February 22

On my way to the blog today I bumped into this little guy, who asked me to come up with a SINGLE reason he shouldn't be featured. I couldn't.

hedgehog

Lately I have been doing freelance editing professionally, and I was introduced to this quote in a client's manuscript. It's about therapy, which is something I really like.

We honor our parents by not accepting as the final equation the most troubling characteristics of our relationship. I decided between my father and me that the sum of our troubles would not be the summation of our lives together. In analysis you work to turn the ghosts that haunt you into ancestors who accompany you. That takes hard work and a lot of love, but it’s the way we lessen the burdens our children have to carry. Insisting on our own experience, our own final calculus of love, trouble, hard times and, if we’re lucky, a little transcendence. This is how we claim our own lives as sons and daughters, independent souls on our piece of ground. It’s not always an option. There are irretrievable lives and unredeemable sins, but the chance to rise above is one I wish for yours and mine.

I work to be an ancestor. I hope my summation will be written by my sons and daughter, with our family’s help, and by their sons and daughters with their guidance…. But this kind of story has no end. It is simply told in your own blood until it is passed along to be told in the blood of those you love, who inherit it. As it’s told, it is altered, as all stories are in the telling, by time, will, perception, faith, love, work, by hope, deceit, imagination, fear, history and the thousand other variable powers that play upon our personal narratives. It continues to be told because along with the seed of its own immolation, the story carries with it the rebirthing seed of renewal, a different destiny for those who hear it than the painful one my father and I struggled through. Slowly, a new story emerges from the old, of differently realized lives, building upon the rough experience of those who’ve come before and stepping over the battle-worn carcasses of the past. On a good day this is how we live. This is love. 

—from “Long Time Comin’,” the final chapter of Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen

The quote reminds me of a value/belief that's really deeply held by my family on my mom's side, which is, "Good things come from New Jersey."

Secondly, my sister-in-law again said something this week that the hedgehog told me to put here. She was talking about baby Ruthie's sleep, and said basically, "With Leo, I read all these different books explaining why you have to co-sleep forever or sleep train in just this or that way and thought that the answer was in the books and I might screw Leo up if I did the wrong thing. Now, I'm pretty sure that Ruthie will be fine whether we co-sleep for three years or let her cry it out at 3 months, and I think what would actually screw her up more than necessary is if her parents pick an approach that makes us more anxious or disturbed than necessary." Far be it from me to enter the sleep-training debates, but the kernel of her thought process really resonated with me: that the answer might not be hidden in that one book she didn't read yet, but rather floating somewhere in her, waiting to be found.

I love hearing everyone's voices. Xo,

Anna