If hats are easy, the only word to describe socks is “not”. They require custom fitting and tedious measuring and remeasuring. I’ve probably knitted 18 pair of those—one pair each for my eight children, three pairs for my grandmother, one pair for a sock exchange and the rest for myself. Socks say, “I love you enough to spend 25 hours of my life making something for you to walk all over.” Socks say, “Here is my heart for you.” Socks are very talkative, even though they are highly functional and usually hidden. They are a huge investment of time because they are made from such thin yarn. You can knit an entire sweater out of bulky yarn in the amount of time it takes to knit a pair of footies in fingering weight yarn, which is very thin wool. Wool is wonderful for socks because it’s very warm but also light-weight, and because it not only wicks but also absorbs moisture. In fact, wool can absorb 30% of its weight in water without feeling wet.
I once started a pair of over-the-calf socks for my second husband. I knit the leg, turned the heel, and knit most of the foot. I ripped it out after our divorce. He had been too uninvolved to try it on so I could close the toe. I will use that yarn to make a pair for myself. I like wool socks enough to be willing to try them on!

I will never forget the smile on Grandmother’s face when I slipped that first pair of hand-made wool socks on her feet. “Aaaah,” she said. Then she wiggled her toes.

“Do you like them?” I asked. My smile was as big as hers.

“Yes, thank you,” she said. I think probably no one has ever been as appreciative of my knitted socks as she was, unless I count myself.

Of course, Grandmother didn’t walk in her socks. By the time I made them for her, she was bed-ridden and in the nursing home. She’d always had cold feet, but after she stopped walking on her own, it was a constant complaint. Except for the first pair, I mostly knit those socks on the way to visit her. My mother drove the 90 mile round trip five times most weeks, and I went along for three of them. I have all of those socks now, except the first pair, which disappeared in the facility laundry.

When I think back and see my hands knitting those socks for her, I also see her hands making clothes for me when I was young. At one time, she made everything I wore except for my underthings. When I got older and petulantly demanded store-bought stuff, thinking it was better, she made clothes for my dolls. And when I was older yet, she made bed quilts for my first six children. On the last one, for my third son, the stitching lines are crooked in a way that she never would have tolerated from her younger self. To me, it is the most beautiful of the bunch. She couldn’t sew at all by the time the seventh and eighth were born. I wonder now if these same thoughts went through her mind when I gifted her with those socks.

My mother has also made blankets for most of my children, and is currently working on the last two. Hand-made, wearable love is a family tradition.

My current project is one I have been working on, off and on, for six years. I have started and finished many other things while stitching on this blanket I call “Hocks.” Its name is “Hocks” because when I started it, my then-baby could not yet pronounce the letter “s”—she called socks, hocks. It htuck. The blanket is made of hock yarn. It is thin, warm, and nearly weightless given its size. It is probably four feet square now, unstretched. Eventually, it will fit my double bed.

Hocks is composed of mitered squares, each one built on the two below and beside it, so that the squares sit like diamonds. It is done in garter stitch: I knit across the row, taking out two stitches in the middle, and then I knit back. The small squares are about two inches diagonally, require 12 yards of yarn, and take 45 minutes to knit. The larger squares are four square inches and require 45 yards and 120 minutes. Knitting on it reminds me of how I live. One thing builds on the thing before.

The blanket is being knit with what basically amounts to scraps. Some are my own leftovers, some have come from friends, and I have even received some from strangers. Sometimes a scrap is so small I get only get one square, but sometimes I get several. People, like the yarn scraps, come and go.

The backside is a mess, with loose ends everywhere, just begging for me to take a minute and weave them in. Unwoven ends are unfinished business. I know I will have to take of them eventually, but for now, I can choose to just look at the pretty side.

Sometimes a set of squares clash as I am working up close and personal on a particular area, but when I spread it all out and step back, it is beautiful, all crazy colors and mixed up randomness. It’s the unexpected events in life, the random ones that take your breath away, that are the most wonderful. Those are the kind of moments that make it worth getting up in the morning.

