February 2017 – New Leaf Parenting

That kind of love doesn’t really exist. It’s all a dream, a movie, a flash in the pan. It won’t last, you’ll see.

Heartache and heartbreaks. They teach us disbelief. We’ve been let down before so best not to get our hopes up again.

And yet, somehow, even in the midst of grief, there’s a tiny part of us that still believes. We are scared and guarded, but still hopeful.

When you grow up with divorced parents or parents who have been physically but not emotionally together; When you have witnessed or been a victim of physical or emotional abuse, it’s hard to still believe.

And when you’ve seen another couple work and have yet to find your own lobster, you wonder if that couple was just “one-in-a-million”. Like winning the lottery. Possible, but not probable.

I remember waiting on his roommate’s couch for him to return from a wedding. We had only been dating a week but had yet to spend a day apart. It was a whirlwind romance and I was excited but scared. His roommate hid my car keys as a way to encourage me to wait and I was secretly grateful to use that as an excuse. The truth was, I wanted to wait. I wanted to believe that what we had was what I had been waiting my whole life for.

But since we had both recently ended serious relationships, neither of us felt ready to jump into another.

He walked in the door and I hid my face in the pillows. Embarrassed I had made myself so vulnerable. Now he knew.

He pulled me towards him and explained he had been counting down the minutes to get back to me. I cracked a smile and so did he. We hugged, we kissed and 10 years later, here we still are.

My valentine. My real-life romance. The champion of my heart. The one who brings out the best in me. The one I will never doubt. The one I will grow old with. Everything I had ever hoped for. My husband. My lobster. My Emmett.

Happy Valentine’s My Love.

First photo by Dee Akright Photography

“I’m not disciplined.” I explained. To them, to myself. Over and over I’ve labeled myself as someone “undisciplined” when it comes to working out on my own. I’ve always found comfort in taking a class with an instructor that tells me what to do. I can’t make myself do 20 burpees but I sure can follow an order. Or can I?

I arrived at the neighborhood park this morning, cutting my run short because I was a) gasping for breath after only 4 minutes and b) knew my kids wanted to play. For the first time, I thought of one of my friends, a mother of four, who uses the park equipment to workout, effectively killing two birds with one stone- the kids play while mom works out. Win-win, except I’ve always told myself I could never make myself do that. I wouldn’t know which exercises to do and am generally just too lazy and unmotivated to make myself move.

But here I was, in my workout gear after cutting my run about 15 minutes short. What harm would a couple of burpees do? So I did 10 of them. Followed by 10 broad jumps with the 3 year-old, who saw and joined me. Squat jumps, walking lunges and push ups- I worked up a sweat and I thought, “Damn. Maybe I can do this.”

In that moment, I realized I had labeled myself “undisciplined” as a subconscious way of excusing myself from ever even trying. And it caused me to wonder, how many times are we guilty of doing this in all other aspects of our lives? How many times are we quitting before ever trying? Is it a fear of the unknown? Of failure?

I challenged myself to think of all the other labels I’ve placed upon myself. We label ourselves fat, lazy, the middle child, unlovable, depressed, not good-enough or perhaps too-good, too-smart, too-risky. And while there may be some truth in these labels, there comes a point when we must ask, “Are we identifying the label or is it defining us?”

It’s true. I’m a bit lazy when it comes to working out on my own but that doesn’t mean I always have to be, just because it’s the way I’ve been in the past.

New Leaf Parenting. Every Day is a Fresh Start.

Today was a new day for me. Today I coached myself and it felt gratifying to know that I can. I can, so long as I toss aside that label, turn over a new leaf and get busy defining my reality on my own, new terms.