If Home Is Where Your Heart Is. . . .

The grief of a stepmom.  This post has had so many titles:  The Invisible Grief of a Stepmom, The Silent Grief of a Stepmom, The Lonely Grief of a Stepmom. . . the grief of a stepmom is like no other grief because it feels so homeless. My stepson died a few weeks ago.   Marc and I have only been married eight months and Mackay, my stepson, lived in NYC and we rarely got to see him (he didn't get to come to the wedding or Cabo and didn't stay with us when he came to town), so I didn't have much of a relationship with him.  So there is a weird layer of loosing someone I hardly knew and I feel like that is the layer that makes the most sense to everyone.   While the family was mourning, I was the one organizing all of the meals coming in from our wonderful friends and neighbors, I was cleaning up one meal and setting up for the next.  I was keeping the house in order and making sure Marc was able to surround himself with the friends and family he needed t...

Who am I? If that isn't a loaded question, I don't know what is.  There are so many ways I could go about answering the question of "who am I?" and so many points of view I could take.  But I am going to "know my audience" in this situation and answer it according to who I am writing to at this point (and I may not be writing to every reader today, so even though you are reading this, you may not be my intended audience). I'm getting married one month from tomorrow.  I am so excited!  The story is a beautiful (beauty from ashes) and magical love story and I am so grateful.  But in the beauty and the magic are two people coming together blending two families and two sets of friendships and two separate lives and in that blending, each person is a stranger in the lives of so many.  I am a virtual stranger to Marc's kids and family and friends.  I've had the opportunity to meet most of these people, but they don't know me.  I'm not writing t...

Valentine’s week and the world seems to be flooded with red and pink and chocolate and roses.  I woke up this morning and my inbox had red hearts in almost every promotional message.  I’ve never really been a big fan of Valentine’s Day, but I am such a fan of true love and my favorite love story (aside from the Bible) is Spike and Darnell’s love story that lasted seven decades and is, now, outlasting their own lives because of the impact it had on me and has had on many others.   For the rest of the story, I’ll be calling them the names they are to me.  They are Spike and Darnell to hundreds of thousands, but they are Pappy and Gran’ma to me.  (Mentally insert red heart emoji here.)   It all started with a blind date. . . . Pappy’s roommate was supposed to go on a blind date with this young girl from Dallas.  When he got sick, Pappy didn’t want the girl to be stood up, so he took his roommates place.  At the end of th...

What?  A recovering P31? Proverbs 31 describes the wife of noble character.  This wife gets up early and works hard all day long and isn't even tired when she finally retires from all of her work at night.  She is a servant to her husband and she makes him proud.  She is a fantastic mom and I'm sure, if there was Pinterest in the day, she would be the Pinterest-y-est of the moms.  She isn't afraid of hard work and she has the pantry stocked in the case of an emergency and she has her family ready for cold winters, famine and hard times.  She helps strangers and loved ones alike and she has her sights set beyond herself.  Her husband praises her and her children are grateful for her and call her blessed. Oh my gosh!  What a great lady!  I want to be like her!  So why am I a recovering P31 and why am I writing about it now when I'm not even a wife? (For starters, I think this kind of noble woman is a goal regardless of any woman's marital ...

Tiki.  He has been home nearly ten years and what a wild ride it has been. . . . so many times over the past ten years I have left sporting events or school events or church events heavy hearted and sad and discouraged because I felt like people saw Tiki as a burden or a hassle.  Don't get me wrong--everyone LOVES Tiki, they really do.  He has never met a stranger and he is the happiest kid on the planet.  Everyone loves him, but those first few years he was a lot to handle and it was obvious at events.  And I would leave those events heavy hearted because I just wanted him to be loved and appreciated for his heart and his spirit. . . .  But last night, I left his football game walking on clouds with a heart overflowing with pride and gratefulness and giddiness.  Tiki is living his best life right now.   During the game I was taking to a mom and not paying attention (I wasn't paying much attention because Tiki doesn't typically go in to the game u...

 I feel like I need to make a disclaimer post before I write from my heart from here on out. I hate that the world we live in requires disclaimers on opinions, but it does and that is a part of the new reality that I feel like social media has brought with it. 2 things mostly that I want to get off of my chest and down on paper: Like I wrote about nearly a year ago, my 25 year relationship with Andy is a part of my story.  It is a part of my past and it is a part that I can't erase and that I don't want to erase.  I want my kids to be able to look back and know that I haven't deleted their father from my story.  Andy and I had what we had and for better and for worse it is my story.  I'm not cleansing my Instagram of all things Andy and I'm not burning my photo albums.  I look back on some of my posts and I know now that I was naive and that what I believed to be my reality often wasn't, but that doesn't mean I'm going to make any post-dated edits. ...

I woke up this morning with a heart overflowing. . . . There are so many things about that statement that amaze me.  First of all, in order for my heart to be overflowing, I realized that it must be healed and I realized this morning that it is healed.  My heart that once was shattered into so many pieces that I honestly believed it would never be whole again is healed.  I'm sure it looks different and I am sure there is some scar tissue, but I am healed and not only am I able to hold love and joy, but I am overflowing with both.  I am whole and complete and full to the point of overflow. And secondly, this quarantine, our "coronacation" has been a dream come true for me!  Why?  So many reasons!!!! I have been sheltered in place for nearly a month with my family.  I have all five kids with me and that, in itself, is a dream come true, but it gets better than that!   Hays has had his girlfriend, Blakely, here and it has been so great...