’ll never know, because my husband woke me, thinking I was having a nightmare.  But I wasn’t.  I was deliriously happy to see the Grandpa of my youth, so very proud to show him my baby boy and grateful for the chance to thank him for the bluebirds.

[My brother suggested our cousin, Jeff Bond, would enjoy this as well, so I sent it his way.  Enjoy it, he did, and he replied with some more memories of our Grandma Lucy Bond, as well as a wonderful description of the delightful British sense of humor "Gramps" shared with all of us, that I just had to share with all of you, with his permission.  Thank you, Jeff!  We were so very lucky to have them both in our lives, weren't we?  And I'm lucky and grateful to have you, too.]

Now that we float in a different orbit I can tell you they were not bats...simple Chickadees...but hey...the imagination can run wild when distorted facts are placed into the mind of a child...[Rotten!!! I KNEW IT!!]

What a delight to hear from you. Bravo on the Blog about our Grandpa. I found myself walking with you and Gramps as we raided the garden and enjoyed the bounty of his labor. I will always have a special place in my heart for Grandpa and Grandma. They shaped me in so many ways. With a home as turbulent as mine, Grandma's house was a sanctuary. I spent nearly every weekend at their place. One of the many benefits of being the youngest brother was I was too young to "work" with Gramps, that was delegated to Mike and Steve. My duties were to assist Grandma with indoor chores. We would quickly clean the house and consider it sufficient. Then it was time to cook. Grandma would turn on WHFB radio (at that time they played tunes from the 40's and 50's) we would dance around and prep the food. To this very day I play jazz music and tunes from the 40's and 50's while I spend hours in the kitchen preparing pseudo gourmet dinners for guests. They all get a kick out of my music selection while working in the kitchen. I entertain my guests by sharing memories of me and Grandma working in the kitchen having so much fun. I describe Grandma as a very loving and gentle lady. She was so happy I was with her. Often stopping in the middle of our cooking to give me a hug and a kiss on the head. She would tell me she loved me and we would get back to work. If I could only tell Grandma how much that meant to me. She gave me value and I will always love her for that. I have been through a lot in my life, but losing Grandma when I was only 19 was one of the most difficult experiences I have ever endured.

[Jeff described Grampa’s sense of humor so perfectly, and the joy of cleaning with Gramma, too.  She was my favorite person in the whole world, and when she died (I think I was 11), I was absolutely heartbroken, and I saw it break my mom in ways I wish I hadn’t.  It’s so very hard on women to lose their mothers so early in their lives.  Maybe she was the one with Grampa in the hospital, and I just woke up too soon to know.  And maybe she was harder to reach because she’d been gone so much longer.  I wish I knew.] 

I always loved Gramps, but even more as I grew older. When I was in my teens I began spending more time with Gramps, in part because Mike and Steve were not as available as they once were and partly because I was able to help him with tasks he was simply too old to handle alone. Gramps and I quickly discovered we had the same sense of humor. I could have Gramps laughing so hard his pipe would fall out of his mouth. In turn, Gramps could drop a one liner on me that would have me laughing so hard I struggled with the simple exercise of breathing. In the summer we used to sit on the park benches downtown while Grandma shopped and Gramps and I would make up stories as people walked past. Gramps would tell me "See that guy with the brown cap on, he was my neighbor in England. He was a cobbler. He made shoes out of polished river rock. He brought them to America in hopes of making it big... never quite worked out for him". I would just die laughing. I would look at Gramps and say.."Do you see that old lady over their with the scarf wrapped around her head...well she married the cobbler with the river rock shoes...when they divorced she took over the business and wouldn't ya know it...the business still never took off. As you can see she now wonders the streets begging for alms". Gramps would crack up then say...you got it...you got the British humor. That British humor Gramps instilled in me has made many strangers my friends, has made many people laugh if only for a moment, it pulled me out of very dark places and has been a true gift. Did you ever notice in all God's creation man is the only being able to laugh. What a gift. How cool it was to have Grandma and Gramps in our lives. I could go on and on with my love and affection for them and all the Bond clan. We need to get the Bond clan back together. Grandma and Gramps would never approve of how we have drifted apart. Looks like it is up to you and I to get it back. I am up for it! 

[I am up for it, too, Jeff!  Thank you so much for permitting me to share your memories of two fine people.  Happy Father's Day to you, and to all the wonderful dads I know, including my own.  Love ya, Man!]

