~BATTER-UP~

Isotopes baseball

I took this picture, the first of many at the baseball game,

which we went to with friends (a family also subscribed to the unschool philosophy).

We so enjoy them.

The Albuquerque Isotopes played the Nashville Sounds.

It was a good match (by my ignorant account anyway).

Our friends used to be from

Tennessee which added to the fun.

But the Isotopes won out in the end.

It was a great game and terrific fun with this yummy family.

The ball park also has a kids park area, for moms like us to take kids when they get restless.

The boys loved it!

Check out the slide show below.

Thanks Tina Dennis, Haley, Luke and Cade, for a great time!

~and the prestigious 'Mommy" award goes to the birthday girl...~

In forty-nine years of living this so-called life, I feel I am just beginning to really recognize the truly valuable and distinguish it from the simulated mimicry the ego mind busily bombards the thought-field with. Today is my birthday. In moments like now, I can only see the student in me.

It has taken nearly half a century to get there~ to the beginning of living. I spent the youngish-half of my adulthood teaching what I didn’t know, until I learned I didn’t know, and then realized that was square one: the only place from which I had a chance at any wisdom at all.

Motherhood is the course the universe offers for the souls who have a tendency to under-value and over-think themselves.

Here’ the story of motherhood curriculum in action…

It was coming up on sunrise, following another night rocking and nursing and comforting my infant son Lucas. I was simply cradling and nursing; tracing his perfect little features with my fingertips, memorizing each detail, overwhelmed with perfection and love, indelibly imprinting it in my mind.

I remember noticing in my peripheral vision that the sun was coming up over the mountain in the east. A new day dawning, as too, was a fresh view of my Self and motherhood, in a single miracle of total acceptance and gratitude. I was vaguely aware I was inside a miracle; part of something grand and infinite, resting in a sense of timeless now-ness, completeness.

I watched his tiny fingers reaching, touching, exploring their source of nurturing, cradled in love; as in my heart-mind with its tiny fingers explored the possibilities of endless Source… I was in awe. Still am. Never understood how someone as bent on a ‘get-it-right’ life, could still for moment and experience ‘enough’ in full-blown gratitude…

I can’t tell you how much, when I began my ‘spiritual journey’, I would draw from these miracle moments of nursing and awakening~ to give hope when I felt hopeless~ to surrender when the war-against myself was too much~ when the meaning of gratitude eluded me.

My birthday and Mother’s Day always fall right next to each other, if not on the same day. Duh! God-clue that motherhood’s my curriculum and paves the path to heaven…

«Inspired by motherhood.»

One can't really tell the story about motherhood until one knows it intimately; till there was no way separate out the mother and the child; the devotee and mentor, the lover and the friend… These labels, so apparently significant as individual titles of perhaps great epics in their own right prior to the immersion in motherhood, now meld together in a single life-giving meaning: Love.

The story tells itself, living in the memory-hearts of mother and children. With each uncontrolled outburst of laughter, tears, anger, and forgiveness, in the twinkling eye of inside jokes and the present awareness of unrelenting acceptance… Love.

Motherhood is the fast-tack to humility… and humanity. I think we can all agree on that.

My story of motherhood has its own unique signature, texture, colors, and materials. Yet placed within the great tapestry, we blend, beautify, bless and complete each other. With out my mother’s love before mine and the constant golden umbilical cord that threads together the continuity that love is life, each story of mother and child, is alone and crumbles.

We are part of the greatest love story ever written, living out the new discovery of life and meaning, generation after generation. It begs the question, “How many rounds do you suppose it will take till we can accept without reservation that the learning of our mother and hers before her and so on, precisioned birthing us into who we are in this world, and then perhaps not waist our precious mom-moments on reinventing the mom wheel?“ Just asking.

Ya know, at my age, the memory of resisting my mother and all she stood for and the way she did it, is very vague in my mind. It's like a story told by someone else, not lived by me. Perhaps that is the gift of forgiveness, motherhood and gratitude; the edges smooth over and only warm fuzzies seem real. Or it’s the some-timers…. I don’t know.

What I know is that I thought I knew what love was, in the sense of loving unconditionally, till I was up with my newborn for the millionth night in a row, and even as I doggedly, could not remember my own name, I realized there was no place, in no situation I would rather be, than in that moment, loving and comforting~ being with this child.

