Category: Mom - A Cottage by the Sea

Thinking about judgments

4/11/2023

Bust of Cosmic I by Benvenuto Cellini

Lately I've been thinking about judgments. In truth, I think about them a lot, particularly myjudgments, which often aren't way off the wall-- I judge people when they don't act as polite society expects. But that's not the point I want to make right now. I'm talking about judgments I make without knowing the circumstances of a given situation.
I'd like to give a current personal example, but as many of you are aware, I am committed not to betray confidences or information about people I know. Maybe it is enough to suggest that you can fill in your own blanks of times you have wrongly judged.
It often happens when in hearing a story from a friend, I take up her side and make up the story of the person that she says has wronged her. Bad enough, but in the case I'm working with now, I didn't even hear that my friend was wronged. I made that up, too!!!
Again I am reminded of my mother's words when I told her about a situation I had heard about. "Well, I don't know anything about that." End of conversation.

Another year being VERY GRATEFUL

10/4/2020

The other day a friend from my teaching days asked me about my journey to divinity school after I stopped teaching. We hadn’t been in close contact since I had retired from teaching kindergarten and first grade twenty-five years ago. Here’s my response.
     In 2004 I receive a Master of Divinity Degree (MDiv) from Andover Newton Theological School in Newton, Massachusetts. I loved every minute of it-- the professors, students, campus life, studies and writing papers. It was a vibrant place then. But the physical campus no longer exists. It is Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut.
    After a satisfying career as a teacher, I had no interest in being ordained (being a pastor felt too much like being a school principal). Because I was pursuing the degree for my own discernment and spiritual growth, I was able to avoid courses on church administration, and, what I referred to as ’student teaching in a church.” Being 60 and having had a full career, I convinced the administration that I would never change my mind about ordination, so certain requirements were waved.
      In another life I might have gone into chaplaincy. I completed the chaplaincy requirement for the degree, but not for chaplaincy certification. Upon graduation I took a part time job as the ’spiritual care director' of Wayside Hospice in Wayland (now called Parmenter Community Health Care—Wayland). During my tenure I visited with families and ‘clients’ both at the hospice residence and in homes.
    I stopped that work in 2009. It was time. My mother was about to celebrate her 100thbirthday. She was my mom; I was her daughter. I didn’t want a spiritual care/chaplaincy relationship with her, although for sure, we talked about spiritual things.  As I wrote in my memoir, Very Grateful, God was always present with us, always, but especially in our last two years together .
     Mom died October 3, 2011, 9 years ago.

Seeking gratitude throughout the day~

7/30/2016

     If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, you know how essential gratitude is to me. I learned it from my mom, who led her life giving thanks, and whose last words were ‘Very Grateful’. Thus the title of my book: Very Grateful: The Story of My Hundred Year Old Mother and Me.
     I continue to try to keep gratitude front and center in my life. For at least five years my husband and I have been naming a gratitude at the beginning of the day. Recently we decided to mentioned two: one personal, the other for the wider world. For example, this morning his personal gratitude was for the effect of the cooling weather on our grass; mine, that I was home after a lovely trip to Bushkill Falls with the family. On the wider world arena, he was grateful for lack of violence at the political conventions, noting it was a sign of hope; mine that a friend was being cared for at a loving nursing home.
     When I take time for silence, solitude and simplicity, gratitude seems to occur not only in the morning, but throughout the day.

Dementia isn't the only story

3/14/2016

It’s been a week since my last post. Since I try to post every other day, what’s with this mini gap? It is not due to lack of silence, solitude or simplicity in my life, but perhaps because lately I’ve had a comfortable mixture of activity and the 3Ss. In other words, time to BE, which for me means time when I don’t have to DO or THINK, and time to DO, which means time with others.
Sometimes I can’t believe how content I am in doing, or, shall I say being, nothing. In part, it is an age thing. Like any # 3 on the Enneagram, I have DONE stuff in my life. Now the challenge is to be. (Search Enneagram and learn about yourself, what number you are.)
Saturday, however, was not a being day. I attended a United Church of Christ Super Saturday event in Connecticut. One workshop was about dementia. As the leader went through the stages of dementia (in which a person a person lives backward to infancy), I was reminded of many incidents and situations with my mother toward the end of her life. I was surprised, and pleased that my siblings and I didn’t think of Mom in terms of dementia. We accompanied her in letting go, enjoying the way she was at the present moment. Dementia isn't the only story.

Remembering Mom~

10/3/2015

Four years ago my mom took her final breath, died, passed away. There are myriad ways of saying it. Died feels final and clinical; final breathe softens it. For me, however, passing away feels more like what my mom did, but I want to add ‘to a better place’, whatever that means? I don’t know, no one knows, but many of us believe that something beyond this earthly exist, and that it is good. Christianity declares it, and those of other faiths, as well as agnostics and atheists, have a sense that death is not final. For many believing that death is a big black hole is too frightening. For everyone, there are the memories.