It takes years to make a bed-sized blanket from sock yarn. It looks very messy while you are doing it. It requires persistence and determination. The only thing that stays consistent in this blanket is the knitter. Though the yarn has come from many places, the knitting is all mine, just as no one else can do my living. Sometimes, I have to grit my teeth and force myself to work on it. Maybe I should have just called it “Life.”

Hats are even simpler than shawls—cast on, rib for two inches, knit for-what-seems-like-ever, decrease consistently and methodically, cover your head. I have made more hats than I can remember. About ten for my best friend who wears some sort of hat all the time, a few each for my children, a handful for family babies, and towering stacks for infants I will never know. I knit them when I want someone to know I love them just because their existence has come to my attention, and I think it’s worth celebrating. You don’t have to do anything special to merit a hat, and I knit them with joy in my heart and laughter on my lips. I think it must be the happy and not the wool that makes them so warm.

That towering stack of baby hats was made in partial payment to the midwife who delivered my last two children. Every time I gave her a new stack, she looked at each one and cooed over it. I had more fun watching her enjoy getting the hats than I had making them. “Look how tiny!” she said. And, “Oh, that color is so pretty!” And, “I know who I will give this one to, her baby is so little and it’s so soft.”
It doesn’t take long at all to make a newborn hat, about four hours if it’s crocheted and six if it’s knitted. Just knowing that it’s going to be on the head of a brand new soul is payment enough. Thinking about those hats and the little heads they went on reminds me of the way my own babies smelled. Not that fake baby powder smell, but the other one, the clean and earthy smell of new life. It lasts such a short time, three or four days at most, and then it is gone; outgrown faster than the first clothes and harder to remember because you can’t touch it.

The hats for my best friend have stories, too. Most of them were knit as we talked on the phone, while he drove across Louisiana and Texas and Virginia and New Jersey and once even to New York. For a while, it seemed like he got a new one every time he came home. He’d take off the old one and put on the new one, and we would sit for hours smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, talking about war and peace, love and hate, time and distance, trauma and hurt. Sometimes entire paragraphs were spoken silently between each painful sentence. We tried to help each other become whole again, one pair of frosty blue eyes looking into another, verifying that we were each worth the next breath of air we took.
~~
We are eating dinner one night, building fajitas from the plates of food the waiter brought to the table. “Tell me about Panama,” I say. I expect to hear about beautiful women, and tropical fruit.

He begins to speak as we unroll the tortillas. “I sat there, with what was left of him on my lap. I couldn’t let him see ….that. I blocked his view. I told him he was going to be fine. I couldn’t let him see that his legs were gone. Three days before, we had been state-side, sitting in the day room, talking smack. He was laughing. I drew his picture. He bled out lying in my lap,” he says. It takes about five minutes for him to say this to me. He looks down at his busy hands while I look at him. Occasionally, he looks up to see if I am still listening, and I nod. When he starts eating, I make my fajita, and we eat that set in silence.

He doesn’t draw anymore.
~~
“What happened with your husband?” he asks. We are sitting in the camper. It is raining. I have just asked about his ex-wife and he tells me about his children instead, and then changes the subject. “You were married to him for 16 years. That’s a long time.”

“Oh,” I say. Then I stop. My eyes leave his face, and dart around the paneled walls. He sits between me and the door. Finally, I drop my gaze to the cracked linoleum. He waits. “Things had been…not right…between us for a while. Several months, you know. And then one day, I came home and he had a picture of me on his computer. As his background. One I had allowed him to take privately almost year before. I, I was wearing. I had on shoes and a smile. He let my children see that. Jasmine says they were all lined up looking at it, all seven of them. He showed it to my children. So I told him again to get out. Get out, get out, GET OUT. I felt like he raped me there in front of my kids.” It takes one and a half cigarettes to tell him this.

“I felt so ashamed,” I say. I glance at his face to see if he hates me. He doesn’t, but what I see in his eyes makes me cry all the same. I look away and we smoke again.
~~
He is lying across the bed, surfing the internet while I clean my room. I need to get rid of some stuff and organize it, because I am planning to paint it pink soon. It will be a princess room for my single-girl self. We are talking about nothing important. I throw a cracked ceramic canister into the nearly empty trash can, and he jumps. “What’s all that about?” I ask.

