Tag: love

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What I Need This Morning

I’m probably at my worst when plans are disrupted. It’s why I purposefully leave lots of time for everything I do and like to have a pocket full of backup options.

Today’s disruptions are complicated by my anxiety over what it means to be a single dad. I know I need an adult life that is separate from my sons, if only for the fact that it makes me a more complete model of self-care for them. More important is actually taking care of myself. Balancing that against being the sole caregiver of two amazing souls can bend me in half.

I’m letting go of the expectations I put on myself. Maybe the son who was in tears about missing his mom’s touch and had his first fearful episode of sleep walking doesn’t have to go to church today.

I’m replacing fear with love.

God bless and thank you for reading,
Jason

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Rock ‘N’ Roll With Me

David Bowie has been playing on life’s jukebox since the Labyrinth’s Fire Gang gave my eight-year-old self nightmares.

By high school I was hanging out with the drama kids, singing “Magic Dance.” I was also in Poetry Club writing my own versions of Nine Inch Nails’ songs, so when Bowie toured with NIN in ’95, I was there. “The Hearts Filthy Lesson,” had just hit MTV and it was intensely dark. I put on some sort of black t-shirt and made my way to a muddy hill in a Camden, NJ, amphitheater.

At 16, I had no appreciation for the moment or the performances. The hill had turned into a slip ‘n slide and I was goofing with the goths. Fortunately, I had my head in the right place for NIN and Bowie playing “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)” together. That, I will never forget (nor the dirt-covered goth girl who pinned me down for a kiss at the bottom of a wicked slide).

I went on to see him at the Roseland in NYC (a show just for BowieNet subscribers), Moby’s Area2 festival (there was a cosplay Jared, but still no Labyrinth tunes performed), and the Tower Theater in Philly (the closing lyric, “Ziggy played guitar…” still holds on to my auditory nerve center).

Bowie had virtually quit touring when I met Mary. We were at Lollapalooza in Chicago when The Raconteurs revived a lackluster set by playing “It Ain’t Easy.”

I was mostly hands-off when it came to wedding plans, but I had a couple requests. One, that her dress show off her “shoulders and boobs” (direct quote). Two, that “Rock ‘N’ Roll With Me” be our song.

—

“Oh, when you rock and roll with me

There’s no one else I’d rather be

Nobody here can do it for me

When you rock and roll with me

When you rock and roll, when you rock and roll with me

No one else I’d rather, I’d rather be

Nobody here can do it for me

I’m in tears, I’m in tears

When you rock and roll with me”

—

For a marriage that involved so few tears, yet lead to so many, this song has come to mean almost too much.

Today I reflect on “Nobody here can do it for me.” I’ve learned the truth that self-love is a connection with the internal divine. There is an infinite engine of Love. I call it God. You can glimpse it in others, feel the radiance of it, but direct access is found only inside one’s own soul. Only once you’ve done that can you really share in the warmth of another’s love.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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Love and Respect Yourself

Hi,

I just read your post about hating your body. My life changed when I realized it wasn’t my body, or habits, or temper that I hated, but my actual Self. “Hate” may be too strong of a word for me, but I was lacking in self-love to a destructive degree.

I read Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life early this year. I can’t recommend it enough. Diet, exercise, and “healthy” routines won’t fix your soul. Getting on a daily (as many times a day as you can stand) regimen of self-care and self-love will bring all the changes you want for yourself.

I can tell you, it was disturbing to discover how much I disliked myself. It’s not fun to listen to my self-critical voices (there are many), but engaging with that in myself has helped me find forgiveness for my Self.

The good habits come. When you really love yourself, you’ll treat yourself like someone you love! How ‘bout that!

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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Don’t Overdo

We don’t have a tree up, I haven’t acquired stocking stuffers, and I’m not sure where the stockings are.

These were all on my mind as I pulled this card from don Miguel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements deck.

Now I’m thinking of Halloween. Mary was Tippi Hedren from Hitchcock’s The Birds one year before we met. She took bloody pecks out of a stylish blazer, wired birds around her, and had more birds torturing her hair. It was brilliant.

We overdid it all. Costumes, hikes, meals, decorations…we never sat for more than an evening by the fire. Even that would be rife with problem solving and planning.I don’t know if that’s what left her depleted and unable to fight off the infection, or whether she knew in her soul that her time would not be long. Both could be true.

I’m finding my pace. I’m learning how to rest.

I’m going to do my nest today.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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Still Present

Mary visited me again.

This inspirational card has floated around our lives for more than a decade. I don’t know where Mary found it and I never paid much attention to it on our dresser or her nightstand.

Having no clear connection to our life together, I was tempted to toss it in my efforts to make room in our lives. Physical health and wellbeing has been paramount in our family transformation and I didn’t think I needed a reminder. I checked myself on how easily bad habits form and old patterns return and placed the card between our kitchen and dining room.

A day or so earlier, I was at Lanikai Wellness Studio for a yoga class and purchased a deck of cards based on don Miguel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements. I have a long to-read list and thought this would be a good way to bring Ruiz’s wisdom into my life. I also hoped they would provide material for a new blog series.

I sat down this morning to flip through the cards for the first time. This same card was of the first ten I read. We didn’t own the book. We never discussed Ruiz. I didn’t discover him until after Mary passed and there’s no indication of his name or the book title on the cards.

This is my first real holiday season alone. A friend buoyed me through my first Christmas as a widower, but that friendship has been lost. As much as I trust where I am and the good things that are to come, the loneliness is weighing on me.