[Author's Note:  This essay has been ACCEPTED for inclusion in the upcoming book, 51%: Women and the Future of Politics.  The editors have expanded it and renamed it to include the theme from my piece, The Enlightened Middle Majority, and Why 'The Sides' Are Alienating Us.  You can follow this link to their website http://www.womenandpolitics.us and/or their Facebook page at womenandpolitics.us.  They have also conducted a survey, the results of which will be included when the book is released before the upcoming presidential election.]
The following represents the essay, as originally submitted:

An image that has persisted in my mind during President Barack Obama’s Administration, is that of a bunch of fat white men sitting around a paneled room smoking cigars, nodding with the one who says, “That boy will never see another term.”  Sure, President Bill Clinton had the ‘Grinch Mob,’ but as a president, despite his obvious flaws as a husband, he still enjoyed a good deal of support.  A circle of life concluded between Republican Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves and Democrat Barack Obama becoming president, and in contrast, he has conducted himself with the utmost class.  I suspect, however, that the Obamas navigate Washington circles amid an undercurrent of discrimination.  I’m not ready to commit my vote yet, but never in my awareness of politics can I remember a president being so vehemently opposed and, God help our country, I feel strongly that it’s because he’s black.

This seems to be the only ideal the Republican Party is united about these days, and the desire to squash a sitting president does not an effective campaign make.  The GOP does not have it together, and that’s what scares away those of us in the middle.  As proven by the disastrous McCain/Palin ticket, you can’t just dress up an ill-prepared hockey mom, put lipstick on her, shove her onto a national platform and expect her to save your party.  She may walk like a duck and squawk like a duck, but she’s still just a good ol’ boy dressed in drag.

The Democrats, however, are guilty, too.  They sit back quietly on their laurels, and when the GOP begins to take too much ground, they occasionally throw out the reminder that still gets many women to vote their way: “Watch out!  They’re all out to take away abortion!”  The Democrats seem to think it’s the only winning card they have to play.  We have to ask ourselves whom it really behooves to keep throwing the right to choose up for fisticuffs.  I said it as Poky Puppy ADD It Again, in my featured piece on BlogHer.com, The Enlightened Middle Majority and Why ‘The Sides’ Are Alienating Us:

     “But that's all any of us really want, and it’s the very foundation on which this country was built. We still don't want         anyone to tell us whom we must worship, where we must worship, or that we have to worship at all, nor do we wish     to stop anyone who wants to do so. Freedom of religion must also mean freedom from religion, and religious doctrines     simply cannot enter into a political discussion of our rights as Americans. I believe in God. But I don't want anyone to         tell me that I have to.”

So uphold Roe vs. Wade, take the right to choose off the table, as it must be, and see what kind of progress we can make on all the other issues.  I believe suddenly the discourse would become far more productive.

The only other cohesive message that seems to come from the Republican side is from that ultra conservative Christian sector, which isn’t what this country wants or needs.  What we are aching for, what this whole 51% thing is about, is the hope and the desire and, dammit, the demand for a voice of reason; to speak out and say, “Enough already!”  I suspect that voice will be a woman’s; to represent the middle majority and do what’s really good for this country as a whole.  In the meantime, if everyone would stop opposing so vehemently and start participating in bi-partisan cooperation, great things could be accomplished now. 

Women hold treasures far more valuable than brute strength:  flexibility, common sense, diplomacy, the ability to multi-task and keep entire families together, to balance and stay within budgets, to go Momma Bear, Tiger Mom, and even Hockey Mom and fight to the death for our clan when we must.  We do this while our men-folk bump chests, bully and bluster and attempt to bend the world with their military prowess.  We are cut open or ripped open to give birth, yet the entire problem both parties have can be summed up in these few words:  They Under-Estimate Us.  We survive rape and breast cancer, poverty and oppression, and we possess strength beyond imagination.

Except that we imagine it.  We understand it--live it--we keep it close and we keep it quiet in order to keep peace, exercising it only when we must.  Well, my sisters, we must.  Whether we lean to the right or to the left, we can no longer afford to just hold our collective breaths and hope for the best.  We must act now.  We must be willing to mix it up with the boys and spar a little; to stand up and let our altos and sopranos and our keyboards be heard.  We are the 51%.  We are the Enlightened Middle Majority and we are the future; of politics, of our nation’s success and of the very continuation of our race. 

I can’t imagine what sort of resistance a woman president might one day be subjected to, but I know this:  ‘They’ won’t know what size Jimmy Choos hit them.


[Here's the link to the first post, "My Friends Think I'm The Only Liberal They Know.  I Don't Know What I Am," which was featured on BlogHer.com, before "The Enlightened Middle Majority And Why 'The Sides' Are Alienating Us," was featured on the same site.  Of course, they are originally posted here, but the comments of the many brilliant readers on BlogHer make for entertaining reading as well.]

My girlfriend’s adorable picture on Facebook of her son’s crazy hair for school today (not my kid, so I won’t share it, but here’s a pretty crazy one of my own from a few years back), and another mom-friend talking about doing seven crazy ponytails in her daughter’s hair got me thinking; and remembering.  I also had a nice telephone conversation with my oldest daughter, Sara, this morning and a blissful 70-minute one with my step-daughter, Rachel, this afternoon.  I didn’t get much writing done today, but it made me so nostalgic for when we were all together under one roof, in one state.  It was brief and it wasn’t always easy, but those were blissfully chaotic and wonderful years before Sara left to go off to college, and too soon after, Rachel graduated and got her own apartment.