“Nothing,” he says. I continue to clean for a bit, and then I realize that while his face is still turned in my direction, he is no longer in that room with me. His hands are poised over the keyboard, but they are still. His one-word answer was not the truth.

I call his name. My voice pulls him back from wherever he’s gone. “What happened?”

“She used to throw things. When she got mad. I’d come home off the truck, and she’d be in bed with some guy. She’d get mad then. She got mad, and threw things, and hit me. And I let her. Let’s go smoke,” he says. So we do. When we get outside, I ask him why he let that happen. He tells me, “I thought it was my fault. If I were a better man, she wouldn’t cheat, and if she didn’t cheat, I wouldn’t catch her, and if I didn’t catch her, then she wouldn’t get mad and hit me.” He says all of this in one breath, between puffs on his Pall Mall. I realize I am looking at him the same way he looked at me when I told him about my husband. We finish our cigarettes in silence. When we go back in, I am careful not to make any noise as I continue to clean the room.
~~
“How’s your mom?” he asks. I can hear the steady beep of the compressor as the air brakes fill on his truck.

“She’s fine,” I answer.

“What’s wrong?” he says. I hate that he can tell at hello if something is not right with me, even on a cell phone, even when he’s in the middle of Nowhere, Ohio where there is barely any signal.

“I was over there today. I spoke to Bill again, and he acted like I wasn’t even there,” I say. Bill is my step-father. It has been six weeks since he looked in my direction, and three months since we’ve had an actual conversation. “He’s still doing that thing he’s doing. Or not doing. Whatever.”

“Have you asked him about that?” he asks. It’s a reasonable question.

“No. Mama still won’t let me,” I say.

“Do you know what his problem is?” he says. It’s another reasonable question to which I have no rational answer.

“I guess. He hasn’t really talked to me since Pat and I split. It’s like he blames me. He told Mama he thinks I’m sleeping around.” I laugh, bitterly. “How can I sleep around when I can’t…?” I trail off here. He already knows what it is that I can’t do. “I feel like he thinks this whole thing is my fault, that he blames me for it somehow. I don’t know what to do.”

“Nothing,” he says. “There is nothing you can do with that.”
~~
He startles himself awake. He has been asleep on the loveseat while I have been doing homework. I am across the room before he finishes sitting up. People don’t make that sort of noise when things are fine. “Are you okay?” I say. It’s a crazy question. I can see he isn’t, but conversations have to start somewhere. I sit down beside him and put my hand on his leg, just above the knee, on the hem of his blue shorts. I keep my eyes on that hand.

“Did I say anything?” he asks. His voice is rigid. So are his arms. His breath is so fast and hard that it could almost be called panting.

“No,” I answer.

“Nothing? I didn’t say anything?” he asks again.

“No. You didn’t say anything,” I say again. We sit for a couple of minutes. I know he doesn’t like to be touched, so I start to get up. He grabs my hand, and pulls me back, placing our linked hands on my own knee. We sit a few more minutes. His breathing slows. He takes his own pulse. It’s a gesture I have gotten used to over the past three years.

“Let’s have a cigamarette,” he says. That’s a word he uses when things are too heavy, when he wants to get away from them. We go outside, and light up.

“Are we going to talk about that?” I ask. When he doesn’t answer, I know we aren’t.
~~
“How bad a person must I be if two husbands and two fathers can’t love me?” I ask. It is the cry of a wounded child, and he can’t answer.
~~
“No one should have to look through their sights at a kid wrapped in explosives and have to make a decision about whether they die alone or whether they take you and your buddies with them,” he says. This, too, is the cry of a wounded child, and I have no answer.
~~
“Did you know that when you start to go crazy, you can feel it? Like, physically, I mean? It feels like the top of your brain is coming off!” one of us says.

