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I am a punk from the ninth ward who escaped from the neighborhood. I am now living up to my potential despite the dire predictions of my teachers in the fifties and sixties.

The accolades, go to my mother who pushed 7 smart, scrappy and sometimes reluctant children into the world armed only with love and tenacity. Our father died when I was 13 and my youngest sister was 2. He left behind a small pension from the Coast Guard, a monthly Social Security check, a mortgage, a car that ran long enough to take a ride to the Lake every few months, 5 daughters and 2 sons who had never really gotten to know him.

Despite her sorrow, my mother, a petite, truly beautiful woman breathed deeply, wiped her eyes and showed the neighborhood what an obstinate, persistent and bitter sweet Irish Catholic lady had to offer. She would have made a great entrepreneur in today’s world.

We on the other hand, proceeded to test her poise, composure and self-control in every manner known to childhood. In return, she tossed values, faith, respect and purpose back at us. Fortunately for us they stuck like sticky balls on Velcro. Education was the most awesome secret she shared. She impressed on us that it was the door to the future and would set us free. It was and it did.

At Christmas time, I remember how she turned hard candy Christmases into enchanting Southern feasts that would challenge even a Hallmark Christmas scene. Oyster soup, turkey legs to fight over, white bread stuffing, green peas, two-layered homemade cake whose top layer slid slowly off the bottom layer, eggnog and Kool-Aid. All of us sat in our special chairs around the table made big enough with the leaf inserted. We always ate as a family.

The highlight was our real, falling-needle pine Christmas tree that commandeered the space between the sofa bed where my sister and I slept and the matching green chair. My Father had invented a tree stand that rotated the tree, displaying all of the shiny, glittery ornaments, sparkling array of lights and tinsel as it turned slowly. The tinsel swayed as the tree moved making shimmering patterns that danced around the room. Since it was impossible to get to sleep on Christmas eve, I would pick a round ornament, usually red, to stare at until I fell asleep. I was amazed at the panorama of my face and my one-room-world reflected back at me. I looked weird, but everything else was expansive, colorful, warm and welcoming. Everything I needed and loved was wrapped up in that Christmas knick-knack.

On Christmas Eve, Santa brought wished-for presents to the littlest ones. My older sister and I got stockings, a staple for prim and proper young ladies to wear to church. Our Uncle Albert, my Mother’s brother who lived around the corner, always laid out gifts wrapped in tissue along the length of the sofa in his living room. It was like a smorgasbord of unexpected wonders to explore.

Today, our family and extended families are scattered over the world. We split Christmas day, dinner at mom’s side of the family and supper at Dad’s. We travel long distances to be together and sometimes we are not able to be with the ones we love the most. It’s just the way it is. Too busy, too expensive, too stressful, too many options and obligations. Certainly, too much missed and never recovered.

Treasure the memories you share and bring them out whenever you are lonely, sad, scared or lost. They are the best Christmas gift you will ever receive.

What stands out amongst your Christmas memories?

Since its Christmas, here are three sophisticated puns for you:

What do snowmen eat for breakfast? Snowflakes.

What do you call a chicken at the North Pole? Lost.

What would you get if you ate the Christmas decorations? Tinselitis.

Have a Blessed Christmas!

I’ve always expected to fail. Not openly, but deep inside my silent places.

Perhaps its kinder to say, I never expected to succeed. This despite many achievements and awards and Atta girls. I never thought I was good enough or that my accomplishments measured up to what others did. The how or why is not important. I am not about assigning blame. The consequences create the story.

According to the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator my rating is INFP, introverted, intuitive, feeling, perceptive. Technically that means I am an introvert, an intuit that receives information from the internal or imaginative world, someone who basis decisions on what they feel they should do and is inclined to improvise and explore alternative options. Simply put, a shy child seeking solitude, cringing when assigned to a group project, hanging out with someone who was a safe harbor and leaving the party early. It lowered the risk of having to engage in clever banter or being invited to the next party. Explicitly, a holy mess.

Yet, I felt a schizophrenic-like pull as if someone smart, playful and funny was waiting her turn to speak up. I confess there were occasions when I dared to let her dance on top of the piano.

Still, I found myself listening for the sound of a shoe as it whistled through the air and dropped with a resounding bang in the middle of my control. Waiting for the other shoe to drop distracted me from living in the moment. I hesitated to join in, protecting myself from a phantom self-doubt and hiding my light because I was ashamed and afraid that I could not live up to its brightness. I worried that there was something about me that, if discovered, would spell out across my forehead warning others to back away. I played poor me – what have I done to deserve so much rejection? It’s not my fault.

