No, not everyone can relate to your specific troubles YET if we zoom out far enough, we can find the areas that we CAN connect and relate; where we come together for common good. It's in choosing LOVE and respect that we can change the trajectory of our culture. I am grateful for the past, the present and I remain hopeful for our future. We are a human race and the areas we choose to give our support matter. 

I choose to connect to what's right in us, what works, what we aspire to experience and how we desire to serve the greater good. Our experiences always seem to come back to perspective.

Healthy, wholehearted Life is a practice; a continuing to choose participation, growth, contribution, and to receive the sweet gifts that come through the moments where we put in the work. 

Onward, fellow boat mates...
In "it" with you,
Lisa
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Guest article written by Karen Weeks of www.elderwellness.net

Most of us moms do much more than just the job of parenting. We wear many different hats, and one role that some of us take on as we get older is that of caring for our aging parents. Sometimes that means you’re a 24/7 care provider, whereas others have one or both parents on our minds even if they’re living on their own or in a senior community. In all of these situations, the underlying thread is concern for our senior loved ones’ health and well-being.
 
When You Worry About Safety
 
One of the greatest health and safety concerns seniors face is the risk of falling. According to the National Council on Aging, about one in four adults over age 65 falls each year, and 20% of those falls result in serious injuries. No one wants their loved one to become injured, and these injuries often lead to seniors losing mobility or independence. As worrisome as this risk is, caregivers can play a major role in helping prevent falls. The best thing you can do is talk to your loved one about risk factors, such as whether any medications make them dizzy or whether loss of vision is a concern.
 
Your loved one’s overall health and well-being is another top concern. One of the hardest things you have to do as a caregiver is to recognize whether your loved one is able to stay safe and healthy living on their own. Unfortunately, seniors don’t always realize there’s a problem, or they may not say anything because they don’t want you to worry. This is why it’s so important to keep an eye out for signs that they’re struggling.
 
If you feel like your loved ones need some extra help, the easiest way to start exploring some options is to search online for assisted living centers nearby. Websites that specialize in helping you find assisted living are easy to use, and they’ll give you a feel for what options are out there and which facilities have the amenities and services you’re looking for. Some of these websites also suggest choosing an assisted living facility next to one of the area’s top hospitals—which, in Atlanta, include Northside Hospital and Emory University Hospital—so that your loved one receives quality care.
 
Helping Your Loved One Stay Active
 
Regardless of where your loved one lives, there’s a chance that they need a little extra encouragement to stay active. Physical activity is essential for older adults, but many seniors fear getting hurt or they simply lack the motivation. As a caregiver, one of the best things you can do is help them find opportunities for activity. Consider looking into senior fitness classes in your area and volunteer to drive them. Or you may even want to suggest an activity you can do together, such as walking a few days a week.
 
Providing Emotional Support
 
Along with staying physically active, another essential health need for seniors is to stay engaged in life. Because they no longer have roles like working or parenting, USA Today explains how many seniors suffer emotionally because they feel like they’ve become irrelevant. This is likely one reason why it’s common for seniors to have symptoms of depression, yet this is often overlooked and many don’t get the mental health care they need.
 
You can help by encouraging your loved one to get active in their community, whether that means volunteering or joining activities at their senior living center. Getting involved in something that gives them a sense of purpose is a great way to improve mental well-being. You can help even more by doing small things whenever you’re together, like asking for help with household chores they can manage or asking for advice.
 
As a wife, mother, employee or business owner…mamas have a lot of people counting on us. All of these roles are rewarding, but aren't always easy. Caring for senior loved ones is definitely a mixed bag, full of both joy and worry. These tips may not wipe away your worry, but hopefully they will help you give your loved ones what they need for a happy, healthy life.
 
Photo credit: Pixabay
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Original Article HERE. Re-posted with permission by the author. 

