the base

I’m pretty sure that one of the strangest experiences a mother can have is to spend some nights in a hotel room alone. Strange and good and surreal and lonely and wonderful. That’s how it is for me anyway, especially since I’m traveling so much lately.

I sat here last night in the silence, in Asheville, North Carolina and felt all of these opposite clashing emotions and of course they were, each of these feelings, tinged with a hint of guilt. Guilt is always the glitter on a mother’s art project, it seems.

(Unless we work really hard at not feeling guilty, but that’s pretty difficult to do when we’re already exhausted.) (Amen?) (AMEN.)

I’m convinced that one thing we mothers have got to try is living more and thinking less. Recently I heard it said that if you want to change how you think you have to live yourself there. It sounds so simple when I type it out like that, but I have a history of taking myself too seriously, all of this over-thinking, stopping me in my tracks. If I let myself go down that road I end up doing the very things I say I don’t think are right. Like not following my heart-gut. Like allowing the guilt to bring me to a rumination that brings me to doubts that bring me to insecurity and comparing.

I’ve probably learned this before and I will probably have to re-learn it again in no time at all, but after I finish letting this out I’m going to hit publish and then I’m going to think of my boys the whole time I’m here without adding the glitter. And when I get home we’ll spend time together like we always do. But for now, I’m going to walk out my hotel door and meet a lovely new friend in the lobby. I will probably forget my key and I’ll keep my comfortable shoes on, just so you know.

And later I’ll go see downtown Asheville with a group of women I’m honored to know. They will inspire me and things will happen that I never could have predicted, good things, I’m sure of it. We’ll walk back to the hotel all sleepy and giddy and I will climb into my soft white bed in the silence again and wake up tomorrow to speak to my blogging friends on a panel or two. And then I’ll go home with new layers of connection and inspiration tucked away in a part of me that used to hold too much worry.

I hope my boys will see those layers someday, so for now, I’m choosing to believe that my experiences as “Heather of the EO” will enrich my Miles and Asher because I have been enriched. I’m always their mother, sprinkled with guilt but still art. Art like a unique mural painting made up mostly of them, my two boys, with my heart-gut experiences as a base underneath. A base that coud, if I allow it, bring out their best colors.

Now that’s an analogy I’m going to have to remember.

Happy weekend, friends…