Great Post and Our Superman Dance Party

The other day, in a dawdling moment, I glanced over Ann Voskamp's blog. I'm always interested to see what links she's posted. When I saw this one, I went straight over, because I like reading Jen Hatmaker's stuff. This post was no exception. It resonates in my heart and mind.

About half of our family has been participating in counseling over the past several months, and I'm rejoicing in the Lord over how fruitful the experience has been and is for us.

One thing our therapist has been saying to me, as I recognize my control-freak, do-it-all-myself tendencies more and more is Where did you get the idea that your children are fragile? Now, that may not be the question that all moms need to ask themselves and explore, but it's been very right for me to examine an belief I didn't realize I had adopted as time has passed.

For me it's about starting to push my kids to greater independence and confidence, and abandoning the idea that they can't do big things or that they can't understand hard truths without my, well, hovering help. This is about me believing and teaching them to believe they can do it, whatever it is.

Oh, it's complicated. I'm still trying to understand and recognize my own beliefs and attitudes and thinking, and where they're right and wrong and such. That means this is a rather limited and inarticulate expression of what I'm (what WE are) learning. Survival mode, where we've been for quite some time, is not the place where good thinking (as our super-smart therapist would say) happens. Very little thinking at all happens, really, when you're putting out fires and trying to get a few hours' sleep in there somewhere.

Saturday night, we decided to have a movie night whilst eating leftovers of baked spaghetti. We all watched Superman, the one produced in 1978. I probably saw it for the first time when I was about 7 years old, and wasn't Christopher Reeve a dashing hero?!

Anyway, it was fun. Before we started the movie though, BB and I got on a kick of remembering songs we I loved from high school and college, and it turned into dance party at our house. For real. I'm so not the fun parent, as I've mentioned here before, and I have a hard time letting go and being crazy. But it was freeing and good to dance (if you can call it that!) around the kitchen to C & C Music Factory's Everybody Dance Now. You know you've rocked to that, too, at some point in the distant past! We played I Saw the Sign (Ace of Bass). It was silly, really loud, fun.

It was light at the end of a tunnel, I think.

Thanks be to God.
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Photos: my mom's always making her home beautiful. She'd put these orange-berried branches in water on her countertop and wasn't the sun dressing them up, making them all the more lovely?