“Yeah, I know,” answers the other.
~~
We don’t converse in the normal way when we talk about these things. One of us talks, or tries to, and the other listens, mutely. Really, what do you say when someone shows you their naked soul? You say nothing because only by your silence can you show your respect for the pain. Always, when one of us finishes, the cigarettes are smoked down to the colored filter and the butts are firmly stubbed out before normal conversation resumes.
~~
It must have worked, all that wool and all those words. The man who swore he would never love again is in Missouri now with a new girlfriend and those ten hats, plus two scarves. It gets cold there in Missouri. And it is cold here without him, but only if I stop to think about it. I’m glad for him. We don’t talk as much anymore, he and I. When we do, usually on Monday mornings, the conversation is light, and focused on what’s currently happening in our lives. Some ghosts are best left alone, once you get them to sleep.

This is the second of three parts. Check out these lab coats while you wait for me to get back with the links.

Part Three

I developed the pattern for “Holy Sheep! Baby Bottoms,” which included soakers, shorts and pants, myself. A soaker is a knitted woolen garment used over cloth diapers in the place of rubber or plastic pants. I could turn out a soaker in one day or a pair of long pants for a two-year-old in two days. I’ve made them plain, ruffled, striped, and with cute embroidered designs. Most of these were custom pieces, with the customer choosing the colors, motifs, and measurements, which I then knit to order. I enjoyed it because it allowed me to practice different skills, the palettes and textures were never the same, and each piece was an original.
My favorite was a pair of green pants with a bear applique on the bum. First, I dyed the yarn and knit the pants. Then I followed a cross-stitch pattern, using it to make a knitted bear. I sewed the bear to the pants, and drew in the facial features with brown yarn. The whole process took about ten days from the time I put the yarn on until the washed and water-proofed pants were in the mail.

Plunging white wool into a vat of colored vinegar-water is as close as mortals can come to making magic. The smell of wool soaking in hot vinegar takes some getting used to, but eventually it becomes tolerable. It comes to signify creative alchemy— I forget that it is so acrid my nose burns and my eyes water! As it “cooks,” the water becomes clear and the yarn takes on a brilliant hue. The whole process takes several hours. As I soak in the acrid smell and watch the color move from the water into the wool, I am thinking about what I am going to make with that yarn.

But there are seasons for everything and that season of professional knitting ended for me after the birth of my seventh child. I miss it: not so much the knitting, which I still do, but the designing and the dyeing of the yarn, and the creativity that went with it.

I have been playing with yarn for decades. When I was nine a family friend taught me to crochet, but my love for knitting was partially inspired by my first husband. He knew how to knit, and he considered his craft quite remarkable. He thought crocheting was a “waste of good yarn.” He tried to teach me several times over the course of our six year marriage, but as with so many facets of his personality and our marriage, it never quite worked out. He had some good qualities and many skills, but teaching was not among them. He held the yarn like a left handed knitter, even though he was right handed. “You do it like this,” he said, hiding what he was doing with his hands.

“I can’t see what you are doing,” I said.

“Then move! Watch my hands!” he said. When I moved, so did he, shifting the position of his hands so that my view was blocked yet again. And when I didn’t understand his wordless demonstration, he said, “This is too complicated for you. Go back to that simple stuff.”

“No, show me again,” I said. We must have repeated that conversation a dozen times over the years. I finally just shelved the desire and watched him knit while I crocheted. I made several blankets and a couple of vests while we were married, and I watched him work on the back of a sweater in plain gray wool—always just the back, and it never seemed to get any bigger. But the lust to knit and knit well was born in those moments, so it was a temporary shelving. I had the tools, I had the books, and I had the desire. Eventually I taught myself.

Late one night shortly after my sixth child was born, I sat in my rocker with my needles and yarn. I opened the instruction book yet again, and I did what it said yet again, and I began to knit. I had actually been knitting correctly—and ripping it out—for several hours that night before I realized I was doing it right and the sample pictures in the book were labeled incorrectly. I was so excited that it was all I could do not to run through the house screaming with joy. After all, I’d been trying to knit off and on for most of 15 years at that point. Of course, the fact that my shout of joy would have awakened my whole family and ended my knitting time helped keep me in my chair.