The paradox is that failing released me. I felt as if I were standing alone on the stage after messing up the words to the Star-Spangled Banner in front of the Marine Corps band. Ripe tomatoes and lemon meringue pies were hurling toward me as I faced the onslaught thinking, “the secret is out at last. I can stop humming the Great Pretender.”

To my credit, I never quit. Feeling the lion within, I would turn my face upward and roar “Are you ready for another round?” Then I would make amends, devise a new plan and find the place where the path branched. And the cycle would restart.

I can’t pinpoint the point of awakening. I think it came gradually wrapped in trust and acquiescence that God knew what He was doing and His plan was better than mine. I allowed myself to be vulnerable; to be the first to say I love you even when there were no guarantees that my feelings would rebound.

Being a scientist, my process was to predict, control and re-predict. So, when the door opened and Vulnerability, the confounding premise that it is better to just let it happen, was standing before me, I was stupefied. Chaos! My mind cried. But the more I thought about it and befriended Vulnerability, the more I realized that chaos predominates over calm control. Limitations are make-believe. Denying it is as laughable as a 3 year with icing smeared across his face saying he doesn’t like cake. I stopped objecting and started listening.

If I tried to describe vulnerability, it would turn out to be a litany of daily life. You can run, but you can’t hide. The places to hide are too often bottles. Prescription, alcohol, drug, diet, anti-aging or numbing pills. The unfortunate side effects are a numbness in your ability to feel the world around, to connect, relate, talk to each other and work things out. The cycle continues. Politics is the prime example of this in today’s dysfunctional world.

It is courageous to declare imperfection, to be kind to yourself first and then to others. It is an act of bravery to choose living with all your heart and soul in this scruffy world of overwhelming choices. While it often feels uncomfortable, it creates a bond with people because they are connecting with the authentic you rather than who you think you are supposed to be.

When my eyes finally opened, I understood how blessed I was to belong to a loving, caring and supportive family and how much I had to offer in return. This sense of belonging also brought a sense of worthiness. When you feel you are worthy, you are no longer afraid to be vulnerable.

The one thing we should teach the children of this and future generations, it is that they are worthy.

I am enough. So are you.

Let me know if any of this resonates with you.

Pun for the Day: My neighbor just got the part for Scrooge in a local performance. I’d love to go see him, but that play scares the Dickens out of me.

A belief is only a thought you continue to think. A belief is nothing more than a chronic pattern of thought, and you have the ability -if you try even a little bit- to begin a new pattern, to tell a new story, to achieve a different vibration, to change your point of attraction. ~ Abraham-Hicks

Time is the nemesis of age. You keep a steady pace, climbing hills one step at a time and feeling “groovy.” Suddenly, time seems to accelerate to the speed of light. The days shorten and the catalogue of promises to ourselves grows until there comes a time when we recognize that the book of our lives is an inventory of ‘I need to,’ ‘I plan to,’ and ‘Tomorrow, I will.”

After you look in the mirror and gasp with realization that it is you looking back, will you know who you are? Do you see the shortcomings and disappointments you’ve known rather than the most magnificent, treasured dreams you once imagined? Are you someone burdened with yesterday’s glitches or someone bursting with today’s promises?

Do conflicting limitations others have assigned to you stymie you or can your soul work through any obstacle that confronts you? Is your mind engulfed by empty, meaningless pursuits of the materialistic culture instead of enriched from deeply held, lasting values you know to be truth?

Maybe you don’t really know who you are or what you are capable of achieving. Me either.

I do know I am part of a generation that produced some amazing risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors who released new ideas, advances and innovations like a glorious fireworks display. Still, life progresses and in the blink of an eye, everything can change.

Sometimes we journey through turbulent waters and other times the waters are still. These journeys become a part of us and make us who we are. If we are wise, we learn from one another and use our insights to heal relationships and hopefully ourselves. Tough as it may be, most of us learn not only to accept change but to embrace it.

Otherwise we go out of style – still wear panty hose, listen to rock and roll on CDs, carry version 2.0 iPhones and fail miserably playing Battlefield II. We think an emoji is a cure for constipation and LOL stands for Little Old Lady. It can be humbling.

It may surprise you then to know that I still cling to some of my outmoded attitudes. I can’t seem to let go of using my values as a compass to direct me to the right choices. I hold the old-fashioned belief that looking out for your neighbor is more important than besting him. To crazy me, the meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.

