Bits of Wit & Wisdom

 

When I was a little girl I often pretended to be Cinderella. I was especially good at becoming a martyr as I did my chores and thought dreadful things about my mother who I was sure acted identical to the evil step mother! I wanted to meet my Prince Charming and live Happily Ever After. I didn’t want to go to college when I was a little girl, because I wanted to grow up and be a mommy. I have obtained that dream through sweat and tears and more tears. But more tears have been happy than sad.

I believe that life is short, unpredictable, that it’s okay to cry or even scream, and that feeling makes us human. I believe that laughter is essential to survival, and that chocolate should be named one of the major food groups. I have a huge heart, am very empathetic and have much to share. I’ve been told for years that I am easy to talk to, and a great listener. I also have much more to learn.

Family is everything to me. Relationships are delicate and fragile and need nurturing. I am blessed, yes, but it is partially because I have educated myself and went into marriage with my eyes fully open. Sure, I still adore Cinderella, but I am not shadowed by fantasy. I strained the good from the fiction, removed the tales, added truth and faced the facts. Because of this, I have been able to talk with and help many people along the way, and can relate to various circumstances of people’s lives, both negative and positive ones.

When I was 21, I met my Prince Charming. Fortunately my husband wanted all the same things that I did, and we were very well suited for each other. We were married in the Los Angeles California Temple (castle! J) in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and started our marriage with high hopes and a great deal of love and respect for one another. I had done a lot of reading and research, and had already taken a few marriage and relationship courses and childhood development classes. I learned a great deal about what to do and not to do in a relationship. We have been very blessed to be extremely happy most of the time.

My oldest daughter Nikkie says that I have a habit of “collecting daughters” because there are several young women out there who needed a mom figure, and still today call me Mom. It is an honor that I do not take lightly. Some have even called me wise, and I did not bribe them to say that, although there may have been brownies involved.

“Many of the social restraints which in the past have helped to reinforce and to shore up the family are dissolving and disappearing. The time will come when only those who believe deeply and actively in the family will be able to preserve their families in the midst of the gathering evil around us.” – Spencer W. Kimball, Ensign, Nov. 1980.

I am very blessed to be married to my best friend for 29+ years, and have five very challenging and amazing earthly kids. I say challenging because we have faced mental illness, loss, anxiety, ADD, ADHD, gender confusion, addiction and Asperger’s syndrome, which is under the Autism spectrum, medication failures and successes; completely amongst all the other craziness that comes from motherhood, life and large families.

I’ve been a Mum for over 28 years; my first two babies were boy and girl twins, and teeny beautiful Preemies. They only lived a few hours. Some time I’ll share my journal with you about that time, when I wrote it as a fresh 23 year old mommy with aching arms, an empty nursery and a broken heart. The three youngest of my children were Special Order: Delivered by the Stork, and were adopted as a sibling set of three amazing kids. But as I listed earlier, they came with some of that special baggage of their own.

I actually have six children who are celestial and were lost either soon after birth, stillborn, or miscarried. I understand a mother’s shattered and broken heart when it comes to loss. I also know first-hand the challenges and difficulties surrounding post-partum depression, clinical depression, panic attacks, anxiety, body image issues, infertility, health challenges etc… Have I gone to school for this? Well yes, but the School of Hard Knocks teaches more in-depth than any university, and Personal Experience flavors life like no class room spice ever could.

I also believe that keeping a journal most of my life has helped me to be a better friend and mother. I am going to share my journals with you starting when I was very young, and then share surrounding details and my hindsight too. I was a very typical kid. What I felt was important seems trivial to me now, but then it was everything. In this way, you can look into the heart of a young teen and perhaps understand a different perspective.

I also understand feeling: overwhelmed, exhausted, frumpy and out of control. Well really it is more like I was standing still and my Life was running away from me! Being a mom is the hardest and greatest gift I have been blessed with. I am not Cinderella, and now I mostly relate to her when I have dinner to cook or mountains of clothes to wash and fold. But I learned a lot from Cinderella and her graciousness along the way, and I reflect that I learned a great deal from a variety of sources in my life. I am flawed, but I am trying to be better.

I’ve also discovered that I use creating beautiful surroundings, possessions and events, as coping mechanisms for the less savory things in life. So if my blog seems very dissimilar, this is why. I love to sing, sew, read, craft and garden… I talk to my roses and breathe in the beauty of God’s creations, even as I have to turn my head just a bit as to not get a whiff of the foul-smelling chicken enclosure. I love lace and the Victorian era and try to emulate some of the finer attributes of that era into my life, but inexpensively if possible. This includes a bit of shabby French and shabby Victorian. Yes, I am a hopeless romantic, sentimental and am admittedly a girly girl who’s proud of it.

My beliefs and my religion are mammoth to who I am, and who I am becoming. I turn to my Savior and scriptures for answers beyond my own intellect, and I try to stay humble along the way. I keep a sense of humor as well, because life does get messy; sometimes extremely so. Sticky too, with stains that refuse to come out. That is where the wit comes in. I cannot take myself too seriously all of the time, or life will just bulldoze me right over.

But sometimes I look at the unhappy lives of people whom I know and love, and I think, “Wow, is this what happens when we have the example of an unhappy home in our childhoods? Or does it stem from ignorance, abuse or mental illness? What happened to that charity that Paul spoke of: the true love of Christ? Why am I the only one among so many with a happy home and marriage? How can I help them?” I’ve been asked repeatedly to give bits of information on these subjects so close to my heart. I want to share some of these with you, and I hope and pray that I can help lighten your load a little, even if I can’t be there to help you fold your laundry.

~Cynthia