TGIF-Weekend Reading….

Weekend Reading!

bicycle in snow...maybe not this weekend

My picks for weekend reading after another cold week here in Chicago. The weekend looks like we will get a January thaw, you just might want to get outside or read these posts?

Daphne Brogdon is a blogger, blogger who also does stand-up comedy. She now has a gig on the Food Network, Daphne Dishes. Here is post about some of my conversation with her this week.

 

Today, I had the pleasure of enjoying a conference call with her. She answered questions about how she combines both worlds of blogging and cooking and how she came to the place where she is now with her own show Daphne Dishes on the Food Network.

Friends are precious and good friends are few, at least that has been my experience. What happens when a friend’s spouse dies or their child dies? How does your friendship change?

 

Friends are mostly a source of joy for me but as I get older I am finding that the more joy a friend brings me the more difficult it is when a friendship changes or ends.

Ringing in a New Year after the death of a spouse…how does one move on when the beloved is still inside you? One woman’s perspective:

 

So many of the men I meet on Match — the ones who are widowers, not those who are divorced — are still mourning the love of their life. She, their late wife, the mother of their children and grandmother of their children’s children, laughed at his jokes, travelled the world with him, comforted and warmed his bed at night. Now she is gone, never to return. After a while he feels the pull of the body’s biology and the heart’s longing, as do we all. “She” is not coming back, one must move on, so who else might there be, out there, he wonders, in the world-at-large?

So how does one move on, when the love of your life is gone, be it your husband or wife or another soul mate with whom you shared a life for many years or for several decades? In truth, you don’t move on; the beloved is still inside you. You just make room in your life for a new relationship, internally and externally, grateful to have had what you had, and grateful as well for the opportunity to care romantically for another human being before you “shuffle off this mortal coil.”

 

Here’s to a wonderful, warm weekend! Warm is relative!

Attachment and Loss …2013

"Roots of Attachment"Loss and Attachment…

Years ago, a very astute clinical social worker made this simple statement at one of my supervision sessions…”life is a series of attachments and losses” and it is important how we form attachments and how we deal with eventual losses.

The year 2013 has come to a close and along with it some life moments of attachment and loss.

Family attachments are really my most important and this year we welcomed my daughter’s fiancé into our family. We give him our love and support and wish the very best to them as a couple for a long, happy and healthy future.

Together as a family, we are stronger than the sum of the individuals. Helping and supporting each other to the best of our ability given distance and our own separate lives is something we try to never forget.

Attachment at work.

My granddaughter still continues to amaze me. I anxiously look forward to sharing her “firsts” during 2014.

I love looking through her eyes as she welcomes new experiences. It brings back memories of my own childhood as well as those of my own children’s experiences.

Friends are dear to me and during 2013 our family lost one of our nearest and dearest.

It is a loss that we are still grieving. It will be a year of “magical thinking” as we go through firsts without him. His family suffers most and this is so hard to witness. They are grieving the loss of the deepest attachment, a father and a husband.

The year 2013 has brought me into contact with many new “virtual friends” and social media has kept me in touch with many old attachments. I love blogging and FB for this reason. It allows me to share with those that live across the country on a daily basis…even if it is just a simple photo. I love seeing the mundane as well as the fantastic.

After all isn’t the mundane what it is mostly about as we age?

I feel like I have just rambled but after two weeks of holiday…at home with a five year old it is where my mind is at…we have all been nursing varying degrees of winter illnesses and a severe bout of “cabin fever”.

Today…it is 24F and perhaps we will venture outside…if only to prepare for subzero deep freeze and the snow that is promised for tonight.