I do not measure success in stockpiles of capital as do many in the current generation. They are like Smog, the dragon in the Hobbit books that rules a massive configuration of caves to hoard all of his ill begotten treasures. He spends his days chained like a prisoner, exterminating would-be-burglars. If he were willing to share his wealth, he could soar out of the cave into the light and have a free and fiery fling any old time rather than ending up alone and empty as was his fate.

Happily, many people still have an attitude of generosity. This attitude undermines any senseless and vicious act with a multitude of small, discreet acts of love, consideration and compassion. For every person who seeks to wound, many more devote their lives to helping and to healing.

The catch is that you are not your attitude, but the one who creates, controls and upholds that attitude. That means that you can also change your attitude if you decide to exercise control and commitment. That is encouraging because it brings hope that limiting attitudes currently in play can quickly evolve into attitudes of empowerment.

No matter what else is happening around you, focus on what is real and lasting and in tune with your values. Keep a positive, open-minded attitude and your natural abilities will open doors.

Live to make your dreams happen, live to make them real.

May I suggest something? Pick one thing that you want to accomplish for yourself – not for somebody else- but for you. Make it something that will make you feel good about who you are and maybe even symbolize what you can accomplish. Write it down, give yourself a deadline to get it done and just do it. Let me know how it goes.

Today’s pun: Sleeping comes so naturally to me, I could do it with my eyes closed.

“So, we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Nothing catapults us back to childhood like a family gathering. Confident, competent and responsible “big people” magically fade and re-materialize as girls with pony tails and boys in grimy baseball tees. The family hierarchy, whatever it used to be, is suddenly reestablished and past anxieties ghostly emerge. The game is on.

Childhood is a time of imagination and creativity that paves the way to adulthood. It is a time to try on different identities for size, casting off those that feel awkward or too fancy or phony or pretentious. It is a shell of naiveté that anchors you to the center of a unique realm where the best moments are most often the ordinary moments. Dreams are free to soar away from the needs and limitations and float away like shiny red balloons. It is a time when you don’t know what you don’t know and growing older is far-fetched. You saturate your mind with ideas, knowledge and promises. Nothing is impossible.

The familial bond is hard to explain. It has something to do with breaking a popsicle down the middle, sitting under the oak tree on a hot, humid summer day and lapping up the syrupy frozen treat before it melted into strawberry and grape puddles in the grass. Those times when we stuck up for one another, cried together, shared, laughed and cheered each other in the face of fear, sadness, uncertainty or anger were seeds that planted roots.

There were seven children in our family, promising a ready-made team for just about any event. Sometimes sibling rivalry and our shared competitive spirit got in the way. Still we trudged through life exchanging measles and hugs, swapping desserts, hiding toothpaste, inflicting pain and healing with kisses as we tailed the common thread that made us a family.

But the tie that bound the tightest is laughter. Sooner or later when families gather, someone remembers a funny, crazy or foolish thing that happened when you were kids. Like the day your youngest brother fell through the ceiling and landed on the ironing board, squashing it to the linoleum floor. Suddenly, spontaneous, contagious outbursts explode from your belly and leave you rolling on the ground, gasping for breath. It wasn’t that funny if you weren’t there to share the memory.

Without humor, there is no connection. If you can’t make it better, you can laugh at it. Laugh now, cry later. Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know.

As we drifted away from childhood, we experienced sweet successes and stinging disappointments. The knowledge that family members were a moment’s call away helped to keep us moving steadily forward. Your family is your rock, your comfort, your inspiration and your conscience.

Like most families, guilt was the gift that kept on giving.  My mother had mastered the art of a carefully place innuendo that stopped you in your tracks, brought you to knees begging forgiveness for being a selfish, thoughtless individual that would strain even God’s love for you. If you did not make the “sacrifice” asked of you, the resulting guilt would shadow you the rest of your life. It assured 100% compliance.

One thing I loved about her was that she never said “I told you so,” even though she had many opportunities. For the most part we were strong-willed, stubborn and convinced we knew best. In retrospect, she must have often known we would struggle, stumble, regret hasty words, actions and decisions. It must have been difficult for her to let us make our own choices and choose our own path on those occasions when she knew we were walking head-on into heartbreak.

Band aids on boo boos healed by mommy’s sweet kisses, hand written letters stamped for a nickel. That was Yesterday. What awaits us on the far side?

I’ll tell you more in my next post.

In the meantime, I’d like to hear about your family and memories you hold.

Pun for the day: I used to have a fear of hurdles, but I got over it.