Life lesson | Lessons from my daughter

We all do it some point in our life…. We look at someone and make a comment (preferably in our head….)…

Over the last month, it happened twice that a comment about me was made directly to me.

One day, I will talk about how people look at Emily but today’s post is about me!

1st… early May, I was speaking with a colleague and for the first time I got talking with him about Emily, her syndrome and our struggles over the year. At some point in the conversation, I was told that I looked too young to have a teenage daughter. That I look like a young successful professional, that it looks as if life treated me well, as if my life was easy….

Something like that…. maybe not to the dot but the overall feeling was that I looked like someone who has had an easy life!

….

Once again, last week… a good friend asked me how it is that I don’t age? In looking at pictures in my blog, she doesn’t feel like I have aged in the last 15 years.

My reply to her was “a life of no stress will do that to you”

LMFAO!!!

We have had so much stress in our life that my mother-in-law use to tease us by asking if we would be able to function without the stress…

Quite frankly, I am not sure!

For friends or colleagues to notice that my skin and general appearance doesn’t show my age…. it’s flattering!

For those wondering how it is possible….. I use cream on my face, good cream and I have used cream since my early 20’s….. ok…. 🙂 that’s sounds ridiculous even to me! I don’t feel I look like I did 15 years ago, in my mind, I feel my almost 40 years old…

…….

I truly don’t believe it’s just the cream…

I believe it goes back to those phone calls that changed my perspectives on life.

I decided years ago that I would be happy, that regardless of what life was throwing at me, I was going to be happy!!!!

I spend time with my daughter, I love just hanging out with her. She is really funny and witty! I sing my head off with her in the car (I know all the Justin Bieber, Carly Rae Jepsen and others teen idol’s songs!!!), we dance in the kitchen, we cuddle, we watch tv and yes, I watched all the little kids show. Now we are more at the pre-teen shows but she also likes the Big Bang Theory….. I love the BBT. It allowed me to have some pretty interesting conversation with her…. “So what do you think Howard means when he says…..” Considering she is a little girl and a teenager all at once, we need to have those conversations…

On top of deciding every single day that I will be happy, I decided to not make a big deal out of little things… this helps too!

Pick your battles….. is it really that important? if it’s not, let it go!

And, don’t go to bed upset… never…

Whatever happened, whatever made you upset… if the person you are upset with doesn’t make it through the night, how will you feel? If those last words you exchanged were your last words… could you live with that?

It seems a little drastic to think that way but it’s really simple. You don’t have to tell that person that you are ok with whatever happened… you don’t have to forgive and forget before you are ready but you can certainly tell them that you are hurt, that you disagree but that you still love/like them. That you need time to adjust to the situation but that you still care about them…

So, here are my secrets for looking so young (which I don’t believe I really do…..)

1. Use good cream on your face! Don’t forget your eyes…

2. Be happy! Play like a kid! Spend time with your kids, not just along side them. Laugh with them

3. Pick your battle, if it’s not really important, let it go! Who really cares about the dishes? I’ll take a cuddle anytime over doing the dishes… The dishes will be there tomorrow but the cuddle might not!

4. Never go to bed upset… Never allow your last words to someone be something you might regret.

And just for the fun of it…………….. don’t take yourself to seriously!

Is there anything else you think I should add to my list?

Emily’s 4th Birthday…

We’ve moved from our lake side house to a tiny apartment just over 2 months ago…. why we made that move is a story for another day!

Today we are talking about fishing!

For Emily’s 4th Birthday, we rented a cottage for the weekend. We were in the woods at the Fairmont Kenauk with access to a river for fishing.

Our guest list was impressive and we were all staying in the same cottage!

Emily, Jon and I. My dad and his wife. My mom. My in-laws. Melanie (Emily’s god mother). My big brother, his wife and their 2 boys. My little brother. 13 people in 1 cottage.

We had a blast!

We wanted to take Emily fishing on a small boat but she refused to get on the boat so Jon sat on the dock with her and took time to explain to her how to fish…. They caught absolutely nothing but I took one of the most beautiful picture ever… My husband and his baby girl fishing. 🙂 She was so small!

Later that weekend, my father-in-law suggested we took Emily to the hatchery so she could at least catch a fish!

If you don’t know what a hatchery is, google it! Its where you “grow” fish 🙂 The last pond in the process is full of really nice trouts just waiting to be picked up and dropped in a lake somewhere on the property.

For a fee, someone can fish in there….. you can barely call it fishing… the fish are almost jumping out to come see you 🙂

Emily was still new at walking so standing on the side of the lake to fish was somewhat dangerous. Fred (my father-in-law) suggested we sat Emily on a bucket…. an upside-down bucket that is.

This takes us to this second picture…. Once again, an amazing picture.

fishatkenauk

Emily caught some trouts and was super excited that she could fish! One more thing we could cross off her list! She was a fisherman!!!

From that point on, whenever Emily saw Jon’s fishing rod out, she got excited because she thought she was going fishing. Whenever he went fishing without her, she got upset…. She didn’t speak but it was obvious that she wasn’t pleased with her dad! When we saw Jon’s parents, Emily was hoping to go fishing… Jon and his dad enjoyed fishing and Emily knew it.

…….

8 years later, my father-in-law passed suddenly and we opened-up our house to our family. Many people came by after the funeral. We were obviously all sad, we were trying to make sense of a tragic loss and we were sharing memories and drinking to the memory of a great man…

Suddenly Emily asked if she could say something.

……

…..

This is always a little awkward, we never know what Emily will say, never know if it will be appropriate to the situation or if she is going to talk about Justin Bieber…..

…….

That day, we were all family… everybody knew Emily… we gave her the floor.

Emily was 12 years old…

As she stood in the middle of our kitchen she told everybody that her best memory was of her grand father teaching her how to fish. She told the story of her birthday party and that her “papie” took her to the pond and turn the bucket upside-down so she could sit and fish with her little purple rod…

She understood perfectly what was going on.

At the hospital, I had asked her if she would like to go see her “papie” and she said no. When the doctors told us it was over, I tried to explain to her what was going on… instead she explained it to me.

“Papie is gone, I won’t see him anymore but he is in my heart. I can still talk to him, in my heart”

She understood perfectly what was going on… She didn’t cry… It took months for her to even talk about her “papie”… actually, she didn’t talk about it, she wrote a story at school about how she sings to her “papie” when she misses him. She sings “I miss you” from Miley Cyrus…

She understood…

My daughter, the one with the extremely rare syndrome was the one who understood what was going on… Of all the people impacted by the loss of a great man who left us way too early, she understood how to grief and understood that if she believed he was still with her, he would forever be with her.

From the day she was born, they were connected and from what Emily is telling me, they still are!

In thinking of the people you have lost, could you do like Emily and keep them alive within you? Smile when you think of them? Sing to yourself when you need peace?