{Originally published on Dadomatic.}

My dad is a great dad. He indelibly shaped my personality, mores, and outlook in life. Now that I am a dad too, I appreciate what he did even more. It wasn’t easy to narrow them down, but these the top ten lessons that he taught me.

1. Don’t take any shiitake from anyone. My dad was a state senator for twenty years, and he never walked away from a confrontation with the local newspapers, labor unions, and government officials. He taught me not to kowtow to anyone just because they are in lofty positions. This is a very useful attitude because if people sense that you don’t take any shiitake, they won’t give you any.

2. Obey your teachers. My dad taught me that teachers knew more than I did so I should treat them with respect. This was a rare exception to the “don’t take shiitake from anyone” lesson. Come to find out, (a) teachers very seldom dish out shiitake, and (b) they truly change the world (and not for the money), so they (c) deserve truckloads of respect.

3. Don’t follow the crowd. Initially, I thought that he was saying that most people were stupid–and I agreed with him. But I now realize that he was telling me not to follow the crowd because the crowd “mentality” can make smart people do dumb things. This is why I don’t believe in the “wisdom of the crowd” to this day.

4. Show some noblesse oblige. My dad was very big on the concept that people who are fortunate (in terms of power, prestige, or money) have the moral obligation to be kind, help others, and even answer their emails. By far, this is the most difficult lesson to implement if lots of people want something from you, but as my father taught me, you just have to deal with it.

5. Read. My dad taught me to love to read. We had hundreds of books around our house, and he bought me any book that I wanted. With his encouragement, I also spent hundreds hours in the public library too. This love of reading led to a love of doing research (in those days, in the World Book Encyclopedia!) and eventually to a love of writing.

{Originally posted on Schmutzie.com}

Over one year later, I am still discovering the shape of my grief over the loss of my uterus.

I miss a thing I could never see. I have no documentation of its existence. It does not show up in family photo albums. My clothing fits as it did before the surgery. I never touched it with my hands. I cannot trace its outlines in pictures or where it is no longer on my body.

The only evidence that it was ever here is a pregnancy test that I keep pushing to the back of the bathroom cupboard behind the cleaning supplies.

I do not like that it was cut up into tiny pieces and vacuumed out of me. I do not like that it became medical waste. No part of any body should be made into medical waste. Our bodies hold far too much power, far too much meaning, to be so degraded.

I am angry that I could not take it with me, that I could not find my own place to put to it to rest. I hate not knowing where its pieces are. I imagine it having its own sapling beneath which it could rest and feed its growth. I need to imagine it being less alone.

The shape of this grief is little more than a chronological line between two points, from there to here. It has yet find its flesh.

{Originally published on Hope4Peyton}

I lost a child already.

When I was 21, before I met Peter, I miscarried a baby that I hadn’t even known that I wanted until the moment the choice was taken away from me. My first instinct was to get rid of that baby, that I wasn’t ready, I wasn’t prepared. I spent days planning to make this inconvenience go away. Then the clarity came that I might never BE ready for a baby, but I had one now and I was going to do my best to be a mother. I told the father. I cried when I told my mom. But I was sure I was making the right decision.

Three days later I lay in the hospital, as the child I was just starting to anticipate was lost to me forever. I cried tears from a place inside me I never knew existed. I mourned the baby that was never to be in my arms. I spent weeks laying on my bed, unable to make myself get up, move, bathe, want to live. I felt the most incredible guilt I think a person could feel because I knew in my heart that I had wished that baby away in my days of uncertainty. And now it was gone.

I spent years waking from dreams of a crying baby, me wandering halls, searching frantically for that child. I spent months unable to even bear looking at a pregnant woman or a baby snuggled in its stroller. My best friend had a newborn and I was angry and resentful that she got to have her baby. There aren’t words to describe how I felt after my miscarriage: devastated, destroyed, incomplete.

And this was a child I’d never even seen. Let alone cuddled in my arms. I’d never stared into its eyes, felt it’s silky skin against mine, soothed its cry with the touch of my lips to its brow. I still grieved for that child with every fiber of my being.

{Originally published on “Et tu?“}

For whatever reason, I keep stumbling across blogs by mothers who are battling cancer lately.

One of the things that’s most striking about every one of them is how much looking through their posts highlights how fragile life is, and how little control we really have over our destinies. The post at the bottom of the page, from last Wednesday, might be titled something like “Feeling great!” and recount high hopes and improving health. And then the latest post, from today, might be titled “Bad news” and tell of dire test results and the choking realization that the author will probably not live to see her children grow up.

Just now I was doing my usual blog reading during the
kids’ naptime, and I came across yet another blogger who just received
a grave cancer diagnosis. She’s a mother, she’s not even 30 yet, and
there’s a good chance that she doesn’t have a lot more time.

Oddly, I was able to keep a stiff upper lip through most of the post, until she got to the part about all the plans she had: how she had her life neatly in place, her plans for the next few years all settled, and this diagnosis completely derailed everything. Nothing seems within her control any longer, and that’s one of the things she’s struggling with the most.

{Originally published on PENSIEVE}

I did something yesterday I hadn’t done in a long, long time.

It was quite by accident, I wouldn’t have planned it, and in fact, had I known what I was getting into, I would’ve done whatever I could to avoid it.