Instead of soiling her struggle with shame, I’m honest in the hopes of breaking the cycle of mental illness in my family. BY MARY PEMBLETON | JAN 8, 2020

​“How’d your mom die?”
Time stilled a little. This question from my precocious five-year-old, a child already versed in the inner workings of procreation, who’d interrogated me relentlessly about God and evolution and sewage processing at the tender age of three, would, I knew, blossom into an onslaught of queries until the truth slipped out if I didn’t answer him directly right now.
I glanced at his green eyes in the rearview and they stared back, intent. This moment: I hadn’t expected it so early in his life.
“Well,” I began. “My mother had a disease, just like Dad’s father had cancer. But this disease was in her brain and it made her very sad. And she didn’t get the help she needed in time to feel better. She was so sad for so long that she chose to die.”
Since the very beginning of motherhood, I’ve vowed to answer my children honestly, because I remember what it felt like as a child to have serious questions skirted. It sent a clear message: We do not talk about this because it’s shameful. And the shame soiling my mother’s struggle with mental health, and ultimately her suicide, contributed to it.
Tissues damp with salinity lay in piles next to her bed in the mornings, but in the house where I grew up, we all suffered from our respective problems quietly, shame-fueled, behind closed doors. I knew the meaning of the word depression from an early age because my mother whispered it into my ear in explanation of the apathy that accompanied my father’s chronic pain, along with a request that I do not talk about it.


 Depression is on the rise in kids—but the signs are hard to recognizeI didn’t want my mother’s suicide to be stigmatized with shame in the minds of my children, who I’m confident will experience their own mental health struggles if biology and genetics and family legacy is any indication, and the science supporting my assertion is well-established.
“So, she killed herself?” my son asked.
“Yes.”
He stared out the window at the passing trees. “What is it called?”
“What?” I asked.
“The disease.”
“Depression,” I told him, “It’s called depression.”
Depression and anxiety and suicidality, I would’ve told him if he were older. Three words I’ve felt the impact of from a young age, not only by witnessing my parents’ but by experiencing them in my own body. But I didn’t tell my mother or father what I was feeling when at the age of 12 I plummeted into a hopeless and inexplicable desire to die: I’d learned from their example. This was not something we talk about.
The additional trauma of my mother’s suicide when I was 17 meant that by the time I made it to adulthood without proper treatment or therapy, I was limping.
“You know how I always think you’re going to die when you’re sick?” I asked my son several years after our initial conversation in the same Prius. His brain was a bit more developed then, his legs stretching nearly all the way to the messy floorboard. “That’s anxiety. Unreasonable worry that’s hard to control. And I inherited it from my parents, and they from theirs.”
“Like when I had strep and you took me to the hospital and told me you’d buy me a dirt bike because you thought I was dying,” he said.
“Just like that. I’m trying really hard in therapy to learn how to challenge myself when I feel really scared and start thinking that way. I’m trying a new medicine that I hope will help, too,” I told him.
I offer this transparency so he can see that though I do struggle, I seek help for my struggle, so that he may one day do the same. Because early in motherhood, I didn’t know how to get help, and my children were collateral.
When our sons were toddlers, I remember lying in bed next to my husband, shivering with anxiety under the comforter and staring up at the whorls of paint on our ceiling. “There’s another measles outbreak,” I told him. Cold sweat pooled in my armpits.
“So, get them vaccinated.”
I wanted to, but I was so scared I was going to hurt them. I couldn’t live with myself. But I also couldn’t live with myself if they got measles either, or spread it to someone vulnerable.
“I need help,” I said, hot tears rolling over my temples into unkempt hair strewn across the pillow.
The more my children grew, the more the anxiety grew to match it, and the clearer it became that I did need help, and a lot of it. So many of my initial parenting decisions were based on a belief that I would inevitably do something to cause their deaths, a belief established in the wake of a death I felt was my fault.
Self-blame is all-too-common in suicide survivors. It may be a cliché, but for good reason. The resounding question being, “What could I have done to save them?”
What motivated me to seek treatment: I wanted to do better for my children. To break the cycle. I loved them more than anything and wanted to give them only the best. To give them a chance at a different outcome than my mother. To give me a chance at a different outcome.
I started seeing a therapist who specializes in eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, which allows trauma victims to resolve trauma’s negative effects through bilateral stimulation of the brain. It is helping me dismantle the stunning numbness that set in when my mother died, as well as a young adulthood of missteps and guilt and paralytic anxiety.
In our traumas so often lie gifts and pearls of wisdom and takeaways. The traumas themselves barbed and twisted and ugly, but given the proper resources to navigate them, to grow the healing parts of ourselves bigger and stronger than what’s hurt and battered us, we can learn so much about ways we don’t want to live, and how to live from a place of clarity of goals and awareness of my biases. My own traumas taught me to mother intentionally and decisively rather than from a place of fear. To get the damn shots. To take a breath and challenge my thought patterns instead of taking my kids to the emergency room for a fever.
The gift of my mother’s suicide is this: While I cannot control genetics or biology, I can, have, and will work hard to accrue the proper tools to contend with our family legacy of mental illness. And my hope is that I can pass these tools down to my children, to add to our wrought family legacy of suffering the very resilience to fight it with.