Even though it took me 15 years to learn to knit, I still say nothing could be simpler than knitting, unless it is breathing. I’ve taught several people to knit, sharing my love and passion for the craft. One begins with two sticks and a string and after a varying investment of time, ends with a useful finished piece. It is a skill that takes just minutes to learn but can bring a lifetime of satisfaction. The left hand holds one stick and the yarn, and remains mostly stationary. The right hand executes small, precise twists, flitting the other stick into and out of the existing stitches to make new ones. There are only two maneuvers, the knit and the purl. To make a knit stitch, one enters from the front, and to make a purl stitch, one enters from the back. From these two stitches every knitted thing you have ever seen is composed. It is soothing and repetitious work, and the pseudo-monotony of it is strangely liberating. The mind is free to wander and dream while the hands are busy creating. The body is kept fully in this world, while the imagination dashes here and there— thinking, planning, composing. It’s how man is supposed to live— staying busy with our everyday lives while dreaming of something better. Someone will probably solve the problem of world hunger one day while doing just such a thing as knitting.

I made my first knit stitch in 2002, and in the years since, I have made hundreds of pieces. I have covered heads. I have covered feet. I have covered everything in between with wooly warmth. I have knit for money, I have knit for the joy of it, and I have knit because I had nothing else to do at the time. I have knit while laughing, while crying, while mourning, and while praying. When I don’t know what else to do, I knit.
Like most “yarnies,” I have yarn everywhere. “You have a lot of balls,” said my best friend, the first time he saw my room. I looked around with fresh eyes. Fiber spilled out of my cubbies, there was a basket full of it by my chair, and my current project was resting on the nightstand. He couldn’t see the boxes of fluffy mohair and silk and baby alpaca under the bed.

“Yeah, I guess I do,” I answered. I gave him mental credit for a double entendre that gave both my personality and my knitting skills full credit.

Along with the yarn, there are unfinished projects tucked here and there about the house waiting for my time and attention. Many of those unfinished things are for me. I tend to drop what I am knitting for myself to knit for others: a prayer shawl here, a special request there. But like I said, I am patient. The stuff I’m making for me will wait a bit and it will get finished eventually. Someday.
In the meantime, if you receive a gift from my needles, you can be sure that I loved you more than I loved myself for the time it took me to make it. That’s all knitting really is. It’s love solidified. Wearable love. Love that hugs and warms your body. When I am knitting for you, I am thinking about you, praying for you, loving you. The finished item that you get is just a reminder that I spent that time with you on my mind. It’s an affirmation of your worth to me.

Prayer shawls are usually given anonymously. You can’t just walk up to someone you don’t know and give them a hand-knitted shawl. Especially when a person is grieving, you want to give her space. It embarrasses those who aren’t grieving to find out someone holds them in such high esteem that they would go to that much effort. Because of this, I like to put them in a pretty gift bag and leave it labeled in a conspicuous place, watched over by a trusted co-conspirator.

I did this once for a woman I had admired for more than thirty years. She was a substitute teacher in my elementary, middle, and high schools. I was always pleased to walk into a classroom and see that Miss Bee was the teacher that day. She went to her grave never knowing who loved her so much. That is exactly as it should have been. She touched so many lives with her graciousness that the entire community loved her. People stood in line for hours to pay condolences when she passed. I was one of them, and I never heard a murmur of complaint while we waited. Instead the line was full of stories celebrating close to 80 years of faithful service to her husband, her children, her church, and her community.

Also her Savior. We never spoke about her faith until I was grown. “It is only because of Jesus’ love for me that I am what I am. There is nothing good in me by myself,” she said. While I designed and made her shawl, I was thanking God for such a remarkable influence in my life.

The Clapotis, pronounced clap-oh-tee, is a fairly simple thing to make. You knit across, increasing on the ends, and purl back. Every few stitches, you twist a stitch. Every few rows, you drop a stitch. After about 20 hours, you have a parallelogram that you can wear around your head or around your shoulders, depending on size. I have made three of them in the past three years. Two I have given away, and one I kept for myself. This is the piece I make now when I am loving someone who is sick or grieving, or just having a rough time. I knit while I mourn with them and pray for them. Thinking about what someone else is facing for such a long time makes me realize how insignificant my own troubles are. It becomes a healing piece for both of us. I’m fairly certain it is the hours of prayer and not the yarn that makes that healing happen.