Under cotton ball-dotted blue skies during the afternoon rush, I walked into the grocery store. A full shopping cart and an empty pocketbook later, I walked out into unexpected gray and gloom; not just rain mind you, but furious pregnant drops defying gravity with a sideways pour.

The parking lot had been crowded when I arrived, forcing me to park at the far end. “It’s better for me, anyway” I remember thinking.

There were no two ways about it, I was going to get wet.

Person after person in the same boat as I made a run for it; it’s funny to watch someone make an umbrella out of a bag of dogfood. It’s also entertaining to watch people dancing and dodging to avoid the inevitable–this was a deluge, THEY WERE GOING TO GET WET!

(click title for more)

Originally posted at Morning Cup of Joe.

Sure, it’s tough
to commit to regular exercise. There are just so many other things that
require our undivided attention. Or maybe it’s just easier to feel
sorry for ourselves and find something better to do.

“I don’t have time”

“My elbow/knee/back hurts”

“It’s just too hard”

“I didn’t sleep well”

“(enter your favorite exer-scuse here)”

I admit, there are days that I consider skipping my workout. But I
have a li’l trick for getting past the “poor, busy me” syndrome – I
think about some of the people I met who had every possible reason to forget about training, yet they soldiered on…

– One guy was in a wheelchair, his shriveled legs resembled
overcooked linguine. Since squatting and running were out of the
picture, he competed in bench press contests (quite successfully, I
should add). He’d train just as hard as any able-bodied person would -
probably even harder. I remember watching him with awe as he did rep
after rep of pull ups with his wheelchair strapped to him.

Did he have a valid excuse to not exercise?

(click title for more)

Blog Nosh Magazine has been live for exactly one month today. One month! Look at all that we’ve accomplished in one month. All the blogs we’ve introduced to new readers, all the new genres we’ve explored. It has been a spectacularly satisfying launch and I have no one to thank but you.

Thank you to our readers.
Thank you to our bloggers.
Thank you to our editors.

The way Blog Nosh Magazine works is that our channel editors scour the blogs in their genre and choose the most moving or entertaining or enlightening posts in the archives of those blogs. The hardest part is learning to click beyond the front page of a blog. That is, perhaps, the hardest part of reading blogs for all of us. Taking the great leap into the archives.

Then again, as a blogger, one of the hardest things is to convince our readers that we are more than our front page. That perhaps those posts we wrote in the first week of our blog’s existence are just as valuable as the posts we write today. More interestingly, perhaps those old posts are also the most true. You never know.

We change as writers with every post we publish. It is, at the very least, interesting to shed light on our archives from time to time. Whether we do it through the “favorite posts” sections of our sidebars, the self-backlinks within the context of our posts, or by allowing publications such as Blog Nosh Magazine to focus the spotlight for you.

Thank you to the 44 bloggers that have allowed us to shine the spotlight on their work in this, our first month of Blog Nosh Magazine.

Although we only published her yesterday, allow me to share with you the story behind the process of spotlighting just one of those 44 bloggers…

(click title for more)

Originally posted on Christine Mason Miller’s blog.

(click title for more)

Originally published on Loralee’s Looney Tunes

I visited my son’s grave today.

There was no special reason. No holiday or anniversary. No family or friends that live far away who wanted to pay their respects. I was just driving and saw the snow on the ground and wanted to check on my son, clean up his grave, and remove the decorations that I put up for Autumn.

Matthew is buried in a beautiful spot. We put him next to family, a cousin of Jonathan’s that was killed in a car crash with his grandmother when she was only 19. It makes me feel better that his cousin is close by. I will be buried near him, but not next to him because that space was occupied, which makes me very sad.

It used to make me angry.

The grave right next to my son is occupied by what they call a “Pauper grave”. Meaning, that the plot was donated and the family doesn’t have the resources for a headstone. There is a metal marker that has an index card with typing on it. The womans name has been obliterated. All I know is that death occurred in July of 1998 and that she was only 41 at the time of passing.

In the four years since my Little Bug has passed, my feelings about “Her” have changed. It’s still hard to know that this stranger gets a place that I yearn to have, but instead of being angry, I began to be curious about this neighbor of my son. Who was she? What was she like? Did she have any family?

(click title for more)

Originally posted on Blogging Sueblimely

Words of wisdom from the world’s greatest thinkers are timeless
providing advice which is as relevant now as when first spoken. All of
these quotes could easily be applied to blogging:

Advice for Bloggers

1. They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel. Carl W. Buechner
2. When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion. Dale Carnegie
3. Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It
   is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense. Ralph Waldo Emerson
4. The ability to speak eloquently is not to be confused with having something to say. Michael P. Hart
5. My opponent can compress the most words into the fewest ideas of anyone I’ve ever known. Abraham Lincoln
6. Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. Rudyard Kipling
7. You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother. Albert Einstein
8. I don’t let my mouth say nothin’ my head can’t stand. Louis Armstrong

Research Tips

1. First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak. Epictetus
2. Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not
   believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do
   not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your
   religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of
   your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they
   have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and
   analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is
   conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and
   live up to it. Buddha

Writing Tips

1. What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure. Samuel Johnson
2. Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they
   will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it and, above
   all, accurately so they will be guided by its light. Joseph Pulitzer

(click title for more)