​It took the 5th kid before I really, truly, always embraced a baby in the moonlight with love. My 1st and 5th are 23 years apart so it's not like the radical growth that sometimes occurs when babies are back to back to back...yet the breaking happens and our Source (Father God, Jesus, Spirit, Mother Nature - whatever you name the Source that you have relationship with) shows up to offer us sustainable wisdom that equips for days ahead. Sometimes it takes a long while and repetition for us to recognize the Voice, the still small whisper that encourages us and feeds us when we're empty.

We must embrace them early...because when they are teenagers, we can't...they rarely let us. 

...and certainly not when they are 35 ... yet I see that child's pain still and desperately want to "make it better" ... and can't. It is so much harder than when he was little... and I scoop him up to rock, sooth, sing to, etc.

Please hold them, the babies...please when you wake and find yourself at the brink, seek your God... see Goodness ...with you at this moment...be blessed in KNOWING that you are NOT alone...your Source is near, with you...that the veil is thin and that your work, as a mother, is as true and as holy as the angels. Our children MUST see us seek ...they MUST see us be renewed in our lack...see our God within shine when we can't. For me, the "flesh died" most often in the nights. 

The work you are depositing yourself into is Holy work...you are moving on Holy ground...especially in the night when it's dark...you are Light. 

You are (partly) writing the programming of the brains for your babies...write their safety, write their connection, write their KNOWING a safe and stable presence.

My prayer is that YOUR safety, connection, and experience is able to shine through because of a KNOWING deep in you that you have come to experienced the presence of your God...and so have your children.

My God is my sustenance... my Source, leading when I can't...and when I am humble, surrendered enough to get out my own way, my leader when I "can"...

When I woke one morning with a 2 and 18 -year old, both telling me they were capable of independent life.  Appropriate to their ages - "I'll do it" ...and me knowing neither were quite able, yet needed to try. In actuality, it sounded more like "I'm a grown-ass man" and "Me DO it".  I knew they'd fall before they flew...they would have to. Like we all do.

I fell. Again. Knees...face plant...for me, it was at the cross..."help" ... "how do I do this protection and equipping??" Knees...on my face...still...still...again, again, again, repeat, repeat, repeat.

May we all "program them" well...at least as well as we can. 

May we HONOR the Innate wisdom within (us and them) that is wired to survive, thrive, and let be a model of the Highest Expression of our Life. I believe our God (whatever name you want to fill in) fills in the gaps where we fall short...and I promise you, we (I) fall short...they don't get all they need from me. They can't. I'm not God. They each have a God, it's not me. 

We, like the babies, are changed by the experience. Yes, sleep deprivation costs...NO DOUBT...yet so does dis-connect to our mothers...

Watching the percentage of our population suffering with anxiety and depression increase only heightens my commitment to restoring the connection to Love and safety. Returning "home" to the love that, above all love, holds us...and holds our babies.

For me, I prayed a double portion of repair and renewal with every moment of sleep I was gifted and my decade-plus of interrupted sleep was a significant challenge that turned blissful. My God showed up in the night...He still does. I trust Him more confidently than ever partly because of all those nights I tended to children. I trust Him with my daughter and her babies...and I still pray for supernatural renewal...for them, for you. 

