refining

It all started when a friend made this her Facebook status:

"I am everything I never thought I'd be and disapproved of in others. Someone tell me that's a positive thing."

To which I replied:

"i have to say i am feeling the EXACT same way. and i think it has so much to do with what a commenter said above, caring about who you are and scrutinizing yourself harder than before. or finally being mature enough to handle facing the things you want to improve about yourself. we spend a lot of our 20's and 30's thinking the problem is the other guy. somewhere right about now, i think we start getting real and seeing we may indeed actually have bad traits we want to fix. i am trying to learn to rise above simply stopping there and being harsh on myself and trying to find my way to problem solving those things...that is the hardest part for me, not condemning myself so harshly. so maybe you're there too and we just need to keep aging and finding our way through. i think it's something akin to taking a rough gemstone and grinding, cutting, polishing it to a beautifully cut jewel. i am sure if the jewel had anything to say, it would say that the process of refining hurt like hell."

And then I realized I maybe a lot of people who are 40-ish might be feeling something similar. So this is my call for submissions. I'd like to open a conversation around this. Ladies, gentlemen...any advice? Anything similar going on for you? How do you think you might go about solving it? Anyone beyond their 40's who's "been there, done that" have any words of wisdom for us?

If so, please consider sharing your thoughts or struggles in the comments below. Maybe something good can come of sharing and witnessing with others around the world who collectively are going through it too.

blessings to you and yours!
~hipmama

And p.s. new visitors, please disregard my swearing post at Google below as well as the lack of any photos on this blog (refraining from swearing at Google one more time, because case in point, I really was the dodo who didn't read the fine print!).

damn you Google+

Crap. Google owns Blogger. Google came out with new social networking site, Google+ recently and I just got signed up for a Beta account yesterday. Noticed that without trying, I had some photo albums there, that Google somehow pulled thru feeds of mine that they own and decided to help me out by putting up some photo albums to me, sort of a house warming gift, I suppose, to welcome me to Google Plus. Well without reading the warning, I started deleting these albums, because I never put them there and they contained photos of my child, so I was feeling protective, when suddenly I realize that the fine print says "are you sure you want to delete these photos? doing so will delete them from all Google owned sites, including Blogger and several other sites, and will be irreversible."


What???


So I come over here and yes indeedy, all the photos I've uploaded in the nearly 6 yrs that I've been blogging are gone. This was supposed to be a tribute to all these years of mothering my girl and poof! the photo journal aspect is vaporized. Why the heck did they need to link it all like that? Why would the action on one Google site affect the content on other sites? Who would be expecting that? Kinda scary how much Google controls and can link together like that.


Ugh. Hope I can find these sweet photos still...

lightening up

wow. it's been a loooooong time since I hit a stage in a dance piece. i mean a long long time. before Sophia was born in fact. Sophia and I are going to dance in a flash mob performance here in Santa Barbara in the coming weeks, and we've been rehearsing every night. i have many observations.

1. First, I am watching myself in some of the videos and I am twice the size I used to be when I danced. Not kidding, I literally wear double the size I used to wear. I realize how much more I carry around with me and how that affects my posture and the accuracy of my movements. I am slower and I look less sharp, less crisp. I look at other dancers in the video and in my mind, I think I move like them, think I look like them, but when the camera is on me, I now realize, in watching it, that I do not look or move like them. Woah. It's a major wake up call for me to get into shape. The elliptical machine has been dusted off and plugged in. I am going to start working out again. Please blog followers, help keep me honest!!

2. Teaching the moves to Sophia is hard! I already have my own personal frustrations with how hard it is for me to learn the piece. And poor thing, she has them too, her own insecurities, but then mine are layered on top and she is learning to stress about not picking it up fast enough by seeing me do it. I used to use dance as a cathartic therapy, where I faced my self-doubt demons and fought hard with my dad's voice in my head and found myself near tears at the most unexpected moments. And right now, for the first time ever, I am going thru all that with a little witness watching me, soaking it all up like a sponge. Not sure it's the best thing for her. Or for me. Maybe I need to reserve dance for it's own special medicine that it is for me and not do this together with her. Or maybe I need to suck it up and step out of myself and just do this for her. But since we both are performers in this piece, it's very hard not to go into my own process around it. Let me point out that all of this is internal, not much of it shows on the outside, but my girl, she's pretty in tune with me, so she's feeling it. Not sure if it's better to make this all about her, and then be inauthentic with myself, or to just be real and be me and maybe that's better for her.

3. Poor thing, she has a lot of stress around getting it right. She always has. I gotta learn how to support her in that...but sadly I have that too and haven't really learned how to support myself in it, let alone someone else. How do I make it fun for her, and not all about working out our neuroses?? When and why did she develop her own neurosis/es in the first place? I thought I've always tried to instill self-confidence and playfulness in her, fighting hard to not raise her with body issues, self-consciousness and perfectionism. Are those things just contagious, so she got them from me subliminally?

Well that's pretty much it. Tough stuff for what is supposed to be a lighthearted fun experience. Working on lightening up in so many different contexts here. Hopefully it will just end up being fun!!

Here's a video of our piece so far:
http://www.flipshare.com/view.aspx?nRecipient=&nFrame=QjkxNTE3QkEtRDEwNy00RTQxLTg3MDItOTAyMzU5MUFGM0M2&nMedia=QkU4NjY2QTgtOUY2MC00QUI5LTkyN0YtMDgzQUFCRjg0NjM5&nT=

Pretty cool, right?

blog spawn

Woke today around 6:30 am to the sound of "Mom, Mom, MOM, come in here!!!" I come running in, bleary eyed and half-robed, expecting blood or fire. Instead I find Sophia beckoning me to get in bed with her and look out the window. "Look Mom, you can see evaporation!"

It has been raining hard here for a few days and our patio furniture cushions have gotten soaked. This morning the sun broke out but it was still super chilly out. Sophia noticed the steam rising from the cushions and got so excited, since they are studying weather and water cycles at school right now. She wanted to know if I could take a video so she could show her class. So I pulled out the iPhone, we threw on boots and bathrobes and went out in the cold to film it (couldn't see thru the window so well).

Then she asked if she could make a few more science videos on her own. Happy for a few minutes to jump back under my comforter, I showed her how to work the phone and let her at it. The result was 8 videos she made all on her own. After showing them to me, I suggested we make a blog with them, since she's been wanting to make a website for quite some time. Apple fall far from the tree much?

So one day after my own blog renewal, here is the spawn of my blog, er the blog of my spawn, um the daughter of all blogs...well ok my puns are drying up so here's the link, if you wanna check it out!

http://anothersciencevideo.blogspot.com/

Enjoy and feel free to comment or post, she'd love it!

purifying

What is it that cleanses our psyche

the way a long, hot shower

washes away the sweat from a hard run?

Sometimes it's a good cry

or months of crying

that washes away the residue left behind

from one experience to the next.

Some people shop,

shedding last year's skin

for the fashions of a new day.

Me, I move.

I pack it all up into boxes and put it away again

into new cupboards and closets and shelves,

touching each of the objects in my life,

one at a time,

deciding whether to keep it

and if so, where does it go now?

Transferring the dust

gathered from one chapter of my life

into the next,

watching it wash down the sink

in little gray drops

every time I wash my hands.