This is the first of a three part series. Go get a quote for liability insurance while you wait. I’ll have the others up shortly.

Part Two
Part Three

Don’t worry, there will be a shower in her very near future.

So, that’s what I did this morning instead of church. I know that I probably missed some good music. Guitar Guy played today, I think. And it’s always a good sound. But I wanted to reconnect with my kids, and spend some time in a bigger cathedral. I felt the chilly morning air. I journaled. I read a book on using writing to heal from trauma. I watched a squirrel dig a hole in the mulch, looking for some squirrely thing, and then neatly cover it back up. I listened to my kids laughing and playing capture the flag. We talked and made jokes. We went for a snack and then to a second park. It was fun. And really, is the music of heaven made with rickenbacker or with joyful laughter, free as a child?

I think next time, I might leave the book at home, and just be. I’m not sure yet. I still have a hard time doing that. It’s as if I feel compelled to spend every minute interacting with someone or something. I can’t just sit and BE. Why not?

So, a couple of days ago, I put this picture on my facebook wall. See, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about life, why I do the things I do, and if those motivations are truly reflective of where I am and how I think. Life, is not about churning your way through to the end. Life is a gift, just like the picture says, and it’s a not something you can buy, or one that full of possessions. For that kind of thing, look at GiftBaskets.com for gift baskets.

Real life, peaceful and purposeful life is so much more than that. It’s paying attention to NOW. What are you doing and why are you doing it? How are you treating others and how are you treating yourself? And I have to admit, I do a lot better at treating others well than I do about treating myself well. But I’m getting better.

Some of that is about adding stuff and some of it is about subtracting stuff. One of the things I subtracted this week was the need and compulsion to get two undergraduate degrees at this time. Here’s what I realized as I was making my decision. Ok, I lie. I realized AFTER I made my choice. But the point is that I suddenly understood that one of the reasons I push myself so hard all.the.time. is some kind of irrational subconscious belief that if I was just excellent enough, my dad would come tell me how proud he was of me. Folks, that man has been dead for almost 33 years. He has been dead as long as he was alive. He is NOT going to tell me anything, ever again. And I have been trying to impress life into a dead man for far too long.

I’ve been doing the right stuff, but doing it toward the past instead of toward the future. Right action, wrong motivation. Big change in perspective, small change in course direction. Still on the tracks, but with a different fuel source….one that isn’t poisonous.

First, one of the books I needed wasn’t in, but it was due on the truck that afternoon. But I had stuff to do, and couldn’t afford to waste time waiting. But I could just do my computer work….except that I hadn’t brought my computer with me that day. So, the owner lent me hers. Luckily, I had the files I needed on a thumb drive in my pocket. And they offered me tea and a cupcake, too. If you ever have an hour or so to spend in Wilmington, I heartily recommend you spend a few minutes at Pomegranate Books. Tell them that crazy lady sent you, the one who camped in their shop for several hours last January.

Secondly, this book store is not a maze. They are small, but they stock some very cool books by small publishers. And I, errr, picked up a few things, aside from my textbooks, and one of those things was a book by Paul Wilkes, called The Art of Confession: Renewing Yourself Through the Practice of Honesty. Come to find out, he’s a local author, and when I finally opened the book this morning, I discovered that I am the proud owner of an inscribed first edition. Yes, I did say this morning, and I am already writing a review. It’s a small book, just 133 pages, but this book packs a 400 page wallop.

Wilkes isn’t preachy, but he has some very pertinent things to say about how we deal with ourselves and others, not only with our mouths, but also in our deeds and in our motivations. I will tell you up-front that he is a Catholic, but he is very clear in the book that he is talking about confession and not Confession.

I enjoyed the whole book, which starts with history, becomes philosophy and ends in practicality. But there were two main things that really resonate with me. The first was the section on guilt, and how we allow ourselves to become so weighted down with it that we have a hard time accepting love and grace. We are cruel to ourselves, because we allow guilt to control and dominate us, instead of using it as a tool to motivate change in our lives. Secondly, he gives some very practical tips on how we can practice more honest living by building moments of reflection into our lives. I’ve marked that whole section to read through and put into practice, by I was most struck by the ideas of the Metta Bhavana and An Adult Examination of Conscience.

