Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Hands Full Friday Round-Up
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is a perverse skill. Which it seems our beloved President Joe Biden has in his repertoire. Who keeps top secret documents in his garage next to his beloved Corvette? I might equate the two but the normal citizen would not. One is more valuable than the other. Curses.
Swirl has eaten three pairs of the six-pack of reading glasses I bought for $12.95. He’s chomped on the red and the blue and one pair of the very sedate professorial looking rust colored pair. I found the ‘lenses’ (such as they are) in his ancient dog bed, so, at least he had the sense not to swallow them. Tomorrow, I order a new batch.
My mind was like meat loaf today. I swam in a lane next to an old friend this afternoon. I thought, as I swam, that I could create an essay out of my thoughts, one of those long, run-on sentence, prose poem type essays that would include everything from my cramping foot to reviews of an old man’s back flip dives to the sublime way I push off the wall and just so smoothly rise to the surface on my freestyle but I lost all that in the scent of the cheap hotel lotion I put on after a too-hot shower.
One way to be a leader is to not be the only one saying what you’re saying. If you’re the only person saying something important, you’re making a speech. If you’re one of a dozen people saying the same thing, you’re organizing. It’s easy doing the first, tiring to do the second. I remind myself.
I spent last week being a beautiful person’s mother. I am always her mother and the mother of others but I have, still, the pile of myself to deal with, to make something of, to direct toward some purpose, to achieve something worthwhile, beyond them. If I were to say something to younger women who are mothers, it would be this – always have something precious to hold that isn’t your children.
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Photo by Fernando Lavin on Unsplash
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
‘Always have something precious to hold that is not your children’ – Jan, what wonderful advice to give to any mother. Maybe we will ALWAYS be mothers, but we will never ONLY be mothers <3
each time we take 3 steps forward something like the documents come to light, very frustrating and self-defeating