Seeing through aging lenses~

7/16/2015

I am rereading “Let Evening Come: Reflections on Age,” by Mary C. Morrison. The book was given to me ten years ago by my best friend, whom I’ve known since we were two years old. Now, in my seventies, I’m reading it with a new lens. I’m viewing its wisdom through an aging lens but I’m also trying see its ageless wisdom. I want to live with both lenses for as long as I can. My mom did that as well as anyone I know, but as she faded away during her last two years, from ages ninety-nine to one hundred-one, her aging lens predominated. It was then that she gave us a glimpse of what she was seeing through it. What a gift that was.

“Very Grateful: The Story of my Hundred Year-Old-Mother and Me” should be available in early August. I can only see that far ahead, and not very clearly. My lenses are foggy;

Inner peace~

5/13/2015

First let me offer an addendum to my last post about Mother’s Day. My church did a heartfelt job offering up the various qualities of the day and what it might mean to different people in varying circumstances.

Now, here I sit, visiting my sister, in the very same condo that my mom owned and lived in from 1990-2000. There was an interim owner until Alice, now widowed, bought it two years ago.

I wondered if I’d feel some conflict with this change of ownership, but no, only gratitude. It was the perfect place for Mom, and is now the perfect place for my sister. I feel the same calm and can absorb a similar silence, solitude and simplicity as I sit here in the morning, looking out the same trees that we’re turning green twenty or so years ago. In part, this feeling is due to my new awareness that I can carry peace with me wherever I go; it’s in me, not out there. So that’s what inner peace is!

Overdoing Mother's Day~

5/10/2015

There is plenty I could say about Mother’s Day, which was officially proclaimed in May 1914 by President Woodrow Wilson. He certainly didn’t invent motherhood, but he did launch the commercialism connected with it. Everyone is supposed to acknowledge mothers: husbands should send cards to their wives; store clerks replace ‘have a nice day,’ with ‘Happy Mother’s Day’; my supermarket hands out a carnation to every women buying groceries.

I am very grateful for my mother and I believe I’ve been a ‘good enough’ one myself, so my energy around motherhood is very positive. Mother’s Day doesn’t bring up feelings of inadequacy or tragic losses or voids.

But what about the women who aren’t mothers, or who have horrific mothers, or who are estranged from their children or their mother? I’m not suggesting that they dismiss the topic, but I am noting the insensitivity inherent in the overuse of saying, ‘Happy Mother’s Day.’ We are conscious about saying “Merry Christmas’ to everyone me meet. Perhaps we could be sensitive and thoughtful in a similar way.

Blogging again~

12/5/2014

Well, I took the week off from posting anything on my blog, and until this morning I pretty much took time off from even thinking about it. Occasionally I would come across a quote worth posting, but I let go of the need to write it down for future use. I took fewer pictures on my iPhone. Instead of writing a post, or even thinking about it, I opened the “Very Grateful” file and got to work.

   The book is coming along slowly, but I’m making progress, or at least I’m adding to the word count. I’ve finished another introduction, but am now a little stuck on how to proceed. The challenge is to move chunks of what I’ve already written to create a more inviting format, a format that invites the reader to become intimately acquainted with my mom and her life of gratitude.

     Today, as I posted a quote, and now, as I write, I am glad to be back on the blog. I missed something important during my mini hiatus. What, I ask myself? I missed the sharing. That’s it. Sharing ideas with whomever you are out there, the readers I know and that mystery group in the clouds around the world.

     My plan, as of this moment, is to keep blogging. Thankfully I’ve let go of the need daily to post a daily quote, or to blog every other day. My goal is to keep the momentum of writing “Very Grateful” going. Um, if this blog is about silence, solitude and simplicity, I’d better do my best to keep it that way.

     P.S. No word on when or if I'll be returning to the cottage this season.

My sixth season at the cottage is coming up~

11/8/2014

I’ll be heading back to the cottage a week from tomorrow. For those of you who aren’t familiar with my the cottage-by-the-sea experience, let me explain. From mid-November to mid-April I rent a cottage right on the Atlantic Ocean (well, a couple of hundred feet from it), an hour and a half drive from my home. My general routine is to spend the week there and then return home for the weekend. At the cottage I watch the ocean (my specialty is sunrises), read, write, pray, walk and do jigsaw puzzles. I talk to no one, never turn on the TV, and stay off the internet except to post my blog and check email morning and evening. As expressed in this blog, I go for silence, solitude and simplicity and because sometimes I like to be alone.

This is my sixth season at the cottage. Each year has been both the same and different. I wonder how it will be this year? In 2011 I was traveling back and forth to visit my mom, who turned 101 that May and died that October. 2012 was a grieving year, as was 2013. Last year I began working on a memoir about her, which I have entitled Very Grateful. I am hoping 2015 will be the year to finish the book and get it out there so people can learn about this amazing, very grateful woman who was my mom.