The lesson (for those of us who are poor learner and wheel re-inventors) is not without repetition opportunities; ‘important’ phone calls interrupted by skinned knees and “I love you, mommies”, deciphering the secret code behind the relentless questions, to find my child had discovered something they liked about themselves, they didn’t know how to champion~ being their champion~ and sometimes keeping their secret, the moments when you poignantly
realize that you don’t need anything about this child to be different than it is, or to change in anyway for you to love without reservation…

This is the stuff we live for ~completion~ Love received by being given fully…

~Ummm~ the joys of motherhood ~Yummy~

~There's a mom somewhere in there~

All the ideas I came into motherhood with, have, one by one left the nest. Reality ushered in a different scope, one that required humility to participate. I remember when Randi (grown up in pic) was a baby; when a cold virus collapsed the roof on me as a mom… Oh, god, the crying of the helpless~ (Yeah, I’m talking about me here) It’s such a painful, hopeless feeling, forcing me to do what I was sure I would never do, (self proclaimed atheist at the time) to eek out that beckoning prayer (“God, have mercy and take over”) while dialing the phone for my own mother.

Yes, you guess it. She knew exactly what to do. (She must have got the manual with her babies).

Being a mother teaches me who I am undercover, forcing me to interpret and respond from a place of love to situations where only fear seems available to me. I am astonished by the miracle I witness…

I just spent a grown-up-girl week with my sister Lyn in her yummy Lyn world of wisdom and freedom, motherhood and family, meaningful conversation on walks and sit-ins and movies and teenagers. (more about this visit with pics later)

She sent this marvelous presentation which I have posted below for you to share with me. From a mother’s stand point, it’s absolutely complete… enjoy…

From Anna Quindlen, Newsweek Columnist and Author:

All my babies are gone now. I say this not in sorrow but in

disbelief. I take great satisfaction in what I have today: three

almost-adults, two taller than I am, one closing in fast. Three

people who read the same books I do and have learned not to be afraid

of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who sometimes tell

vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor

blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors

closed more than I like. Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip

up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves.

Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at

its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible

except through the unreliable haze of the past.

Everything in all the books I once poured over is finished for me

now. Pene lope Leach., T. Berry Brazelton., Dr. Spock. The ones on

sibling rivalry and sleeping through the night and early-childhood

education, have all grown obsolete. Along with Goodnight Moon and

Where the Wild Things Are, they are battered, spotted, well used. But

I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust would rise like

memories. What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on

the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations --what they

taught me, was that they couldn't really teach me very much at all.

Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then

becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that

it is an endless essay. No one knows anything. One child responds

well to positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a

stern voice and a timeout. One child is toilet trained at 3, his

sibling at 2.

When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on

his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up. By the time

my last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of

research on sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent this ever-

shifting certainty is terrifying, and then soothing. Eventually you

must learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research will follow. I

remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton's wonderful

books on child development, in which he describes three different

sorts of infants: average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a sub-

quiet codicil for an 18-month old who did not walk. Was there

something wrong with his fat little legs? Was there something wrong

with his tiny little mind? Was he developmentally delayed, physically

challenged? Was I insane? Last year he went to China . Next year he

goes to college. He can talk just fine. He can walk, too.

Every part of raising children is humbling, too. Believe me, mistakes

were made. T hey have all been enshrined in the, "Remember-When- Mom-

Did Hall of Fame." The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad

language, mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The

times I arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover.

The horrible summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling

out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I

responded, "What did you get wrong?". (She insisted I include that.)

The time I ordered food at the McDonald's drive-through speaker and

then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all

insisted I include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons

for the first two seasons. What was I thinking?

But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while

doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly

clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs.

There is one picture of the three of them , sitting in the grass on a

quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and

1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about,

and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night.

I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing:

dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little

more and the getting it done a little less.

Even today I'm not sure what worked and what didn't, what was me and

what was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought

someday they would become who they were because of what I'd done. Now

I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they

demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be. The

books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I

was sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound

up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more

than anyone to excavate my essential humanity. That's what the books

never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts.

It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were.