This week I came home from a brutal two hours of soccer. I was hammered in goal and on the field, nothing seemed to work in the back-to-back games. I was wiped out emotionally and physically. I was useless to my sons as they warmed up leftovers and served themselves dinner. I wondered what I was doing wrong, how I got to this place.

I had a dream that night that Mary had been in the stands watching our boys and watching me play. I ran over to the edge of the field to ask for help with something small. It startled me and I woke angry. I envisioned the stands again and I took her away. It wasn’t like a dream. I can see the empty spot at the end of the metal bench now. I could have told her how much I loved her, how blessed I am to have had her, how important she was and is to me, or I could have just smiled and enjoyed a moment seeing her again. But I erased her. I was angry at myself for a foolish fantasy.

So she’s back this morning telling me to take care of my body. She always protected soccer for me. She would come home from a long day of work, start making dinner, and send me out the door, no matter if the boys were being disagreeable or impatient, or if coats were still on the floor from our afternoon adventures. She was always there later to hear about my frustrations and successes on the field. I can hear her drowsy, mumbled, “I’m listening,” as she fought off sleep after a late game. She was listening, she was always present. She was so good at being present that she still manages it from time to time.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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Single AF

Romantic. Fool for Love. Intense. Romeo.

My friends (and myself) have taken me to task for how I love. Sage advice, patient nurturing, and loving mockery have been at my doorstep since I chose to end an intense and public love affair.

I’ve experienced romantic love twice in the nearly two years since I lost my wife. It seems I have two modes of dating: one and done, or falling in love.

I live with all my heart. Parenting, soccer, yoga, even blogging isn’t fulfilling until it pushes me to tears. That’s where I like to get, that place of danger, the place where possibility blooms like a sunrise out of a winter morning.

Widowhood didn’t create this, as my high school sweetheart recently reminded me, it moved the bar. The love that Mary left me is greater than any I have ever known, the pain nearly equal. Living in these extremes has stripped away much of the middle. So comes the high-wire act. The joy and jeopardy of dancing between the fringes of existence. Worse than tripping back into the pain is floating off the wire into space, drifting without course.

My heart doesn’t break. It grows to the size of its pot. Then it continues to grow. The beauty is obvious as leaves and blooms spill out over the sides. The pain comes as the roots push silently against the hardened clay, struggling for room. The pot breaks and the pain is exposed and ugly. Relief is there too. I am reminded that love is infinite. I am reminded of God’s love that Mary opened a window to on the day she left this realm. I am reminded that there is always a bigger pot, that I can mold one on my own, and that it’s okay to crave a partner in that process.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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Love and Trust and Family and Friends

In the last few days I’ve connected with friends and family and built on existing love and trust. I’ve found new friends in which to trust and build relationships. I’ve explored my trust in God and found that he is working in my life in remarkable, unexpected ways. In trusting Him I have been more able to let events unfold before me and let my place in them occur without pushing or prodding with my own desires. I’ve started to let go of my drive to control and instead listen and find the path meant for me. God has been very good to me. I pray that I can keep the wisdom to continue listening.

God bless,
Jason

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Assumptions

No Kidding, Willie Yao, 2018. Delaware Contemporary

Assumptions and expectations took a beating in 2018. When I suddenly lost my wife I had assumptions about how I would rebuild my life. I assumed I would find a new wife and that we would have a slightly inferior life to the idealized marriage I had with Mary.

After a few months, I gained confidence and moved those expectations a few notches toward the goal of having a stronger marriage than I had before. I found independence in my adventures with my sons and enough patience to wait for “the one.”

Ten months a widower, I met someone who asked for “intentions” in place of “expectations.” It seemed easy enough, I’d been intent on treating humans as individuals deserving of love. I’d been gifted boundless love and intended to share it.

In practice, I started to actively take note of my expectations and assumptions and substitute them with clear intentions. This became painful as I felt my future imposing itself on my present; or rather, my expectations were getting in the way of my intentions.

I’m working hard to curb expectation and live an intentional life. It has lead me into new ways of thinking and being. It has disrupted my thought process and made me happier than I would have imagined months ago, regardless of many pitfalls along the way.

Do you still want a new marriage?

I don’t know. I’ve got so much yet to discover about myself. I’ve got impossible things to accomplish. I’ve got a world of possibilities and the curiosity to pour myself into it. I’ve got a house full of boys who thoroughly enjoy being in a house full of boys. I’ve got a lot of love around me.

God bless,
Jason

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2018: The Year I Lost My Wife and The Mother of My Sons

It could be that easy to define my 2018, but that’s not how it went. Mary started to get sick at the end of January and spent six days in the hospital before passing into the hands of God on February 12th. Miracles began before she left this Earth: from the maturity and bravery of her 6- and 8-year-old boys to say, “I love you” before she passed, to her holding on until friends and family from all over were able to come and do the same, to the peace that God brought me before her final moments, and to the connection with an eternal love that she left me.

That connection is a super power. Paperwork, memorial planning, giving her eulogy in front of hundreds of people, spending that same night alone with my boys…it all just came to me.

That connection remains unbroken, but doesn’t shield me from my own brokenness. In fact, it’s given me the courage to face my broken parts. That is how I might define my 2018: The Year I Faced My Darkest Parts. I’ve found strength by diving into my weaknesses. I’ve found love by embracing my fears and spending real time exploring them. I’ve started to find myself through a lot of muck piled up inside.

I don’t know why God took Mary, but I’m certain both of them would want me to continue to grow, learn, search, lead, and, most importantly, love.

God bless,
Jason