Driving to a friends home today for her baby's first birthday, I share the ride with our mutual friend. She has recently come back from a transformative week of seeking her inner soul and past in order to pursue a healthier and happier life. A life where she's making choices that are good for her because she is worth it.

It amazes me how the most incredibly kind, compassionate, giving and intelligent people can let their past rule their lives but as it turns out we all do it. Somehow something in our youth takes away, in one swoop, any ounce of that thing that children have. The ability to believe in happiness. Somehow so many of us go through our adult years just not believing that we deserve love, kindness, or prosperity.

She looks at me as I drive and tells me about her childhood, about losing her parents at a young age and how in her childhood innocence she puts her pain aside and begins a life with people who mistreated her and her sister. She says that because she was so young she did not grieve her mothers death. She speaks of her week in this therapeutic and spiritual healing place and says that it was the most painful journey she's ever taken, but that it's left her changed. She realizes that she has her job because she deserves it. Always feeling like everyone else was so much smarter and better at her job, she is now accepting that she is smart too. She said that the day she left, she saw the world brighter as if in technicolor. Like a baby coming out of the womb and seeing the world for the first time. Her senses coming alive and bursting for the first time.

We hold hands in understanding. Two people who are trying to believe in themselves. Struggling to make healthy choices so that the rest of their days are in deep awareness of their goodness. Wanting more than ever to feel connected to a world of beauty and goodness. We looked at each other with tears in our eyes and drove in silence with a smile.

Starting now....

In an effort to be consistent with change, it felt only right to start a new blog. I am not sure where this is going, but I do know that as in the past writing seems to be the way I go. I write for me as a measure of sorting, analyzing and reflecting.

As I sat with my 93 year old mom today, I had this overwhelming sense of endings. My mom, though very mentally intact, struggles as the arthritis plummets her. Don't get me wrong the lady does not let it stop her. It just takes her so much longer to just get up from the chair that forms her small body. For her its just the process, for me its so much more. I spent hours with her. Watching TV, eating and just sitting. She tells me she's chilly and in role reversal I become her mom. I put the blanket around her small frame and I put my arm around her and we sit quietly for a while. She dozes and I can feel her breathing gently and I am so grateful for that moment. I let her sleep and when she wakes she tells me she did not sleep at all. I smile.

This past summer I sent of my one and only 17 year old away to college. What I thought would be a time that I've waited for with excitement for all the things I was going to do......is actually a time where I am fighting to not go to bed at 9pm on a Saturday night. I am 48 years old and single, living in the city for the first time since my 20's. I had believed that I'd pick up where I'd left off. Aha, but alas the problem. At 48, my peers are all married engaging in the mid life activities of family. While all my friends are dealing with children coming back home from college, and keeping their 20 year old marriages interesting, I am seeking to start all over again.

Married twice, I am, at 48 ready to enjoy my partners company, travel and relish in the moments when for a small amount of time I don't have to worry that my son is out driving or if he will miss his curfew. Its suppose to be a time where I am financially stable and my partner is also in the same place. Where is this partner? The reality is that an empty nest is harder than I understood it to be. I miss my son and his empty room in our new city apartment is a constant reminder to me that maybe a one bedroom would have suffice. Even when he comes home, he goes home to the suburbs where he grew up and he can resent my leaving his life behind.

At this moment, I sit at the kitchen counter writing. My son is visiting his friends and his old neighborhood and will come home in time to take the bus back to school after the weekend. It seems like a lifetime ago when I was a young married wife, thinking that that was it. That the life I'd enter would be unchanging in any drastic way. Now, I start all over as if that life never happened.