Month: January 2023

Happy Birthday Happy Mama

Happy Birthday Happy Mama

On Thursday I had my perfect day, and during our family dinner celebration at home Lady Kitty said, “Happy birthday, happy Mama!”

Indeed! This special day of mine was really quite ordinary and yet it was infused with joy from start to finish. What’s your perfect day?

This astonishingly mundane and exquisitely special birthday included pre-dawn yoga, work, British afternoon tea with a dear friend out at Queen Mary’s tearoom, phone calls and text messages from dear old friends and inspo from Brené Brown in her Unlocking Us podcast. Her interviews with the Gottman are poignant and powerful. John Gottman: I love the equation in the Beatles song: “In the end, the love you take is equal to love you make.” So I’m a mathematician, too, and I love to see an equation like that.

It all added up to a beautiful day, and Michael was being so thoughtful about dinner plans trying to pick the perfect evening plan and restaurant. Option after option was not feeling quite right and then I realized I wanted nothing more than to enjoy a home cooked meal together with my family around our own dining table. As it turned out some time-saving hacks were in order— my list is always longer than the day has hours. I had fun shopping at Metropolitan Market for some catered prepared foods and voilà, a (semi)-home cooked meal at home!

Happy Birthday, happy Mama!

I’m truly blessed with wonderful friends and family, and I was able to revel in the gratitude of these beautiful relationships all day. Lady Kitty, though, really takes the cake. She might just be my biggest supporter and fan. She regularly says, “I take care of you Mama, puz I don’t want you to die.” And “don’t hurt yourself Mama puz then you’ll have to go to the hospital to get medicine and a band-aid that makes you feel better!”

The love you make…

A perfect birthday day… I’m glad I spent it with you!

On Inspirement and Compassion

The gift of sibling love and compassion. 📸 Jason Gerend

Today’s pearl is coming to you compliments of Brené Brown, and is this quote from Harvard clinical psychologist Chris Germer PhD: “compassion is love plus suffering. So, when suffering meets love and stays loving, then we have compassion. A moment of compassion is always a kind of mixture between suffering and love, but compassion is also a positive emotion… it transforms the experience of suffering into something positive. That’s compassion.

“Often when love meets suffering, it turns into fear, it turns into anger, it turns into disgust, it turns into aversion because we just get overwhelmed. But if we can stay loving, then we have compassion. So compassion is actually a taller order than love because suffering is a challenge to love.”

And the cute quotes are coming in strong from the kiddos. As always it’s difficult to capture them all, but here are a few gems.

Lady Kitty on a film Lake wanted to watch, when she came running to me and Lake had his head under the sofa pillow: Iss wery swery [it’s very scary]. But iss not a lot of swery [scary].

Lake: I got the “inspire-ment” of have pirates in my legs because there’s pirates in Porco Rosso.

Lake, said, in response to me passing on almond cake for dessert because I had a big piece for breakfast along with my protein bar said,

“Wow, you’re… That’s really living a life!“

Lady Kitty, “I like aw-mon cake. I love aw-mon cake this much. That’s a lotta much!”

We hope your day includes some sweetness and compassion— that’s really living a life, as Lake would say!

After the Rain

Listening to Brené Brown’s podcasts whist Linnéa and Lady Kitty are out adventuring. The house is quiet and I have my daily work awaiting me. Lake is at school and Michael is working at the hospital.

If this message doesn’t speak to you, at least enjoy the gorgeous photos.

Brené highlights in her 14 Dec 2022 Unlocking Us podcast this moving passage that stunned me, and I wanted to share together with some photos taken by Linnéa this morning at Gasworks Park. Father Richard Rohr wrote in his book Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps first published in 1989:

“We suffer to get well. We surrender to win. We die to live. We give it away to keep it. This counterintuitive wisdom will forever be resisted as true. It’ll be denied and avoided until it’s forced upon us by some reality over which we are powerless, and if we are honest, we are all powerless to the presence of full reality.”

📸 Linnéa Johansson

Wishing you all a blessed and beautiful day!