Metta Bhavana is the cultivation of an attitude of lovingkindness toward everyone and everything. And not in a haphazard, whatever kind of way, but by calling specific individuals (ourselves, someone we treasure, a neutral person, someone we dislike, the universe) one at a time, and thinking of their safety, health, peace and welfare. If you’ve known me long at all, you know there have been some very unpleasant things in my life, things that hurt and anger me every time I think about them. Things that still make me feel cheated, make me feel less, make me feel an irrational and unjustified guilt. I’m thinking it’s going to be hard to feel all that negative stuff and also lovingkindness. And I am thinking all that negative stuff is a weight I just don’t need, and it’s time to move on to other, better stuff.

The Adult Examination of Conscience has us reflect on daily life, work, desires, inner life, physical well-being, loving, personal integrity, relationships, spiritual life, nature, and money/possessions. You don’t do this all at once, of course, who has time for that? The idea is to pick one area and really think deeply on it, and determine if your attitudes and actions need changing.

I really, really recommend this book. I wish I had about a dozen copies to give away. I don’t. I have ONE, and it’s going on my shelf of “read some daily” books. But find a copy, and read it. It took me less than 5 and a half hours, and that included a break to drive home, a conversation with a friend AND a nap. It’s a rather small investment of time for a book that could LITERALLY change the way you view yourself, your fellow humans and the world you walk in. In a day when many self-help books offer a faux window into the soul, this one has some very valid things to say about living in a mindful, self-examined way.

The week before spring break, I was busy making plans about all the things I would accomplish on my week off. I had planned to catch up on my reading, get ahead on my school work, do the laundry and shovel out from under all the dirt and yuck that has accumulated in my house over the preceding eight weeks. I finally got started on all that today, 3 days after spring break ended. What I actually did on spring break was way more important.
Last fall, I moved my 16 year-old daughter into the smallest room in the house, which had previously been my room. I took her place in the master bedroom, which I shared with my two youngest children. It made sense at the time, because of the different sleep schedules. Mine is much closer to that of the youngest children than hers is, no one was getting enough rest, and it just seemed like the best solution at the time. And it was, for her. And probably for them, as well. But not so much for me.
Once I moved out of my small, private room and into the larger more public room, I no longer had any privacy at all. I mean, I was used to having to field questions through the bathroom door while I went pee, but things escalated. I would push the bedroom door “to” for a few minutes of quiet, only to have little people thrust it open seconds later. I could no longer read a textbook, have a phone call or even think a thought with interruption and unwanted input. Not only did they feel free to violate my space, but they also took the liberty of running commentary on my every word and action. Puh-lease.
This invasion of privacy culminated week before last in one of my sons walking in on me while I was changing clothes. The following day, my daughter opened the closed door and walked in, exposing me to the neighbor kid who happened to be in the living room.
So, Monday of last week, I stuck with my original plan. Tuesday of last week, I went to Wal-Mart and got paint. I moved the baby girls’ bunk beds into an alcove in the living room. My sons and I painted that black and red room pink, and I took over the whole stinking thing. My room. I worked on it off and on, arranging it just so all week. And last Saturday night, I installed a Brinks exterior door lock on my bedroom door. That’s right. My bedroom door now has to be opened with a key.
And how have the kids responded to this? Much better than I thought! I taught them all that they must knock on the door, and now they do so even when the door is open. It’s nice. They’ve also slacked off on the interrupting while I’m talking, the constant commentary on my breathing, and the best part is that I haven’t inadvertently shown my ass in days.
So here’s what I have learned from that: my children (and other people) will give me exactly as much space and respect as I demand, and not one iota more. Now, I am not, by nature, a demander. For most of my 44 years, I have been quiet and unobtrusive and fairly subservient. It is a role I am comfortable in and for which I am reasonably well-suited. Apparently, folks think that because I don’t assert my boundaries, I don’t have them. Well, they are wrong, and that brings me to the next and best thing I learned: just because I don’t like to assert doesn’t mean I can’t, or that I won’t

Good morning!