My CMS

How many times have these words been uttered?

“She got more than me!”

“I was sitting there first!”

“His slice is bigger than mine!”

“That’s not fair!”

We’ve all said it, and if you’re a parent like me, you’ve heard it – in all its forms – numerous times a day. The standard response to these statements tends to be “life’s not fair!” (In my house, with a “suck it up, Buttercup” added at the end for good measure!)

For the most part, whatever they are complaining about is trivial and the fact that Johnny got a slightly larger piece of pie than Tommy really doesn’t matter a whole lot. It’s only pie after all!

But every now and then the “pie” is a little bit bigger. The stakes higher. The fallout greater.

What do you do then? How do you deliver the “life’s not fair” speech without completely demoralizing your child? What if you didn’t have to deliver that speech because you had properly prepared your child for the outcome – both good and bad?

We haven’t had to deal with anything life altering … yet. Soccer try outs that went awry have been the biggest issue to date. And even then, she knew her effort on the day wasn’t equal to those of the girls who were picked. Tough lesson perhaps, but a valuable one. Hard work and consistent effort beats natural born skill more than you’d think!

Recently we faced a try out of a different variety. One that required more preparation than we’d dealt with before. Continue reading →

Saying goodbye to loved ones is never easy.

I recently had the privilege of creating a couple of items for a friend to use at her mother’s Celebration of Life service. She said something to me when she picked up the finished pieces that has stuck in my brain.

“I guess I’m just getting used to the new normal.”

Truer words were never spoken. And what an excellent way to think of grief.

Experts talk about the five stages of grief – Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance – but I’ve never thought of that as a linear path. Or even one that you traverse only once! I’m convinced that when you suffer a major loss you still cycle through the various stages every now and then. Skipping over the ones that aren’t applicable at the time and getting side swiped by the ones that are. Many of you know that I lost my parents at 14 in a car crash. I was also quite seriously injured and so had to put my grieving process on hold in order to focus on healing. The psychologists warned us that I would suffer later on in life for not dealing with my grief immediately and boy were they right! Continue reading →