My boy has never been one to let me do a thing to his hair, even when his sisters were around and wanted to spike it all the time.  ONE time he allowed me to spike it for his school picture, but when Grandma said she didn’t like it; never again.  Not once since.  Not even for Crazy Hair Day.  But it’s my very favorite school picture of him, ever.  And his big sisters would probably agree.

I now have my boy trained to tell his dad, “Not Your Department,” whenever his mop gets too long, which I rather like, but Dad threatens to get out the clippers.  This phrase came up because when Rachel was little, her dad thought she needed a haircut and thought he was just the guy to see it done.  Well I was totally in the ex-wife’s corner on this one:  SO Not Dad’s Department!  It looked exactly like his sisters’ did, in their typical 70s Pageboys.  In fact, he probably wouldn’t admit it, but I bet he took an old picture out of his wallet of one of his sisters to show the stylist at the time.  I would have been furious with him if he’d done that to my girl.  Of course, Rachel and her sunny smile were adorable regardless, but that phrase has lived on in our family, forever more. 

The craziest hair times typically occur when girls are in their high school years.  They begin experimenting, asserting their independence and, depending on what they’re into at the time, might come home with half a head shaved or a shock of hot pink running through it.  My own high school photos range from a Barbra Streisand Main Event perm to Farrah Fawcett feathered bangs; not so bad, I guess. 

When my girls were in high school, straightening was all the rage, or Goth, but thankfully neither of them went there, so not too much craziness to report.  Except (and I’m sure at this point, she knows this is coming) when Rachel needed her hair done for Competitive Cheerleading:   We had to put it up in a high pony tail, then twist and wrap little individually sectioned pieces around flaming hot rubber noodles to make a gagillion ringlet curls all through the pony tail; but not before absolutely COATING both sides of each little section of hair with AquaNet hairspray.  The stench was bad enough, but my hands, forearms and even the tops of my feet would get absolutely coated in the stuff.  I wouldn’t do it upstairs because of the bamboo floors, so we did it in the basement and would both be nearly asphyxiated by the time we were done.  And lucky her, she’d have to sleep in it all night like that. 

Even with no fingerprints left to identify my cold, dead body (which could very well be a reality when she sees this example that shows her little brother isn't the only one in the family who will put on a crazy outfit from time to time), the unpleasant AquaNet arms, crusty nose hairs and my fingers literally sticking to one another, to her hair and to the rat tail comb, I wouldn’t trade those blessed moments with my spunky, funny, smart, loving and spectacularly beautiful step-daughter for anything in this world.  Especially on this long holiday weekend, far from home, I wish I could blink my eyes and spend an evening doing her hair and breathing AquaNet all over again.  I’d happily do Sara’s, too.  I know for sure my son will never let me do his, not even for Crazy Hair Day.  But he’d put on a crazy getup, have a blast and there would be lots of laughs with his Dad, sisters and all of us together under one roof again, if only for a moment.  (The things you can get away with when your daughters are an entire country away, however, can be rather fun!)

That's my new mantra.

As in:

I don't want to clean my son's bathroom (ew)...put on your Big Girl Panties, your rubber gloves and a face mask and just do it, preferably right before your shower, and maybe even naked.

I don't feel like walking today...put on your Big Girl Panties, your shoes and just do it.

I don't know what to write today...put on your Big Girl Panties, sit at your computer and just start typing.

I don't care to fight with my kid about eating his broccoli...put on your Big Girl Panties, make the damn broccoli and just set a good example and eat it yourself first.

And here's a big one:

I don't have a clue where to begin to help my kid succeed in school...put on your Big Girl Panties, talk to his teacher, and be willing to go in every day, STUDY THOSE MATH FACTS every day, and give him the opportunity to rise to the high expectations he is more than capable of meeting.  In other words, make him put on his Big Girl Panties.

Self-discipline has never been something I tap into easily.  But the payoffs are magical, numerous and probably limitless (I say probably because I only just started so I don't actually know for sure yet, but I have an inkling).  For instance, you won't be embarrassed when the Potty Queen is over, however briefly and unexpectedly, and must use your bathroom.  If you just put your shoes on first thing when you change your clothes in the morning, you'll be more likely to walk, which will feel great and your dog will love you even more and won't pester you so much when you're trying to write, which could eventually lead to something delightful and unexpected even if you didn't know in advance what you were sitting down to write that day, but that probably actually came to you while you were walking. 

And best of all, the kid who cried daily about math homework and took hours to complete five problems, suddenly answers, "Actually math," was his favorite thing at school, when, "Recess," was the usual answer to the daily question.  Not only that, he approaches homework enthusiastically, and completes it in a timely manner and has time to actually play after dinner on a weeknight.

So what if he still doesn't eat his broccoli with similar enthusiasm...neither do I.  But this recipe from The Barefoot Contessa might actually rectify that situation in the future.  And here you go, in case you need your own set of Big Girl Panties.