What are you made of?

From time to time, being so involved with parents and parenting, people send us stories and video clips about special parents who truly go above and beyond what most people would do for their kids. It makes me wonder about what parents are made of.

Imagine you are in the delivery room, having your baby boy. You are overjoyed, until the doctor examines him. You already know something is not right and then you hear this, “I’m terribly sorry, but your son was born with no eyes and with a certain debilitating problem in the joints that will make his movements very limited”.

If you are feeling the urge to get up and run for your life, away from the enormous burden of dependence, struggle and hopelessness, please stop for the next 6 minutes and see how a special pair of parents, especially the father, have handled such a fate and turned it around into the most inspiring story of dedication and triumph over the odds.

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Give Me 22 Reasons

For over six month, I have had a note posted here on the shelf over my computer. The note says, “Give me 20 good reasons”. All this time, I knew what I wanted to write, but I was not sure I would be able to go through the “open heart surgery” of telling you about my loss. I think I was building up the confidence to write about it.

Whenever I asked myself what I was afraid of, I knew I was scared of dragging myself again through old emotions of loss and hopelessness. I had been there twice and the feelings had faded but not disappeared.

This sticky note on my shelf is what made me write the posts about my loss.

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What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger

I have always thought of myself as a good mother. It has been easier for me than for other people, because I have studied Special Education and I have had the knowledge to raise happy and successful kids.

Yet, during my Better Parenting Skills workshops, I surprise people when I tell them that a big part of my parenting confidence comes not from my studies or my professional experience, but from my personal loss (if you are here for first time, please read 35-hour Baby).

You see, when people talk about having it tough, I can relate to it and say, “When you are hit hard, you discover how much stronger you are than what you thought before”. When people talk about failure after failure, I can relate to it too. I have failed twice. Big time! I think the best thing I can give them is better perspective, because I have been through it and come out with a smile. If I can do a good job giving you this message about perspective, I will be happy.

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A Choice I Could Not Make

I talk and write a lot about choice. It is no coincidence my motto is “Happiness is a choice!” Yet, there was a time when I could not live by this motto. It was after I had lost two babies. I wanted to make the choice to have only one child and to let go of my desire to go through another pregnancy to satisfy my wish to hold a baby, take him or her home and be happy.

… On my daily walks with Kathy, my doctor friend, I looked for a way to give up. One part of me longed for a baby, a healthy baby that I can take home, and the other part was afraid I would not be able to survive another pregnancy and possibly another loss. To make matters worse, another doctor I had seen told me that since I had already had one baby with a heart defect, my chances of having another one were no longer 1:20,000 but 1:10 (!) and that certainly did not make things easier.

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Kid Grief

Grief is hard for grownups and can be even harder for kids. As we grieved for our lost hopes and our two dead babies, our very-much-alive daughter Eden was going through a very tough time.

Eden was 5 years old and could not understand why these things had happened. She was angry with us and we could not comfort her, because we could not comfort ourselves. Most people treated me as the grieving person and did not recognize Gal or Eden’s loss. I was angry, sad, in pain and found it hard to give her answers.

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Baby Hope

… I spent hours closing my eyes and trying to wake up in a different life, where the scar is not so painful. I knew what it meant to have a broken heart. I was broken, damaged, feeling like my body had failed me. I had been through a caesarian section and I was in such emotional pain I felt nothing at all.

“I have Eden”, I told myself, trying to find some comfort. Our house was in a total silence. We had to take the new crib back to the store and pack all the little things we had already put in the baby’s room. I was grateful I didn’t have to take care of the funeral arrangements – Gal did that with Eden. The thought of him choosing a tiny coffin was too hard for me and I tried closing my eyes, but that did not help.

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35-hour Baby

I have been writing this blog for over two years now and published more than 500 posts about parenting, but I know I have been skipping a big part of my own parenting. I have been skipping this part deliberately, not because I think it is not important, but because it is too important to write about it lightly. Writing about it means I need to open my heart and as all heart surgeries go, it may bleed.

Do you remember the last scene in the movie The Sixth Sense, when the kid tells his mom, “I’m ready to communicate”? I think I feel the same now. I am ready to open my heart and tell you about some of the defining moments in my life as a parent. It is long and a bit painful, so I think I will do it in installments.

It was on the 39th week of my pregnancy. I woke Gal up and told him my water had broken.

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Happiness is a Choice

Happiness is probably the thing people dedicate their life to achieve the most. Their definition of happiness is different from one to another, but when they focus on a relationship, they want to be happy in that relationship, when they focus on money, they want to be happy with their financial situation, when they try to be healthy, they want to be happy with their body and wellbeing and when they spend time with their kids, they want to be happy in their parenting. Happiness covers every area of life. Life is a journey to many destinations, but in all of them, we seek to be happy.

So the big question is “How to achieve happiness?”

Would you like to have a happiness manual?

Who wouldn’t?

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Make a list: Quotes to live by

Quotes are signs we put on our map to navigate through the journey called “life”. We need the signs to find our way through the happiness and sadness, joy and heartaches, challenges and success. They are the guidelines for how we choose to live our life.

My first quotes were sentences from songs I loved. When listening to songs, some people hear the melody. I always pay attention to the lyrics. Whenever I chose to carve them on my life map, I copied them into my diary and read them from time to time.

One song that was most meaningful for me as a teenager was John Lennon’s “Imagine”. It is not a coincidence that today, many years later, I am the state coordinator of Together for Humanity, a foundation advocating living in peace and harmony.

Finding and listing 100 quotes that you consider good guidelines for living is a good way to discover who you are, what you want for yourself in life and what your need to overcome. Through the quotes, you can find out what your thoughts, values, needs and beliefs are and direct yourself towards a good life.

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Big Picture Kids

Every parent would like to give their kids abilities that will stick with them and make their life easy, happy and successful in every area.

One good and easy way of doing this is to raise kids who look at the big picture, because it increases their emotional intelligence and, as a result, their happiness and success in everything they do.

Kids who are able to see beyond local and immediate circumstances (“right here, right now and only me”) can handle and prevent difficulties more easily and it only takes practice to teach kids this mindset. Seeing the big picture means being able to detach and look beyond what is happening right here, right now into other places and other times that are being affected. It is very much like being in a helicopter (hence the term “helicopter view”, as opposed to “tunnel vision”).

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