Thank you for tending to your babies, your BLESSINGS, new Life allowed to your care.

Please be well,
Lisa


PS - As I write, my 12 YO (baby) is watching silly shows with a friend...at 1: AM...and I'm up nearby to "see them"...not overwhelmed by it but better equipped to see bc I embraced the nights before. .... Lord, come near. 

Each year, I speak to groups of women about creating their optimal (OptiMOM, get it?) holiday season and every year I hear women complain about all the ways the holidays are "crazy" and hard; that they feel robbed of the joy meant to be experienced this time of year.

My friends at KPK Interactive and I created a shortened version of the session for you to begin to explore how you might reconnect to what matters to you this season. 

My wish is that we all experience more Peace this season. May you find yours!
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On Facebook? Follow along with daily posts that will remind us to stay connected to our gratitude this season. 

I have a dear Aunt Sandy who lived on the opposite side of the country so we rarely saw each other, but we talked often. She was always my companion when I drove home from evening events with more than a 15-20 minute drive since she was 3 hours behind me. Book club evenings I would talk to her on my way and on my way home. Sometimes she had read the book we were discussing and often, I brought an extra insight to the gathering because of our conversations. 

I consider Sandy one of the most humble and wise women I knew. As I speak to groups and individuals, I regularly share "nuggets" that she gave me. Insights that bring strength, Peace, acceptance and healthy growth. One group I speak to frequently calls them "sandyisms".

​As the oldest sibling, she was given a lot of responsibility and felt significant pressure to meet the expectations of her parents (perceived or real). Drugs and alcohol consumed the pain and separation she felt in her early adult life....until it didn't and caused her more pain.

Sandy went on to find AA, an AA family and sobriety. Her walk in "the program" forced her to wrestle with God and herself in ways that littered her life with Truths that eventually were solid enough to stand on. Until they weren't...and pain and separation came again with mounting enormity. Her partner, Jer, and her parents both died. After 34 years of sobriety, Aunt Sandy began drinking again. After 2 years of sneaking and lying to her family (biological and AA), she got caught by a friend. That humble and wise woman wanted sobriety again...she confessed, brought her pain to light, let others into her story more fully, faced the facts and the realities of aging. 

We talked more often. Her health challenges came a bit more frequently and she had an occasional fall that required friends to come by more often to help. We shared more frequently...especially regarding my mothers cancer and what stresses I was facing. She heard and understood me (also the oldest sibling). We seemed to share a language that nobody else spoke.

I can still hear her greeting me when I called her. She was giddy to connect when time permitted and totally trusted the timing so I never felt pressure to ring her. Yet, I wanted and needed to talk with her. As I shared the value of our time to me, she would assure me that I was never alone. That lesson was one I learned decades ago, but I (maybe like you too?) learn a lot of lessons again and again, rooting into them deeper and deeper. 

Often as we hung up, she would tell me "Just pat your ass, honey. I'm always in your pocket."

In December 2017, I "heard" the whisper that if I wanted to see Sandy, I needed to plan a trip west. She and I talked about it and both were very excited to be in the same time zone, same space. In February the whisper said,"you really need to get the dates in place and buy your plane ticket". So we collaborated dates and I did go to Oregon to visit with Sandy in April 2018. The day after I landed back in Atlanta, she was hospitalized and made her transition less than a month later. 

This picture was taken the morning I left. She and I talked while she was in the hospital and she chuckled at watching me splash in the puddles as I ran to my rental car parked in front of her little house. She had the best grin and giggled often. 

I still talk to Sandy frequently and regularly pat my ass...I'm never alone. 

For those of you who are facing grief this season, please connect to others. Share your stories and tell people about the gifts your loved ones gave you. As I shared after my mom passed, I saw the image of a wave coming to shore and returning yet some of the water seeped into the sand. She was the wave, fluid now. And me, the sand still in form. My mother and Sandy have returned to the greater whole, but have left themselves in me too. We are better people because of those who have poured themselves into us.