I love positive and uplifting tales. I love to write about good things that bring smiles or feelings that inspire peace. Sometimes it’s hard to find the words that match the hat I’m wearing when I sit down in front of my computer. I found myself just this week struggling with that dilemma. It’s been days since I last put a thought done on paper simply because I couldn’t bear to see the adjectives I would have to use.

I woke up this morning to my favorite cup ready and waiting for me next to a fresh pot of coffee and noise of activity coming from the area of my husband’s newest project. It made me feel loved and just like that, here I am, able to let my fingers do what they love.

It is truly the little things in life that will carry or lift a heavy burden off your shoulders to give you relief, even just for a moment. I’m sitting here sipping my morning glory reviewing my last few days and wondering how much I want to share or divulge.  Details are not important as long as you get the idea of where my mind and heart were held captive…….

When you are a mother there is a burden of guilt that comes naturally with the job. Everything that happens to your children or decisions they make, somehow you take it upon yourself as being your fault. Something you did or didn’t do that cause this action or behavior to happen. This burden of guilt does not lessen as they grow and age out of the home into the world alone. It actually, I find, gets worse because you have no control any longer and your hands are tied in helping them. They begin to build their own lives and families, which add more worries and additional chambers of love in your heart that will overflow with emotion you didn’t even know you had room for until it happens….and believe me, it happens.

When you are an adult child watching a parent struggle physically and mentally as they age out of life there is also a surmountable dose of guilt and burden you carry as well, especially when you have another struggling personality as part of the equation that you must deal with on a daily basis. It is a cruel part of life that I never saw coming and it messes with your head like you wouldn’t believe. Your heart wishes what your suffering parent wants would happen but then your mind instantly turns around and punches you in the throat for even having that thought, but the thought still sits there waving at you while you hold your throat and cry.

When you are a woman that has fought her way through the dark alley ways of life and found a beautiful valley to live in filled with wildflowers and butterflies, protecting it from the destructive shadows of the past will trigger a very instinctive urge that can startle you when it comes to the surface. The thing about getting older is that you have the knowledge on how and why you should control certain instinctive behavior. Some instincts were created as part of a defense mechanism and they are no longer needed but they are still there laying low beneath the surface of your smile.

Here is why I am glad I didn’t act on a once useful and needed self-created defense mechanism that rose out of the darkness this week….I went to bed last night with a sadness in my heart that I thought would still have control of me today but a small jester with a cup of coffee gave me sight after temporary blindness of my heart. This week did, and is, having some negative things happen but for all that was pulling me down there was tenfold keeping me up. I couldn’t see the good because I focused on the bad.

I have a husband that is supportive and loves me unconditionally. I have sisters that are sharing and understanding in my pain. I have friends that reach out to me for no reason other than love. I have love given to me every day by people that have their own struggles to live the same as I do. It is so easy to get caught up in what is going wrong that you forget to look at all the good that is swirling around you. Sometimes the ugly is overwhelming and feels like you will drown in anger or pain or the injustice of what is being done to you or those you dearly love.  Drowning will occur if you do not remember to breathe in the beautiful surrounding you and the ugly.

Temporary blindness to light and love is only a side effect caused by the emotion inflicted by acts of others, it is not permanent if you remember to take your medication. I took a full dose left on the counter by a man with a nail gun at 7am………..