For Christian & Gia …

My babies, I know what you’re thinking. You and I have much to say. And you’ve been making me crazy trying to understand, but it’s impossible at your age. I know I said I’ll always try … but you’re going to bed alone again tonight … and you lie there in the dark and wonder why.

You’re so afraid your life is over and nothing I can say can change your mind. How can anybody be so selfish and treat you both so cruel? Go on and scream at me and cry! I’ll always hold you in my soul … and I’m never going to leave you all alone … but your mommy doesn’t live here anymore.

Everybody’s got a boat upon the ocean. Not everybody’s sailing out to sea. And is there someone there for me?”

I did it for you … because love should teach you joy, and not the imitation that your momma and daddy tried to show you.

I did it for you … and for me … and because I still believe there’s only one thing you can never give up and never compromise on, and that’s the real thing you need in love.

{Adapted from “The Real Thing” by Kenny Loggins}

Love, Mama

Meanwhile …

The great Sufi poet, mystic, and spiritualist, Rumi, once said that, “The cure for the pain is in the pain”. I couldn’t agree more. Just as all our beautiful and often bittersweet dances with love, that wisdom has transcended space and time. As for me, however, I say that likewise has pain and suffering transcended time and space through the root systems of our family trees. Until that day comes when someone finally says, “No more!” then decides to calm the fire of that generationally gifted pain within themselves once and for all … such that the toxins that once poisoned its roots stop bleeding out through the hearts of its ancestors … the agony endured by the poison in its roots lives on. Please, God, let it be me! Let me be the one to have absorbed the very last drops of poison that bled out and suffocated the rotting roots of our sick and dying tree so that the branches of my children and theirs will reach up and touch the Sun instead of digging back down into hell. I am humbled and honored to have been chosen for such a sacred calling and for getting to know “the secret”.

(“The Secret Of The Changing Seasons“)

So, yes, I did it for me … but I also did it for them … because love should really should teach them joy … not the lie that their momma and daddy tried to show them. Pray God that I’m the one who stops this sick and broken cycle once and for all.